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
Using
Online Resources to Re-center the U.S. History Survey:
Women's History as a Case Study
Kriste Lindenmeyer
In a recent interview in the New York Times, Gerda Lerner
was asked if it was time to eliminate the separate focus on women's
history. She defiantly responded, "For over 4,000 years, men
have defined culture by looking at the activities of other men.
. . . Give us another 4,000 years and we'll talk about mainstreaming."1
Her point is a good one, yet the majority of undergraduates will
never take a women's history class. It is therefore important to
weave women's history into the standard U.S. history survey. Although
today's survey textbooks include gender as one of the perspectives
necessary for a full understanding of America's past, women's experience
is usually presented only as an "add-on" to the central
narrative. Fortunately, teachers can remedy this situation by making
creative use of the World Wide Web. I have found that assigning
students to read, and work with, selected online primary sources
allows me to re-center the U.S. history survey by placing women's
experience at the core instead of the fringes.
My frustration with the treatment of women and gender in most textbooks
led me to the seminar "Making History on the Web: Creating
On-Line Materials for Teaching United States History" held
at the University of Virginia in June 1996.2 Promoters
suggested that the World Wide Web might fill pedagogical voids left
by commercially published texts. But in 1996 a ride on "the
information highway" provided little substance for historians
and could often best be described as a trip on the "World Wide
Wait." Some libraries and archives were beginning to digitize
segments of their collections, but it seemed that significant progress
was far in the future.3
About the same time, commercial publishers began experimenting
with laser discs, CD-ROMs, and Web sites. A few pioneering efforts
by online publishers such as iLrn.com have managed to survive the
dot-com compost heap. Other e-supplements produced by traditional
publishers (for example, Bedford/St. Martin's America's History,
Addison Wesley Longman's History Place, and W. W. Norton's
The Essential America) have enhanced printed textbooks.4
While these digital formats offer interesting alternative presentations,
they rely on existing textbook models that do not fully include
women's history or a gender perspective in the U.S. survey.
Thankfully, since 1996 there has been an explosive growth of Web
sites highlighting women's contributions to American history. To
turn an old phrase, if you have not visited the Web lately, you
have not seen the Web. It has also become easier to identify the
best online sources.5 The primary-source Web sites I
use in teaching the second half of the U.S. survey are maintained
largely by libraries, archives, museums, university history departments,
government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Their quality
is high, they are free, and I choose where, when, and how to incorporate
them into my courses. While instructors must be sensitive to the
wide variance in students' computing expertise, the benefits of
using online sources to enhance printed textbooks and supplemental
readers far outweigh the difficulties.6
Yet there is a need for more discussion on the best practices for
using online sources. As Phyllis Holman Weisbard noted in her comments
during a session on women's history Web sites at the 2002 Berkshire
Conference, we know little about instructors' actual use of women's
history Web sites in their teaching and research.7 A
query to the H-Women listserv, sponsored by H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences, asking for feedback on Weisbard's comments failed
to elicit a single response.
There are many ways to use online sources. One method is to introduce
female voices into the presentation of topics covered in most U.S.
history textbooks that lack a women's history perspective. For example,
American history textbooks generally provide a good narrative that
outlines the major political debates in the 1896 presidential election.
They pay little attention, however, to women's political participation
in that significant event. My online course syllabus links students
to a brief biography of free-silver advocate Mary Lease.8
In addition, students read a newspaper article from the New York
World describing an address Lease gave in New York City advocating
free silver. Both documents are located on the 1896. The Presidential
Campaign. Cartoons and Commentary Web site designed by the Vassar
College professor Rebecca Edwards and her student Sarah DeFeo. Edwards
and DeFeo's site also features biographies of other important political
leaders of the period (including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton), political cartoons, party platform statements (such
as William Allen White's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
editorial criticizing the Populists and William Jennings Bryan's
"Cross of Gold" speech from the 1896 Democratic nominating
convention), state election results, and a brief tour of 1890s American
popular culture. Since many students will go no further than the
two required readings, I display additional sections of the Web
site in class.9 Students
get a multifaceted look at 1890s politics and see that it was possible
for women to be active political participants despite being denied
the vote.
Using online women's history sources to reexamine the details of
a dramatic historical event is another teaching and learning strategy.
The Kheel Center at the Cornell University Library maintains a sophisticated
Web site on the 1911 Triangle Factory fire. This is an excellent
collection of primary sources (newspaper articles, oral histories,
photographs, and illustrations) that highlight a tragic and significant
event in U.S. labor, political, and social history. Reading through
the list of victims and witnesses, students realize that most New
York garment workers were female and recent immigrants or the daughters
of immigrant parents. The documents also list the ages of those
who died, underscoring that the victims were mostly teenagers and
young adults. Newspaper reports and photographs illustrate the public
outrage expressed in the wake of the tragedy. A letter written by
a former Triangle Factory worker, Pauline Newman, describes the
working conditions employees endured in the years before the fire
and explains why the girls continued to work for the company despite
the dire circumstances.10 A related Web site, Like
a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, based
on the 1987 book, provides a useful regional comparison. Looking
at examples of workers' lives in southern mill towns suggests both
the differences and the similarities in working-class life over
time and region.11 Photographs of women workers in the
Library of Congress's American Memory, America from the Great
Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI,
19391945, carries the themes of gender, work, and economics
through the first half of the twentieth century.12
Another technique is to assign primary-source documents to help
students make connections absent in textbook narratives. For example,
the black civil rights movement and women's changing social roles
after World War II are topics covered in most U.S. history textbooks.
Yet few texts discuss the links between these two significant shifts.
An online sampling of documents from the Papers of Constance Baker
Motley (1921 ), part of the Sophia Smith Collection's Agents
of Social Change Web site, demonstrates how black civil rights
and gender equality were part of a changing America during the Cold
War. Among her many accomplishments, Motley served as a law clerk
for Thurgood Marshall and was chief counsel for the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Educational
Fund. In 1965 she became the first black woman elected to the New
York State Senate, and in 1966 she was the first black woman named
to the federal bench. I like to use a speech Motley gave in the
mid-1960s to the Children's Organization for Civil Rights (COCR)
that illustrates the ideology embedded in calls for racial and gender
equality during the Cold War. The COCR's membership pledge, motto,
and membership form and transcripts of selected meeting notes provide
further evidence of such ideas.13
Online resources can also help enliven women's history topics already
covered in the standard survey. For example, most textbooks highlight
the fight for woman suffrage. The Women and Social Movements
in the United States, 17752000, Web site housed at the State
University of New York, Binghamton, includes over sixty documents
on the struggle for female suffrage in the United States. Each project
is built around a historiographical question that is answered through
an evaluation of primary-source documents. The projects include
narrative essays (complete with endnotes and bibliography) and headnotes
placing the primary documents in a broad historical context. A project
completed by students at the University of Northern Colorado focuses
on the debate over woman suffrage in that state from 1877 to 1893
and shows how region could make a difference in the passage of woman
suffrage. The Women and Social Movements in the United States projects
examines Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and woman suffrage
from 1900 to 1915, linking the issue to black civil rights. I like
to use the Women and Social Movements in the United States projects
as supplements to the textbook's discussion of woman suffrage because
they introduce students to the complexities of citizenship and suffrage
in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The fight for female suffrage
was part of a larger national debate on the rights of citizenship
complicated by issues relating to region, class, ethnicity, and
race, as well as gender.14
This discussion can be taken further by focusing on sex, race,
and inequality. Mary Church Terrell's 1898 address before the National
American Woman's Suffrage Association at the Columbia Theater in
Washington, D.C., highlights the dual prejudice faced by black suffragists
in Jim Crow America. This document is located in the Library of
Congress's American Memory, From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American
Pamphlet Collection, 18241909.15 The Kate Coles
Collection, part of the Proffit Historic District Online
Resource Archive housed at the University of Virginia, offers
insight into the everyday triumphs and frustrations of black women
and their families. The Letters of Kate Coles Web site has
a sampling of correspondence from the Coles collection. The letters
may be effectively juxtaposed with documents from the "How
Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 18901942?"project on the Women and Social Movements in the United States,
17752000 Web site and images from the Musarium Web site, Without Sanctuary: Photographs
and Postcards of Lynching in America. The latter site graphically
depicts the violent consequences of Jim Crow segregation and its
social links to sexuality and definitions of gender.16
Breaking the students into groups responsible for examining specific
documents from Web sites helps stimulate class discussion and encourage
collaborative learning without overwhelming the students with too
much online reading. I also require the students to take online
quizzes each week to help them keep up with the assignments, both
print and electronic. The quizzes are similar to a weekly study
guide.
The course's final writing assignment builds on the primary documents
assigned throughout the semester. During the third week I divide
the class into groups of six students. Each group is responsible
for a specific period in American history since 1877. The students
are free to get together outside of class, and each group has its
own online discussion board. I like the electronic discussion format
because it gives students experience with online communication in
a professional setting and does not take away precious class time.
I provide a list of Internet Web sites that contain relevant primary-source
documents for each period. Over the next few weeks, the students
use the online discussion board to create a list of topics they
believe are significant to their assigned period. Each student then
chooses a different topic from the list for a final written project.
For the final assignment, the student writes a four- to- six-page
essay using evidence from primary sources to justify the answers
to four questions related to his or her chosen topic.
Final papers are due during the tenth week of the semester in both
a digital and a print version. I ask for both so that I can easily
check the students' Internet sources, and most students still feel
safest turning in a print version of their papers along with the
digital version. As with more traditional assignments, student papers
have been of varying quality. But I have been very pleased with
the historical insight students gain from a careful reading of primary-source
documents. Furthermore, although less than 10 percent of the students
choose topics focused exclusively on women's history, almost one-third
include female voices, underscoring the effectiveness of using online
primary sources throughout the semester to help to re-center women's
history as part of mainstream American history. For those who do
not wish to wait another 4,000 years to incorporate women's experiences
into the U.S. history survey, the Web offers a wide range of valuable
opportunities right now.
Kriste Lindenmeyer is an associate professor of history at the
University of Maryland Baltimore County. She has also taught at
Tennessee Technological University, Vanderbilt University, and the
University of Cincinnati. Her teaching and research interests focus
on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American women's history,
and the history of childhood.
2 The "Making History on the Web: Creating On-line
Materials for Teaching United States History" seminar was held
at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, June
1622, 1996. Edward Ayers and Mark Kornbluh designed and ran the
seminar, and sponsors included the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the University of Virginia Department of History, the University
of Virginia Digital History Project, and H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences Online.
3 It had been thirty-one years since Theodor Nelson
presented a conference paper describing his vision for a gradually
expanding, globally connected "hypertext" library. See
Roy Rosenzweig, "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways
on the History Web," Journal of American History, 88
(Sept. 2001), <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/88.2/rosenzweig.html>
(Aug. 3, 2002).
6 All my syllabi begin with a standard HTML Web page
linked to Blackboard course Web sites designed for each class. Visitors
may log in as "guests" to my Blackboard course sites that are linked
to my personal Web page at the University of Maryland Baltimore
County, see <http://www.research.umbc.edu/~lindenme/>
(Nov. 19, 2002).
7 Phyllis Holman Weisbard, "Comment: Doing Women's History
in Cyberspace," paper delivered at the twelfth Berkshire Conference
on the History of Women, Storrs, Connecticut, June 8, 2002 (in Kriste
Lindenmeyer's possession). Weisbard has published similar comments
from a talk given in 2000, see Phyllis Holman Weisbard, "The World
Wide Web: A Primary Resource for Women's History" <http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/Talks/nwsatalk.htm>
(July 28, 2002).
9 Rebecca Edwards
and Sarah DeFeo, 1896. The Presidential Campaign. Cartoons and
Commentary <http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html>
(July 5, 2002); "Mary E. Lease," ibid. <http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896/lease.html>
(July 5, 2002); "Cheered Mary E. Lease," ibid. <http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896/leasespeech.html>
(July 5, 2002). For the sort of research on gender and politics
that informs the Web site, see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the
Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War
to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997).
11 Jacquelyn Dowd
Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill
World (Chapel Hill, 1987); Like a Family: The Making of a
Southern Cotton Mill World <http://www.ibiblio.org/sohp/laf/>
(Aug. 25, 2002).
14 Edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, the
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 17752000 Web
site contains projects on major American women's history topics.
For a description of the Women and Social Movements in the United
States, 17752000 site, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Teaching
Students to Become Producers of New Historical Knowledge on the
Web," Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002) <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/88.4/sklar.html>
(Aug. 6, 2002). For projects on the site, see Jennifer Frost et
al., "Why Did Colorado Suffragists Succeed in Winning the Right
to Vote in 1893 and Not in 1877?," in Women and Social Movements
in the United States, 17752000 <http://womhist.binghamton.edu/colosuff/abstract.htm>
(Nov. 19, 2002); Chelsea Kuzma, "How Did the Views of Booker
T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois toward Woman Suffrage Change
between 1900 and 1915?," ibid. <http://womhist.binghamton.edu/webdbtw/abstract.htm>
(Nov. 19, 2002); and Kathryn Kish Sklar and Jill Dias, "How
Did the National Woman's Party Address the Issue of Enfranchisement
of Black Women, 19191924?," ibid. <http://womhist.binghamton.edu/nwp/abstract.htm>
(Dec. 3, 2002).