Archivist Deborah G. Douglas details the story behind a one-inch-square piece of fabric from the Wright Brothers' flyer stored at the MIT Museum. She explores the creation and flight of the flyer, considering the community that supported and contributed to the Wright Brothers' invention, and the impact of that invention on popular imagination and society.
Have you had time to get outdoors this summer? Toured any historical sites? As you walked across a battlefield, by a historical house, or through the remains of an abandoned pueblo or factory, have you thought about how we know what we know about these places? Primary sources describing some sites exist, but we can also learn about historical places through exploration and observation, treating the site itself as a primary source. Archaeologists analyze a place with sharp eyes, specialized tools, and historical knowledge, keeping close records of what they discover.
The National Park Service (NPS) encourages teaching students about archaeology. According to the NPS, archaeological knowledge can help students better understand the need for stewardship of historical and cultural resources. An NPS roundup of guides, lesson plans, online activities, and more can help you start training students as "public history citizens." Students can introduce themselves to the basic concepts of archaeology with the exhibit "Archeology for Kids," while "Visit Archeology" guides visitors to NPS sites where archaeologists have worked.
Remember that archaeology doesn't have to mean ancient history! For instance, students in Massachusetts have learned about local history by helping dig up the remnants of an 18th-century bottle factory (read more). Archaeologists have worked in the ruins of plantations, slave quarters, and homesteads to learn more about the lives of African Americans both free and enslaved (see NPS's guide to archaeology and African American history or click on "Scholars" at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum's Online Academy for videos about African American artifacts).
Archaeologists work everywhere. They may dig on the bottom of the ocean (or lakes or rivers) to uncover shipwrecks. They sift with care through early Native American sites to form theories about the lives of cultures like the Mississippi River moundbuilders (take a quiz to test your knowledge of early cultures).
Interested in getting your students out in the field (or in bringing techniques from the field to them)? A number of programs exist. In addition to the NPS, the Bureau of Land Management's "Learning Landscapes" program promotes the educational use of public lands. They offer classroom activities on New Mexico's Tewa villages, artifacts from early North Americans in Alaska, cultural contact at a Spanish fort, and railroads. Students and teachers can also explore "History Mysteries" related to public sites.
The Bureau of Land Management also offers online and in-the-field archaeology professional development through Project Archaeology, a national education program. Through hands-on (or virtual) experience, participants learn how to use archaeology and "archaeological thinking" to grow student understanding of history, science, math, art, language arts, and other subjects. Teachers come away with curriculum guides designed for third through eighth grade. Check out Project Archaeology's "Teachers" page for photos from past workshops and the calendar for upcoming professional development. You can also contact your state or regional Project Archaeology coordinator about professional development opportunities in your area.
Even if you and your students never have the chance to get your hands dirty, archaeological skills can sharpen historical thinking. Archaeology requires close observation, precision, patience, respect for the past, knowledge from many subjects, and an inquisitive mind. Asking your students to "think like archaeologists" can help bring math, science, and hands-on enthusiasm to your history classroom.
Colonial Williamsburg curator John Watson discusses the considerations curators and preservationists must make in deciding how to conserve, preserve, restore, and display historical artifacts.
Curator John Davis describes what he looks for when determining if a piece of metalwork is truly colonial in origin.
Curator Erik Goldstein talks about four Patriot flags known to have been captured by Banastre Tarleton during the American Revolution.
Elspeth Inglis and Kim Laing explore the benefits of teaching history with artifacts, not just text. Based on their own experiences with teaching children and history educators, they suggest introducing an unfamiliar object to students and letting students form their own hypotheses about the object's identity. The questioning skills learned from such active, inquisitive engagement with objects can invigorate both learning and teaching.
Elspeth Inglis: I call it teaching in three dimensions. I did have a short stint teaching high school history, right out of college—and I didn't feel that I knew what to do teaching from a book—teaching history from a book. I had some fun with literature, but teaching history from a book did not come easily to me. I think there are some teachers who know how to do that and some of us don't. I had to have props. I had to have things.
And so my whole museum career related to education—working with children and working with teachers—has always, always, been focused on how do we use objects of everyday life? Works of art, architecture, monuments, any thing that has been made or used by a human being is fair game in my book.
So I usually begin any class on 'what is history?' with an object. And I try to find a mystery object—something that my students, no matter what their age, might not have ever seen. And I do this on purpose, because I want to demonstrate first and foremost how difficult it is to understand history when you take a nugget of information out of context. It is very hard to understand something that you have had no experience with.
So, you know, if a teacher would to walk into a classroom one day, say, she is going to teach pioneer life, and she immediately says to her students "Imagine being a pioneer," the students have nothing with which to spark their imagination. But if that same teacher walked into her classroom and she had a straw hat and she had a cow horn cup and she had a wooden bowl, a candlestick, etcetera, etcetera. And then she tried to get her students to imagine being a pioneer because these are the things that a pioneer would wear, use, or make, etcetera. Then we are getting somewhere, I think, because we are building on experience.
Elspeth Inglis: I find that children really do connect with objects and that they really can have a deep, deep understanding of those objects. It might not be the same understanding you or I have as educators but we have to acknowledge what that student's experience is first and then try to broaden their experience using that artifact.
So I do mystery artifact investigation, that is, that begins with simple observation—descriptives—what is this thing made of? How big is it? What does it weigh? You could do all kinds of observation skills like that. I don't allow them to make guesses about what it does until after they've thoroughly, thoroughly examined the physical properties of the object and test it. Does it have any moving parts? Does it look like something is missing? Does it belong to something else?
Then after they've really exhausted all of those basic observations, I start asking for their ideas about what the thing might do. And if a student responds with—it really doesn't matter what the answer is, I never tell them whether they are right or wrong about what the object is. That is not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to get them thinking and to get them questioning.
And so if, and here is an example I used yesterday, if you know what a candle mold looks like, it's got, you know, cylinders—usually, six, four, it can be many different numbers of cylinders—and it's tin, and it's got a handle, and a place for you to pour the wax. So when I present this to children, and I have been doing this particular artifact for many years, and many times I get the answer from children that they think it's a hot dog cooker. OK, if it's a hot dog cooker, why don't you tell me, or do a pantomime and show me, how this hot dog cooker would work. And the children begin to, you know, pantomime putting the hot dogs in, putting it in the fire, and then you can see—you can see what's happening on their faces as they think this through.
And I say to them, how do you get this out of the fire—because we're talking about before microwaves and stoves, they all know this at this point. And they say, well, you have to have something long because, because they know the metal gets hot and you can't just reach in and hold the handle. Then I ask them what happens to a hot dog when it cooks. Every 4th grader knows that hot dogs expand when they cook, and so then they begin to realize it would be difficult to get the hot dog out of those cylinders. They come to their own conclusion that their hypothesis is not the right one. I don't have to tell them that.
Or I may ask them is there a better way, an easier way, to cook hot dogs over a fire. And they always have the right answer for that. So this is just an example of the kind of process, questioning process, we go through with an artifact. If I wanted to take it a step further, after the students have decided that their original hypothesis of hot dog cooker isn't correct, maybe they have no more guesses left. Then I might bring out a candle or even a lump of beeswax, and usually that's all it takes, is that one extra clue that helps them understand, maybe, what this thing is if they've ever had an experience with making candles. They'll often go, if they see a candle, they'll think it's a candleholder because of the shape—it fits. But, I think you get the idea, that after I have taken something out of context, just to force them to go through that questioning process—it's much harder to do when you are looking at something that is familiar than it is to do with something that is unfamiliar. Then I begin to add some layers to it. Those are the clues or that is the context and that helps to build the story of the object or give the object some life of its own.
Kim Laing: In terms of lessons learned, what we found was that, because we started with high school, we had teachers that had very strong history backgrounds. Their college degrees were in history programs—maybe social studies, but still, they had a lot of history classes. As we have gone down to our elementary, we have teachers with elementary ed degrees, and many universities don't require any history course as part of an elementary ed degree. So while they're super interested and excited and ready to work, they just don't have that university background in history.
So, we back up a little and give them some practice in historical thinking, which really works with the mystery objects, because all those questions are the historical thinking process. And so we have learned to kind of take the teachers from where they're at and customize our interactions with them to the level they're at. So I think that really has helped us in terms of being very grade specific. A lot of grants are multi-grade, but because we focus down on a single grade at a time, we've been able to really customize the information we are giving to the level they might have already had instruction in.
Elspeth Inglis: Elementary and middle school teachers like to have stuff. They always use things. Every teacher I know has used their own money to buy things to bring into their classroom. High school teachers too, but with the high school teachers we have more of an opportunity to use documents. And sometimes it's easier to use documents. It's certainly less expensive to make facsimiles of documents than it is to go out and find objects, but we also assume that the high school teachers will be able to make a different use of objects than elementary and middle school teachers do—including sending their students out into the field on their own. Students, if they are not doing a field trip per se, sometimes they can do internships, they do special projects—classroom projects. I've worked with high school students doing history projects before, and I know that they are capable of some very high-level thinking involving primary sources.
So, we have been experimenting with this over the years, everybody loves objects, everybody. We take—the high school teachers get to go behind the scenes at the museum and see what we do with collections and begin to understand how important material culture is to understanding history. So again it's one of those things that they might not be able to have in their classroom, but it gives the teachers a greater depth of knowledge of the history that they're teaching, when they get to see it in three dimensions.
Kim Laing: Each of our grants has gone to a different site, but we go on a field study—usually two days, sometimes one depending on just how far away it is and how much we can get done in that day. And they get to go behind the scenes at those places, as well. We try to take them places that, funding permitting, they could take their students. Obviously everyone's budgetary situation has limited the number of field studies they can do lately, but we stay in the vicinity of Michigan, or maybe Chicago because we're close enough—it's only two hours away for us—but they work with the curators there and the directors of education at those sites and they go behind the scenes and they participate in the activities and they work with the reenactors and again, it increases their basis of knowledge, their depth of experience, gives them stories to tell in the classroom to make history more alive—and just makes, you know—kind of renews their passion for it. If you have teachers that have been teaching for a really long time, sometimes just that reinvigoration can be really important for them, to get a new feel for it. Or maybe when they studied history, it was political history or military history, and getting a chance to work in kind of a daily-life material culture is something they might not have had an experience with in their college work, so we like to broaden their experience as much as possible.
Elspeth Inglis: Material culture is not something that is covered very well in textbooks, nor is it covered very well in colleges of education. And so, just to underscore what Kim had said, when we give teachers things to play with, in their hands, or put them behind a horse pulling a plow at Greenfield Village we are enriching their experience, which we know, we know, will get back to the classroom in one form or another. The teachers' own experiences, I can't state strongly enough how important it is for teachers to have strong, broad experiences in whatever subject that they're teaching. So I have no qualms about giving teachers tools or time to do things that they may not be able to do with their own students. Still they are going to be able to teach the subject at a greater level of understanding, and with more passion. That's my little soapbox. History has to be taught with passion or it's—it's flat.
Teachers today face a great challenge in keeping students' attention in a media-saturated world in which these students are immersed in fast-moving imagery, multitasking, and instant gratification. As history educators increasingly view the traditional textbook as a limited instruction tool, many are exploring methods of teaching that develop essential historical research and analysis skills while also making history interesting and fun.
The Louisiana State Museum actively encourages educators to use our exhibits and collections for studying material culture, as we embrace a mission where the museum provides a hands-on extension of the classroom. The museum's collection, which focuses on the history and culture of Louisiana, provides a diverse array of objects for studying history from the past 4,000 years.
From pre-contact Native American artifacts to those recovered from Hurricane Katrina, the museum's collection offers a window into the past and also a mirror of the present for the 30,000 students who visit the museum system annually. And because many educators are not able to visit the museum in person, we also provide access to significant artifacts and images through our website.
As educators strive to move beyond the textbook to stimulate and engage students, the prospect of studying material culture appears attractive to teachers for several reasons. First, the process of studying material culture engages students to think and ask questions, not just passively accept the teacher's view of history. As the students examine the artifacts, they become historians themselves in terms of learning to ask the appropriate questions about historical context, and by comparing and contrasting relevant historical periods. This process of learning to ask questions develops greater thinking and analytical skills.
Second, this process of studying material culture encourages greater intellectual independence among students. By asking students to work in teams, and analyze an historical object from the perspective of studying material culture, they can formulate their own questions and reach their own conclusions about the significance of an object and its historical relevance. The focus on an object, or group of artifacts, allows the student to take ownership of history, and not rely on the teacher to provide the answers. This fostering of independence can provide students with a sense of accomplishment and self-reliance that cannot be achieved through simple lecture and testing format.
Third, studying material culture is a great tool for bringing history to life and making it relevant to students' lives. Many students do not relate to history, because they find it irrelevant to their own interest or concerns. But by studying historical artifacts, the possibilities are greater for students making a personal and meaningful connection.
For example, in our Cabildo Museum in the French Quarter, the Battle of New Orleans exhibit features a field drum used by Jordan Noble, who was an enslaved teenage musician in 1815. The history of Jordan Noble provides a window into the role of both enslaved and free persons in defending New Orleans from the British invasion of 18141815.
However, students from the New Orleans area relate to the music connection in the story. In a society where parades and music processions are part of the cultural fabric, the Noble drum provides a relevant touchstone or hook that then allows them to learn the personal history of an individual within the context of the larger event. While the drum is a fun and engaging artifact for this region, educators should always try to find artifacts of material culture that will engage students in their relevant cultural context.
No set method to study material culture exists, and this lack of set pedagogy can be daunting to any teacher who wants to incorporate the process into their curriculum. But at the same time, the method is wide open to adaptation by teachers to make it relevant to their students.
Teachers interested in adapting material-culture-based ideas into their lessons are encouraged to seek museums and websites that promote this method, and also to network with other teachers who have used it in the past, and who may have valuable ideas on the most effective methods for different subjects or grade levels.
History kits (“trunks,” “boxes,” etc.), available for rent or purchase, have attracted attention from school districts, museums, and funders as a tool for integrating material culture into history instruction, and rightly so. As a museum educator and historian, I often witness the power of “stuff” (aka material culture) to connect students of all ages to historical events and people that might otherwise seem both remote and irrelevant. (1)
As an educator once cautioned me, however, “The world is full of dead kits.” You may have come across some yourself—boxes full of objects and notebooks stuffed with resources and lesson plans—developed with the best intentions and often at some expense, yet languishing on museum shelves or in curriculum directors’ offices. No matter how attractively packaged and thoughtfully conceived, using neat stuff in a history classroom is no slam-dunk.
Ultimately, efforts to enliven and deepen history instruction come down, as in so much else, to the teacher. This means that districts need to devote time and resources to professionally developing K12 educators in the effective use of material culture in the history classroom. Even high school teachers confident in their ability to use primary source documents with students typically lack training in teaching with material culture. Without such training, even the most inspiring history kits are likely to stay on the shelf.
The Deerfield Teachers’ Center (DTC) has found that combining teacher training in material culture with access to well-designed history kits is an effective strategy for improving history instruction. Best of all, it is a replicable model. Museums with robust education programs welcome opportunities to work with schools and teachers to develop strategies and materials to bring material culture into the classroom.
The Deerfield Teachers’ Center has created nine Traveling History kits to meet the needs of teachers and students. Designed around historical events, topics, and themes ranging from early exploration and contact to World War II, kits contain reproduction objects, images, music, and documents as well as contextual information and teacher background materials. Each item is carefully selected for inclusion based on its capacity to convey essential content and to promote skills of historical thinking and critical analysis in elementary and high school students. So far, so good. But how to encourage teachers to use these rich resources in their classrooms?
This is where teacher training in material culture comes in. Educators who attend DTC professional development interact with material culture in workshops and seminars. Teaching American History (TAH) project participants also select and observe a History Lab in their own classroom. In-class History Labs taught by DTC staff are organized around specific topics and themes and model teaching with a variety of primary sources, including material culture, to meet specific learning objectives. These experiences build teacher interest and confidence in using material culture; educators report that they routinely include such sources in their own teaching as a result of the training they received.
Embedding material culture in its historical context extends and deepens students’ knowledge beyond superficial memorization of dates and factoids. Hands-on, collaborative interaction with the “stuff” of history helps students to connect abstract concepts communicated through documents and secondary sources to human experience. Teachers and students take tea 18th-century style using reproduction tea equipage in the Tea Tax Tempest kit as they consider the role tea played in English social, economic, and political life on the eve of the American Revolution. (2)
The Made in America History Lab models for teachers how to use kit items to explore with students the role of a colony in the British Empire and offers students tangible evidence of the mercantilist assumptions that informed British economic policies. Access to this rich material culture also offers teachers alternatives to historically inaccurate activities involving appealingly tactile puffs of batting and sheep-to-wool textile stories that reinforce the myth of colonial self-sufficiency.
Not surprisingly, teachers who have observed a History Lab program are much more likely to use a history kit on their own. And, of course, kits are fun to use! Teacher training in material culture combined with access to well-designed history kits is a winning combination for any American history classroom. Is there a history kit on your shelf?
1 For a fascinating discussion of the potential power, utility, and methodology of using material culture to forward historical understandings, see Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman, eds., American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture (East Lansing: University of Michigan State Press, 2000).
2 T.H. Breen, “Baubles of Britain,” Past & Present, 119 (May 1988): 73104; Rodris Roth, "Tea Drinking in Eighteenth Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage," in Material Life in America, 16001860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 439463.
Material culture is at the heart of the work of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Using material culture, we fulfill our mission of promoting the understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. JANM has a permanent collection of over 60,000 photographs, documents, crafts, artwork, and moving images. These artifacts make up the material culture that illustrates and substantiates the history of one ethnic group in the United States.
One of the largest artifacts in our collection is a barrack from a World War II-era American concentration camp. During World War II this barrack was located in Heart Mountain, WY, and housed Japanese American families forcibly removed from the West Coast. It is now on display as part of Common Ground: The Heart of Community, JANM's ongoing exhibition covering the history and culture of Japanese Americans from the 1880s to the present.
Within the exhibition the barrack confronts people with the reality of the experience of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent who were confined in one of 10 camps run by the United States government. For Japanese Americans who were once confined in similar barracks, seeing this artifact often serves as an emotional reminder of a difficult past.
Each year, over 20,000 students in Los Angeles visit JANM and are able to stand inside this barrack. They listen to the volunteer docents' first-person stories about life during World War II. Material culture brings history to life so when students see the gaps between the barrack floorboards and hear the volunteers recount the mass removal and confinement without due process, they often respond by saying, "That's not fair."
An opportunity for dialogue opens when students ask how this could have happened to the Japanese Americans. This allows us to share not only the World War II experience, but also the pre-war discrimination, the community's post-war struggles to get back onto its feet, and the coalition that fought for and in 1988 achieved redress from the United States government. A tour that began in a 70-year-old barrack can become a discussion about race-based discrimination and the struggle to redress a constitutional wrong.
The barrack from Heart Mountain is one example of an object's ability to teach and invite thoughtful conversation. Like many other museums, we are beginning to experiment with ways to increase the accessibility of more of our artifacts. This school year we have introduced two new school programs. Digital Speakers Bureau is designed to allow real-time, Web-based dialogue between docents and students who cannot visit the museum. Object Analysis with the Education Collection is for students who live in the Los Angeles area and are interested in hands-on analysis of a subset of JANM's collections. Additionally we have begun to upload 30- to 60-second video clips of volunteers sharing stories that relate to artifacts from our collection and have a handful of online collections.
Material culture encourages students to think critically about the real-life lessons that this experience holds for us all. While the Heart Mountain barrack evokes deeply personal memories for many Japanese Americans, it also stands as a general warning against the discrimination, mass removal, and incarceration of any one ethnic group. The barrack from World War II reminds us that—now and in the future—it is our individual and collective responsibility to uphold constitutional rights for all.
While the Holocaust bears the distinction of being the most documented genocide, it also bears the weight of incomprehension. Oftentimes, this leads to pedagogical approaches that, though well-intentioned, distort or trivialize history. To better understand the factors that led to the persecution and murder of European Jews and millions of non-Jews, how do intentional encounters with seemingly ordinary artifacts—in the exhibition space of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and through its online resources—promote historical thinking for understanding the Holocaust's profundity?
First, artifacts facilitate translating the statistical millions into individuals. (1) This in turn demonstrates how chronology, geography, and circumstance led to persecution, murder, or survival for the mosaic of victims. When used as a sustained classroom teaching tool, the identity cards visitors receive when entering the Permanent Exhibition illustrate these factors. (Over 500 are now available on the Museum's website.)
For example, the identity card of Gad Beck reveals that as a Mischlinge—the child of a German Gentile mother and Jewish father—Beck was spared deportation to the killing centers in Eastern Europe. While many homosexuals lived in fear, and thousands were persecuted and murdered, being part of the homosexual community aided Beck’s survival. He turned to trusted non-Jewish homosexual friends to provide food and hiding places.
Beck's card also calls for inquiry into the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. Under these laws, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was considered to be Jewish, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. The card details his betrayal by a Jewish spy for the Gestapo near the end of the war in 1945. The year bears examination, for if his betrayal had occurred prior to 1945, this would have severely limited his chance to survive.
Second, artifact contemplation helps to contextualize the Holocaust beyond the brutality of mass murder. On the Museum's third floor, visitors encounter a mass assortment of victims' shoes from the Majdanek killing center near Lublin, Poland. The shoes signify the systematic plunder of victims' belongings in the dehumanization process of the Holocaust. Students visiting the shoe exhibit notice the deterioration of the shoes, but they may also notice the variety of styles and realize that for many victims, the shoes may be the only personal items that survive them. The shoes remind students of the personal stories behind the artifact.
Next to the shoes, the Tower of Faces displays photographs of shtetl life in Eishyshok, now in Lithuania. These photos, available on the Museum's online archive, portray a vibrant Jewish community that existed for 900 years. In 1941, an SS mobile killing squad entered the village and in two days murdered the Jewish population. The photos speak not to the killing, but to the culture and inhabitants of Eastern European shtetl life before the war while ensuring that the victims not remain faceless or forgotten.
Third, analyzing artifacts of Holocaust history helps avoid giving simple answers to complex questions. The voyage of the St. Louis, displayed on the Museum's fourth floor and in an online exhibition, frames the often-asked question, "Why didn't they just leave?" as a conduit to understanding how U.S. immigration quotas established in the 1920s prevented significant Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 1940s.
Examining the photo album of a St. Louis passenger increases students' understanding of the individuals who were impacted by the "push-pull-push back" factors of emigration and immigration. The album's photos depict passengers dancing and dining, roller-skating and sunning themselves on the ship's deck, blissfully unaware that they will soon be denied entry to Cuba and the U.S. Realizing that their lives were in peril if they remained in Europe, their fates were determined by factors beyond their control. The photo album prompts students to look at the social, diplomatic, political, and often anti-Semitic tone in the U.S. before and during the war. The St. Louis photo album provokes scrutiny of U.S. foreign policy then and now, and perhaps more importantly, the photo album conveys that history is not inevitable but is shaped by decision-making at all levels.
Analysis of the Museum's rich trove of artifacts can move the Holocaust from the abstract to the tangible. As the witness generation passes away, Holocaust education will rely increasingly on evidence from the era. Through contemplation of artifacts and other documents, studying the Holocaust will remain dynamic well into the 21st century.
Note: The views expressed are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.