tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21571511237928732612012-01-27T22:22:21.705-05:00Methods and ideas for teaching and learning digital history.John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.comBlogger391100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-85014924715912178162011-06-13T22:06:00.003-04:002011-08-23T11:33:01.436-04:00

The National Archives and Records Administration released today a complete digital version of the United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by The Department of Defense, better know as the Pentagon Papers. (see http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/) The document was produced in the later 1960s at the order of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Commissioned

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-44080666572701078612011-04-03T12:29:00.005-04:002011-10-07T11:38:10.426-04:00

This poster might be used to teach about the recruitment of Union soldiers during the Civil War. This piece of historical ephemera is available from the collection An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Printed Ephemera at the Library of Congress' American Memory online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.06901800. The poster is a call for recruits to the Union army in

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-785468452649518942011-02-02T21:34:00.005-05:002011-10-01T10:40:32.971-04:00

This week, an avalanche of information, much of it visual, has flooded out out of Egypt. Historians, students, and just those interested in the past will access these resource. How will we manage the information in future? In an effort to think ahead about what images we should "archive" let's consider some questions about significance. What messages does this image communicate?religion?How about

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-13023925460565205662011-02-02T08:21:00.000-05:002011-02-08T08:51:10.811-05:00

Chopping through my cotton.Can’t keep my hands out of the house long enough.Graf(t)s, the hard things on the side…The help is sick. The crops are not, except the summer oats; they’re like the help. Hope to stay on track, cause the season is underway.As for the help…Salby has a daughterAggy has a sonJoe’s as you left himSo’s HendersonTony’s got a hurt footJuber’s trying to go homeJim, he’s hurt

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-44292693407117788922011-01-03T14:16:00.000-05:002011-02-02T21:33:36.287-05:00

Here's a follow-up on an early post about simple digital history Everyman the archivist, and yes that includes Benjamin Franklin Gates!Simple digital history enables us all to be archivist. Just point, click and use.Simple digital history makes use of ubiquitous digital devices (cell phone, digital camera, laptop, etc) to capture pictures or video of historical artifacts or historical resource (

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-59406922357822360972010-12-02T21:37:00.003-05:002011-03-11T09:41:31.209-05:00

Imagine a combination of several component charts brought together to form a single large one.Thus began Denis Diderot in his Encyclopedia entry on Jaques Barbeu Dubourg's mechanical timeline, the Carte Chronographique (see on the left). Dubourg's 1753 invention was a 54 foot long annotated timeline rolled into a small wooden container.More images from Princeton University, where a version of the

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-26297231361995952102010-09-06T14:39:00.000-04:002010-12-02T21:56:52.731-05:00

An assignment I regularly make in a course on contemporary social studies involves analyzing an illustration of Abraham Lincoln using Walter Werner’s seven ways of reading visual texts.More on Werner on reading visual texts belowReading Visual Text View more presentations from jk1lee.Werner's article is hereThe materials for this assignment are drawn from campaign literature, periodicals, and

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-32644275102749171552010-06-01T09:30:00.001-04:002010-09-01T09:40:26.460-04:00

What does it mean to compose? Most of us probably think of music, maybe classical music, when we hear the word compose. Of course, a composition is much more. Compositions involve the creative and even artistic rendering of ideas using various modes to express. We might compose in text or with paint or with sound or even with physical objects. Today, compositions are taking on a new meaning with

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-68577537115596203772010-03-17T22:38:00.000-04:002011-05-06T22:38:52.718-04:00

This weekend, the New York Times Sunday Sports section ran an article on two American literary icons and their interest in baseball. The story featured Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. I read the print version, which featured a picture of Twain and an image of notes Twain kept while attending a baseball game on May 18, 1875 between the Hartford Dark Blues and Boston Red Stockings.The NYT website

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-12993584352258689282010-02-10T08:48:00.000-05:002010-03-16T09:46:51.701-04:00

Digital history can be complicated and expensive work. High impact collections from libraries, museums and university require consistent sources of money and personnel. Take for example the massive collection of materials from American Memory. This effort began in 1994 with a 13 million dollar grant to fund the National Digital Library. Over the next six years, almost 60 million dollars in public

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-31064413346998483462009-11-30T10:21:00.002-05:002009-11-30T17:04:53.470-05:00

Pablo PicassoLe Chant des morts (The Song of the Dead) by Pierre Reverdy (Paris: Tériade Editeur, 1948)

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-89466723571086280002009-11-23T08:28:00.002-05:002009-11-23T08:31:02.591-05:00

Images of the Court of North Carolina from North Carolna State University Special Collections Department. These images are displayed using embed code from Lunar Browser. The space below is a workspace I created. Images are dynamically represented in the space and can be moved in the space re-sized, and opened in a new window.

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-15657015642265356532009-09-30T15:51:00.009-04:002011-09-28T14:42:34.112-04:00

The rapidly expanding body of historical information online has quickly stripped our ability to describe this mass of information in quantitative terms. While in the early days of the Web some talked about the numbers of documents available on the Web or in particular collections (e.g. the 9 million document images available at the Library of Congress’ American Memory), today we might be better

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-69783018312762892532009-08-24T19:45:00.000-04:002009-09-30T19:49:11.058-04:00

Local is history is a powerful entry point for students to learn dispositions, skills and content in the discipline of history. Students and teachers at all levels can work on local history projects by using personal and authentic resources that are often just at arms length away. These resources might be in box in your closet, in the files of a local business, or in storage at your local library

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-12112101816160052942009-07-28T20:40:00.005-04:002009-09-20T16:19:11.809-04:00

Benjamin West was one of a group of painters who came to prominence in the American colonial period. Hugh Howard writes about these artist in his recent book The Painters Chair. The book is a fascinating glimpse into the emergence of artistic painting in America that chronicles the work of artists such as John Singleton Copley, Charles Wilson Peale, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart. The story of

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-70427109577066926232009-07-14T16:50:00.007-04:002009-07-17T09:40:45.326-04:00

Camelot, the musical opened on Broadway December 3, 1960 The production stared Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet.The musical opened just 25 days after John F Kennedy was elected president. In a refection of culture on politics and vice versa, the popular news media would later labeled the Kennedy White House as a Camelot. How this happened is an interesting example of popular

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-62016325870126591322009-07-07T12:46:00.004-04:002009-07-08T08:18:33.025-04:00

December 7, 1941 is of course a day that lives in the memory of Americans as the day the Japanese Imperial navy attacked the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Most Americans' historical conciseness about that day and the events immediately afterward is shaped by President Roosevelt's speech to a joint session of Congress, delivered Monday at 12:30 pm on December 8, 1941. In the speech,

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-60014737462370773852009-06-02T21:54:00.004-04:002009-06-02T22:24:51.946-04:00

Cabinet of American Illustration from the Library of Congress includes 4,000 drawings and sketches produced as illustrations for American books and magazines. The collection was established by William Patten who was the art editor for Harper's Magazine during the 1880s and 1890s, and is now online at http://memory.loc.gov/pp/caiquery.html More on the collection from Artstor.org "The original art

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-16554100485270741772009-05-28T10:07:00.010-04:002009-10-18T22:58:41.872-04:00

Last week, GQ magazine ran a story on Donald Rumsfeld's use of Christian scripture in official Department of Defense communiques. The author of the story, Robert Drapor, takes issue with Rumsfeld's actions. As Drapor put it, "one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-51375672814410980062009-05-13T15:07:00.001-04:002009-05-20T16:38:55.506-04:00

Creativity is an educational skill that is getting a good bit of attention these days. Whether its 21st century education thinkers or from folks in new literacies or other people interested in education reform, creativity seems to be a hot topic right now. Just one example- the Partnership for 21st Century Skills places creativity high on the list of skills they are promoting. Despite this energy

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-79485950179261172122009-05-09T00:17:00.000-04:002009-05-20T16:37:58.752-04:00

An interesting roundabout historical debate has emerged in the political media over the last couple of weeks between, among others, two media ideology prize fighters, Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann. The tete a tete, began with a segment O'Reilly ran on his show May 8, 2009 in response to an answer to a question offered by President Barack Obama in his April 29, 2009 press conference. Obama was

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-43702470812439130162009-04-17T23:18:00.006-04:002009-04-22T00:10:09.385-04:00

The New York Public Library presentation of Native American Portraiture is a study in representation. The collection, titled After Columbus: Four-hundred Years of Native American Portraiture is online at the NYPL wesbite and includes "369 prints and drawings by Simon van de Passe (1595-1647), George Catlin (1796-1872), and Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), dating from 1627 to the 1830s; 227 gelatin silver

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-43367951462119982712009-04-02T01:04:00.003-04:002009-04-02T01:55:34.251-04:00

One of Mexico's most famous artist, Diego Rivera, painted in the cubist style know by most as the style of Picaso, as well as in mural form. Rivera's paintings are both fasinating explorations in color and contrast, shape and expectation, and for us, history and culture. One of Rivera's most infamous murals, Glorious Victory, was painted in 1954, then tought to be lost for 50 years, only to

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-10023882245161749442009-03-18T01:03:00.000-04:002009-05-20T16:36:28.440-04:00

This amazing map was drawn in 1828 by a very gifted child in Middlebury Vermont. The map includes text in a circular pattern and begins, "The first settlement made within the limits of the United States was in North Carolina." Positioned along side are the names of bordering states and the Atlantic Ocean.

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-3720142365616838762009-03-07T23:25:00.004-05:002009-03-07T23:36:40.850-05:00

"aerial views, battlefield maps, geological formations, oceanic charts, disease transmissions, animal migratory routes, molecule structures [or] black holes" "etc"A collection of pencil drawings from Emma McNally on display 2007 at TI+2 Artspace in London, a starking pleasing geographic rendering of lines and points in space.More at the Map Room blog - http://www.mcwetboy.net/maproom/2009/03/

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-48455240121790153592009-02-16T16:44:00.000-05:002009-03-02T01:08:14.889-05:00

Timelines have a central place in social studies classrooms. The simplicity of a timeline, drawing on notions of past, present and future, is powerful and communicative. Surprisingly, historians say that the first historical timeline was produced in 1757. The 1753 "Carte chronologique" created by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg (1709-1779 is consider the first modern timeline. Barbeu-Dubourg's timeline

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-40246186531842013792009-01-18T01:41:00.000-05:002009-05-20T16:35:58.052-04:00

This fascinating Flickr slideshow from peacay presents JCS Monch' 1754 "Friend's book" (liber amicorum).

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-51275967005710800372008-12-18T18:11:00.000-05:002009-02-28T17:15:46.065-05:00

This website hosts a growing collection of annotated resources that can be used in social studies and history classrooms. The annotations include specific information about the content of the resources as well as pedagogical uses. Adam Friedman at Wake Forest University develop the tool and it is available online at http://www.afriedman.net/dlt/ One of the interesting things about the site is

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-3642653610285127792008-10-20T12:34:00.000-04:002009-02-28T17:15:08.821-05:00

July 1945 the Atlantic Monthly published an article by Vannevar Bush, director of the U. S>Office of Scientific Research and Development titled As we may think. The article described an imaginary system for organizing information that Bush argued would meet the demands of people trying to make sense of information in an age when traditional methods were overwhelming individual's abilities to keep

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-11054225330596495192008-09-08T10:23:00.000-04:002009-01-08T12:27:10.519-05:00

September 21, 1993, Dr. Lynn H. Nelson a history professor at the University of Kansas posted the first link on a new web-based index of historical resources. The project was part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library, a larger initiated aimed at cataloging web resources. The WWW Virtual Library (WWW-VL) was created in 1991 by the founder of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee as a user supported index of

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-16122552286962182882008-08-28T01:30:00.004-04:002009-01-08T00:50:21.871-05:00

I just spent some time reading "Journal of a Lady of Quality" by Lady Janet Schaw from 1774-1776. It is an account of Lady Schaw's travels from Leith in Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal. The journal was found apparently unknown to most of the world and published in 1921 by Yale University Press in a version edited by Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews.The

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-507040225516870542008-07-20T11:29:00.006-04:002009-01-08T12:34:26.336-05:00

There seems to be some interesting differences emerging between high profile online historical sources and other sources that are created and managed on a smaller scale. Take for example the new Digital Vaults website (http://www.digitalvaults.org) from the National Archives and Records Administration. This resource presents historical resources in a visual and dynamic environment that is both

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-21601509303553835852008-05-12T09:32:00.002-04:002008-07-16T10:11:50.873-04:00

The more time I spend online engaging historical resources, the more convinced I become that the shear volume of what's available has outstripped my (our) abilities to comprehend or even discuss digital history as body of content. Just take the collection online at HeritageQuest Online (http://www.heritagequestonline.com) from ProQuest. The site includes access to U.S. Census records, Freedman's

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-72658502965120731142008-04-18T00:23:00.006-04:002008-07-16T10:10:53.994-04:00

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History - http://www.gilderlehrman.org is a beautifully designed and implemented web-based historical resource. The website mixes an atheistically pleasing layout with rich visuals and enticing content. The Institute’s web-based presence includes online exhibitions that feature concise collections of historical resources presented around a theme or content

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-67538726590102215092008-03-30T15:05:00.000-04:002008-04-10T22:37:57.736-04:00

Conducting digital historical inquiry means taking full advantage of current and emerging technologies to support conceptualizations of learning history that stress perspective taking and meaning-making over the current transmission textbook-driven model. The recent online availability of thousands of primary source materials at websites such as the Library of Congress' American Memory has given

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-92080984637160851872008-03-02T13:39:00.000-05:002008-04-10T22:34:36.826-04:00

Images have long played an important role in social studies. Textbooks devote significant space to images and social studies teachers commonly display visual representations of content on the walls of their rooms and in the halls outside. Today, digital historical images are available in massive quantities. The World Wide Web, digital cameras, and movie and video making software have facilitated

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-91693402629305200122008-02-10T22:30:00.000-05:002008-04-10T22:31:43.076-04:00

The emerging field of digital history presents opportunities for learning which are quite seductive, but ironically, equally limiting. Many scholars, excited about the potential of digital history, trumpet the arrival of new electronic or “digital” historical resources as enabling students to actively and authentically engage in acts of doing history. Most of these “promises” of new learning

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-21301593778755275422008-01-18T18:01:00.000-05:002008-01-23T01:31:32.228-05:00

Pedagogical stories are unique representations of teachers' subject matter content knowledge. These stories can provide teachers with a frame for understanding complex content related to teaching. When teachers use such complex content, they almost always have to adapt it. Pedagogical stories can be one way for teachers to construct such adaptations of content. Since digital historical resources

John K. Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03108144571795352245noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2157151123792873261.post-87854471442658639592008-01-07T09:54:00.000-05:002008-01-23T01:32:16.046-05:00

In 1990, the American Social History Project at New York's Hunter College produced what at the time was viewed as a groundbreaking multimedia CD entitled Who Built America?. The resource offered a social history of the United States from 1876 and 1914 in a highly visual, nonlinear format that provided a uniquely new way to organize and present social studies subject matter. Teachers used

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