Instructify

Civil rights issues have received a lot of attention in the United States recently. On one hand, the nation elected its first African-American President. On the other hand, same-sex marriage bans have threatened the rights of millions. While the minority group being attacked has changed, the struggle itself is, sadly, nothing new.

Teachers and students who are interested in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s now have an outstanding resource at their disposal, The Civil Rights Digital Library. The site “promotes an enhanced understanding of the movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.” Quite simply, there is a wealth of information here for educators. The bulk of the site’s content is divided into four categories: events, places, people, and topics. The information is also organized by media type, covering everything from pamphlets to slide shows. There is an impressive list of the various institutions that contributed to the Civil Rights Digital Library, as well as an alphabetical list of featured collections. Most importantly, the educator resources section is extensive, and includes learning modules, lesson plans, slide shows, teaching guides, study guides, time lines, worksheets, and annotated bibliographies.

In short, The Civil Rights Digital Library boasts a collection of resources as numerous and remarkable as the massive list of people who have fought for racial equality. Some of that struggle took place right here in North Carolina, a fact which may help students connect to this material in a way that will really hit home. –JIMI RADABAUGH

The Civil Rights Digital Library

Related Stuff:

The National Museum of the American Indian

In Motion: The African American Migration Experience

Drop Me Off in Harlem: Learn how people and culture intersected in the Harlem Renaissance

Photo credit: DrewMyers on flickr

Sometimes it seems as though the main thing kids (and adults) need to learn about history is that it really happened, to real people, people not so different from us. Never in all of history has it been easier to make this point with primary sources, more of which go online every day. One recent historic addition to this global archive at our fingertips is the LIFE magazine photo collection, now on the web courtesy of Google.The front page of the LIFE photo archive gives some terrific introductory browses, by decade or by a few chosen topics. To search only the LIFE photos, you can visit this page or else enter “source:life” in a regular Google Images search. Perhaps best of all, all the pictures seem to be available in large, high-resolution versions, and all of them seem have useful information prominently displayed, such as the date the photograph was taken and the name of the photographer. It would have been nice if copyright information about the photos were as easy to find; under the current copyright laws, it is a fair use for educators to put any of these photos in classroom-only materials, but it’s not clear whether they can be reproduced on an open website or in a book, for instance.

One wonderful thing about the LIFE photos is that they’re works of art as well as of American history; the magazine’s photographers routinely collected entirely justified awards. Some of the gorgeous photos I found by browsing include a picture of a bare-chested Picasso with a flower behind his ear, a picture of children of Japanese ancestry on their way to a WWII internship camp, and a picture of famed socialite and photographer Lee Miller in full soldier kit sitting on a piece of rubble. But why not look around for yourself? A search is worth a thousand words. — AMANDA FRENCH

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

Related Stuff:

View Library of Congress photos on Flickr

View historical photos from the 1900s at Shorpy

Browse original historical documents for free with Footnote

Google plans to digitize newspapers

Taking a group of students on a field trip to Rome may be financially unrealistic, and taking them to Ancient Rome is physically impossible. Fortunately, an international team of researchers worked more than 10 years to provide the next best thing: a three-dimensional model of Rome in the year 320 AD.

Enter Ancient Rome 3D and witness the best view of Ancient Rome in over 15 centuries. Brought to you by Google Earth, this digital glimpse into the past is simply awesome. For those of you who have never used Google Earth, the two-minute instructional video on the intro page is helpful. You will need to download the program itself, which will run the simulation. A word of caution: slower computers (like mine) may have a hard time running Ancient Rome 3D without freezing up. I suggest closing all other programs and exercising a little patience. You should also note that the directional control at the top of the screen adjusts your horizontal perspective. In other words, the control allows you to see buildings as if you were walking towards them, as opposed to the default overhead angle.

Once you’ve become familiar with the program, the next step is to introduce Ancient Rome 3D into the classroom. Google is sponsoring a Rome Curriculum Competition, “accepting curricula from all grade levels and K-12 subject areas including art history, math, social studies, physics, and philosophy.” Contest winners will feel like they’ve achieved gladiatorial victory, without the risk of getting torn apart by wild animals. –JIMI RADABAUGH

Ancient Rome 3D

Related Stuff:

Explore Early Civilizations with BBC Ancient History

National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid: Archaeology with No Risk of Snakes or Nazis!

It’s All Greek (Mythology) to Me

See Ya, Colossus of Rhodes… Hello, Chichen Itza’ !

Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian from Northwestern University and the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection is a collection of over 2200 photographs of individuals from over 80 American Indian tribes taken by Edward Sherriff Curtis in the early 20th century.  Curtis’s photography emphasizes the theme of native people as a “vanishing race,” a belief that was widely held in his time and that has contributed to damaging stereotypes since then.  An excellent series of biographical and short historical essays, Edward S. Curtis in Context, provides background on the series of photographs and on Curtis’s views of native people and includes a very insightful article by David R. M. Beck on the myth of the vanishing race.  Be sure to read these essays before venturing into the photographs — they will provide tremendous insight!

While viewing the collection, visitors can search by keyword or browse the collection by the volume of Curtis’s original collection of books, by American Indian tribe, or by geographic location. Digital records for each photograph include Curtis’s captions, bibliographic information, and large JPG versions of each photograph, allowing the user to view them in great detail.  These photographs and the issues, interpretations and controversies that surround them, have the potential to spark interesting classroom discussions on more than just American Indian history. Students should also consider photographs as primary sources (are they untainted documentary evidence of the past, or can the photographers beliefs, choices, and staging present a false record?), and the complexities of ethnographic encounters.  Teacher resources from the Learning Page at the Library of Congress include ideas for using this collection to teach U.S. history, critical thinking, and arts and humanities.

Edward Curtis: Dialogue, a website from PBS station WNET, which produced an episode of American Masters on Curtis, focuses on the controversies surrounding Curtis and his photographs of American Indians.  The site focuses on five key issues surrounding Curtis’s work.   Curtis Photography: Stealing the Soul or Preserving a Legacy? considers American Indian responses to Curtis’s work. Dressing Up, Whose Idea Was It Anyway? addresses why Curtis chose to represent native people as he did and whether or not photos were staged to present a stereotypical image. Shooting the Sacred explores the controversies surrounding Curtis’s photography of sacred objects and ceremonies. Did He Show Us What Was Happening? questions the accuracy and completeness of the views of American Indian life presented by Curtis, and Who Was Edward Curtis? delves more deeply into the life of the photographer himself.  In each section, visitors can watch video clips of experts discussing Curtis’s work and the reaction to it in American Indian communities, participate in online discussions (which teachers should note are open to the public), or take part in a poll on the issues raised.

Collaborative Arts Resources for Education, a program of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Photographic Arts, and San Diego Museum of Art, presents a lesson plan on ethnographic photography for high school art students that uses Curtis’s work as the starting point for student photography projects. -KATHRYN WALBERT

Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian

Edward Curtis: Dialogue

Related Stuff:

Celebrate Thanksgiving with Plimoth Plantation

The National Museum of the American Indian

You may not be able to make it to Massachusetts this November, but you and your students can learn a lot from the website at Plimoth Plantation without ever leaving home.

With Thanksgiving coming up, be sure to visit You Are the Historian, part of Plimoth Plantation’s online educational resources.  There, you can explore myths about the first Thanksgiving, read or listen to the only written eyewitness account of the harvest feast (including commentary from a historian), learn more about the English colonists and the Wampanoag people, view a time line that looks at events in Plimoth from both English and Wampanoag perspectives, and show what you have learned by writing a museum label or creating a museum exhibit.  Students can select images and add text to them in this activity, printing out their finished projects before navigating away from the page.  At any time, click to the Glossary to read definitions of words used on a given page, click Visit the Expert to hear the perspective of a historian, educator, or other expert on the documents and ideas that you’re exploring, or click on Teacher’s Guide for lesson plans and other ideas that will help you use specific resources with your own students.

The Kids area of the website features coloring pages, recipes for succotash and stewed pumpkin, instructions for making a Wampanoag toss-and-catch game and a colonial game called Fox and Geese, stories from Wampanoag and English perspectives, a “talk like a Pilgrim” feature where students can learn (and hear) how colonists might have spoken to one another, and a Homework Help area with detailed information for students on many aspects of Wampanoag and colonial life in the 1600s.

In the Discover More area, you can delve more deeply into the interesting history of Plimoth Plantation through archaeology, behind-the-scenes blogs, and a number of very useful articles and essays on a range of historical topics. Other resources specifically for educators include bibliographies, printable maps from Wampanoag and English perspectives, a timeline, and a list of helpful internet resources. -KATHRYN WALBERT

Plimoth Plantation

You Are the Historian

Related Stuff:

The National Museum of the American Indian

November is National American Indian Heritage Month and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian offers a wealth of resources for K-12 teachers who want to help their students learn more about American Indian history and culture.  In addition to discovering the museum and its many resources, educators who visit the museum’s website can view two engaging online exhibits, find lesson plans, and download PDFs of several different educational publications.

In the online exhibition Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian,  students can learn about native artist Fritz Scholder, a member of the Luiseño tribe, and view several of his works and commentary about him, and consider his significance in the history of native art.  There is also a podcast available describing Scholder’s work.

In the online exhibit Native Words, Native Warriors, students can learn about the experiences of native code talkers in World War I and World War II.  Students can read the text of this exhibit themselves or listen to audio while viewing compelling image and teachers can access a lesson plan for grades 6 to 12 focused on the exhibit.  The lesson plan includes a list of resources for teachers that will lead you to numerous websites on the code talkers, on various kinds of codes and ciphers, and on American Indian languages.

In the museum website’s Education section,  a collection of print resources offers teachers PDF files that can be used to support a field trip visit to the museum as well as PDF versions of several publications and educational posters that can be used in the classroom even if you are not fortunate enough to be able to visit the museum in Washington D.C.  Of particular interest this month are the teaching poster (which also includes a detailed guide for educators) American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving, aimed at students in grades 4 through 8, and the study guide Harvest Ceremony: Beyond the Thanksgiving Myth, which includes detailed information about the Wampanoag people, the first Thanksgiving, the importance of corn as a native crop, and a recipe for Johnny cakes that you could make with your students

For another detailed collection of resources, you may want to also visit the National Register of Historic Places feature on National American Indian Heritage Month from the National Park Service. -KATHRYN WALBERT

National Museum of the American Indian

National American Indian Heritage Month

Growing up in the Midwest, I thought all the important bits of American history happened on the East cost. Turns out the Midwest was home to some juicy parts of history, too, especially in the Windy City. Chicago’s oft-infamous past includes the Great Chicago Fire, The Black Sox Scandal, and the career of Al Capone. You can find out about all that, plus some of the more positive events like the World’s Fair of 1893, at The History Files from the Chicago Historical Society.

The History Files provides a great primer on several key people, places and events in Chicago’s history. In addition to what’s mentioned above, be sure to read up on the creation of Pullman cars, the world’s first luxury railroad sleeping cars. Or find out where your dinner comes from by checking out Chicago’s Union Stockyards. Each section includes pictures, and lets you gawk at historical artifacts like the podium from the 1880 Republican National Convention, or prohibition-era stills used by bootleggers. The bibliography provides avenues for further reading.

Chicago has never exactly been a low-profile town. But now that we’ve elected a Chicagoan president of the United States, it’s the perfect time to look more closely at the city that brought us Michael Jordan, Oprah, and a century of losing from the Chicago Cubs. -BILL FERRIS

The History Files via the Chicago Historical Society

Related Stuff:

The pen is mightier than the tommy gun: G-Men and Journalists

Drop Me Off in Harlem: Learn how people and culture intersected in the Harlem Renaissance

Learn about the lives of runaway slaves with The Geography of Slavery

Jon White is an artist. Not only is he skilled in the ways of character animation, drawing, CSS and HTML, he also knows a thing or two about education. From his bio:

But beyond everything else, what gets my blood pumping are the lightbulb moments. The episodes of clarity, of understanding, and of fun when new ideas and concepts get made real.

White’s site has a bundle of fun videos and interactive segments designed to make learning fun, especially when it comes to understanding our political system. In the first video he presents on the page, White shows how the 1968 Presidential election played out by using caricatures of the candidates to illustrate how topsy-turvy the race actually was. The animation is fun and presents the information in a way that allows users to digest and retain the information.

Not all of White’s creations are entirely educational in the traditional sense of the word, but his creativity and use of time lines and interactive flash elements make for a lot of fun for teachers and students alike. The page is really a chance for White to show off his skills, but honestly, I’m impressed. I wish more web designers would take education more seriously, and Mr. White can serve as a role model. You can also subscribe to Jon’s RSS Feed to find out what he’s up to. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Jon White Studio

Related Stuff:

Relive the Carnage of American Conflict…With Food

Condense Centuries of Hostility into Ninety Seconds with Maps of War

Animated explanations abound at Biology in Motion

Its no coincidence that journalism remains the preferred secret identity for superheroes. The correlation between news reporting and crime fighting dates back for decades. You and your students can learn about how that relationship works for non-cape-wearing law enforcement by visiting G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI’s First Century.

G-Men and Journalists, a website based on an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC, explores how the press played a huge part in the FBI’s investigations of gangsters like John Dillinger, terrorists such as the Unabomber, spies, snipers and more. Match famous headlines to the feds and felons who inspired them. Watch videos detailing how two guys terrorized our nation’s capital with a rifle and a Chevy Caprice. Also learn how Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover courted the press, providing juicy tips to reporters who then wrote laudatory stories highlighting the FBI’s scientific, team-oriented investigations. The FBI’s courtship of the press helped mold the tough, all-seeing, not-to-be-trifled-with Bureau image we know today.

If you happen to live in Washington, DC, or are near enough for a field trip, you can see the G-Men and Journalists exhibit first-hand at the Newseum, billed as the world’s most interactive museum. If you can’t, the Newseum website has a lot of great information, including daily scans of the front pages of the leading newspapers in the United States. If your students crave something more adventurous, G-Men and Journalists shows they can find it not just in superhero comics, but also in the news. -BILL FERRIS

G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI’s First Century

Related Stuff:

Google plans to digitize newspapers

View Library of Congress Photos on flickr

Learn the Rules of Photography Composition

Did you know Iceland celebrates their independence from Denmark every June 17th? How about that Samoa has 2,337 kilometers of roadways? Or that Ukraine is an actual country and not just a territory in Risk? You too can use facts like these to win at Jeopardy, lord it over your colleagues, or even impart it to your students. It’s easy with The World Factbook from the Central Intelligence Agency (yes, that Central Intelligence Agency).

The CIA World Factbook has information on pretty much every country on earth — not surprising, since it’s the CIA we’re talking about. They’ve got the skinny on every country’s climate, type of government, prominent religions, literacy rates, natural resources, infant mortality rate, and lots more information you’d probably never think to ask about. The only way to find out more about these places would be to visit them yourself.

This site should be your students’ first stop if they’re researching a country for a social studies or a foreign language class. They can also print a PDF of the book for offline usage. You seriously won’t believe the depth of information available at The World Factbook. See for yourself so you and your students can put those facts to good use. -BILL FERRIS

The World Factbook

Related Stuff:

Find Where the Government Keeps its Secrets

The Genuine Article–Browse Original Historical Documents for Free with Footnote

Monitor The Government As Avidly As It Monitors You. Well, Almost: OpenCongress.org

What do the Middle Passage, the post-Civil War movement of rural African Americans to the north, and Caribbean immigration have in common?  All of these events involved the migration of people of African descent to, within, or from what is now the United States.  These and other migrations are the focus of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience, a project of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.  This unique resource brings scholarly research and primary sources on many different migrations together, creating exciting possibilities for student research on both individual topics and comparative themes.

Each section of the website includes a detailed historical overview of a specific migration, interspersed with primary sources that the reader can explore in detail.  For example, in the section entitled Runaway Journeys, you will find paintings, engravings and photographs of enslaved people, interviews with former slaves, maps, newspaper advertisements for runaways, photographs of the shackles and collars used to restrain slaves, letters, personal narratives of escape, writings from slave holders, secondary accounts from historians, and much more.  In all, the website brings together more than 16,500 pages of text and 8,300 illustrations to create an incredibly rich archive for historical research.

The Educational Materials section provides lesson plans for using these resources that go well beyond history and into other curriculum areas, including economics, mathematics, language arts, performing arts, and world religions.  For example, students can use documents from the Great Migration to study wages and expenses in 1919 in an economics lesson plan, focus on the arts of the Harlem Renaissance while learning about the Second Great Migration, or explore the Constitution in detail while studying the slave trade.

Taught well, history is always a comparative endeavor — we want our students to understand how the past differs from the present, and also how different moments in the past relate to one another.  In Motion beings together an incredible collection of tools that students can use to figure out the connections between migrations and to develop their own interpretations of African American history. -KATHRYN WALBERT

In Motion: The African American Migration Experience

Related Stuff:

Drop Me Off in Harlem: Learn how people and culture intersected in the Harlem Renaissance

Learn about the lives of runaway slaves with The Geography of Slavery

Stock up on history resources at the National History Education Clearninghouse

With so much information available online, the printed newspaper might not have much time left. In the information age, opening the paper today to read about what happened yesterday seems incredibly slow. They’re not searchable, and their size is unwieldy for folks used to reading news on a laptop or iPhone. Plus they generate waste, and your fingers get all inky. That said, I’ve fond memories of reading through the funnies and the sports section on Sunday mornings as a kid. My wife wrote for a daily paper, too. The newspaper was our culture’s medium of record for generations, and it deserves better than to merely vanish into obsolescence.

Leave it to Google to make newspapers searchable. Google will partner with newspaper publishers to digitize archived issues and make more papers available online. You can still read them as they were originally printed — that includes headlines, articles, photos, ads, letters to the editor, maybe even an ink smudge or two. “Over time,” the Google blog says, “as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well.” Cool!

Google’s newspaper digitization project will allow your students to use primary source material to view history through the lens of people experiencing it. It also means they won’t have to head to the library to squint at microfiche editions of old newspapers for that research paper you assigned them.

Sure, the newspaper doesn’t have as many features as today’s online media, but it’s an important part of our heritage as an informed society. Now a lot of that heritage will be available digitally, and easier to access than ever before. I just hope they don’t forget to digitize the funny pages. -BILL FERRIS

Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time via the Official Google Blog

Google Launches Newspaper Digitization Project via Lifehacker

Related Stuff:

Learn about the lives of runaway slaves with The Geography of Slavery

Get Your History Straight from the Source: Making Sense of Evidence

Google Knol: a new Wikipedia?

Personal stories usually make for compelling history, but it can be hard to help students move beyond individual biographies and begin to make connections between people, places, events, and ideas.  What if you could allow students to delve into the stories of individual historical actors while also helping them see how those individual stories are woven together and steeped in a particular time and place?  At Drop Me Off in Harlem, you can do just that.

Drop Me Off in Harlem: Exploring the Intersections  from ARTSEDGE, a project of the Educational Department of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, allows students to explore the Harlem Renaissance through biography, geography, and thoughtful social history.  In the Faces of the Renaissance section, students can learn about musicians, actors, writers, artists, dancers, supporters and activists.  In many cases, they can view photographs, listen to audio clips of music or poetry readings, or see artwork related to the individual.  In the section entitled A Place Called Harlem, students can mouse over a map of Harlem to see photos of buildings and learn more about what happened within their walls.  In both sections, an Intersections sidebar will allow visitors to follow links to other people and places related to what they are currently learning.  The Themes and Variations section provides essays that offer additional historical background and analysis that will help students place the people and places of the Harlem Renaissance in a broader historical context. 

When reading about Duke Ellington, for example, students can view two video clips and listen to several audio clips. They can also connect to information about the Lafayette Theatre where Ellington played in 1923, the sculptor (Selma Burke) who created a bust of him, the composer Eubie Blake (whose “Lindy Hop” Ellington recorded), the dancer Florence Mills (for whom he wrote a song), and the dancer Earl Tucker (with whom he appeared in the movie “Symphony in Black”).  Each of those connections will, in turn, lead to other connections, allowing students to see the ways in which major figures in the Harlem Renaissance related to one another.

Drop Me Off in Harlem provides not only a great place for students to learn about the Harlem Renaissance in an innovative way, but also a great model for collaborative research projects.  Building on this model, students could work together to find creative and interesting ways to turn their individual research projects on a different historical time and place into a rich web of historical connections. -KATHRYN WALBERT

Drop Me Off in Harlem

Related Stuff:

Learn about the lives of runaway slaves with The Geography of Slavery

Stock up on history resources at the National History Education Clearninghouse

Get Up Close and Personal with the Past at EyeWitness to History

Get Your History Straight from the Source: Making Sense of Evidence

In November of 1770, a woman who gave her name as Betty was committed to the James City, Virginia prison as a runaway slave. Described in an advertisement as “a Congo new Negro woman,” Betty was said to be “very big with child” and either unable or unwilling to tell the name of the slave holder who owned her. True stories like Betty’s help students understand history as a compelling story about real people, and it’s easy to see how her attempt to find freedom for herself and her unborn child could get students interested and asking questions that will lead to an in-depth understanding of American slavery.

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, a project from the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, presents the full text and images from more than 4000 advertisements for runaway slaves and servants from Virginia and Maryland newspapers between 1736 and 1803. The site also provides additional primary sources, a bibliography, a glossary of unusual or antiquated terms found in the advertisements, and teaching materials to help teachers make the most of these advertisements.

Students don’t have to sift through all of the ads to find stories like Betty’s or to find patterns in these sources. Want to know more about enslaved people under 18 years of age who were running away to rejoin family? It’s easy to find the 38 such ads in the collection that students could use in their research. The site’s detailed search feature allows students to search the ads based on many different criteria (or combinations of criteria) that are relevant to their own questions. Resources like the Geography of Slavery bring primary research out of the archives and into the classroom — and the search feature allows students to instantly find the sources that will be most useful as they develop original interpretations of the past.

On a related note, for a nineteenth century exploration of slavery using North Carolina newspaper advertisements, see this lesson plan with accompanying primary sources from LEARN North Carolina. -KATHRYN WALBERT

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia

Related Stuff:

Stock up on history resources at the National History Education Clearninghouse

Click Through The Valley of the Shadow

Get Up Close and Personal with the Past at EyeWitness to History

Get Your History Straight from the Source: Making Sense of Evidence

If there’s one thing we know about history, there’s an awful lot of it. The world has changed a lot in the past several thousand years, and it’s tough to keep track of it all. But keep track of it you can, thanks to Macrohistory and World Report.

Macrohistory uses timelines to illustrate historical events. Think of it like SportsCenter — since it’s impossible to catch all the action, you can still see the highlights. And MWR has highlights from the last 200,000 years all the way up to the present day, showing classics like the extinction of neanderthals, the beginnings of agriculture, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In addition to condensed history, you can also find summaries of books on a wide range of historical and geographic subjects, including terrorism, the Middle Ages, and my favorite, “general.” Macrohistory and World Report is a great place to visit to get a handle on events from antiquity, as well as what’s been happening in Europe over the last few months. So even though you’ve missed most of recorded history, you won’t have to miss the most interesting bits. -BILL FERRIS

Macrohistory and World Report

Related Stuff:

See Art through the Ages with Timeline of Art History

Time Lines are on your Side with Mnemograph