Roundup: The History Classroom

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Janet Bagnall, "Teaching Sovereignty in Quebec Classrooms," The Gazette, November 6, 2012

. . . . Éric Lamoureux, 45, a history teacher at Vanier College, instructs students who have already had several years of Quebec history classes in high school. Students’ reaction to another course on Quebec history, complete with discussion of the two independence referendums, is “Oh, no, not that again,” he said. “Yet I teach a course on Montreal history and it’s full to the rafters.”>>>

Nicholas Ferroni, "Using Music in the Classroom to Educate, Engage and Promote Understanding," Huffington Post, November 8, 2012

. . . . Educators have been using music to effectively educate for as long as there has been music. Many of us were fortunate to have those unconventional and edgy teachers (mine were Mr. Caliguire and Mr. "Weez," and I can't thank them enough), who played the iconic protest songs from the anti-war movement of the '60s and '70s, and then we analyzed and discussed the lyrics. This was one of my favorite activities and it helped me understand the nation and its differing political views better than any textbook or lecture ever could. This, however, is not the method of using music in the classroom to which I am referring. The method of using music that I will be discussing can be applied to all subject areas and used to engage all learners.>>>

Lara Harmon, "Teaching with Food," Teachinghistory.org blog, October 15, 2012

We need food to live, but don't always think about where food that comes from. We carry foods and foodways with us as we immigrate, emigrate, or migrate. We share food and celebrate with it. Every bite we eat has a long history involving geography, trade, science, technology, global contact, and more.>>>

James M. Lang, "Teaching What You Don't Know," Chronicle of Higher Ed, October 22, 2012

. . . . I can confirm that easily enough from my own dozen years of teaching at a liberal-arts college. Although my background is in 20th-century British literature, I regularly have to dip back into the 19th century for my survey course on British literature. With almost no formal training in rhetoric, I count "Argument and Persuasion" among my standard course offerings. Every member of my department could make similar claims.>>>

Kill Your Textbook

Jonathan Rees

In light of the interview I did with NPR a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d try to explain a little more here about why I stopped assigning a U.S. history survey textbook.  Since the decision to assign anything is almost always the teacher’s or the professor’s alone, this post is primarily aimed at my fellow educators.  However, as this decision has a tremendous effect on everyone else in the classroom too, I hope history students (or maybe just former history students) will chime in below with comments.

Before I made the switch to a no-textbook survey class, I was assigning a different textbook every year or two for about five or six years.  What made me unhappy with them wasn’t the quality of the scholarship.  Every one of them was solid in that department.  What made me unhappy with them was the alignment between what was in them and my lectures.  I came to believe that they were all teaching against me rather than with me.

What does that mean?  Well, like I wrote in my original post here on this subject a few months ago, anyone teaching the post-1877 US survey class has a lot of ground to cover.  With a limited amount of time and lots of history worth discussing, something is inevitably going to be left out.  Textbook writers have it a little easier.  They can include more material in print than I’ll ever get to during a 14-week course.  Yet it seemed to me that the relationship between what I was teaching and the material that appeared in whichever textbook I was using was getting further out of whack with each passing year. 

Of course, there were inevitable areas of overlap.  I teach the New Deal.  There’s a New Deal chapter in every textbook.  But I had started teaching the New Deal more as a series of themes rather than a long list of programs, which made having students read about programs that I no longer taught seem like a waste of their time.  And then there’s the material that I’ve been teaching for years that nobody seemed to cover well.  Take the 1960s, for example.  I think it’s important to teach the counterculture, but even the best survey textbooks treat Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey with kid gloves, assuming they bother to cover them at all.

Then there’s the elephant sitting in the corner of every introductory history classroom:  the fact that so many students don’t read the assigned textbook no matter what.  Sure, I always imagined that the best students could use it as a kind of encyclopedia, looking up the terms that they don’t really know, but that was a pretty expensive study aid that I was making them buy.  Ultimately, I was reading (albeit very quickly) so many textbooks in so few years that I lost interest in ever reading another one again.  Be honest with yourself now:  Do you read every new edition of your chosen history survey textbook?  Have you ever read even one edition cover-to-cover yourself?  If I wasn’t willing to read the textbook I assigned, how could I in good conscience make my students read it too?

Overcome with pedagogical despair, I wrote a post on my blog critiquing modern textbooks without having a really good solution to the problem.  That’s when a colleague of mine at our sister institution (who you may know as Historiann) left a comment suggesting that I adopt her approach and assign no survey textbook at all.  I remember exactly what first flashed through my mind as soon as I read her comment:  “You can do that?” 

Yes, you can.  As the secondary school teacher from Alaska suggested towards the end of my time on Talk of the Nation, there are plenty of principals out there who might look askance at high school teachers who tried innovating in this manner.  Perhaps there are some department chairmen out there who might frown upon contingent faculty who tried doing something that’s still rather novel.  People with tenure, however, have no good excuse.  You really can teach a rigorous American history course without a textbook, and speaking personally I’ve never been happier.

Please understand that it’s not as if I’ve chucked all assigned reading out the window.  I’ve replaced my textbook with edited primary sources.  Also, as always, I assign three other short books on a rotating basis covering subjects that I’ll explore in greater depth during class time.  I think of this arrangement as the equivalent of the Sugar Act of 1764.  Like the British Empire, I’ve lowered the reading tariff, but now it’s much more strictly enforced through things like ID quizzes and requirements for details on my essay exams.  Since the documents I select now correspond perfectly to what I cover in lecture, I’m also sending the unmistakable signal that this is the history that students have to know.

I don’t want to teach from a textbook.  I want to assign readings that reinforce the way I teach already.  Equally importantly, by killing my textbook I’ve killed the kind of coverage pressures that I discussed on NPR.  This not only gives me more time to teach the history that I want to teach, it gives me more time to teach skills like writing and reading that my students often desperately need in order to succeed throughout their college careers and beyond.

Unfortunately, the kinds of commercial demands that James Loewen famously described so memorably almost twenty years ago now still make it impossible for commercial textbooks to enable the kind of flexibility that history teachers should demand.  However, thanks to the vast array of primary sources that are now available to history teachers all over the world, it’s really easy to assemble textbook substitutes online or to use document banks assembled by publishers of all kinds.  This way, we can all teach what we want, not what they want – but only if we’re willing to break with the past and take the first step in a new pedagogical direction.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs about education technology, labor and American history at More or Less Bunk.  He is also a course editor and consultant for Milestone Documents.  His book, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction, will be released in September by M.E. Sharpe.

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>

The Bouncing Boundaries of Europe

Heather Cox Richardson

I have thought a great deal this winter about nationalism. It seems to me that the rise of the internet, international trade, and NGOs begs us to ask whether or not nationalism was a twentieth-century phenomenon that had little meaning before the mid-nineteenth century, and will have little meaning after the mid-twenty-first century. The bouncing boundaries in this video seem to reinforce that suggestion:

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's New Website

Randall Stephens

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History recently rolled out its new website. It's clean, well designed, easy to navigate, and a major improvement over the previous version. (Still, the new format will take regular users some time to master.) I think the "History by Era" section (see below) is far more intuitive than what the site had before. And that goes for other pages as well.

Over the years, I've used the Gilder Lehrman site quite a bit. It's wonderful for gathering material to use in class: ideas for short assignments, summaries of important events, primary sources, bibliographies, and links to all sorts of related items.

So what does the revamped site offer? Gilder Lehrman describes it like this:

An online curriculum and resource center but not a textbook, Gilder Lehrman’s new site presents a chronological and thematic look at American history through a range of different voices, with fifty original essays by renowned historians, including six Pulitzer Prize winners. . . .

Central to the Gilder Lehrman Home for History is “History by Era,” the Institute’s innovative approach to the American history curriculum with a focus on literacy. Through podcasts, interactive features, online exhibitions, timelines and terms, primary sources, teaching tools, and content spanning all of American history, “History by Era” offers a wide range of views of the important people, places, and politics in American history.

Other highlights of the launch will include a special double issue of the quarterly journal History Now on military history; and Gilder Lehrman’s first online course for graduate credit, “Civil War and Reconstruction.” The new site also offers improved search capabilities and more transcripts and digital images than ever for the catalog of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, a holding of more than 60,000 historical documents.

“Our aim is to support history education in every classroom in America,” declared Gilder Lehrman President James G. Basker. “We’re bringing the past to life while stepping into the future.”

“We’ve combined rich resources with advanced digital technology to create a framework that’s both easy to use and designed for growth,” said Executive Director Lesley Herrmann. “Created by a team of master teachers, renowned historians, education professionals, and technical consultants, Gilder Lehrman’s new site is great for teachers, students, and lovers of American history.”

Learn more about the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and find out about events, activities, and prize competitions here.

Norway Doorway, pt 5: Sean Taylor on Reacting to the Past

Randall Stephens

One of the more enjoyable things about my Fulbright experience in Norway has been getting to know other American Fulbrighters and to hear about the work they are doing. Martin Fisk (Oregon State University, University of Bergen) is studying bacterial life "deep in the Earth and their impact on the rocks in which they are found. This research could contribute to solutions

of a number of environmental problems and help to identify evidence of past life on Mars." He's one of the researchers who is taking part in a future Mars Rover mission. Others are studying climate science, literature, drama, public art, the nature of genocide, and much, much more.

The historian Sean Taylor--a Fulbright scholar at the University of Agder in Kristiansand--is associate professor of history at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His research focuses on colonial, revolutionary, and early national America. While in Norway he is working on a dynamic new pedagogy that is changing the way we draw students into debates about history. Called Reacting to the Past, this history game offers students the chance to engage history on a more direct level.

The Reacting to Past website at Barnard College describes it as follows:

Reacting to the Past (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills.

In the video embedded here I speak to Taylor about his use of this pedagogy and how it has worked in his classroom. He also speaks to me about Barnard College's role in developing curriculum and hosting events. And finally Taylor tells me a little about how he'd like to use Reacting in the classroom in Norway.

Norway Doorway, pt 3: Trysil and Bergen

Randall Stephens

A couple of weeks ago I gave a series of lectures in Trysil, Norway, on American history, regional culture, and religion in the South. It was a wonderful visit, though, I think I never figured out just how to say "Trysil" like a native. (Spoken, it sounds like "Trusal" to me.)

My hosts were wonderfully gracious. Lively conversationalists and the sort of people you meet briefly and miss quite a bit when you're back on the road.

The school at which I spoke had a culinary, vocational program. Meaning: fantastic multi-course lunches that featured a salmon casserole and then moose burgers. Quite a few of the students here were part of a sports program. And, from what I understand, some of those were on the professional track, with sponsorships and bright futures. Xtreme energy drink ski suits with aggro fonts and nuclearized color schemes.

One of the sessions I gave in this lovely ski resort town was for teachers. I focused on the range of teaching materials and resources out on the world-web, inter-tubes:

"Teaching American History and Culture with Online Newspapers and Images."

The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division (www.loc.gov/pictures/) and the newly created Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) hold a treasure trove of historical and cultural artifacts. In this seminar we will explore using the free newspaper archive and the vast resources of images at the Library of Congress to reconstruct the past. Students could be encouraged to take a news item from 1860-1922—a political campaign, scandal, natural disaster, technological innovation, etc.—and then investigate that by using both newspapers and visual materials (prints, cartoons, photographs.) Students might be asked to outline what we learn about a particular period in history by examining the item being reported. Students might also explore the biases and perspectives of cartoonists and reporters. Questions like the following might prod the conversation: Why would a reporter or editor in the North take a different view of black voting rights than one in the South would? How did the political battles of the late 1800s differ from region to region? How are the views of contemporary Americans or Norwegians different today from those being studied here? Students should come away from the project with an understanding of the context of late 19^th and early 20^th century history, a greater appreciation of change over time, and insight into how news and other media shape our view of the past.

As part of that talk I gave a handout to the teachers that included the sources we discussed. Here's that list, with some brief descriptions

ONLINE RESOURCES FOR AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE

BOOKS

Google Books
http://books.google.com/

DATA MAPS

Bedford/St. Martin’s Map Central
http://worth.runtime.com/browse/Music

HISTORICAL IMAGES

Artcyclopedia (paintings, prints, lists of movements and countries)
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs On-line (cartoons, photographs, paintings)
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/

Picturing America (historical American paintings)
http://picturingamerica.neh.gov/

HISTORICAL MAPS

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (images, manuscripts, maps)
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/

LESSON PLANS/TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (lesson plans, guides, documents, and more)
www.gilderlehrman.org/

Smithsonian: Teaching American History
www.smithsoniansource.org/

Teaching History: National Education Clearinghouse
http://teachinghistory.org/

NEWSPAPERS

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

University of Pennsylvania Libraries: Historical Newspapers Online
http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/guides/hist/onlinenewspapers.html

SOME OF EVERYTHING

American Memory from the Library of Congress (music, movies, documents, photos, newspapers)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Archive (documents, movies, photos, music)
www.archive.org

Bedford/St. Martin’s Make History Site (documents, photos, maps, and more)
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/makehistory2e/MH/Home.aspx

Today I arrived in Bergen for three days of sessions with students and teachers at the Bergen Cathedral School, founded, according to legend, all the way back in 1153 by Nicholas Breakspear, who would go on to become pope Adrian IV. Breakspear . . . no relation to Burning Spear, right? (Check out where I am and where I'll be on the Google Map.) These are bright, bright kids. They will no doubt keep me on my toes!

When I'm not doing the shutterbug thing around town and on the wharfs, I'll be speaking about the following: “The Praying South: Why Is the American South the Most Religious Region of the Country?” and “What do American English & Regional Accents Tell Us about America?”

Next Week it's on to Øya videregående skole 7228 Kvål. Say that five times quickly.

iPad for Higher Ed Roundup

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Steve Kolowich, "Relaunching the iPad: Apple drops new iPad apps for digital textbook creation and distribution," Inside Higher Ed, January 20, 2012

NEW YORK CITY -- Apple made its much-anticipated move on the education technology industry on Thursday, announcing a revamped version of its iTunes U platform that could challenge traditional learning management

systems. It also unveiled new tools for creating and distributing low-cost digital textbooks that could speed the pace of e-text adoption.>>>

Dan Miller, "Analysis: Apple's e-textbook push earns mixed grades," Macworld.com, Jan 19, 2012

Ask people in educational publishing about Apple’s foray into e-textbooks, and you’ll hear a consistent message: It’s good for all of us—and good luck to Apple.

It’s good for e-textbooks in general because “Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention,” as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn’t know otherwise that such things exist.>>>

Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, "Apple to bolster iPad's educational content," San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 2012

. . . . Apple also wants to empower "self-publishers" to create new kinds of teaching tools, said the people. Teachers could use it to design materials for that week's lesson. Scientists, historians and other authors could publish professional-looking content without a deal with a publisher.>>>

Jeffrey R. Young, "Apple's New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field," Chronicle of Higher Ed, January 19, 2012

Apple made a splashy entrance into the digital-textbook market on Thursday at an event here at the Guggenheim Museum, but its new build-your-own-textbook tool is likely to lead to more fragmentation in the market rather than becoming a dominant new model.>>>

Larry Abramson, "Apple Carves Inroads In Educational Publishing," NPR, January 19, 2012

Apple today launched a big initiative to update an old standby, the school textbook. In a splashy announcement, the company released new tools to help publishers create digital content for students. As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, Apple is trying to capitalize on enthusiasm for the iPad in schools and colleges.>>>

Prezi for Historians?

Chris Beneke

Tired of using PowerPoint in your History teaching? You might consider using Prezi instead. Here are some preliminary thoughts. (Maybe you’ve already seen it used here; for a brief overview, check this out.)

Strengths

If you make extensive use of in-class readings and don’t want to distribute the texts in paper form, Prezi can help. It allows you to easily pull the texts up and zoom on important passages. Ditto for high resolution pictures and maps. You could post an entire reproduction of a U.S. or world map and quickly zoom around it. That’s handy.

With Prezi you can easily create a vivid and infinitely extendable timeline, connecting it to relevant images, videos, and text. As far as I know, there’s no way to do this in PowerPoint or Keynote.

Beyond that, the most immediately apparent virtue of Prezi is the fact that it allows for nonlinear presentations. If you’re like me and mix lecture and discussion flexibly throughout the class, that’s an especially attractive feature. Of course, PowerPoint and Keynote allow you do this as well. Just not as gracefully.

Finally, you could, theoretically, save a cluster of class materials or even an entire semester’s worth of materials in the same Prezi. This would save students the trouble of slogging through twenty-plus PowerPoint presentations ahead of their final exam and might also encourage them (and you, history teacher) to make stronger connections between class topics.

Weaknesses

When it comes to usability, Prezi is often coy, seldom allowing you to predict just what it intends to do. The interface will not feel intuitive to PowerPoint users. Right-clicking gets you nowhere. Formatting options are available, but somewhat mysterious. And as far as I can tell, Prezi places new frames wherever it darn well chooses.

Non-linearity has its advantages, but let’s keep in mind that teachers resort to linear arguments for a reason: they make sense to human beings and are easily recalled. One of the virtues of PowerPoint is that it keeps the digression-prone professor on track. Prezi includes a tool (called “Path”) that allows you to fly from one section to another. By zooming out you can see a riveting overview of your class’s trajectory. This has the aesthetically pleasing effect of launching you up, over, and around the various parts of the presentation. I suspect that this novelty will wear off fast and that Prezi will have to rely on other virtues to retain converts. (Another cute feature—the ability to create tiny hidden text—is likely to make it unnecessarily difficult for students reviewing the presentation to find what they need.)

I’m also worried about preserving Prezis over time. With a subscription, you can download them to your computer. You can also save the entire presentation for static use as a .pdf. I don’t find either option reassuring. Prezi’s novelty and its isolation from an existing office sweet offer additional reasons for pause.

This Prezi on jazz bassists illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of the software. Though beautiful and moderately instructive, the gratuitous twisting and zooming is dizzying. You can also see that the presentation includes five or so embedded YouTube videos and that one of them isn’t working.

Overall Evaluation

Prezi should appeal to the teacher who needs the technological structure that presentation software provides but also wants to encourage active learning. The ease with which users can vault from timeline, to text, to image, to video—and back again—is certainly alluring. The capacity to zoom into and out of images, including portraits, photographs and maps, should especially charm historians.

In the end, Prezi’s primary contribution to history instruction may be on the teaching side of the teaching-learning enterprise. It should force us to think more rigorously and creatively about the connections residing within our class materials. For that reason alone, it’s worth a try.

* Here’s a tiny text caveat: I tried Prezi for the first time in a local Teaching American History session this past week. The feedback hasn’t come back to me yet, but I got the distinct impression that the results were mixed. In addition to the usual assortment of images and maps that any PowerPoint might include, I pasted in some very long selections from Lincoln’s 1842 Temperance Address. That was a mistake. I ended up reading aloud for extended periods. Looking back, Prezi’s zoom-function may have been the cure to the this disease of my own making. In sum: While you may be tempted to post a large selection from a speech, article, or book chapter, you should resist the urge. But longer excerpted text selections are definitely possible with Prezi.

Notes from Grad School: Teaching Writing

Dan Allosso



As I prepared this summer to resume my role as a teaching assistant at a large, public, East-Coast research university, I’ve been reflecting on the responsibility that goes with that assignment. Most of the lower level courses offered to undergraduates by my department fill the university’s “general education” requirement, which means that in addition to the historical or diversity outcomes these classes are designed to achieve, many of them also satisfy the university’s writing requirement. So as well as leading discussions on the readings and answering questions arising from lectures, I am a writing teacher.



I happen to like writing, and I’ve had some experience with writing and teaching prior to becoming a grad student. This experience isn’t completely unique (the grad student in the next office was a journalist), but for those of us who didn’t come with these skills, the university doesn’t really do much to prepare us as writing teachers.



I don’t say this to criticize my particular school. Twenty years ago, when my father was earning his PhD in Comparative Literature at a major West-Coast university, the situation was similar. My Dad, whose main interest was teaching literature to young people, made a career there (following his earlier career as a high school English teacher) and wrote A Short Handbook for Writing Essays about Literature, which has been in constant use there ever since.



Looking at the resources available for people like me, who teach writing outside of English departments, it was clear to me that a concise, practical, nuts-and-bolts writing handbook was as needed today in History as it had been twenty years ago in Comp. Lit. So I started with my father’s manuscript, and tried to expand it for use by social science as well as humanities students. It was a fun opportunity to reflect on the thought process he had gone through in writing his handbook, and then to engage in a sort-of dialog across the years. The advantage for me was, I was also able to email my revisions and expansions to my dad in California and get his reactions.



The result of this summer project is A Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences. At 80 pages, it’s about twice as long as the earlier handbook, and it includes topics and examples geared for history students as well as readers of literature (although I’m hoping that exposure to examples from outside their specific fields will help make some of these ideas clearer for readers). I hope to use this in the fall, if I can convince the professor and the other TAs I’m working with to let me test it on our students. I’m also thinking of posting some short YouTube videos covering the main ideas of each chapter. One of my Dad’s original motivations was to get all the basics down, so that he wouldn’t have to repeat himself every time a student came to his office with questions. As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, I think the web offers us an incredible opportunity to reach out to people both inside and outside our classrooms with material they can use in whatever field they pursue.

Some Teaching Resources for Your American or European Survey

Randall Stephens



Once again it's that time of year. About a decade ago when I first started teaching, I spent quite a few late nights blasting my way through lecture prep and scouring the web for resources and information. (The interweb was still steam powered then).



So, for those of you in the middle of it now, I post here some helpful sites that might give you a leg up. Of course, this only represents of fraction of what's out there.

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Contains thousands of images dating back hundreds of years. Many are high resolution.



The Beinecke Rare Book and Map Collection, Yale University

Do a keyword search of "photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books from the Beinecke's collections."



Internet Archive

Browse for original documents, audio, and movies. The collection of films on here is amazing.



Map Central, Bedford/St Martins

This site is a little dated, but the maps for teaching are quite good.



Harvard Digital Maps Collection

". . . one of the oldest and largest collections of cartographic materials in the United States with over 500,000 items. Resources range from 16th century globes to modern maps and geographic information systems (GIS) layers. A selection of our materials has been digitally imaged and is offered both as true picture images and georeferenced copies."



Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library

Like the above, "dedicated to the creative educational use of its cartographic holdings, which extend from the 15th century to the present."



W. W. Norton's Make History Site

Some publishers lock there on-line content. Not so with Norton. Access loads of maps, images, websites, and original documents.



Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

This is "a nonprofit organization supporting the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation." Access material for teachers and students. The site contains wonderfully useful teaching tools.



American Experience on-line

If you have a high-speed connection in your classroom, you can view full episodes of American Experience.



Historical Society's Resources for Teachers

We created this a few years back. It includes links for environmental history, American, and world history.



Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress

"Search America's historic newspapers pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present."



American Religion and Culture On-line Resources

I created this site for a course I teach on the topic.