Category Archives: Historical interpretation

Teaching History Without Textbooks? Stanford Proves It’s Possible.

In 2008, Stanford University introduced “Reading Like a Historian,” a non-traditional history curriculum to five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District.  According to Sam Wineburg, who directs the Stanford History Education Group and has been a longtime proponent of revising the teaching of history, “We need to break the stranglehold of the textbook by introducing students to the variety of voices they encounter in the past through primary sources.”  It seems this new curriculum is doing that and more, as recently reported in Futurity:

There are no orderly rows of desks in Valerie Ziegler’s 11th-grade history class—students sit in groups of three or four at small tables around the room. There also is no lectern because there are no lectures. And perhaps most striking, there are no textbooks.

These students at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco learn about the Vietnam War, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the Great Depression, and other major events in U.S. history by analyzing journal writings, memoirs, speeches, songs, photographs, illustrations, and other documents of the era.

“I always tell my students they’re historians-in-training, so the work we do in here is that of a historian,” Ziegler says.

That sounds like fun, but does it have any impact? Continue reading →

Historian Named One of the the Year’s Top Tech Innovators

The Chronicle of Higher Education just named Dr. Daniel Cohen one of academia’s top Tech Innovators for 2012 for his innovative approaches to employing digital tools in research and teaching.  Is he a computer scientist, business professor, or cognitive psychologist?  Nope, he’s an historian of 19th century science and religion, not a typical place where you’d expect to find someone on technology’s cutting edge. Nice to turn the tables on those who believe history is just about the past and has little to offer the future.  Think again.

Dan Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History and director of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia. He is the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History.  If that isn’t enough, he is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship.

To learn more about the work being done by Cohen and others at the center to preserve history through the use of digital media, read “Presenting and Preserving the Past Through Digital Media” in Mason Research and “A Digital Humanist Puts New Tools in the Hands of Scholars” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

WebWise Attracts 400 Museums, Libraries, and Research Orgs

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This week I was fortunate to spend two days in Baltimore with 400 persons representing museums, libraries, archives, and research organizations from 40 states at WebWise, the annual conference hosted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  This is always one of my favorite conferences and despite a rapid sell-out, I was able to snag a seat.

There seems to be a growing number of history museums and historic sites attending WebWise, and perhaps that’s due to increased recognition that digital technologies are no longer a fad but an essential part of a successful organization (indeed, one of the presenters remarked that staff with technology in their titles are rising up to senior levels with more frequency).  Among the history organizations represented this year are the American Continue reading →

KCET Launches Online Neighborhood Field Guides

The Highland Park Field Guide by KCET.

KCET, a public television station based in Los Angeles, has been working for the last few years on Departures, a project designed to engage “community residents, non-profit organizations, schools and students, in the creation and procurement of relevant and relatable content.”  Included in this work are a series of online interactive field guides to various neighborhoods in their region, and most recently launched is one on the historic community of Highland Park (which features the Lummis House, Heritage Square, and the Southwest Museum).  Given that KCET is one of the major public tv stations in the nation, the field guides are beautifully produced and include lots of video.

According to Kelly Simpson, associate producer of the KCET Departures, “The Highland Park Field Guide was produced in partnership with the Highland Park Heritage Trust and the North Figueroa Association. In six categories (with two more coming soon) we feature fun, informative and adventurous activities for Continue reading →

Field Trip: Homestead Museum in California

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Last week I had a chance to visit with my colleagues at the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, California.  I was the assistant director there a decade ago and it continues to be a special place to me (if you haven’t visited, it has great architecture and a great story).  After a generous lunch with the staff, director Karen Graham Wade and some of her staff took me to see the Workman House, the earliest house on the site.  It’s undergoing extensive interior rehabilitation to make it more suitable and attractive as an exhibit gallery.  It’s part of a major effort to respond to the changing interests of their visitors by increasing the self-guided experiences.  They are also reducing the number of days per week the Homestead Museum will be open for walk-in public tours and  increasing the number of days they’ll be open for tours by appointment and for other activities.  At La Casa Nueva, the second house on site, they are Continue reading →

A Great Conference for Historic Sites Coming Up in April

The Organization of American Historians and the National Council on Public History are combining their annual meetings this year and this double-header is creating a really interesting conference for people who are working to preserve and interpret historic places.  Here are just a few sessions that caught my eye (and just a few–there are more than 200 sessions offered over five days):

  • Museum and Makers:  Intersections of Public History and Technology Buffs from Steam Trains to Steampunk
  • Museums, Historic Sites, and the University:  Public History Projects and Partnerships in the American Indian Great Lakes
  • The Witness Tree Project:  Using Historic Landscapes to Explore History and Memory
  • Toward a Reinterpretation of the Indian Wars at National Historic Sites and Parks
  • Closing Up Shop:  Strategies for Partners and Communities When Historic Sites Close Continue reading →

Will iBooks Textbooks Extend the Reach of Historic Sites?

iBook textbook on an iPad. Image courtesy of Apple, Inc.

Today at the historic Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple announced an expansion of their iBooks app to include textbooks for their iPads.  Students will no longer have to lug around heavy books, content will be always be current, and it will cost less.  As Apple describes it:

A Multi-Touch textbook on iPad is a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos, and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object, or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content, and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go.

They’ve already partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw Hill to produce textbooks on math and science.  With the big publishers in play, what’s in it for historic sites and history organizations? A lot. Continue reading →

Pine Point: Interpreting a Vanished Town

Pine Point, an interactive Web documentary by The Goggles.

Last week I had a chance to visit Bill Adair, director of the Heritage Philadelphia Program and one of the co-authors of the new book, Letting Go?:  Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World.  As usual, we had a wide ranging discussion which included his interest in the work of The Goggles, an award-winning Canadian design group headed by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons.  He was particularly taken by “Pine Point,” an interactive web documentary about a northern mining town that closed in 1988 and was demolished.  Through oral histories, documents, video, and artifacts, the story of this ghost town is told in a mesmerizing scrapbook style.  If you’re looking for a way to interpret a place in a new way on the Web, this might provide some inspiration.

New Guide for Historic Sites on the Scottsboro Boys Trials

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Before I left the National Trust last October, I was the director of the Interpreting African American Historic Places Project, an experimental initiative funded by the Ford Foundation.  One of the elements was a grant program for collaborative projects between universities and historic sites to improve interpretation of African American history and culture through historic places and for a few years, the National Trust supported some amazing projects that are now just beginning to bear fruit.

One of the most interesting projects was the interpretation of the infamous Scottsboro Boys Trials of the 1930s by the New College at the University of Alabama and the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center.  Ellen Griffith Spears and Shelia Washington initially sought to mark a few sites related to the trial in Scottsboro, but after some discussions with them, broadened their scope to look at all the places that were associated with this major civil rights event, providing a geographic context that’s often overlooked.  They’ve just shared with me Continue reading →

Take Advantage of the Ten Cultural Trends for 2012

JWT Intelligence has just released its Ten Trends for 2012 based on surveys of Americans and Britons and interviews with experts and influencers.  If you can’t afford to buy copy of their full report for $250, here’s a summary plus some suggestions for taking advantage of them:

  1. Navigating the New Normal:  The economy won’t be back to the way it was for some time, so consumers are now becoming price conscious by habit.  Consider stripped down offerings (such as smaller sizes of products in your museum store) or some access at lower cost (such as a “grounds only” admission fee).
  2. Live a Little:  Although they don’t want to pay a lot, visitors are becoming anxious to splurge on a few good things responsibly.  Adjust your programs so they promote both the fun experience and extraordinary aspects of your site (and be sure you can deliver it–just saying your tours are fun and extraordinary doesn’t make it so).
  3. Generation Go:  20-somethings are struggling Continue reading →