Our Collective Stories!
One of the virtues of the Web is
that it has democratized history,...It has
accelerated a process that has been in motion for two
or three decades. The National History
Standards encourage a
greater sensitivity for history from the bottom up --
listening to people from every walk of life -- across
class, race and gender. Most of us welcome this
development. It empowers people who were never before
empowered. These people become part of the story.
-- Michael Birkner,
chair of the Dept. of History from Gettysburg College
Birkner was quoted by Joyce Kasman
Valenza, the author of a tech.k12 article every week in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in her
piece on the film Amistad. She used the publicity
around this film's story as the launch site for an
investigation of histories of African American people in
celebration of Black History month. She writes, (from the
perspective of a school librarian);
...History is the telling of the
stories of real people.
It used to be a challenge digging
up those stories. Back in February 1976, when Black
History Month was first celebrated, there was an
embarrassing scarcity of materials available to meet
growing student interest and an increasing number of
teacher assignments.
... the Web has placed firsthand
sources -- remarkable archives of documents, letters,
diaries, images, sounds and video clips -- virtually
in our laps. It invites us to explore individual
stories, to create our own interpretations of these
stories, to act as historians ourselves.
This is a great tie-in to this week's
Wednesday Websites. Instead of celebrating Black History
Month and the upcoming Women's History Month by listing
celebrated and famous individuals, I'd like to focus on
the potential of the web to share individual stories and
histories, and to reinforce this idea of going beyond
facts, dates, and names to students and teachers becoming
historians themselves. I paraphrase here from a draft
document written by Jim Culbertson about a Women and
World History Project we are exploring at the Fund. As
well as incorporate my own feelings of what it means to
celebrate and share your personal history by listening
and telling the stories of loved ones and everyday people.
I'd like to start first with a Writing
Project colleague/friend and teacher at the Stearne
Elementary School here in Philly, Caltropia Wilder. Cal
is having an upcoming family reunion and put together this site, "dedicated to the many African-American
family reunions that are held across the United States of
America every year". It is a great example of
personal stories coming alive on-line linked to many
genealogical resources. She's included general links, as
well as those specifically for African American and Black-Native
American research. Primary documents are shared by
genealogists throughout the world on the web and there is
much to be discovered about all of our histories. These
just touch the surface though -- take a look at Yahoo's list of
Genealogical resources for an
overview of what is available.
Then I was looking under Yahoo's Oral History
archive I found a bunch of
really interesting looking stuff. There's a jazz archive
from Tulane U and a Civil Rights Oral History website
from Mississippi. Many of these sites have just
information about how to obtain these documents. But then
I found a couple great ones with text actually published
by students on-line:
What Did You Do During
the War, Grandma? pulls
together interviews and research done by high school
students for a school project about WWII in Rhode
Island.
And this -- Bland County Homepage was also done by high schools students
about the people in their Appalachian community.
And then I ran across these K-2 grade
students at the Buckman school in Oregon who drew a timeline about Dr.
Martin Luther King's life that
is just so beautiful and feel so personal I had to share
it here.
(See also the Martin Luther King Day
Wednesday Websites for more
sites about the Civil Rights Movement)
Then there are a ton of primary
documents on-line which include full text, pictures,
sounds and film clips:
First, look at this huge Historical Text
Archive. I found sites like
this huge one on African American
History....There are tons
of really interesting resources here, including stuff
like documentation of an early African American
settlement in New Jersey -- the documentation includes
mostly cemetery records and pictures which tie
together this story of a no-longer existing
settlement and this historian's process.
The National Archives and
Records Administration has
Primary Documents and Source Material on-line for the
teaching to the National History
Standards for US History
and the National Standards for
Civic and Government.
Documents linked to the Amistad case are here and the Women's Suffrage
Movement, for example.
These are all tied to their Digital Classroom which has the sources linked with
activities and guides. Make sure to click on the
"Related Website" links also for more great
stuff!
The Library of Congress has a site
called American Memory
from which you can primary documents from the
including the African American
Mosaic and this document on Immigration in
American Memory. I also
looked under "stories" and found tons of
article, referenced first and then with a link to see
the full text on-line. A great resource.
Take a look at an multimedia site
called the Tenement Museum which looks at the history of a tenement house
from the Lower East side of New York City in the 30's and
40's through family stories and photographs.
As usual, I'm just scratch, scratch,
scratching the surface here. To find more, I'd suggest
you start at large Directories like Yahoo or at
Educationally-oriented Directories like Kathy Schrock's Guide for
Educators. If you use the
larger search engines (Netscape has a listing at http://home.netscape.com/escapes/search/ntsrchrnd-3.html) then you search for say <"Oral
Histories"> in quotes to look for the phrase, or
you use <Oral AND Histories> to look for the two
words to occur in the site's description. Nothing is
perfect when searching the web, but try it and see what
you can find. I'd also suggest that whenever you find a
page you like you see if they have created a "Related
Links" or "Other Resources" page....often
similar projects are linked together.
Have fun! Christina
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