Category Archives: Historical interpretation

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 →

Grants Awarded for Experimental Interpretive Research

Congratulations to Jebney Lewis, Sandy Lloyd, Philip Seitz, and Randall Mason on their 2011 HPP Awards for Interpretive Inquiry and Investigation from the Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP) of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Formerly known as the HPP Scholars in the Interpretation of History, this professional development opportunity supports individual practitioners in the investigation of imaginative projects in public history by connecting the present to the past in engaging, imaginative, and meaningful ways; responding to audience/community interests or needs; and
demonstrating a complex understanding and presentation of history.  There are four recipients this year, an unprecedented number:

  • Jebney Lewis for We Make the City.  Lewis will develop and construct a small exhibit with a focus on the intersection of Broad and Market Streets between the years 1900–10. It will examine “how the aspirations of the industrializing city were embodied in the creation of grand expressions of pride and ostentation,” as illustrated through Continue reading →

History Places

HistoryPlaces.WordPress.com by Tim Grove

Some of you may know Tim Grove as the Chief of Education at the National Air and Space Museum or as the History Bytes columnist in History News, but you may not know he started a weekly blog about historic places in April.  Through a wide variety of sites, he posts ideas and opinions about interpretation, visitor experience, and historical significance.  It’s part travelogue, part museum studies.  Most recently he’s discussed the C & O Canal near DC, the Forbidden Drive in Philadelphia, Appomattox Court House, and Fort Mantanzas in Florida.  If you’re enthusiastic about historic sites, check out his blog at HistoryPlaces.WordPress.com.

Teaching History Through Inquiry

If you’ve ever worked with students, you know that lectures and PointPoint presentations are a sure way to kill any interest in history or historic places. In Teaching History Through Inquiry, Stephen Lazar, a social studies teacher at the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn, lists six ways he engages high school students to provide cultural literacy and help them develop as critical thinkers:

  1. Carefully craft your questions.
  2. Engage students in examining evidence.
  3. Move on to more nuanced questions.
  4. Navigate myths with the inquiry approach.
  5. Identify helpful resources.
  6. Prepare critical thinkers.

You can find details of each of these points at TeacherMagazine.org, which is making this premium article available for free.  But let me add another point:

7.  Engage with the real thing:  use original documents, visit historic sites, look at objects, and examine historical photographs and maps.  Those experiences bring mind and eye (and perhaps heart) together in a way that’s not possible in textbooks and classrooms.

Upcoming Free Webinars for Historic Sites

The American Association for State and Local History is offering three free webinars that will particularly interest historic sites:  storytelling, interpretive planning, and engaging new audiences.  Thanks to an IMLS 21st Century Museum Professionals grant, webinar participation is free and open to staff, volunteers, board members of history organizations and anyone else interested in learning more about visitor engagement.  You can register for one, two, or all three!

Telling a Good Story

  • November 17, 2011
  • 2-3:15 pm Eastern
  • A good guided tour is a good story, told well, says guest speaker Linda Norris. Join us to explore telling stories to create Continue reading →

Best Practices for Community Engagement and Interpretation Available

For your convenience, I’ve pulled together in one page the various standards and best practices for community engagement, public education, and historical interpretation at historic places and by historical organizations, including scholarship, curriculum development, visitor research, and staff training, as well as the broad range of public programs presented by historic sites, from tours and exhibits to publications and the Internet.  You’ll find “Best Practices” as a topic on the navigation bar on EngagingPlaces.net.

These resources can be used to: Continue reading →