Tip of the Week – Civil War Interactives

I’ve been on a Civil War kick lately. We’ve got the Fort Sumter anniversary, causes of the war, a Lincoln assassination movie coming, re-enactments all over the place. So I’ve gone back to the classics and am re-reading James McPherson’s excellent Battle Cry of Freedom and Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic.

But earlier this week, I talked about the need for us to go beyond the use of just print materials. We need e-books and interactives, cool maps and videos. So . . . today, a quick list of some 21st century Civil War goodies.

The History.com people have put together an awesome iPad app called The Civil War Today.

Experience the war as it unfolded, one day at a time, with daily updates that let you live the events in “real-time” over the course of four years. The Civil War Today leverages the iPad multi-touch interface to enable app users to feel and explore thousands of original documents, photos, maps, diary entries, quotes, and newspaper broadsheets like never before.

History.com also has a couple of other great online Civil War resources:

• Civil War 150 offers interactive topics in battles, weapons, tactics, economics and people. Students can also explore a wide variety of topics and are asked to vote for one that had the largest impact on the war.
• They’ve created 38 short video clips and eight photo galleries that are great for starting discussions and hooking kids into content.

HowStuffWorks has some very good Civil War video clips. And Life put together The Best Civil War Photographs online gallery.

The National Park Service put together a nice Then and Now feature that lets kids compare and contrast Civil War events with similar events taking place now. It includes some handy primary sources such as newspapers from the period as well as things like live web cams of Fort Sumter today.

NPS also created a “Civil War Reporter” that updates several times a day via Twitter. Pretty cool!

Some guy in Maryland has collected links, and created others, to many of the 3D Google Earth / Google SketchUp Civil War goodies online. You have to dig around a bit but you can view 3D images of weapons, forts and places using the GE technology.

For younger kids, I really like the Smithsonian’s Who Am I? A History Mystery. Kids use clues and online artifacts to predict the identity of Civil War participants.

Have fun!

Civil War lesson plans and teaching resources

It’s that time of year.

For those teaching American History surveys, you’re probably right around Civil War time. And it’s always nice to have a few lessons and resources in your back pocket. So a couple of sites with handy resources:

• EDSITEment put together close to 50 sites in a variety of categories.
• The Valley of the Shadow is an incredible digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War.
• This Duke University site documents the diaries and papers of three Civil War Era women along with some nice teaching resources.
• The PBS Ken Burns Civil War site has some fantastic teaching activities.
• Created by educators for educators, plans at the Civil War Trust include all the needed materials and resources free for you to use in your classroom.

And don’t forget the 150th anniversary!

Abe Lincoln, the Civil War and Social Media

One hundred and fifty years ago, America’s citizens were wrapped up in their own election excitement. An Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln was locked in a tight race with three other candidates including Southern Democrat John Breckinridge and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas.

With the majority of northern counties in his pocket (despite any campaigning or speeches,) Lincoln easily won the electoral vote. “But as we approach the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s election and the long conflict that followed,” says author Tony Horwitz

it’s worth recalling other reasons that era endures. The Civil War isn’t just an adjunct to current events. It’s a national reserve of words, images and landscapes, a storehouse we can tap in lean times like these, when many Americans feel diminished, divided and starved for discourse more nourishing than cable rants and Twitter feeds.

In an electronics-saturated age, (we’re forced) to exercise our atrophied imaginations. There’s no Sensurround or 3D technology, just snake-rail fences, marble men and silent cannons aimed at nothing. You have to read, listen, let your mind go.

And the New York Times just started a pretty cool way to read, listen and let your mind go. Using a blog called Disunion, the NYT will tell the story of the Civil War in a series of weekly roundups and analysis, by Jamie Malanowski, of events making news during the corresponding week 150 years ago. Written as if in real time, this dispatch will appear every Monday. Additional essays and observations by other contributors, along with maps, images and diaries, will be published several times a week.

It looks like a great way to engage students with actual content. I like the way that the story of the period

revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.

Add the RSS feed and you’ll get Disunion delivered straight to your news reader. Use a variety of primary source analysis worksheets to help kids break the information into manageable chunks and develop some essential questions to guide instruction. You might even pick and choose your favorite posts and create your own document reader for next spring when you hit the Civil War in your curriculum.

If nothing else, use Disunion as your own private professional development to increase your content knowledge of a specific period. This week I learned more about Head-Stompers, Wrench-Swingers and Wide Awakes. Pretty sweet stuff!

(hat tip to honorary historian Jerry Butler!)

One more reason to check internet sources – inaccurate history books

Digital literacy.

Twenty-first century skills.

Media smarts.

My teenage son says

ya gotta be good on the tubes.

Different vocabulary but they have the same meaning – all of us need the ability to navigate the online world of multimedia. A recent textbook brouhaha in Virginia highlights how important these skills can be.

Joy Masoff, author of books such as Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty and Oh, Yikes! History’s Grossest Moments, wrote a fourth-grade history textbook for the state of Virginia. The book titled, Our Virgina: Past and Present,  included a paragraph claiming that thousands of African American slaves fought on the side of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. A review committee made up of three elementary teachers and no content specialist approved the book for state-wide adoption.

Apparently no one involved noticed the passage until the parent of a fourth-grader, moonlighting as an historian at the College of William and Mary, came across the reference while browsing through the text.

A Virgina Department of Education spokesperson called the passage

outside mainstream Civil War scholarship.

When questioned by reporters, Masoff and her publisher provided three web links which Massof used as her source for the passage.

The problem?

All three links cite work done by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The SCV is based in Columbia, Tennessee and disputes the widely accepted view that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. The group’s web site claims that Confederate soldiers took up arms to protect their homes “from an illegal invasion” and argues that the war was fought

to preserve their homes and livelihood.

According to the Washington Post, John Sawyer, chief of staff of the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Army of Northern Virginia, is happy that a state textbook accepted some of its views. Respected historians disagree with these revisionist views:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson of Princeton University said, “These Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery.”

The whole thing seems a bit like some sort of Comedy Central episode. We’ve got a history textbook written by someone who’s not an historian, an author who didn’t evaluate her online sources, a publisher who didn’t provide adequate oversight and a department of education that created a flawed textbook review system.

But in the end, it comes down to an author who failed to practice what we should be teaching – quality research and evaluation skills. Masoff told the Post that she was “unaware that a number of her sources were members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.” Whether unintentionally or otherwise, Masoff didn’t do her job. She included information in a history textbook from a source that she failed to evaluate. And the parent who first caught the error knows how big a deal this is:

It’s disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship. It concerns me not just as a professional historian but as a parent.

So . . . lessons learned?

Think twice about selecting a history textbook whose author also writes encyclopedias about everything nasty. And we need to continue to teach ourselves and our students about how “to be good on the tubes.”

Black History Month resources and lesson plans

Update 2/6/2015 – I’ve updated the list! When you’re done here, head over to the 2015 version.

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Finding Black History Month lesson plans and teaching resources is not that tough. Finding good ones . . . a bit more difficult.

Bessie Coleman, first ever licensed African-American pilot at Bio.com

So I’ve spent some time over the last few days, trying to sift through the hundreds of places that are posting Black History Month materials. And I think I’ve come up with a pretty good list. The stuff from the National Archives and the Library of Congress seems especially good.

African American History Month from the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

pays tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.

NARA has its own Black History Month site. New resources are clearly marked and all look great!

ThinkFinity, the great metasearch tool from the Verizon Foundation, put together a series of nine lesson plans.

eHow created an interesting take of the Black History Month lesson plan idea called How to Write Lesson Plans for Black History Month.

Education World offers a wide variety of resources including lesson plans, activities, games, recipes, sounds and resources.

The Teach-nology people have developed a very nice list of over 50 lesson plans, biographies and numerous worksheets that could lead to great conversation.

I also like the very extensive list of lesson plans posted by the LessonPlansPage. They also have nice list of additional resources.

And finally, the Bio.com folks have an awesome, interactive site with biographies, timelines, videos, games, photos and basic historical background section.

Good luck! And enjoy.

John Hope Franklin 1915 – 2009

I had the privilege of working with a group of teachers several years ago as part of a Teaching American History grant titled American Rights and Race Relations: The Legacy of Brown vs. Topeka. Together for three years, the group studied the century before the 1954 Supreme Court case, the actual case and the half-decade since.

It was an eye-opener for me.

With both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in American history, I knew a lot. But I didn’t know a lot about African American history. We had the chance to read and discuss a ton of stuff that I wasn’t familiar with and had not studied. Some of that material was written by John Hope Franklin.

I was familiar with his book, From Slavery to Freedom, but hadn’t read any of his latest stuff. Together with books such as Why Black People Tend to Shout: Cold Facts and Wry Views from a Black Man’s World, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White and Slaves in the Family, Franklin’s work had a huge impact on my historical worldview.

Franklin passed away last week at the age of 94.

The grandson of a slave, Franklin wrote Freedom in 1947 and later worked with future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall on the Brown vs. Board of Topeka case. He joined civil rights marchers and leaders during the 1960s in Alabama and was selected by President Clinton as the chairman of Clinton’s One America Initiative, charged with directing a national conversation on race relations. He served as president of the American Historical Association. In 2006, Franklin was announced as the third recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity.

He once said that on the evening before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Clinton in 1995, a woman at his club in Washington asked him to get her coat. About the same time, a man at a hotel handed his car keys to Franklin and told him to get his car.

“I patiently explained to him that I was a guest in the hotel, as I presumed he was, and I had no idea where his automobile was. And, in any case, I was retired.”

I knew Franklin only by his writings and speeches. But I am a better person, and America is a better place, because of Franklin’s scholarship and his public service.

Leonard Pitts suggests that the best way to honor Franklin’s memory is to read his books. I couldn’t agree more.