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By Leah, April 5, 2011 10:08 am

This entry also appeared on the National Trust for  Historic Preservation’s blog.

As a history major at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA I was exposed to a lot of Civil War history. Located just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Dickinson College was a hotbed of activity in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. The college was one of the few institutions of higher education in the country with a student body that was half-northern and half-southern. Two of its graduates also were two of the most powerful men in the country –  President James Buchanan, class of 1809 and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, class of 1795. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Dickinson College will host a series of events on April 15th and 16th to formally launch the House Divided Project, an innovative effort to provide 21st century tools for teaching 19th-century topics in America’s K-12 classrooms.

I worked on the House Divided Project for multiple summers during my college career, staying in Carlisle and immersing myself in the history of the Civil War both inside and outside of the classroom. From field trips to teacher workshops to endless hours in the archives, a huge part of my college experience involved the Civil War. The House Divided Project is an amazing resource for students, teachers, and history buffs alike. It offers a great example of what collaborative work can achieve and the creative ways in which historians can make the most of the web.

The project uses Dickinson College as a window and a starting point for a unique focus on the Civil War era. Faculty, staff and undergraduate students at Dickinson have been building and testing the House Divided Project for the last five years, creating nearly two dozen websites offering public domain historical content and free digital tools on a variety of subjects from the period 1840 to 1880. The project hopes to find in the stories of thousands of individuals a way to help illustrate how the Civil War came, why it was fought so bitterly, and ultimately how the nation survived.

At the center of the House Divided Project is a powerful database dubbed the “research engine,” which includes more than 10,000 historic images and hundreds of thousands of individual records connected together in an easy-to-use interface. The project aims to offer historical resources and documents for each day of the period from 1840 to 1880. You can visit March 17, 1860 for an example of the project’s vision.

There are a number of events surrounding the launch of the House Divided Project from April 15-16, many of which are free and open to the public. Events include a documentary film festival, a teacher workshop led by Project Director Matthew Pinsker (registration required), an “augmented reality” tour of Underground Railroad and Civil War sites using the latest tools in smart phone/computer tablet technology, and a speech by Yale University historian and author David Blight. You can learn more about these events on the launch page of the project.

I hope that you’ll check out the House Divided Project and let the staff know what you think! And if you’re free the weekend of April 15 and 16, this alumna wants to remind you that Carlisle is always beautiful in the spring.

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By Leah, November 14, 2009 6:05 pm

This blog posting originally appeared on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s blog. To view it there, click here.

In recent history, Columbus Day has become less a celebration of discovery and more a moment of contention as people debate the true significance of the explorer’s initial arrival in the Americas in 1492. Whether you believe that Columbus is a hero or a villain (or perhaps somewhere in between), Columbus Day is a moment when we should all consider the true complexity of our history and heritage. Historical interpretations can vary widely, but a consideration of all viewpoints can help us to better understand the past and to better appreciate events that led us to the present day. Embracing and accepting such diversity in opinion is one of the best parts of historic preservation.

Consider all the worldwide preservation efforts related to Columbus. The capital city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic is the oldest continually-inhabited European city in the Americas; the colonial section is even a World Heritage Site. Columbus named the island Hispaniola and served as governor there for a period of time. In 1948 the controversial Columbus Lighthouse (or “Faro a Colón”) was erected as a tribute to the explorer, and the site even claims to contain the explorer’s mortal remains. In A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World author Tony Horwitz explores European contact with the Americas prior to the landing at Plymouth Rock. He has an entire chapter dedicated to Columbus’s Santo Domingo, including a description of his own personal visit to the Columbus Lighthouse.

In Venezuela, Columbus Day was long celebrated as a commemoration of the first meeting between Europeans and Natives, but in 2002 Hugo Chavez renamed the holiday “The Day of the Indigenous Resistance,” commemorating instead the resistance of Natives to Europeans. In 2004 protesters toppled a statue of Columbus, linking the destruction of the monument to the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Iraq, which had happened the previous year. They saw Columbus as a tyrant in the same vein as Hussein.

There are many examples of Columbus’s presence in historical memory as well. The American Knights of Columbus were so named when the group protested the American government’s attempts to limit Catholic citizenship. They viewed Columbus as an appropriate namesake since he was a Catholic and, in their opinion, was responsible for the discovery of America. For American Indians, Columbus represents the beginning of an era in which their people were subjected to a great deal of pain and suffering, and they use Columbus Day as an opportunity to remind people of the negative consequences of European colonization. The Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas has been encouraging people to stop observing the holiday, noting that what was the beginning of freedom and discovery for some was the beginning of death and destruction for others.

It is largely accepted that Columbus did not discover America, but most people can agree that, upon his arrival, Europeans were in the Americas to stay. Regardless of whether that legacy is a positive or negative one in your personal opinion, his arrival is nonetheless significant. Columbus Day is an opportunity for us to reflect on that arrival, maybe even at a historic site related to the explorer’s legacy. And perhaps if we’re lucky, we can reflect on a day off from work!

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By Leah,

From mid-May through mid-August 2009, I worked with the Heritage Education Services (HES) program of the National Park Service (NPS). The goal of HES is to “enable the NPS to be fully engaged in using cultural resources and historic preservation programs to educate people of all ages, promoting public knowledge and support for cultural resources in parks and communities nationwide and the role the NPS plays in their identification, preservation, and interpretation.”

The two main programs within HES are the Teaching with Historic Places program (TwHP) and the Discover Our Shared Hertiage travel itineraries program. This summer, I was able to work on projects within both of these programs. For TwHP, the lesson plan I was most closely involved with was President Lincoln’s Cottage: A Retreat. I also helped with two other lesson plans that deal with President Lincoln (these lessons were being focused on due to the bicentennial of his birth), but those lesson plans are still in production. I was able to participate in the editing, partial rewriting, and digital posting of President Lincoln’s Cottage: A Retreat, and learned just how detailed this process can be.

For the travel itineraries program, I worked most closely on revising the Virginia Main Street Communities travel itinerary, though I also helped with revisions on the Detriot and Route 66 itineraries if necessary. These travel itineraries deal with a variety of places and topics, but all of them include sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As time goes on, these itineraries need updating, so much of my work with the travel itineraries included researching, rewriting, and updating existing projects.

Prior to my work with HES, I had little experience with the educational side of public history. I had little experience with educational programs beyond being an interpreter, and this internship certainly exposed me to new things. Additionally, I learned a great deal about the issue of heritage. Heritage is a buzz word in the world of public history these days—from heritage education to heritage tourism, it seems that almost all organizations are trying to get their piece of the heritage pie. Being able to talk to my supervisors Carol Shull and Beth Boland about issues surround heritage and education was incredibly helpful as I tried to make sense of these issues and draw conclusions about my future as a public historian. While I’m not sure that the education side of public history is what I want to do for my long-term career, I do feel that I better understand and appreciate the importance of history education programs. The internship was an invaluable experience in helping me to further define my professional goals.

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By Leah, November 13, 2009 11:47 pm

While attending the National Council on Public History’s annual conference, I wrote two blog entries with a coworker (Priya Chhaya) for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s blog. You can check them out here:

How Did We Get Here?

Preservation as Public History

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By Leah, June 26, 2009 11:54 pm

Just a quick post to let everyone know that my final project for digital history is nearing completion (well, at least for now). My final project is entitled Personal Liberty in Antebellum America: The Fugutive Slave Crisis and the Coming of the Civil War, and I intend to keep developing the site beyond just this summer as time allows. Feel free to let me know what you think so far.

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By Leah, June 11, 2009 3:23 pm

In what ways can the computer truly revolutionize history? Much of what historians are currently doing on the web isn’t really that different than traditional forms of scholarship, since many history websites are dedicated to archiving print materials and are still largely prose-based. In his book, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transfrom Our Understanding of the Past, David J. Staley argues for the importance of visualization in transforming our understanding and study of history. He defines visualization as “any graphic which organizes meaningful information in multidimensional spatial form” and argues that visualizations should be seen as a legitimate form of historical inquiry as well as an important type of secondary sources (p. 3). He is also quick to acknowledge, however, that the field of history still has much progress to make in terms of accepting visualizations and other forms of digital history as legitimate sources. Staley is not saying that visualizations should replace all prose, but he does argue that there are instances in which visualizations are the better choice since they allow for different, nonlinear types of thinking.  

We also read “When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age” by Alan Liu and “50+ Web 2.0 ways to Tell a Story” by Alan Levine. Both of these articles prompted a discussion regarding the future of images and visualizations in historical scholarship. Historians such as Staley have published photo essays (such his Visual History of Germany) that force readers to draw their own conclusions with little written guidance. Certainly there are instances in which images and visualizations are the best choice for conveying specific types of historical information or narratives, but Americans (and, even more specifically, historians) have not been trained to interpret images as we have been trained to interpret text. Just as with other new forms of historical scholarship (i.e. public history), historians need to learn to embrace well-done examples of visual history. However, historians producing such types of work also have to think carefully about how their audience will interpret such work. If authors of photo essays such as Staley are ok with different people interpreting their work in different ways, then that is fine, but if they want to ensure that a specific, fairly uniform conclusion is met by people that read their work, they will likely still have to provide some written explanation. Until we are taught to better understand and interpret visual works, visual historians will have to decide how far they want to go in ensuring that their work is interpreted in a specific way.

For me, the ultimate point of visual history and visualizations is to better convey complex history and to get people thinking critically and in new ways about important topics. Here are a few of my personal favorite examples of visual history:

• The new Virtual Museum of Iraq: The Baghdad Museum was looted during the United States invasion in 2003, but just this past Tuesday Italy helped Iraq launch this virtual museum as part of an ongoing cultural collaboration between the two countries. You can read more about this partnership and the project itself in the article, “Italy Puts Baghdad Museum Online,” but you should definitely explore the site itself. Visitors can enter different “halls” (from the prehistoric to the Islamic), and through this project people across the world gain access to priceless artifacts from more than 6,000 years of history. Although each object does have a brief description, the site is largely visual, utilizing still images, 360-views of artifacts, and movies to convey a great deal of history in a very engaging way.
•  The Coney Island History Project is a nonprofit group whose goal is to “increase awareness of Coney Island’s legendary and colorful past and to encourage appreciation of the Coney Island neighborhood of today.” Their website now includes an interactive development map that “seeks to preserve the memory of the Coney Island that was and to tell the story of how it arrived at the form it takes today.” The map allows visitors to explore sites on Coney Island through the ages, providing a map with different views as well as multiple pictures of each highlighted site through the years.
• The National Constitution Center is definitely worth a visit. Their opening presentation and exhibits make use of visualizations, immersing people in a variety of interactive experiences that explore what, exactly, “We the People” means for us as Americans.

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By Leah, May 31, 2009 3:04 pm

It is often said that public historians wear many hats—that we are “historians in the middle,” with one foot in academia and the other firmly in the public sphere. The National Council on Public History’s Board of Directors recently defined public history as “a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public.”

In class, we got into a rather intense debate about whether it is possible to be an academic and a public historian at the same time or whether the two categories are mutually exclusive. It is true that people tend to be more of one than the other depending on what they spend the most time doing (i.e., writing books and journal articles vs. creating exhibits and historic tours). It is also inevitable that people will be categorized as primarily academic or public historians– basically, these are specialties. However, such pigeonholing should be done cautiously and avoided as much as possible, because in the end we are all historians being trained at the graduate level.

Furthermore, we are all producing history, albeit in different forms and for different audiences. Perhaps if various categories of historians worked together more often, we could reach a broader audience, expand our influence, and better educate those people that read or interact with our work. This is especially true for more academic historians, who think less critically than public historians about how to reach the appropriate audience. This is due in large part to the fact that academic historians are usually more interested in reaching a very small, specific audience, but in many ways they are ignoring large trends in the field. The rise of public and now digital forms of history has changed the field rapidly and in unprecedented ways.

In Sunday’s Washington Post Philip Kennicott wrote article entitled “After an Age of Rage, Museums Have Mastered the Display of Commotional Restraint” in which he discusses the decline of controversy in museums since the culture wars of previous decades. He questions what happened—“Was it a cultural or historic change? Self-censorship or a more subtle shift in what museums were exhibiting? Did audiences grow up, or were they just inured to radical art and provocative historical revision?” Although there are a variety of reasons that likely led to a decline in controversy, one of the major things that Kennicott suggests is that museum staff, including historians, have learned from their past experiences. For example, the Jewish Museum in New York prepared for strong reactions to its exhibit, “Mirroring Evil” by adding “public panels and forums to their schedule” and hiring “an on-site facilitator to organize daily public conversations with museum visitors. They also moved four of the most controversial works to a separate room and put up a warning: ‘Some Holocaust survivors have been disturbed by the works of art shown beyond this point..’ It was, literally, an escape valve, and it was part of a strategy that worked.”

Public historians such as those working at the Jewish Museum have much to teach the profession at large, as do digital historians wading into the uncharted waters of open-source history and new forms of communication and research. By learning from their own experiences, listening to their various audiences, and working collaboratively, these new categories of historians are doing their research and considering all available evidence in an effort to constantly improve the field. If all of this sounds familiar it is because it is what more “academic” historians have traditionally done, demonstrating that ultimately we all simply historians, just with various tools, methods, and audiences.  As Edward Ayers concludes in his essay, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History,” all historians “need to understand the new media [and public history] and its implications as fully as possible, for both defensive and hopeful reasons,” and the best way to react to these new trends in the field is to jump in and work together as historians rather than independently in limited categories of our own creation. Perhaps then, as Ayers suggests, we will be able to seize “the opportunities the medium offers, opportunities to touch the past, present, and future in new ways.”

For more information on the rise of public and digital forms of history and the effects of these trends on the field as a whole, see also: Carl Becker’s AHA presidential address, “Everyman his Own Historian”; “Defining Public History: Is it Possible? Is it Necessary?” by Robert Weible; and “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” by Katharine T. Miller and Howard S. Corbett.

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By Leah, May 26, 2009 8:21 pm

Digital history challenges much of traditional historical practice. From its form of communication (websites, digital archives, and online exhibits vs. traditional print books and in-person museum experiences) to the challenges it poses for long-standing traditions such as peer review, digital history has far-reaching implications for the discipline as a whole. Generally speaking, academics (historians being no exception) have very specific standards for what constitutes “good” historical work, and these characteristics have changed little over many, many years. However, with the rise first of public history and with the more recent rise of digital history, historians are being forced to consider shared authority and open source work more seriously than they ever have before. In an article entitled, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Roy Rosenzweig questions how far professional historians can and should go in embracing open sources such as Wikipedia.

In his study of Wikipedia, he finds that the online encyclopedia ‘“beats Encarta but not American National Biography Online in coverage and roughly matches Encarta in accuracy. This general conclusion is supported by studies comparing Wikipedia to other major encyclopedias.” Where Wikipedia lacks, in Rosenzweig’s view, is in writing, and he believes this is largely due to the synthetic, collaborative nature of the writing. Rosenzweig acknowledges that many academic historians are rather hostile towards Wikipedia, either because they view it as unreliable (which his study dispoves) or perhaps because they are unsure of how to deal with a model that differs so greatly from traditional historic scholarship. Rosenzweig also makes the point that Wikipedia is ultimately an information source (as are all enxyclopedias) and is inherently different from more subjective, interpretive works of history and historical theory. Wikipedia should inspire all historians to teach their students the limitations of encyclopedic sources, but this doesn’t mean that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source just because it differs from more traditional historical sources.

Where Rosenzweig really hits his stride is when he questions why other sources of historical knowledge (such as JSTOR or other subscription-based repositories) aren’t available to there general public in the way that Wikipedia is. Sources such as the American National Biography Online, “written by professional historians, sponsored by our scholarly societies, and supported by millions of dollars in foundation and government grants…[are] available only to libraries that often pay thousands of dollars per year rather than to everyone on the Web as Wikipedia is…Shouldn’t professional historians join in the massive democratization of access to knowledge reflected by Wikipedia and the Web in general?” Historians, Rosenzweig argues, should also be participating in ventures such as Wikipedia in order to improve the site’s content and educate Americans who will interact with history on these types of open source sites (and likely not anywhere else that professional historians will be publishing their work). Furthermore, Rosenzweig argues, “Although Wikipedia as a product is problematic as a sole source of information, the process of creating Wikipedia fosters an appreciation of the very skills that historians try to teach.”

Clearly, Rosenzweig’s article is chock-full of valuable information that seriously challenges the way historians approach their work in this new digital age. He is also very realistic about the opportunities and problems involved with digital work, but tries to make a distinction between Wikipedia-type history vs. more traditional forms of historical scholarship. There will always be a place for interpretive, academic works of history, but historians would also be doing themselves a disservice by ignoring the rise of the Wikipedia world of history. By involving themselves in both the academic world of history as well as the public, open source world of history, historians can improve the work in both spheres. Although he is clearly unsure as to how interaction between the two spheres will work out in terms of details, Rosenzweig clearly doesn’t believe that historians can  ignore the world of Wikipedia: “And whether or not historians consider alternative models for producing their own work, they should pay closer attention to their erstwhile competitors at Wikipedia than Microsoft devoted to worrying about an obscure free and open-source operating system called Linux. ”

For more on history as an open source, see Kevin Sheets, “Wiki in the Historical Classroom.” Additionally, for more information on digital tools and sources, see the Digital Resources Tools Wiki. I wrote a review of CiteULike.

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By Leah, May 19, 2009 9:12 pm

During class on Monday, May 18, we were lucky enough to have Dan Cohen (Director of George Mason’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web) speak to us about digital history and its effects on the the discipline of history as a whole.

In Digital History, Dan and his co-author Roy Rosenzweig make the point that, in order for digital history projects to ultimately “be all that they can be,” there need to be some methods and standardization. In class, however, we also discussed the importance of flexibility in digital history work. For many reasons, digital history content simply cannot adhere to the same standards as traditional historical scholarship. These reasons include the medium for digital history work (the internet) as well as the types of projects undertaken by digital historians. For example, when CHNM undertook the September 11 Archive, they quickly realized that the archive would not succeed if modeled on traditional, non-digital archives. Not only would users not be likely to fill out a cumbersome form when making their contributions, but there was also no easy way to verify much of the incoming content. Perhaps most importantly, CHNM staff wanted to get the archive off the ground as soon as possible in order to quickly begin collecting objects and stories. Hearing Dan talk about his experiences with projects such as this one truly demonstrated the importance of flexibility in digital history work– taking smart risks can certainly pay off. Historians doing digital work must still strive to be as thorough and competent as they would be for a non-digital project, but perhaps by learning to sweat the small stuff less and taking reasonable risks, historians can achieve new things as they learn by doing through digital projects.

Our discussion about the possibilities of digital history naturally led us to discuss some of the difficulties surrounding such projects. While most people now acknowledge the potential of digital history, such projects cannot be easily evaluated through the standards traditionally used by historians–namely, peer review. Standards are certainly important, but as projects such as the September 11 Archive or other digital undertakings demonstrate, new standards must be developed to properly evaluate and ultimately improve digital history. Using traditional standards to evaluate digital projects is like comparing apples and oranges. Digital history and social media have enormous potential but they also break down barriers, and this can be scary and lead to resistance from some. In order for digital history projects to fulfill their potential, digital historians will have to become (in the words of Dan Cohen) “thought leaders” working together to develop standards, inspire new projects, and hopefully change some long-standing traditions within the field of history.

See also: Dan Cohen’s article, “The Future of Preserving the Past.” Many thanks to Dan for taking the time to visit our class!