07.04.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas at 12:31 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
Take a look at Today in History for July 4th! If you miss the date, just click on the archives search and select July 4.
One of my favorite primary sources for July 4th is a link to a letter written by John Adams to his wife, Abigail, on July 5, 1777. He describes the first ever Independence Day celebration in Philadelphia when the colonies were in full revolt against England.
Other links take you to speeches, music, photographs, and some wonderful oral histories filled with memories of old-time celebrations.
Sheet Music for the 4th of July
“Today in History” - Library of Congress
Words and music by W. E. Howard, 1915
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07.03.08
Posted in Technology & Primary Sources, Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas, Primary Source Workshops at 11:31 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
This week I had the opportunity to teach a workshop for the Teaching with Primary Sources - Colorado program to a most enjoyable group of educators in Colorado Springs. I had been trying to incorporate primary sources from the 1908 Democratic National Convention in Denver because of the upcoming July 31-Aug. 1 When History Happens conference and all the wonderful opportunities for teaching the political process and current issues this fall.
I also had the germ of an idea. How could I use this workshop as an excuse to experiment with a Web 2.0 tool in combination with primary sources? Then I remembered something that I had stashed away in my basement that just might be the link I needed.
It was an army document–a sort of certificate about 18 x 20 inches–dating from the Spanish American War of 1898. In the center of a group of patriotic illustrations was the name of “Col. William Jennings Bryan,” and under his name, a list of soldiers who served under his command. Why did I have this document? One of the soldiers was my grandfather, Abram Gildersleeve, who had enlisted at the age of 17 and served as a medical corpsman for the duration of the war.
What did this document have to do with the presidential election of 1908? William Jennings Bryan was selected as the Democratic nominee! (He eventually lost to William Howard Taft.)
I took the document to the second day of the workshop, and during lunch I took five close-up digital photos of it. In only about fifteen minutes, Nancy White (a colleague and friend) and I uploaded the images to VoiceThread and recorded an introduction. Everyone in the class quickly registered with VoiceThread (with just and e-mail and a password), and they immediately began to contribute comments. It couldn’t have been easier.
We had been working on asking strong questions of primary sources. For example, does the question advance knowledge of an event, person, or era? Is it researchable? Does it require only a “Yes” or “No” answer? Does it even matter? The ability to ask effective questions rests at the core of primary source teaching, and I wanted to be certain that the workshop participants understood that at a basic level so they could work with their own students to develop meaningful questions.
Click here to view our VoiceThread! (I’m still trying to figure out how to embed a VoiceThread code in my blog. Please respond if you know how!) As you go through our experimental VoiceThread, which questions do you think succeed, and which ones would you eliminate or revise? Why and how?
Another bit of good news is that VoiceThread has just launched a secure area just for education. Based on my one and only experience with VoiceThread, I think it’s every bit worth the $60 per year subscription to have unlimited VoiceThreads with which to experiment in every possible curricular area. I think most of the participants who tested VoiceThread with me would agree.
Abram Gildersleeve, Age 17 - U.S. Army, 1898
Abram Gildersleeve - Hospital Corpsman, 1898
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06.21.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas, Technology & Primary Sources at 1:25 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
My apologies for not having written for over two weeks. You see, I’m in the middle of a huge writing project for Linworth Publishing, and the deadline is looming. All in all, the project has been hugely enjoyable because it has given me an excuse to explore Web 2.0 tools in combination with primary sources. Back when I first started hearing about Web 2.0, I quickly realized that all the multimedia options were ready-made for primary source integration. Photographs, historic newspapers, documents, maps, sound files, motion pictures, artifacts, ephemera…every type of primary source, complete with student analyses, can plug right into those friendly Web 2.0 tools.
I’m especially excited about the interactive possibilities of presenting primary sources to the world, then inviting interested parties to submit audio feedback, text comments, and tags. What I’d really like to do (when…if…this project ever ends) is to send unidentified photographs out to family members via VoiceThread and ask them to comment and offer their thoughts on the identities of generations past. I wonder how many long-forgotten family members I could identify. For that matter, I wonder how many of the cousins who are still kicking could get in touch again after all these years.
Past connections must be on my mind. In July I hope to attend my 40th high school class reunion. Egad! How did I ever get that old?
Well, at any rate, I ask your patience while I crank out the last chapter, build an index, follow up on permissions, rewrite awkward sections, double check bib formats, follow printing instructions down to the last detail, and so on. I cannot begin to tell you how many fabulous primary source Web sites and Web 2.0 tools I have discovered during this writing. I want to share them all, but it looks as if I’ll have to divvy them up over the next several years of writing this blog. I don’t believe I will ever run out of material, but I may run out of energy.
As a little teaser, take a look at this great “Guide to Doing History with Objects” from the National Museum of American History. I love the idea that the authors, Lubar and Kendrick, view artifacts as “passageways into history.” Their guide includes four excellent artifact analysis examples. One of them features a baseball from the American Negro Leagues All-Star baseball game of 1937 (pictured below). Sorry I don’t have time to follow up on the source. I’ve gotta get back to my “real” writing.
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06.04.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas, Digitization news at 10:41 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
While working on a chapter on teaching with primary source sound and film for the book I’m writing, I discovered the Web site of the National Film Preservation Foundation. The non-profit NFPF has been supporting film preservation for about ten years, and in 2007 it started giving out grants to help libraries, museums, and archives across the nation preserve films. So far, NFPF has funded preservation of 1,270 films in 44 states and Puerto Rico. You can search them by title, date, program, or archive. The following titles give an idea of the great variety of films:
- Buckwheat (1974), documentary short featuring celebrated storyteller Ray Hicks showing how to reap buckwheat, telling stories, and playing harmonica (East Tennessee State University, Archives of Appalachia).
- The Daughter of Dawn (1920), recently discovered “lost” feature made in Oklahoma with a Native American cast (Oklahoma Historical Society).
- Jackie Robinson Workout Footage (1945), profile of the baseball star shot prior to his signing by the Los Angeles Dodgers (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library).
- San Idelfonso-Buffalo and Cloud Dances (1929), ceremonial dance performance filmed by Ansel Adams’ wife Virginia (New Mexico State Records Center and Archives).
- Sweeter by the Dozen (ca. 1950), a day in the life of the second graders at the Los Angeles Westlake School for Girls, by amateur filmmaker Herbert Sturdy (Northeast Historic Film).
Normally, I stick to American Memory collections because I always know that their resources will be available online. The wonderful films in the list above do not have links for easy viewing, so I wrote to NFPF to inquire about how to view any of them. I received an immediate reply from Projects Assistant Ihsan Amanatullah, who explained, “Some of the institutions we have awarded grants to have made their films available online to the general public (or plan to do so). It is up to each archive to decide if they will give online access to the films they have preserved with our support.” Sadly, there is no master list of films available online.
Mr. Amanatullah provided me with some links to films available online, but in general, someone who wants to find films from the list that they can view online must follow the Web site links provided to each institution and search within that collection. I did watch a 1928 amateur film from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that showed an area near Verdun, France just ten years after the end of World War I. It included views of acres and acres of white crosses in cemeteries, an overturned German tank, and film of some local people going about their business.
I was really impressed with the award-winning series of three DVD boxed sets offered for sale by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and I think they would be well worth the cost to add to a school library collection. I even wrote to my local public library to ask them to consider adding it to their collections! It can’t hurt to try.
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05.24.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas at 2:26 am by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
For the past three weeks I have been traveling in the Greek islands, ferrying to a new one every few days. I’ve visited Crete, Santorini, Naxos, Paros, Andros, and now Mykonos, but the reality of working life will begin again shortly. As always, the photography trips that my husband and I take are a mixture of fascinating discoveries, great food (and some not so great), and heavy-duty work. Nothing quite compares to the relief of turning in that last rental car unscathed.
So many visual memories flood a traveler’s mind–
- Sea vistas and peaceful harbors all around at the end of the last hairpin turn
- Colorful wildflowers in unexpected places, especially red poppies
- Tiny, primitive Byzantine chapels with 6th century frescoes still visible
- Brilliant white buildings with intense blue doors, trims, and domes
- Donkeys winding through narrow paths over paving stones painted with white edges
- Men smoking in tavernas (so much smoke)
- Widows in black
- Enormous ferry boats discharging hundreds of people alongside heavy road equipment and trucks loaded with rock in five minutes
- French, German, Brits, Japanese, Norwegian, and every other kind of tourist
In past posts about travel, I have written about the World War I monuments that tell so many hidden stories of suffering and grief. In the Greek islands, I have been puzzled by the dates on similar monuments: 1912-1922. I know that Crete was occupied by the Germans in World War II, and many of the other islands were occupied by the Italians during the same time period, but I’m a bit in the dark about the World War I monuments. One taverna owner told me that the extended dates beyond 1918 covered the fight for independence from Turkey. I must read more when I return to the States. Meanwhile, I offer a couple of photographs of World War I era monuments as the only primary sources I can “read.”
Monument in a Mountain Village on Crete
Donkeys & 1912-1922 Monument (right) on Santorini
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05.03.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Technology & Primary Sources, Primary Source Workshops at 10:20 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
Yesterday I left at 5:30 a.m. for my drive to Las Animas, Colorado, where I conducted a day-long workshop for the “Teaching with Primary Sources–Colorado” program. Las Animas sits on the southeast plains of Colorado in Bent County, known for the Santa Fe Trail, Bent’s Fort, Rocky Ford melons, and railroad history. My route took me past irrigated wheat and alfalfa fields, large cattle lots, old sugar beet factories (I think), small farm towns, and many purple lilac bushes and pink flowering trees.
Early 20th Century Las Animas Scene, Denver Public Library, Western History & Genealogy Department
As an Iowa farm girl who has lived in cities for many years, I always love to get back to the country and into schools that do amazing things with fewer resources, higher percentages of free and reduced lunch kids, and a wider mix of cultures than my own homogeneous suburban district. Even though I always feel at home with educators in general, it is always a pleasure to visit to a school that has the same size and feel as that of my own school days.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with the seven teachers who gave up a day off just two weeks before their school year ends. (Las Animas works a four-day week with long days–a fairly common schedule in rural Colorado.) A couple of teachers had some experience with the collections of the Library of Congress, while others were seeing these treasures for the first time. One of the challenges for me is always to find a balance between wanting to introduce all the fascinating features of the Library of Congress Web site and recognizing that depth might trump breadth in usefulness.
The computer lab in Peter Wybenga’s library had been funded by a grant. The student service group that served lunch was funded by a grant. The school will install environmentally friendly heating and cooling systems this summer, again funded by a grant. And of course, the workshop was also funded by a grant. It certainly made me wonder where our schools would be without generous grants.
I also ran into a frustrating, but typical, situation when training the participants to download the rich examples of sound and video files from American Memory. All blocked by the filter. All unavailable for effective teaching. All essentially non-existent. The necessity of downloading these files at home, saving them to a CD or DVD, and bringing them to school to use in the curriculum seems like a series of insurmountable roadblocks. I think most teachers would reject blocked primary source sound and moving picture files as simply not worth the trouble.
Both the principal and the superintendent stopped by twice during the workshop. Very impressive! To their credit, they see the connection between 21st century skills and teaching with primary sources.
So, thank you, Las Animas, for an excellent workshop experience! On my journey home, I gripped the steering wheel tightly to control my car in 60-mph wind gusts, survived an attack of a giant tumbleweed, and squinted through layers of sandstorms. I wish for you soothing days of rain to ease the drought. We would all prefer to keep the study of the Dust Bowl in the category of primary sources.
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04.21.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas, Technology & Primary Sources at 10:48 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
I was sad to see the end of the amazing HBO mini-series about John and Abigail Adams. Even though I had read the David McCullough book on which it was based, I now have a much better visual understanding of the entire time period. I think my favorite scene visually was that of the half-finished White House into which John and Abigail moved in 1800. The film didn’t exactly leave the elegant impression that we have of the White House today. It looked more like living through a remodeling nightmare.
The Digital Reference Team at the Library of Congress has produced an excellent resource guide of John Adams materials:
“The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with John Adams. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Adams such as manuscripts, letters, broadsides, government documents, and images that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Adams and a bibliography containing selected works for both general and younger readers.”
From the main resource page you can follow links to these resources:
Abigail Adams or Laura Linney?
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04.18.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Lessons, Technology & Primary Sources at 10:18 am by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
Next spring when the cherry trees bloom, maybe I’ll be able to fly to Washington, D.C., to see all the great sights I missed when I first visited our nation’s capital in the early 90s–the renovated National Portrait Gallery, the new National Museum of the American Indian, the huge new Audiovisual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress at Culpeper, Virginia (covered with earth, perennials, grass, and trees to restore Mount Pony to its natural appearance).
Now a new exhibition is calling my name. It’s called “The Library of Congress Experience.” As I understand it, this “experience” is a fabulous interactive exhibit at the Library of Congress that opened to the general public just last Saturday. I suspect its “cutting-edge interactive technology” is something special indeed. Even my favorite author-historian, David McCullough, said that if you only had a chance to see a single D.C. sight, it should be the “Creating the United States” exhibition that is part of “The Library of Congress Experience.” (For more on McCullough’s speech, see Matt Raymond’s Library of Congress blog entry.)
As for those of us who can’t just pop over for a quick visit to the actual “experience,” a companion Web site comes to our rescue. It’s called MyLOC, and it’s well worth a visit and a bookmark. After I watched the well-done introductory video, I naturally clicked on “Educational Resources,” which took me to a screen of lesson plans and online activities. I definitely want to explore the “Zoom into Maps” activity. I also registered for MyLOC so I could add lesson plans and primary sources to “My Collection.”
Matt Raymond reports in his blog that the Library of Congress has also updated a lot of its signage at the Thomas Jefferson Building, so the place looks spiffy both inside and out. You can see the evidence on Flickr!
Photo by Allen Hayden Johnson
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04.05.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas, Primary Source Lessons at 10:40 am by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
Last year I helped a bit to build a list of lessons and teaching ideas in support of the National Endowment for the Humanities “Picturing America” program. Now you may not think of paintings as primary sources, but I find many similarities between American paintings and traditional primary sources such as letters, photographs, maps, journals, and artifacts. In many cases, paintings are truly eyewitness accounts of historical events. Portraits, too, brought the artist and the subject face-to-face, which makes portraits fit the primary source definition as well. As students work through events in history, the visual representations of those events and the people involved in them can greatly help increase their understanding. Paintings can also be used to compare and contrast the visual with the written accounts of history. What is truth? What is myth? What is somewhere in between?
Today is April 5, which gives teachers exactly ten days to fill out the application to receive Picturing America Exhibits for their schools:
Successful applicants will receive a set of 20 laminated reproductions printed on both sides with artwork. A Teachers Resource Book is included with the reproduction set. Additional educational resources will be available on the NEH Web site. In return for receiving the Picturing America reproductions and Teachers Resource Book, schools are required to encourage teachers to use the reproductions in the classroom. Schools and libraries are required to keep as many of the reproductions as possible on continual exhibit in classrooms or public locations in the school…during the September 2008 through May 2009 grant term, and to retain the reproductions for future display and educational use.
What a deal! No cost sharing–just gorgeous reproductions to be kept and used in schools forever, plus the curriculum support needed to work with students. I don’t know how anyone could resist this fabulous program for a school. School library media specialists will receive recognition for their library programs, their teachers, and their administrators. The connections to art and history classes are obvious, but the exhibits will also enrich the entire school environment.
Good luck, and happy viewing! The deadline for applications is April 15–tax day!
Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, (the Landsdowne Portrait), 1796. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery.
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03.16.08
Posted in Recent Posts, Primary Source Teaching Ideas at 6:05 pm by Mary, The Primary Source Librarian
Most people with access to HBO, and many others as well, could not but have noticed the media blitz accompanying tonight’s debut of the mini-series “John Adams.” With big names involved (Paul Giamatti as John Adams, Laura Linney as Abigail, Tom Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, Tom Hanks as a co-producer) and the amazing historian, David McCullough “over the moon” as the author of the biography on which it is based, this mini-series can hardly fail to inspire.
From the Library of Congress Collection:
By Popular Demand: Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present.
In case you have not yet looked at the HBO Web site, you will be pleased to see a link to Teaching John Adams. A free education kit has been sent to 10,000 high schools, but if you missed it, you can download the complete teacher guide and student guide from the HBO Web site. If you subscribe to the inTIME Student Magazine, you will also find the entire student guide in the John Adams edition.
There’s more. In cooperation with the United States Postal Service, HBO has developed a special “Power of the Letter” section for its Web site based on the letters of John Adams:
In his prolific correspondence, John Adams left us a remarkable first-person account of the birth of our nation, as well as a candid portrait of his life and personal relationships. John and his wife Abigail’s letters offer a window to our past; we can be inspired to revive this tradition, to return to the enduring power of the written word, and leave a legacy for future generations.
The featured letters, which you can read either in transcribed form or enlarge to view original details, are provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society. (If you’re lucky enough to live near Boston, you can see the originals at the Society’s headquarters. There’s also an exhibition at Vassar.)
Students might enjoy customizing and sending a free John Adams greeting card. The US Postal Service is also helping to celebrate letter writing by postmarking First-Class Mail® letters with a special Power of the Letter cancellation in February and March.
In support of the mini-series, Colonial Williamsburg is sponsoring a Sweepstakes to win a family trip to the historic site.
And finally, on a personal note, the screenwriter and co-executive producer–Kirk Ellis–graduated from Cheyenne Mountain High School in my own city of Colorado Springs! When I “googled” him, I discovered an excellent interview about his work on the mini-series in an “interactive history magazine where YOU decide the course of action.” Not being a history teacher myself, I had never heard of Armchair General, but I was impressed with the goals of the publisher, whose name is Eric Weider:
Eric Weider is an experienced magazine publisher whose passion is bringing history to life through both print and Web media that engage the reader and provide interactive, decision-making opportunities. Eric’s goal is to make history meaningful to a broad audience, especially to America’s youth.
I hope you enjoy reading the Armchair General interview with Kirk Ellis. And I hope you will watch, record, or purchase the mini-series for your classroom or school.
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