2003
Using Digital Technology to Teach American History
Editors' Introduction
Gary J. Kornblith & Carol Lasser Article
Building the Better Textbook: The Promises
and Perils of E-Publication
Michael J. Guasco Article
"Scholars will soon be instructed through
the eye": E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History
David Jaffee Article | Appendix
Using Online Resources to Re-center the U.S.
History Survey: Women's History as a Case Study
Kriste Lindenmeyer Article
Pursuing E-Opportunities in the History Classroom
Mark Tebeau Article
"Scholars
will soon be instructed through the eye":
E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History
David Jaffee
A visit to the book exhibit at the 2002 annual meeting
of the Organization of American Historians left me thinking that
I had stumbled upon a CompUSA store rather than a gathering of professional
historians. Strolling through the aisles I found a multitude of
high-tech equipment, including flat-panel monitors, digital projectors,
and laptop computers. What was going on? Publishers had their rows
of new monographs and their displays of colorfully covered U.S.
history texts, of course--staples of exhibits for decades--but they
also featured numerous CD-ROMs and online resources. Some of the
exhibited items were historical databases for research purposes,
such as The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade CD-ROM published by
Cambridge University Press and Harvard University's W. E. B. Du
Bois Center, but the bulk of digital resources on display were for
teachers, especially teachers of the U.S. history survey course.
Are we witnessing a transformative moment in the history of textbook
publishing, as many champions of educational technology would have
us believe? Or is something less far-reaching and more problematic
perhaps at hand? What does the entry of digital history into the
college classroom portend for how we teach and for how students
learn?1
Long before the advent of personal computers, educators and others
celebrated the potential of technology for improving the quality
of instruction." Is blackboard analysis of periods or subjects used?"
was one of the categories listed in a table compiled by Carroll
D. Wright for Herbert Baxter Adams's The Study of History in
American Colleges and Universities, published in 1887. Over
a decade later A. B. Hart devoted significant space to the use of
maps in his "Methods of Teaching American History." He even
offered graphic advice on how to make one:
A large outline map should be painted on a movable blackboard;
it is significant to indicate the coasts. . . . A roll of strong
manila paper, a few colored crayons, or, better still, water colors,
a yard-stick, and a small map on which rectangles may be lightly
ruled are all the materials necessary.
And, most memorably, Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park,
wrote in the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1913,
Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon
be instructed through the eye. It is is possible to teach every
branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school
system will be completely changed in ten years.
Today’s advocates of educational technology often echo Edison’s
proclamation of a new age of visuality, and they trumpet as well
the supposed advantages of computer technology for institutional
efficiency and student engagement.2
The all-too-familiar siren call of computer technology appeared
at my very breakfast table as I wrote this essay. The New York
Times "Circuits" section of August 15, 2002, featured the
theme of students going back to school and highlighted the cool
electronic gadgets that students can bring to class and the gigabit-speed
networks and "smart" buildings at Case Western Reserve University.
Yet amid all the celebratory remarks on hardware and other equipment,
some cautionary flags popped up. A short box on "What Students Say"
reviewed the Pew Internet and American Life Project report in which
students stated that their teachers fail to grasp the real potential
of the World Wide Web. One high school senior lambasted the "mundane
use of the Internet" as a place to send students to "look up
such and such lesson and I’ll quiz you tomorrow"--rather than
as a resource for developing innovative and intellectually challenging
assignments.3
This essay surveys the state of electronic supplements--either
CD-ROMs or online Web sites--for various college-level U.S. history
textbooks to see where we are and where we might be going. The emergence
of e-supplements comes at the intersection of several developments
in the areas of academic publishing, higher education, and American
popular culture. The publishing industry's concentration has provided
economies of scale in bundling resources of print, microfilm, and
digital form, while textbook publishers have pursued new revenue
streams in the marketing of new electronic materials. Colleges and
universities have jumped on the bandwagon by hailing technology
as a means to enhance efficiency and engagement at the same time.
Finally and most profoundly, I would argue, there has been a proliferation
of digital sources posted on the World Wide Web by government agencies
or university archives or just plain amateurs. Most impressive are
huge Web sites such as the Valley of the Shadow, a virtual
archive of two counties on opposite sides at the onset of the Civil
War, and the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress.
The American Memory site boasts seven million digital items
contained in over a hundred separate collections, ranging from Ansel
Adams’s 1943 photographs of Japanese American internment at Manzanar
to sound recordings by American leaders during World War I and the
1920s. These are exciting times--and getting ever more exciting
if your idea of a good time is locating (and displaying) materials
with the click of a mouse (and a fast connection to the Internet).4
The first generation of electronic resources for the teaching
of U.S. history came with the publication of textbooks in CD-ROM
format early in the 1990s. Prognosticators announced that the age
of the e-book was upon us and that students would soon be reading
their multimedia texts at the computer screen. As it happens, we
are still waiting for that day to appear. What happened instead
in the mid-1990s was the explosive growth of the World Wide Web.
In the wake of that phenomenon, publishers made materials available
online rather than via CD-ROMs. But, even with the arrival of this
second generation of e-supplements, the potential of computer technology
for improving history education remains open to debate. My argument
will be that technology per se is not the main issue. What demands
our greatest attention is the pedagogical framework--how digital
resources are best deployed to achieve our goals for teaching and
learning history.5
Electronic supplements come in a variety of forms, but most have
a consistent set of features: chapter goals and outlines, maps,
quizzes, Web links, primary sources, and sometimes Web exercises
and other student activities. Almost all supplementary resources
are keyed to the textbook (even as publishers offer identical resources
across their textbook offerings) and to a particular chapter of
the textbook. Some publishers offer e-book versions of their print
texts, such as Pearson Education’s interactive edition CD-ROM of
The American People by Gary B. Nash et al.; others offer
their supplements in identical CD-ROM and online versions, such
as Vivendi’s @History CD-ROM and Web sites for their various
history texts; a few have developed stand-alone Web sites for users
of any of their textbooks, such as Thomson/Wadsworth’s American
Journey Online; and there are separate CD-ROMs of maps such
as Vivendi’s GeoQuest: United States CD-ROM or the McGraw-Hill
series of After the Fact Interactive CD-ROMs of topical modules.
(An appendix to this essay provides a list of the publishers, e-supplements,
and textbooks discussed herein.) Surprisingly, few Web sites are
readily searchable; you must go chapter by chapter through the site
to locate information on a particular topic. Less surprisingly,
many sites are protected by passwords. To get a password, a student
must purchase a new copy of the printed textbook, which typically
comes shrink-wrapped with a card bearing an access code. By this
means, publishers discourage the use of secondhand copies and seek
to increase their sales and profits.6
To a great degree, e-supplements follow the model of their print
predecessors. Over the past twenty years, textbooks have made increasing
use of multicolor maps and illustrations and of sidebars and multiple
frames on the printed page. Those changes, I would argue, are linked
to the dramatic changes in content presented in survey texts, especially
the incorporation of more diverse voices in the central narrative
of United States history for undergraduate students. E-supplements
allow publishers and authors to go further in this direction by
breaking the physical and economic constraints of printed works.
(How many sidebars can you lay out on a printed page, and how many
sources can you bind into a paperback reader?) With e-supplements,
instructors have a wider range of sources to choose from when they
customize their courses for particular mixes of students. The supplements
also offer gateways to the wealth of Web materials, selectively
grouped and sometimes annotated, and some have exercises and assignments
based on those digital history sources. Supplements follow the textbook
author’s lead in displaying a document such as a manuscript census
document and explaining how we know what we know--making visible
the process that otherwise is quite hidden in the textbook’s seamless
narrative.
Yet publishers make more ambitious claims for the superiority
of e-supplements over their print counterparts. According to W.
W. Norton, with Inventing America’s Digital History
Resources CD-ROM, students can "see and hear American history"
and "explore subjects in detail." Primary Source Media’s American
Journey Online hails itself as "the future of research,"
and the Thomson/Wadsworth History Resource Center claims
to be "the most comprehensive collection of historical information
ever gathered into one source."7
The buzz word of the day is "interactive." E-supplement activities
are always "interactive." On the Nation of Nations Web
site, for example, each chapter offers ten different resources;
four are labeled interactive. But when you look at how that works
in practice, you discover that what is meant by "Interactive People
and Places," the first one I clicked on, is a Shockwave animation
in which students are asked to drag the numbers from a column of
names to the boxes of another column of events. Unfortunately, for
many e-supplements, "interactivity" means a quiz about the
chapter contents or after reading an online source--which can often
be e-mailed to an instructor.8
This is hardly what I would call interactivity. Students need to
be engaged and challenged, not just tested on their recall of material
they have just read. Heightened student involvement comes from constructing
active learning activities that make intellectual connections concrete.
As Randy Bass has argued, compelling questions drive learning through
engagement with resources, materials, and methods in a cyclical
process:
It is compelling questions that motivate expert learning; similarly
it is in those moments when students are driven by questions that
are compelling (or interesting) to them that they learn best.
And, ultimately, it becomes its own "cyclical process"; it
is inquiry itself that drives learning--and resources, materials,
and methods that drive inquiry. The question confronting us as
teachers . . . is how can information technologies play a role
in the engines of inquiry that drive learning?
Yes, rich multimedia resources can help "hook" students on
active learning. But technology by itself does not automatically
produce intellectual engagement. For educational technology to be
truly effective, it must go beyond the presentational model and
capitalize on the hypertext possibilities of multiple pathways and
complex stories. Most important, it must enable students to pursue
their own questions and in the process gain an understanding of
the complexity and depth of historical research and analysis.9
Mapping the Past--Interactively of Course
Cartographic history is a significant part of historical studies
today. Numerous monographs bear the title "mapping," and their
refined cartographic conceptions have reached wider circulation
in textbook treatments and the e-supplement materials under review.
We now look at maps with fresh eyes, no longer seeing them as faithful
representations of space or terrain. J. B. Harley explains,
Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean
sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in
the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles
of representation maps are a way of conceiving, articulating,
and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted
by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations.10
Interactive modern-day maps are perhaps the single best use of
technology to be encountered in e-supplements. For a long time one
could lay transparency upon transparency to trace the routes of
the major European explorations in a classroom presentation or look
at a textbook’s artfully used hatched regions or different colors
that depict the growth of the United States territory--to see change
over time. Several years ago scholars at the University of Oregon
created the OSSHE Historical & Cultural Atlas Resource
to "enhance teaching experience for students" with original
maps that had been created using Macromedia Shockwave. The U.S.
sections of the resource contained such series as "Territorial Expansion
of the United States, 1783-1898," which showed the same historical
phenomena as transparencies did, only now by means of a click of
the mouse. Today clickable maps are available on almost every e-supplement
Web site or CD-ROM; publishers own the maps created for their textbooks,
which frees them from the complicated use of historical photographs
or motion pictures and the issues of permissions and payments.11
Historical maps are more of a challenge. Technically there are
issues of how to present often large and difficult-to-understand
maps containing strange symbols, accompanying text, and colorful
cartouches. Conceptually, several e-supplements offer good questions,
but there is room for improvement. Sites reflect new scholarship
with such statements as "Maps explain change over time as well as
tell us about the world of the people who construct them."
McGraw-Hill's Nation of Nations site (where that quotation
comes from) is linked to its print text, which stresses how cartographic
advances were one of a series of technological advances that contributed
to European globalization.The Nation of Nations
site, however, is less successful in making that connection through
its examination of the map itself.12
I was pleased to find a host of cartographic activities with different
approaches and will discuss them in order of sophistication of inquiry
and presentation. Four focus on Diego Gutiérrez's 1562 world
map. The American Pageant's online activity builds on a
print section titled "Making Sense of the New World," but the
activity's designers do the least with the map itself. After a student
reads the print feature (either in the textbook or online), useful
questions are posed about how Europeans’ cultural conceptions might
be glimpsed through geography and how those understandings or misunderstandings
might redound in further exploration and settlement. Then the student
is provided with a link to the 1562 map at the American Memory
project--or at least to its thumbnail version--and asked to compare
it to a 1540 map included in the textbook. What the e-supplement
fails to note is that the Library of Congress has prepared an intriguing
exhibit on the Gutiérrez map that would certainly give students
far more material to reflect upon. A student activity on the Internet
requires focus and structure--not just links to interesting materials.13
McGraw-Hill's Nation of Nations site begins with a map
identified as "Apian's 1544 Charta Cosmographia" from the Hargrett
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia. Clicking
on the map brings up a larger pop-up version with four "hotspots"
or outlined areas that, when clicked, bring up details of Charles
V or North America or the "canibales" in the eastern part of
South America. The questions that go along with those details are
good ones such as "How is North America imagined?" The activity
has seven such sections, moving next to the Gutiérrez map
of 1562 and the Library of Congress's exhibit, and then on to excursions
at other impressive cartographic sites such as the University of
Virginia's Lewis & Clark: The Maps of Exploration, 1507–1814
and the University of Calgary's tutorial The European Voyages
of Exploration. The activity also contains additional research
links. This exercise provides a much "thicker" passage through
a wealth of material, but students are shunted off too often and
for too much time onto other Web sites and receive too little guidance
on looking through the visual sources. Most significant, the authors
have neglected to provide their own material to frame the other
sites' virtual exhibitions or archives. Apian's 1544 map appears
at the front of the exercise but with no explanation about what
is important about this map or its maker. Peter Apian turns out
to be a significant Enlightenment figure with an academic position
as a mathematician and a secondary career as a print entrepreneur.
Born in Saxony, he was professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, the
recipient of significant courtly patronage for his astronomical
work such as his Astronomicum Caesareum (1540), and the
producer of significant cartographic work as an editor and publisher.
His maps followed Martin Waldseemuller's early world maps, and his
1520 map is among the earliest to use the name America; the 1544
map featured on the Web site had a truncated North America, South
America was called America, and it displayed the Straits of Magellan
along with other details and flourishes.14
In McGraw-Hill's After the Fact Interactive: Envisioning the
Atlantic World CD-ROM, the Gutéirrez map is only part
of an extensive inquiry into the process of historical investigation.
The module, developed from the After the Fact text, contains
ample materials for student inquiry: a timeline, a modern map where
a viewer can see explorers and exchanges highlighted, a brief guide
to various sorts of sources, Web links, and a bibliography. The
CD-ROM's collection of artifacts, maps, documents, and audiovisual
materials can be examined in a general "archives" or through
virtual "drawers" according to their object type. When a particular
source is selected, such as "Gutiérrez Map (1562)," a student
can utilize pop-ups or magnifying tools to study the map and, most
important, find two substantial paragraphs of contextual information;
indeed, each of the forty items in the "archives" receives
this full treatment--from a 1565 astrolabe to a 1490 world map.
After the Fact's three-part process of "Ask, Research,
Argue" offers a somewhat prescribed movement for the student
through the material, from collecting questions through looking
at data to making a presentation. However, there are alternative
(and more open-ended) ways of examining its rich resources, which
are presented in an engaging graphical interface. Student inquiry
is foregrounded in the CD-ROM, which offers a far broader perspective
on cultural exchanges of the early modern Atlantic world.15
A Bedford/St. Martin's Research Room module on "Envisioning
the New World, 1562," puts the 1562 Gutiérrez map at the center.
This activity is the fullest and most interactive of the online
materials at hand. The module is set up in frames--separate spaces
in the browser window--with nine headings on the left and the particular
material then opening in the main right space. An introduction explains
the significance of the Gutiérrez map as the "largest known map
of the new world printed up to that time." Most valuable is
the page of "Guidelines for Evaluating Maps," which includes
quotations from the publisher’s book A Student’s Guide to History
and discusses how maps offer points of view and are embedded
in their historical periods. The guidelines encourage a student
to look at the type and title of a map, explain that maps are graphical
instruments so cartouches should be looked at, and even provide
a discussion of modern computer-generated interactive maps. Then
the student can look at a full view of the map with several outlined
details that open in separate windows with nice close-ups of figures
in the map; each step of the way the module poses a series of questions
that go along with the short statements about what one is seeing
(for example, "What did the image of Native Americans as cannibals
communicate to Europeans about how they could understand this new
world?"). Only then are the students sent from the activity
site to look at the Library of Congress presentation.16
What is most impressive
about the "Envisioning the New World, 1562," critical thinking
module in Bedford/St. Martin's Research Room is not the
technology per se, but the pedagogical process--the framing of the
issues, the brief background, the guidance for seeing--all in a
series of steps similar to a class discussion. All the e-supplements
show the value of pop-ups, but seeing better means more than identification.
Students need to learn to view maps critically, and for that they
need good questions, contextual information, and tools for analysis.
You do not want students just clicking wildly onsite or offsite
or trolling through the Internet. The best-designed activities reach
their goals by combining interactive and presentational modes of
pedagogy. Of course, the presentational approach itself can become
the subject of analysis, but self-reflexive inquiry is in rather
short supply. One interesting approach for understanding the revolutionary
period and the nature of these Web inquiries was the Bedford/St.
Martin's virtual tour of Colonial Williamsburg; the exercise frames
the Colonial Williamsburg site, asking students to think about how
the nature of Internet evidence is related to the issue of the presentation
of history in the hypertext medium.17
Imaging American History
In his essay "'Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity': The Use of
Images in American History Textbooks," Louis Masur observes,
"Hardly a page passes without a visual supplement to the written
text."18 E-supplements
are no exception. Images offer a powerful means of engaging student
interest, and the use of colorful illustrations will only expand
with the spread of Web-based materials. But will our students have
the tools of visual analysis to make critical use of the virtual
museum exhibitions and other enhanced multimedia resources that
CD-ROMs and Web sites can provide? I am skeptical.
The relationship between American art and the American Revolution
can serve as a test case. The print version of Thomson/Wadsworth's
Liberty, Equality, Power includes an essay on "American Artists
and the Revolution in Painting" in which the works of Benjamin
West, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull are featured in a
discussion of American accomplishments in painting--in Britain as
well as the new United States. West's success in court circles and
in refashioning classical models of history painting is discussed
in terms of a remaking of art. Vivendi's textbook A People and
a Nation uses Copley's 1776 portrait of The Copley Family,
a grand group portrait, for a discussion of the remaking of
society based on the National Gallery of Art's Web site. The
People and a Nation site nicely frames the same visual materials
with its own introductory comments. Students are informed that the
Revolution not only changed forms of government but also altered
attitudes about family and a host of other social and cultural matters--and
that the Copley family portrait "limns some of these changes."
The study questions and instructor's notes focus almost exclusively
on art-historical concerns: pose, gaze, garb, color, composition,
and foreground and background. Unfortunately there is no link to
the National Gallery Web pages on Copley, which misses the opportunity
to direct students to the painter's biography or any of the other
fifteen Copley portraits owned by the museum, each with its own
separate image and discussions.19
(There is a hyperlink to the home page of the National Gallery of
Art <http://www.nga.gov>,
but how would a student or instructor know that a wealth of additional
information lies there?)
The Pearson Education History Place has a feature on
a 1778 painting by Copley; "Watson and the Shark: Reading the Representation
of Race" was produced by Saul Cornell (this site is one of
the few where contributors are named). Here we have an exemplary
discussion both in its technical and pedagogical elements and in
its historical and interpretive paths. Students are provided with
several screens of directed questions and links to additional information.
The historical context of the artwork is set through discussions
of the central figures of Copley and Brook Watson, artist and subject,
along with additional material such as contemporary newspaper reviews
and similar artworks of the period. What is most impressive is not
the good design displayed--though that is apparent, with the lengthy
exercise being broken up into several screens of readily visible
text and images rather than long scrolling screens of information--but
the layers of meaning and levels of information that are reflected
in the design decisions. The hierarchy of information established
by those screens and the links within those pages to subsidiary
pages, made possible by the hypertext environment, is similar to
labeling in museum exhibitions. For example, the several links on
the page concerned with the painting’s contemporary reception allow
interested students (and an instructor) to follow their interest
and inclination to learn about composition details on a page about
analyzing the painting or another contemporaneous work.20
While painting often finds pride of place in the canon and the
classroom, other visual forms and genres demonstrate that visual
materials do not merely illustrate or illuminate history. Visual
materials can even constitute historical events--none more so than
Paul Revere's engraving The Bloody Massacre. Many supplementary
sites include the image in their revolutionary crisis sections--some,
such as Thomson/Wadsworth's American Passages, without
source information, just "The Boston Massacre, 1770." American
Journey Online has quite an extensive module on the revolutionary
crisis, with audio commentaries on various texts that include other
images and texts. McGraw-Hill's Nation of Nations has an
extensive Web activity on Benjamin West's The Death of General
Wolfe (1771) and Revere's engraving. Its stated focus is on
visual evidence and the decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic
Ocean. Yet, besides a sentence on West's composition, students find
little guidance except for a link to Edward Papenfuse's lecture
notes on Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (1991) with its
discussion of Wolfe and West. There is some good information about
the comparative cost of the two engravings, but it is quite a jump
to ask students to answer questions about colonial identity and
revolutionary allegiances.21
Although the ease of incorporating visual materials into online
supplements seems to have advanced the project of analyzing visual
evidence, too often visuals are used to illustrate an event rather
than as a means to understand the event's very construction. More
troubling is the continued reliance upon presentational format rather
than creative implementation of the principles of interactivity.
One can glimpse some of the possibilities of the technology at the
Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Web site, in particular
the exhibition George Washington: A National Treasure, which
features Gilbert Stuart's Lansdowne portrait of Washington (1796).
The exhibition centers on an "interactive portrait." Visitors
can choose among various filters--symbolic, biographic, and artistic--and
each path chosen offers the viewer a distinct interpretation of
the what and the how they are seeing. Likewise,
the Worcester Art Museum's Early American Paintings Web
exhibition offers an initial graphical timeline of two centuries
of early American history and the paintings of those eras; viewers
can then choose to learn about the artists or the paintings, complete
with artists' biographies, technical notes, and scholarly discussions
of the works' artistic and cultural importance. Again, it is the
multiple layers of meaning accessible through these design pathways
that illuminate how images inform our historical understanding.22
Jumping across the Civil War and the discovery of the daguerreotype,
we find photography at the core of a burgeoning visual culture of
newspapers, advertising, department stores, and other mass media
by the late nineteenth century. The halftone process made possible
the broad circulation of images, and flash photography allowed the
camera to peer into interiors and other places. Photographic and
then filmic technologies meant experiential changes, while the visual
record grew exponentially along with the availability of images
across the population.
At the center of this story resides Jacob Riis, a multimedia pioneer
with his lantern slide lectures and illustrated reform texts. Indeed,
Riis, Lewis Hine, and the ashcan school of painters have become
almost canonical figures in the study of immigrant and urban life.
Riis appears in every site's sources and activities about immigration
and ethnicity, the rise of the city and the new urban culture, the
documentary impulse, and Progressive reform. But is this story properly
presented? Maren Stange and others have studied the images' use
in their original contexts rather than in today's more pristine
museum settings, where large photographs hang divorced of their
original and more cluttered but more complex environments. Stange
has taught us to pay close attention to the relationship of text
and image. Few do as good a job as Pearson Education's The American
People textbook feature "Recovering the Past: Documentary Photographs,"
with its full treatment of Riis's biography and descriptions of
how he came to photography and how he used images to illustrate
his lectures. Students can also read about Lewis Hine and the generally
sympathetic treatment of his subjects in his child labor photographs.23
Looking at the e-supplements' sections on photography, I remain
concerned that these powerful images frequently serve as screen
window dressing rather than as the focus of serious historical analysis.
While Riis appears often, he is not always identified. In Pearson
Education's History Place, for example, a photograph is
identified as "Families Working in Sweatshops" with accompanying
text about the dangerous and tedious work in unregulated sweatshops.
This turns out to be a photograph from Riis's How the Other
Half Lives (1890) in the chapter called "The Sweaters of Jewtown";
it is identified in the text with the title Knee-Pants at Forty-Five
Cents a Dozen--A Ludlow Street Sweater's Shop. Students deserve
to know the source of the photograph, and they would benefit from
learning more about Riis's intentions as conveyed in his original
titles. More generally, students should be introduced to the complexities
of using photographs as primary sources. The People and a Nation
site takes a different but equally flawed approach with its labeled
excerpt from the same text; the introduction nicely tells about
Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant and innovative flash photographer
of the urban poor. The selected text comes from several chapters,
including chapter 12, "The Bohemians-Tenement-House Cigar Making,"
but there is no citation for these selections, which makes it difficult
to follow. The authors tell students that Riis illustrated his book
with several line drawings but do not provide any of them.24
The American Pageant takes a different approach. From
its print discussion of 1900 manuscript census data, it moves online
to ask students to visualize the people in such documents through
Riis photographs. Students are directed to look at the Museum of
the City of New York's virtual exhibitions on Riis and to find three
photographs that connect to the census document. The museum site
has a good introduction, but once again students are asked questions
without any guidance on how to do visual analysis.25
Bedford/St. Martin's Research Room has a module on "Documenting
Photography" through examining Riis's photograph Bohemian
Cigarmakers at Work in Their Tenement. The accompanying text
explains Riis's project to engage people emotionally and to transform
them into reformers through his use of the sometimes explosive flash
photography. As in the Research Room's other modules, there
is an introduction, guidelines on how to evaluate visual evidence,
photographs with selected details such as wall decorations, questions
about what you see and how the original audience might react, what
is included and what is omitted, and a final link to the text of
the entire chapter 12 in David Phillips's hypertext edition of How
the Other Half Lives.26
Like the History Place's exercise on Copley's painting
Watson and the Shark, the module focuses on the process
of inquiry, set of stages, and here the multimedia of photograph,
drawing, written text, and additional resources. But why no annotations
or detailed pop-ups for text? Do not text selections bear the same
weight and need for additional detailed analysis as images? A good
model here would be the History Place's "Estate Inventories
of Early Virginians," in which three of the often intractable
probate inventories are analyzed, and one document's perplexing
terms are hyperlinked with pop-up boxes that provide definitions.
This is a simple technology whereby students can examine the document,
interact with it, receive more information, and go on in their investigation
to begin to combine the sources.27
More supplements should extend this example, perhaps emulating
the much fuller DoHistory, which builds on Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich's study of Martha Ballard's diary to "explore the process
of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past."
Viewers can look at images of the diary pages, read a transcription,
or even try their hand at transcribing. Also, an accompanying archive
of primary sources--text, pictures, material objects--provides the
context to move out from the document itself. Finally, you can progress
through the site according to your interests, whether genealogy,
medicine, diaries, or Ballard herself. Yet it is the online diary
with its "magic lens" that translates phrases of Ballard’s
eighteenth-century handwriting into standard print.28
Also, more could be done with visual images. Examinations of images
in their original context could lead to direct comparisons between
social documentary photographs, commercial photographs, and academic
paintings. The National Museum of American Art's virtual exhibit
Metropolitan Lives of the Ashcan School shows how the growth
of the city and its "exotic" population fascinated photographers
and painters alike. Again, e-supplements must move beyond illustration
to interpretation. Students need to learn about the conventions
embedded in artists' works and how multiple audiences made meaning
from these visual representations. Seeing is not easy work for us
and our students, but digital tools can enhance our powers of historical
vision.29
Imagining U.S. History: Multimedia or Media-Made
America?
Instructors have used records, audiotapes, movies, and videotapes
in teaching history for some time. With the advent of "smart"
classrooms, one can show a clip of a film or play a blues song at
the touch of a button. So what difference does digitization make?
Now sounds and moving pictures can be shown seamlessly in hypertext
form, which also offers the possibility of easily navigating and
combining different formats into one package. This fluidity of connection
and juxtaposition crosses the border of existing genres to create
something new. Again, I would argue that what makes electronic materials
distinctive is not the increased ease of access (though one cannot
argue with ease) but the experience of multimedia. There is an almost
magical capacity of modern sound recording and motion pictures to
capture history and transmit its feel to today's students. This
opportunity poses a question about our goals for the survey: do
we want to emphasize the pastness of the past, or do we want students
to be encouraged to make connections between the past and the present?
Multimedia can work both ways. A palpable "sensory experience of
history can be gained from archival audio and visual materials,"
says W. W. Norton's Inventing America; no text can match
"the din of the weave room at the Lowell mills." Yes, but my
survey of multimedia resources reveals that too much of what is
available is simply presentational. To date, producers of e-supplements
have not come close to using these evocative materials to "imagine
American history" as creatively as some other digital historians
have done.30
Several e-supplements contain original multimedia materials, and
they often are very impressive productions. The supplement for Norton's
Inventing America includes four video clips ranging from
"Slave Culture on Mount Vernon Plantation" to "Ellis Island
and the Immigrant Experience." Each video offers a dramatic
lecture complete with slide show; we even get to see and hear Merritt
Roe Smith speaking amid textile machines from the Lowell mills.
American Journey Online provides expert audio commentary,
including a discussion of Revere's and others' images of the Boston
Massacre, for example, as students see those images on the screen.
Yet as expert as these audio and video commentaries might be, novel
as it might be for students to have their instruction pop up in
a small window on their computers, the current generation of e-supplements
does not explore fully the possibilities of multimedia.31
This situation might be a result of sites planned years ago, before
personal computers could handle files nearly as large as they do
today. The American Pageant chapter "American Life in the
'Roaring Twenties'" builds upon a print feature about the 1927
talkie The Jazz Singer. The text tells about the technological
innovation but rightly stresses the film's themes as appealing to
a substantial portion of the Hollywood audience, especially immigrants,
with its story of the Al Jolson character's being torn between his
father’s choice of career for him of a religious path and his own
desire to be a jazz singer. Students can read about the complex
issue of the Jewish immigrant’s path to assimilation through blackface
and minstrelsy as a means of acceptance into American society.32
The development of these important themes is understandably limited
when presented on the printed page. More surprising is that the
textbook's e-supplement only utilizes the resources of the Internet
for plot summaries (either short or detailed ones) and a contemporary
movie poster. With a little more effort on the publisher's part,
students could be guided to clips of the film online or, better
yet, be provided with those riches on the e-supplement Web site
itself.33
The Nation of Nations chapter on the rise of a new urban
order points to cities as key sites of a new culture with the influx
of new people and new cultural forms, particularly noting department
stores, vaudeville, and professional sports. The accompanying exercise
lists a series of Web sites on immigration, women's temperance,
Chicago, and Tammany Hall. In one case, students are instructed
to go to the Learning Page of the Library of Congress's collection
American Variety Stage, 1870-1920, and answer a good set
of questions about the differences among variety shows and their
appeal to different audiences through an examination of two sections
of the site. Students are also directed toward theater playbills
and Harry Houdini's biography. But unless they explore on their
own, they will not discover that the Library of Congress site, described
as a "multimedia anthology," offers digitized and downloadable
early sound recordings of comic skits and popular songs and sixty-one
motion pictures of comic acts, burlesque routines, animal acts,
and other vaudeville shows. Why not encourage students to see and
hear, rather than just read about, the variety shows? Likewise,
The American People's Web activities for its chapter on
the Progressive Era and industrial capitalism asks students to examine
the lives of American composers of popular music from materials
on the PBS site I Hear America Singing, but the e-supplement
does not include samples of the music itself. Why not create something
to contextualize the audio resources of The Red Hot Jazz Archive:
History of Jazz before 1930? This site, an amazing online compendium,
calls itself "an experiment in using this new multimedia technology."34
When audio and video clips are included in e-supplements, the
assumption is made that their evocative power will be enough--a
situation parallel to the use of images to spruce up a printed page.
The Pearson Education History Place lists several audio
and video resources among its primary sources, and more and more
video is contained in the later chapters. For example, students
can hear Woodrow Wilson or see a short clip of "Henry Ford's Assembly
Line." The clip of Ford’s factory depicts workers assembling
cars on a long, slowly moving platform; while quite vivid, the clip
appears without any accompanying information. It turns out that
the film (cited as coming from the National Archives) originally
was a production of the Ford Motor Company film unit that documented
many of the innovations and technological advances of the first
half of the twentieth century. Would students not benefit from some
guidance in thinking about the novelty of the assembly line, its
meaning for workers, the use of film itself by the Ford Motor Company,
and the larger application of film as a part of time and motion
studies? The American Social History Project's Who Built America,
1877-1914 CD-ROM includes narrated footage of the Westinghouse
factory floor circa 1904 to raise some of those issues.35
The Inventing America e-supplement's mix of clustered
documents, text, image, and audio clips starts to offer viewers
a multimedia experience, perhaps not at the level of the publisher's
claim of allowing students to "see and hear American history"
but moving us closer to the experiential power of multimedia history.
The Ellis Island section asks one to "hear the voices" and
view the buttonhook used by doctors to check for trachoma as well
as a wealth of photographs of the immigrants. There is an outstanding
body of over thirty audio clips of two immigrants: Bertha Devlin,
an Irish immigrant in 1923, and Victor Tartarini, an Italian boy
in 1921, who speak of their premigration experiences, passage, arrival,
and new lives in America.36
Multimedia materials need to be designed in a way to get students
to interact with them creatively. Several years ago a student of
mine in a "Historian and the Computer" class designed a simple
Web site based on the National Park Service’s Ellis Island Immigration
Museum. She posted a floor plan of Ellis Island and then had her
students click on various rooms to learn about what they would experience
at each step of the way. When you travel across New York harbor
today to visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum you view the
objects in the cases, see the vastly enlarged photographs that greet
you at various turns during your tour, and stand in the Great Hall
and other interiors of the famous site--all of this makes for a
unique experience. Imagine the possibilities of evoking interactively
the immigrant experience with a full-fledged virtual tour of Ellis
Island or of an immigrant residence in simulation. Models exist
for such experiential use of digital history. For the immigrant
experience, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum's virtual tour allows
visitors to walk up the dark stairs, visit various apartments, learn
about the families that lived in those apartments, enter different
rooms, and--by clicking on "hot spots" in the QuickTime movie--learn
about objects in the rooms. This use of multimedia is evocative
but also instructive and truly interactive. Students can pursue
their own interests and proceed through various levels of information
as they wish. Multimedia’s magical power, like the technology itself,
needs to be harnessed to our pedagogical program; we cannot assume
it will work by magic.37
Wandering back to the Organization
of American Historians book exhibit and reflecting upon its resemblance
to a CompUSA store brings the realization that the market for educational
technology reaches well beyond early adopters and "geeks."
Many teachers want to try digital history materials in their classrooms
or at least assign them to students. E-supplements offer a guided
encounter with those resources, restricted by their integration
to a textbook's organization and its presentational mode. However,
they are readily available and dramatically expand the range of
sources, especially visual and other multimedia ones. As Amy Greenberg
wrote in a post to the H-Shear listserv, she chose The American
People text because of its "great on-line primary sources"
since her goal in introductory courses was to get students engaged
and excited by history, and this was "most easily accomplished with
clear thematic lectures and engaging primary sources."38
E-supplements often may close off opportunities for broader inquiry
by their narrow presentational structure, but they can also be used
to imagine more open possibilities.
We should ask more of publishers and their products. The World
Wide Web started out as a means to transmit text files but has ended
up as something much more. New media and e-supplements in particular
can promote the vision of greater student engagement and complex
historical understanding that many of us have for our classrooms.
First, the hypertext form opens up the possibility of teaching multiple
ways of looking at an object or text--to turn it around virtually
and intellectually--to choose different stories and to see multiple
ways of looking (and understanding). Web sites today demonstrate
the limitations of sequential presentations and promote the power
of multiple paths through a wealth of information and media. Second,
the Internet increasingly has moved from pages of text decorated
with the occasional graphic into a "pipeline" to deliver multimedia.
Hypertext history is ideal for our project of expanding the range
of sources, whether they be "collected" in vast digital archives
or presented in the mini-archives of an online exercise. Finally,
and most significant, digital e-supplements are moving and should
move us toward having our students "do history." If anything,
the hypertext form is composed of pages where the construction of
links makes concrete intellectual connections, connections that
we scholars and teachers often follow instinctively but that our
students need to learn and make visible. New media by themselves
will not accomplish any of these goals. The promise of interactivity
must be linked to the project of student inquiry. These are not
lofty goals reserved for the rarefied research seminar; they can
be advanced even in the undergraduate survey. E-supplements can
be part of the active learning potential of hypertext history where
we ask students to create narratives out of a wide range of sources,
provide them with additional contextual information at the click
of a button, and bring us closer to creating historical knowledge
with those sources rather than merely feeding back information--interactively.39
Appendix:
Electronic Supplements for U.S. History Textbooks by Publisher and
Text
The American Promise: A History of the United States. Second
edition. By James L. Roark, Michael P. Johnson, Patricia Cline Cohen,
Sarah Stage, Alan Lawson, and Susan M. Hartmann. (Boston, 2000.)
Web site <http://bedfordstmartins.com/tap/>
(contains critical thinking modules reviewed from Research Room
above).
Nation of Nations. Fourth edition. By James West Davidson,
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, Michael B. Stoff, and William
E. Gienapp. (Boston, 2002.) CD-ROM, Interactive e-Source CD-ROM
of Nation of Nations (2001). Web site in Online Learning
Center <http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/history/usa/david4/index.mhtml>.
Supplementary CD-ROMs:
After the Fact Interactive: The Visible and Invisible Worlds
of Salem (CD-ROM). Third edition. By Charles Forcey and Clio,
Inc. (New York, 2001.)
After the Fact Interactive: USDA Government Inspected (CD-ROM).
Third edition. By Charles Forcey and Clio, Inc. (New York, 2001.)
After the Fact Interactive: Envisioning the Atlantic World
(CD-ROM). By Charles Forcey and Historicus, Inc. (New York, 2003.)
Pearson Education
The Pearson Education History Place <http://www.ushistoryplace.com>
(restricted access). Accompanies the following texts:
Out of Many: A History of the American People, Combined
Edition. Third edition. 2 vols. By John Mack Faragher, Mari Jo Buhle,
Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.,
2000.) Geographical CD-ROM to accompany text, Mapping American
History: Interactive Explorations CD-ROM. (Upper Saddle River,
N.J., 2001.) Web site <http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/faragher3/>.
The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society. Fifth
edition. By Gary B. Nash, Julie Roy Jeffrey, John R. Howe, Peter
J. Frederick, Allen F. Davis, and Allan M. Winkler. (New York, 2001.)
Interactive Edition CD-ROM of The American People. Web
site <http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/nash5e_awl/>.
@History CD-ROM, Version 2.0, Instructor Version, for
use with all of the above Vivendi texts.
Robert Grant, GeoQuest: United States CD-ROM, Interactive Maps.
(Boston, 2001.)
W. W. Norton
Inventing America: A History of the United States. By
Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel
J. Kevles. (New York, 2003.) Digital History Resource Web
site (preview of supplementary CD-ROMs to accompany print text)
<http://www.wwnorton.com/college/titles/history/inv/emedia.htm>.
America: A Narrative History. Fifth edition. 2 vols. By
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi. (New York, 1999.) Web site
<http://www.wwnorton.com/tindall/>.
David Jaffee teaches history at the City College of
New York and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He
is on the faculty of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program
at the Graduate Center.
I would like to thank Roy Rosenzweig, Tracey Weis, Josh Brown,
Chad Berry, and John McClymer for valuable conversations; Gary Kornblith
for his skillful critiques and editing. I am also grateful to Lori
Creed and Mary Jane Gormley at the JAH for their assistance
in the preparation of the article.
1 David Eltis et al.,
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New
York, 1999); see also Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey
D. Groves, eds., Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts
and Commentary (Amherst, Mass., 2002), accompanied by Image
Archive on CD-ROM.
2 "Carroll D.
Wright on Political Education," in The Study of History
in American Colleges and Universities, ed. Herbert Baxter Adams
(Washington, 1887), 273-77; A. B. Hart, "Methods of Teaching American
History," in Methods of Teaching History, ed. G. Stanley
Hall (Boston, 1898), 26-27; Thomas Alva Edison, New York Dramatic
Mirror, July 9, 1913, quoted in Paul Saettler, A History
of Instructional Technology (New York, 1968), 98.
3 Kate Hafner, "Study
Finds That Teachers Fail to Grasp the Web’s Potential," New
York Times, Aug. 15, 2002, p. E6; for two of the Pew Internet
and American Life Project reports, see Douglas Levin and Sousan
Arafeh, The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap between Internet-Savvy
Students and Their Schools (Aug. 2002) <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=67>;
and Steve Jones, The Internet Goes to College: How Students
Are Living in the Future with Today’s Technology (Sept. 2002)
<http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=
71>. All Web sites in this essay were accessed August-September
2002.
4 See Roy Rosenzweig,
"The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History
Web," Journal of American History, 88 (Sept. 2001),
548–79; on Edward L. Ayers, The Valley of the Shadow: Living
the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/>,
see Gary J. Kornblith, "Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually:
A Review," Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001),
145-51; Library of Congress, American Memory <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/>.
5 Paula Petrik, "Net
Survey: Looking at a Textbook Site--the Norton Example," History
Computer Review, 15 (Fall 1999), 45-57; Roy Rosenzweig, "‘So,
What’s Next for Clio?’ CD-ROM and Historians," Journal
of American History, 82 (March 1995), 1621-40; Carl Smith,
"Can You Do Serious History on the Web?," Perspectives
(Feb. 1998), 5-8; Roy Rosenzweig, "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors,
and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet," American
Historical Review, 103 (Dec. 1998), 1530-52; James B. Schick,
"Online History Textbooks: Breaking the Mold," History
Computer Review, 17 (Fall 2001), 25-47.
6 Also see the Interactive
Learning Resource Network (iLrn) learning modules <http://www.ilrn.com>
discussed by Ronald Smith, "The Purpose, Design, and Evolution of
Online Interactive Textbooks: The Digital Learning Interactive Model,"
History Computer Review, 12 (Fall 2000), 43-59 (restricted
access).
9 Randy Bass, "Engines
of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches
to Culture and History," in Engines of Inquiry: A Practical
Guide for Using Technology to Teach American Culture <http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/guide/engines.html>;
George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary
Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, 1997); Lev Manovich,
The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
10 J. B. Harley,
"Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in The New Nature of Maps:
Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore,
2001), 53; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical
Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997); David
Buisseret, ed., From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting
North American History through Maps (Chicago, 1990); David
N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the
History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, 1992).
14 "Internet Exercise:
Chapter One," Nation of Nations, in Online Learning
Center. Lewis & Clark: The Maps of Exploration, 1507-1814 <http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/lewis_clark/home.htm>;
Applied History Research Group, University of Calgary, The European
Voyages of Exploration: The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries <http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/>.
Robert W. Karrow Jr., Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and
Their Maps (Chicago, 1993), 49-63; Rodney W. Shirley, The
Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472-1700 (London,
1983), 51-53.
15 James Davidson
and Mark Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection
(2 vols., New York, 1999); Charles Forcey and Historicus, Inc.,
After the Fact Interactive: Envisioning the Atlantic World (CD-ROM)
(New York, 2003).
18 Louis Masur,
"'Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity': The Use of Images in American
History Textbooks," Journal of American History, 85
(March 1998), 1409.
19 John M. Murrin
et al., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American
People (Fort Worth, 2002), 200-201; The Copley Family,
in Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation
(Boston, 2002), 146; for the Web site, see <http://college.hmco.com/history/us/norton/people_nation/6e/students/primary/copley.htm>.
A December 2002 check of the page reveals that the National Gallery
link has been changed to the Copley reference page.
23 Maren Stange,
Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America,
1890-1950 (New York, 1988); Gary Nash et al., "Recovering the
Past: Documentary Photographs," The American People (New
York, 2001), 670-71.
26 "Documenting
Poverty: A Jacob Riis Photograph, c. 1890," in Research
Room <http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/history/modules/mod22/frameset.htm>.
Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, the publisher does not expose
the direct Web address (or url--uniform resource locator) but makes
the user go through its server. In this exercise the link had changed,
and I could not reach the Yale site: Riis, How the Other Half
Lives, hypertext edition by David Phillips, 1995 <http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html>.
28 Film Studies
Center, Harvard University, DoHistory <http://www.dohistory.org>;
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha
Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990).
29 National Museum
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Lives:
The Ashcan Artists and Their New York <http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/metlives/>;
Rebecca Zurier and Robert Snyder, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan
Artists and Their New York (Washington, 1995).
30 Pauline Maier
et al., Inventing America: A History of the United States (2
vols., New York, 2003), I, xxii-xxiii.
38 Amy S. Greenberg,
"Textbooks and EAR Survey Texts," post to H-Shear: H-Net
List for the History of the Early American Republic, April
24, 2002.
39 John Seeley Brown
and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge,
Mass., 2000); Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future
of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); John Bransford,
Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds., How People Learn:
Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, 1999); Suzanne
de Castell, Mary Bryson, and Jennifer Jenson, "Object Lessons: Towards
an Educational Theory of Technology," First Monday
(Jan. 2002) <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_1/castell/>;
Samuel S. Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural
Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia,
2001).