Pursuing E-Opportunities in the History Classroom

Mark Tebeau

Over the last decade, information technology has fundamentally altered the American social and cultural landscape, including the classrooms in which we teach American history. Not surprisingly, five of twelve "Textbooks and Teaching" field reports in a recent issue of the Journal of American History reported utilizing electronic opportunities (e-opportunities) when "teaching outside the box." The reports made connections between innovative teaching methods and electronic resources, but the question remains: Is incorporating electronic resources and technologically based teaching strategies so revolutionary that the result is an entirely new mode of history pedagogy?1	1
I believe that the promise of e-opportunities for innovations in teaching American history is directly tied to the exponential growth of materials made available on the Internet during the past several years. Most critically, the mushrooming availability of primary sources in digital format, when combined with our increasingly easy and fast access to them, represents an unprecedented opportunity to refocus our efforts as teachers. We can—and should—think about how to bring our students more fully into the production of historical knowledge. I want to focus on the implications of this bounty for our work as teachers and to suggest how we can reorient our pedagogy to develop in our students an ability not just to read but also to do history.	2
A casual glance at Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" reveals just how dramatically the quantity and quality of resources available on the Internet for historians and their students have expanded in the last five years. In January 1998, the Library of Congress's American Memory site had a simple design and 43 separate "collections" of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text selectively taken from the Library of Congress's collections of Americana. Five years later, American Memory boasts more than 110 separate collections across a much broader range of topics. Likewise, the libraries at Cornell University and the University of Michigan have created complementary Making of America Web sites. By mining their extensive collections of nineteenth-century monographs and periodicals, these flagship institutions have made available online over 8,500 books and more than 150,000 journal articles. As a result of such efforts, including such material in our courses has become easier than ever and is not tied to the purchase of texts. 2	. . .