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February 1, 1997
History Goes Digital: Teaching With On-line Primary
Sources
By Bill Tally
One day last Fall an 8th grade social studies teacher named
Paul browsed wide-eyed through an on-line archive of Matthew Brady's Civil War Photos from
the Library of Congress. "If only my students had more access to this," he said,
"we could throw away the textbook. They'd be researching history themselves, not just
memorizing names and dates."
t the Center for Children and Technology, we've spent the past year
watching teachers like Paul use the Library of
Congress American Memory collections -- primary sources in U.S. history that include
photos, films, pamplets, oral histories and political cartoons. Supported by the Kellogg
Foundation, the Library has asked CCT researchers and curriculum designers to help them
understand what roles on-line resources can play in history and social studies classrooms,
and what kinds of support teachers and students need to use them well.
Why exciting? On-line primary sources promise, most of all, more
authentic materials that can enliven history for students and teachers. Instead of
consuming history as an 'end-product' -- the closed and consensual narrative that students
find in textbooks -- students get fragmentary and detailed pieces of evidence that
historians themselves use as building blocks in fashioning their narratives. At their
best, these fragments are vivid and personal -- a letter, a domestic photograph -- in ways
that intrigue students and provoke questions and curiosity. And what teacher doesn't want
students who are genuinely curious and motivated to inquire into the fascinating
complexities of history? For a teacher like Paul who's taught the Civil War through
textbooks and lectures for a decade, the Brady photos -- views of battlefields, but also
portraits of slave 'contrabands', documentation of military technology, and images of what
daily life was like for common soldiers -- open new windows onto an old subject, and new
avenues for his own, as well as students', curiosity and research.
 But what does it take to use authentic
historical sources well? In our research we found that electronic primary sources pose new
challenges for teachers and students, at the same time that they opened new possibilities.
The most commonly discussed challenges of teaching with on-line resources are practical --
access to good quality information, speed of downloading, the time necessary to find and
make good classroom use of the material. These hurdles must be faced with electronic
primary source archives. But the pedagogical challenges that primary sources raise are
more novel. On-linehistorical archives invite teachers and students to confront new kinds
of materials, new perspectives on historical events, and a new need for historical
context. Ultimately, using these resources to advance a more dynamic, inquiry-based
approached to history teaching and learning will require creative teachers to collaborate
with each other -- perhaps using the Web itself -- and share lesson plans, teaching
approaches, and assessment methods.
History in Multiple Media
On-line archives can contain documents in many different media. The Library of Congress collections, for
example, include photographs, films, audio recordings, pamphlets, and political cartoons.
Teachers and students need new kinds of skills to interpret these different media. Like
most teachers, Paul was adept at helping students look closely at the meaning of texts; he
and his students had never before used a photo archive as a learning resource. And the
1,100 Brady photos accompanied only
by bibliographic records, seemed strangely mute, especially in comparison to photos that
appeared in books about the Civil War (which illustrated the accompanying narrative, and
which had explanatory captions as well). What did 24 pictures of men sitting and standing
around in Union encampments, in kitchens, in front of tents, and at card tables, say about
the Civil War?
Only when students began to interrogate the
pictures on their own terms did they begin to 'speak' to students. Paul had his students
follow a four-step process in which they first carefully observed and wrote down
everything they saw in a photo, then noted what they knew about the objects and activities
they observed, then drew a provisional conclusion from the photo based on their
observations and background knowledge, and finally noted what else they needed to know,
and how they might go about answering these questions. Following this method, Paul's
students used the pictures of Union camps as launching pads to learn about a variety of
topics -- the technologies in use at the time of the war, the complex roles that African
Americans had in the war, and how the North's industrial strength helped insure better
material and supplies and ultimately helped win the war.
The teachers and students we observed had to develop new skills of
observation and analysis with each of the media they used. With photos, they learned to
take account of as many visual details as possible. With political cartoons, they began to
attend to the symbolic use of imagery, making the task of interpreting historical cartoons
something like cracking a code. For audio recordings such as political speeches, students
noticed and discussed a speaker's use of vocal inflections and flourishes in addition to
the words spoken. These different formal features were keys to the getting the fullest
historical insight from the document.
History from Multiple Perspectives
On-line historical archives also offer a more complex, fragmentary, and
multi-vocal view of history than most traditional classroom materials. Textbooks, for all
the complaints they receive, perform a crucial filtering function that is absent on the
Web. First, there is age-appropriateness. Textbook narratives are written in a vocabulary
and at a level of complexity deemed appropriate for 6th graders, or 10th graders. Second,
materials are screened for moral and ethical appropriateness. Offensive or inflammatory
language, and undemocratic sentiments, for example those about genetic racial inferiority,
tend to be omitted. Third, textbooks strive to create a 'master narrative' -- a single,
coherent story of social, political and economic transformation over time, a sense of 'the
big picture' that students can take away.
Historical collections used by scholars, including many now on the web,
are more idiosyncratic and unruly. For a teacher, one key challenge is that primary
sources faithfully depict the language, thinking, and behavior of historical actors, even
when these are out of step with contemporary values, or are even patently offensive to
many. When students in a seventh grade social studies class were reading through
interviews with former slaves culled from the Library of Congress collection of WPA Life Histories , for
example, they encountered Lonnie Pondly, a Georgia preacher who in his description of life
as a slave tells his interviewer, "Oh, miss, we was the happiest little niggers in
the world." Jeanne, a colleague of Paul's, found her students doubly perplexed and
uncomfortable -- first by the word 'nigger' (Was the teacher sanctioning its use? Was it
OK to joke around with the word?), and second by Lonnie's upbeat description of his life
as a slave, which seemed to contradict their strongly held belief that slavery was bad.
The danger presented by such 'raw' and unfiltered historical material is
that students might leave the classroom believing that the word 'nigger,' and slavery in
general, weren't so bad after all. Students with contrary views, especially if they are
black, might feel silenced and angry. But the multiple perspectives presented by these
kinds of texts also create rich learning opportunities, if they are treated as historical
evidence, subject to intellectual and ethical scrutiny. A creative teacher, Jeanne dealt
with the material in a straightforward fashion. She acknowledged the discomfort that the
word 'nigger' caused, explained the historical origins and meaning of the word, allowed
students to voice their own associations to and feelings about it, and finally,
established ground rules for the use of the word in the classroom: it was to be used or
referred to not in a casual but in a scholarly way, as a linguistic artifact and a form of
historical evidence.
Lonnie's account of life as a 'happy slave' called for a more nuanced
response. Jeanne had students carefully note exactly what things about his life were
happy. It did not take them long to see that he also chronicled many abuses that other
slaves routinely suffered. This raised the question of whether he was telling the whole
truth about his own life, or softening it for the benefit of a white interviewer whom he
did not want to offend by showing anger or resentment. Jeanne introduced information about
the context of the interview -- that in 1930s Georgia blacks could not communicate with
whites on an equal footing, but had to defer to them in myriad ways.
Finally, Jeanne made use of the strong point of primary source archives
-- the ability to see history from multiple perspectives. She assigned students a variety
of interviews describing slave life on the plantation: accounts by rich white planters,
poor whites, and former slaves who described both harsh treatment and efforts to resist
and escape. Students thus had to weigh competing accounts and the evidence they presented,
and come up with ways of explaining variations and discrepancies. In order to do so they
consulted secondary sources that Jeanne had gathered, as well as their textbooks. After
arguing back and forth they concluded that, while some slaves lived well and felt
agreeable toward their masters, and their masters towards them, all were deprived of
fundamental rights and dignities, and many resisted the master's power, and strove to
build and maintain their own lives and traditions within the confines of white-dominated
society.
The multiple perspectives presented by primary source archives make
history, and history teaching, more complicated, and they can also touch emotional nerves
in students, making the history classroom a more volitile place. Yet as Jeanne found,
primary sources, approached critically, can help students build a more authentic and
complete portrait of the past, against the frequent impulse to edit and thereby 'soften'
history for students.
A New Need for Historical Context
A final challenge of using electronic primary sources is that historical
archives are both vast, and fragmentary. Finding resources that link to established
curriculum topics can be difficult. And because most documents are about highly specific
events -- an impending treaty, a wounded soldier's convalescence, the opening of a world's
fair -- students need help gaining historical context, or background knowledge of the
period, to make sense of the documents. The Brady photo collection, for example,
contains over 1,100 photographs, yet these are almost exclusively of Union, not
Confederate, armies, and they show mainly men's contributions to the war effort, for
example, and not women's contributions. Teachers need to do two things: first, help
students identify the subset of photos that might help them answer relevant curriculum
questions; and second, direct students to appropriate secondary sources that can provide
the scaffold they need to understand a particular photo's content. Teachers need, in
short, lesson plans or student research guides, that suggest how parts of a vast
collection can be used to accomplish common curriculum objectives, and that also suggest
helpful supplementary reading.
Supports for Teachers
Many teachers will be eager to incorporate into their students' work the
historical archives now becoming available on the web. Meeting the pedagogical challenges
above, however, and getting the most from these resources, will require staff development
for teachers, more sophisticated web and CD-ROM design, and a new kind of shared
curriculum development.
Staff development experiences should give teachers strategies for
analyzing historical documents that come in new forms, such as photos, films, and poster
graphics. They should also give teachers critical thinking strategies for addressing
provocative historical materials that offer non-traditional perspectives, and may raise
intellectual and emotional tensions for students. One such program, the NEH-funded New Media Classroom, is a week-long institute for
high school humanities teachers that offers overviews of cutting-edge history-related web
sites and CD-ROMS, hands-on strategies for working critically with electronic primary
sources, roundtable discussions with history scholars and new media producers, and
opportunities for teachers to collaborate on designing sample lessons, and even publishing
them on the web. Teachers who participate in these kinds of training experiences will reap
rich rewards for themselves and their students.
The design of on-line and CD-ROM-based archives should also take into
account the needs of teachers and students. Too often, archives are mounted with awkward
search engines, insufficient background on the historical collections, and virtually no
overviews to provide historical context for the material. Some sites, however, are
beginning to offer all these things and more. The Valley of the Shadow is
an archive housed at the University of Virginia containing thousands of primary documents
detailing the history of two communities on different sides of the Mason-Dixon line during
the Civil War. Ideal for student documentary research, the site contains, in addition to
census records, newspapers, photographs, government papers, and letters and diaries,
several different kinds of overview documents that orient the researcher in time and
place. One is like a traditional textbook, providing a national scope of events; another
is more local, narrating the events in each community. Both provide branch points into the
archive of primary documents in multiple places. The researcher can at any time 'dip down'
for more archival detail, or 'back up' for contextual information, as he or she pursues a
line of inquiry. The Library of Congress American Memory sites also contain orienting
'essays', and a Learning Page to
guide teachers toward useful resources.
Finally, web-based publishing by teachers may be a key to making
historical archives useful for the great majority of teachers who do not have time to
create their own primary source-based lessons and research projects from scratch. By
definition, historical archives contain more learning opportunities than any one publisher
or institution can imagine and publish. The smaller number of teachers who are willing to
invest some time in devising and sharing lessons or guidelines for student research are
therefore in an ideal place to help their colleagues, and contribute to the reshaping of
history and social studies teaching. Look for web sites that offer lesson plans created by
teachers, places to post lessons you have designed, and on-going projects that your
classroom can join. The Valley of the Shadow now
contains an index of teacher-created activities, as does the New Media Classroom site mentioned above.
As Paul and Jeanne and a whole host of teacheres are now discovering,
teaching with electronic primary sources opens up the classroom to new and challenging
perspectives on history that can enliven history for students. While the textbook may not
be passe -- in fact, it may be more important than ever, as a quick reference resource! --
the challenge of using digital archives to explore history presents an exciting new
frontier.
Author's notes:
1. About the photographs:
"Incidents of the war. A harvest of death, Gettysburg, July, 1863. by Timothy H.
O'Sullivan."
"Portrait of Brig. Gen. Napoleon B. McLaughlen, officer of the Federal Army, and
staff, vicinity of Washington, D.C. 1895 August. No. 0948." (The photographer is
unknown.)
The source of both photographs is the Library of Congress' Selected Civil War Photographs.
2. Paul and Jeanne are composites of approximately 6 or 8 teachers
observed directly or through the detailed field notes taken by classroom researchers. I've
used these notes to describe features of good pedagogy, taking some license to attribute
skills to two teachers that were actually spread across the whole group.
3. A shorter version of this article appeared in the October 1996 issue
of Electronic Learning, a print magazine for school teachers and administrators.
Email: Bill Tally
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