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How I Arrived on the Web: A History Teacher's Tale

Howard M. Wach
Bronx Community College of the City University of New York


FOR HISTORY TEACHERS, the Web seems ubiquitous these days. Many of us are completely accustomed to drawing on Web-based resources, constructing our own Web materials, engaging in various kinds of distance learning activities, and (even if we aren't doing these things ourselves) hearing colleagues talk about it whether or not we want to listen. It wasn't always this way, of course. My own journey toward the new technologies has accelerated quickly in the past couple of years. The amount of time I spend either working or teaching on the Web is astonishing to me. It's time to reflect on how I got here. I suspect that many readers of this journal will recognize aspects of their own stories in mine. 1
     In 1994, I was working at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, an institution with a strong technological focus. One benefit of this was having a networked computer installed in my office somewhat earlier than most historians. It was a memorable moment; all at once, my desktop computer became something more than a glorified typewriter. The new technology propelled me into bewildering tasks: figuring out e-mail protocols, learning a few simple Unix commands and, most vividly, understanding that thousands of computers all over the world, containing vast stores of information, were now connected to the machine on my desk. It was all text back then—screen after screen of words from libraries, universities, and government agencies. I accessed them through a gopher server that sent me whirling into an exciting if somewhat vertiginous world. About the same time, just as I was acclimating to this flood of information, a colleague in Clarkson's Technical Communications program organized a presentation in which he and one of his students demonstrated something even more impressive. The World Wide Web, they called it, the Internet with graphics accessed through a kind of software called a "browser." The presentation drove home a pretty convincing message: get ready, because this will be the next big thing. 2
     It took years to grasp what all this could mean for my work as a writer and a teacher. In the remote reaches of far off Potsdam, with no ready access to a research library, I was thrilled to sit in my office and search the collections of Harvard and the University of California or to check on journal articles through newly discovered tools like the CARL UnCover database.1 But within a year or so I realized there were more possibilities here than merely looking up citations. As more and more institutions began to "digitize" different kinds of materials and as the Web gradually transformed the textual Internet into a new multimedia world, the possibilities began multiplying. They've been multiplying ever since. Roy Rosenzweig, one of the most accomplished of Internet-savvy historians, tells us that the Alta Vista search engine generated 300 hits for the name Eugene Debs in 1996, compared with nearly 3,000 (2,971) in November 2000. As time passed, moreover, the nature of these hits has substantially changed, from biographical sketches and contemporary reflections on Debs's legacy to detailed studies of his political career, many different images, and a broad range of primary sources.2 Similar results could be produced for virtually any topic. Bibliographies were one thing. Actual work with sources, whether for teaching or for scholarship, was quite another. 3
     I continued to do my bibliographical work online and e-mail became a daily routine. I subscribed to a couple of H-Net discussion lists, posted the occasional contribution, and published an online book review on the H-Net reviewing site.3 In 1997 my Internet work took a new turn. Now working at Lehman College of the City University of New York, I published an essay (the old-fashioned way) in the American Studies Association Newsletter,4 in the process unexpectedly stumbling upon a very active node of web scholarship in the ASA's Crossroads Project. After my essay appeared in print, I was invited to post it online as part of an ASA forum called Interroads, a site dedicated to exploring international perspectives on American Studies. Five American Studies scholars from around the world were then invited to write responses to it, I wrote a rejoinder to their criticisms, and the entire exchange was published and archived on the Interroads web site.5 The same year I began working with the American Social History Project (ASHP), another "early adopter" of Web and new media technologies, and I was soon learning how to design Web-based activities for New York City high school teachers attending ASHP professional development seminars.6 With no forethought or intention, I was moving more deeply into a new kind of professional life. 4
     I took my biggest leap in this new direction in the Fall of 1999, by which time I had moved down the road from Lehman College and joined the history department at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Knowing that I was interested in using the Web to teach history, my department chairperson asked me to write a proposal for a Community College Humanities Association grant project called "Advancing the Humanities through Technology at Community Colleges." I worked with Dr. Isabel Mirsky, a colleague in the communications department to develop a proposal through which each of us would build web-based resources for the courses our respective departments taught in the college's core liberal arts curriculum. The CCHA accepted our proposal. The grant would pay our way to an intensive three-day conference with community college teams from around the United States. Over the following year, it would also provide a mentor experienced in web-based humanities instruction and released time from teaching to work on our individual projects.7 5
     My part of the CCHA project began with a simple premise: that the Internet and the Web were transforming the available knowledge-base of historical study, and that our students ought to have some kind of organized way to take advantage of it. Our "bread and butter" in the BCC history department is called History 10—The History of the Modern World. We all teach it, we use a common textbook and source reader (written collaboratively within the department), and we all adhere to a common departmental syllabus comprised of general topics like Industrialization, Imperialism, the Cold War, and Nationalism. I proposed to build a resource that would somehow bring together web-based primary sources and allow History 10 students (and instructors) to complement our existing "brick and mortar" course with otherwise unavailable materials. I knew the sources were there. My own informal web surfing had shown me that, and my work with ASHP had taught me how these resources could be used. Why not make them available to our History 10 students?8 6
     As anyone who has taken on instructional technology projects could predict, I had no idea what I was getting into. The conference itself was held in December 1999 at George Mason University, a hotbed of innovative work and home to the Center for History and New Media. It consisted of three long and very intensive days of workshops, presentations, and planning sessions, much of it offered by the very best practitioners of instructional technology in the humanities. Equal parts overwhelming and inspiring, the experience propelled us back home full of energy and very concrete plans for how we could approach our work. 7
     The first lesson I learned—and in retrospect it's a measure of how I had barely thought through the implications of what I proposed to do—was that my goal of compiling lists of web-based history sources logically meant one thing: I was going to create a web site. After learning what kind of work was already being done and what our fellow conference attendees were planning, listing URLs on a piece of paper and stapling it to a paper syllabus seemed pretty silly.9 Within twenty-four hours of arriving at the conference, I had started to realize the kind of learning curve I was about to negotiate. Within seventy-two hours I had a remarkably accurate picture of how steep the curve would be because of the questions I confronted. What is "ftp" anyway? Is there space on a college web server that I can use? How do I access it? How do you design a web site? Which offices in the college will I need to contact? Who will I need to get to know? How will I work on the project when I don't have an Internet connection in my office? These, of course, were the technical questions. The teaching questions, the questions about whether and how the web and instructional technologies affect classroom work, were clearly going to take a lot longer to answer. 8
     The conference had also taught us how far BCC had to go institutionally. The obstacles were serious. We knew that many of our colleagues did not have computers in their offices, that campus labs were under-equipped and understaffed, that the wiring projects designed to network the campus were proceeding glacially, and that there was no college office or department dedicated to instructional technology and its applications. We knew that our low-income student body resided on the wrong side of the "digital divide." As of Fall 1999 about one-third of our entering freshmen reported using a personal computer, and about one-fifth used the Internet for academic work, compared with roughly half of community college freshmen surveyed in a national sample.10 On the other hand, our administration clearly supported our efforts wherever possible, though hampered by the chronic under-funding that always afflicts the City University of New York. But our CCHA projects fit into the overall direction the college had charted for itself, a major part of which included improving and diffusing the use of instructional technologies. 9
     Slowly, and sometimes fitfully, my project unfolded. Several weeks more passed before my office was finally wired. While my colleagues continued to wait, the CCHA project had jumped my request to the head of a very slow-moving queue. Midway through the first semester I had designed a rudimentary web page with a few links to primary sources and I had begun to see the kind of resource I was constructing. At bottom, I viewed the task as an exercise in complementarity. Our department had a well-established, well-organized course, complete with in-house textbook and source reader, a full selection of videotapes, and a commonly determined syllabus. So the underlying structure for my project was in a sense already in place. This was a big help, of course, in that I was not beginning the work with an entirely blank slate, but it could only take me so far. What exactly was my complementary material going to provide? What would it be used for? How should I present it? I knew intuitively—and the insight had been driven home at the CCHA conference—that instructional technologies disrupt settled work patterns. Adding new kinds of resources that require new kinds of skills forces teachers out of familiar practices. My original motivation—to draw on the quantitative riches of the web to deepen historical study—was only half the story. The nature of the web—interactive, nonlinear, its multilateral links and threads a constant encouragement to break away from well-worn paths—was the other half. Embarking on the project meant engaging these qualitative distinctions as well. It meant confronting the pedagogical issues posed by a new kind of medium. My complementary resource—the History 10 Web Site—would bring more sources to historical study. That much was indisputable. But how would teachers and students use it?11 10
     The question was more complicated than it first seemed. In technical terms, some students were able to use the web site easily and well, while others needed basic instruction in how to manipulate a mouse and operate a web browser. Some colleagues were enthusiastic about the new resource, while others were skeptical and withheld judgment. (Lack of computer facility was not confined to students either. When we offered a workshop for colleagues in our two departments, a few had no less difficulty than novice students.) 11
     Progress on the site was (and is) slower than I would have liked. To date I've completed nine of twelve topic pages.12 Crafting the pages and determining how best to link them is daunting work for a design-challenged historian. The process of finding sources, writing text, choosing illustrations, and integrating the content into existing course materials can absorb endless hours. But the critical questions—the pedagogical questions—only surfaced when I began to integrate the project into my own classes. For example, I gave students a two-part assignment that connected reading from their sourcebook to web-based sources linked to the new site. First they were instructed to read a short selection from Arnold Toynbee's 1884 Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, a section in which Toynbee narrates the history of enclosure and early industrial towns to argue that industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain produced "wealth without well-being."13 Students had to write a one-page response to the reading that discussed Toynbee's analysis of British class relations. After I read, marked, and returned these papers, students were directed to the web site to access a link I provided to a series of vivid first-person descriptions of early nineteenth-century Manchester.14 After reading the web material, students then wrote a two- to three-page essay that addressed these questions: 12

What kind of evidence does the web site document provide to help you answer the original question [i.e., Toynbee on class relations]? How does this additional evidence affect your answer? Has your understanding of the topic changed? If so, how has it changed? If it hasn't changed, how has the new evidence supported your original answer to the question?
The results were mixed. Some students wrote perfunctory papers, with little or no evidence that the web sources had made any difference in their understanding. Others showed that additional sources could corroborate or strengthen their agreement with Toynbee's assertions about "wealth without well-being." Thus one student cited this remarkably apposite excerpt from Alexis de Tocqueville's description of Manchester in 1835, one of the sources included in the web site: "A sort of black smoke covers the city. Under this half-daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. The homes of the poor are scattered haphazard around the factories. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. In Manchester civilised man is turned back almost into a savage."15 13
     Another student, however, used the same web materials in a different and more interesting way. The Spartacus site he used is very dense; it includes dozens of internal links to other Spartacus pages on British history. While exploring the link to a page on Liverpool, the student discovered the centrality of the slave trade to Liverpool's prosperity and the intimate connections that bound industrial Britain's development to the expansion of slavery in the United States. Rather than sticking to the letter of my assignment, his paper turned the question of industrial "wealth without well-being" into a consideration of these cross-Atlantic connections. I had not intended this outcome; nor had the student expected to discover it. Indeed, the ties binding American slavery to British cotton factories surprised him. Moving "laterally," so to speak, taking advantage of the capabilities hyperlinked material provides, the student opened his understanding of history in a new and revelatory direction. Working from his own curiosity and the links I provided, he transformed the assignment into something more meaningful. In this case, the medium enabled the message and advanced his conceptual understanding of history. 14
     This was the sort of qualitative transformation of learning which acolytes of the new technology are fond of promising. I've seen other instances of it since then, but not very frequently. To be sure, my experience may have less to do with instructional technology's possibilities than with specific conditions where I work. In a community college environment where fundamental academic skills cannot be assumed, conceptual expectations and the structure of assignments have to be approached cautiously. Many if not most students need close guidance with basic tasks: reading the textbook, taking notes, understanding questions, and working through the procedures of formal writing assignments. Bringing these students into the infinitely bigger and less structured world of web resources cannot be done without close planning and careful direction. Maintaining that sort of pedagogical vigilance may not necessarily conflict with opening new conceptual horizons, but bringing the two goals together is no simple matter. It requires striking a workable balance between direction and freedom, attention to skills and tasks and encouragement to explore. I have found this dilemma instructive in that it reinforces a fundamental insight: that technology must always serve pedagogy. To use web resources effectively, the history teacher must have a clear set of goals and a clear route to arrive at them. In that sense, teaching with the new technology is little different than teaching with a fountain pen and carbon paper. Without a plan you're lost. 15
     The most recent turn in my technical work has taken me into the brave new world of "distance learning." Distance learning has the virtue of compelling the teacher to come up with a plan more forcefully than traditional modes of instruction. In this effort I was part of a training cohort of CUNY faculty in the spring 2001 semester, finished preparing my course over the summer, and began teaching it in September 2001. In the City University, a unique feature of distance learning initiatives has been the "hybrid" course, a model in which some proportion of contact hours (defined as between 30% and 70%) is delivered online, with the balance remaining in the face-to-face classroom. When I agreed to develop an online version of History 10, I assumed from the outset that a totally "asynchronous" course, delivered entirely online, was impracticable and quite likely to fail. Our students need too much guidance—substantively and personally—to permit online contact to replace classroom contact completely. I have no desire, moreover, to give up personal contact with students, a fundamental source of job satisfaction for me. As a teacher, I know that my many improvised clarifications, repetitions, and questions are too critical to my students' success for me to trust the software to be my conduit to them. On the other hand, I don't need to be convinced of the benefits web-based instruction can bring to history education. A predetermined structure—the course management template supplied by Blackboard, CUNY's licensed distance learning software—would be the format for employing the same transformative possibility and quantitative riches that compelled me to start the History 10 Web Site project. Surely the same promise could be brought into a hybrid version of the course. 16
     As I write I have just finished my second semester of hybrid teaching. Definitive conclusions would be premature, but my experience so far suggests both promise and challenges. Certainly I've benefited from all my previous work. The History 10 Web Site is linked to my course and students have been required to use it periodically. Knowing my way around web resources and familiarity with their use in assignments has made preparation somewhat easier. But having a plan remains the sine qua non of distance learning instruction. Even the hybrid class, while requiring a less complicated architecture than a completely asynchronous course, nonetheless needs a clear and logical structure. Course material has to be organized, accessible, and predictably arranged. After puzzling over the problem and sharing questions with other CUNY faculty who were training at the same time, I decided to put the bulk of my course materials on the Blackboard features called "Course Documents," "Assignments," and "Discussion Board." The image below is the Blackboard "Announcements" screen which comes up when I log on to the course web site. Students go to an identical screen, absent the instructor's "Control Panel" button on the bottom left. Navigating this vertical row of buttons is the students' means of moving around the course pages: 17

 
Figure 1
     
 

 
Each week's activities have required that students use material from all three components, illustrated schematically in the table below: 18

 
Blackboard Course Web Site "Buttons"
Table 1
 

 
     I organized "Course Documents" into folders that held materials for each of the main topics on the syllabus. Each topic folder contains two documents: a set of study and discussion questions based on primary sources drawn from the History 10 reader, and a lecture outline, seeded with hyperlinks to maps, primary sources, and other relevant documents, designed to be used when we have our weekly session in a computer lab classroom. 19
     I used the "Assignments" category to design formal writing tasks for each syllabus topic. My regular History 10 students typically have written three short essays, usually based upon primary sources and intended to link those texts with the larger contexts of a survey course. My hybrid students also write three papers, but their assignments require integrating their reading assignments with online sources. As the semester progressed, I gradually reconsidered what those online sources should be. Instead of links to specific primary sources (the model I've employed most often in the History 10 Web Site), I moved toward "omnibus" sites, museum exhibitions, and topic portals that offer many choices for exploration. Comparing written sources is a valuable skill, but it increasingly struck me as a very thin use of the medium for this purpose. So a writing assignment on Social Darwinism, for example, combines study questions based on readings by William Graham Sumner or Joseph Arthur Gobineau (like Arnold Toynbee, sources included in the History 10 course reader) with two well-designed, informative, and well-illustrated web sites on the history of eugenics—one from PBS and the other from the American Philosophical Society.16 I've read many papers on Sumner in the past, and those of my hybrid students were better than most—broadly conceived, well informed, and open to contextual connections that clearly emerged from the web sites. 20
     The Discussion Board, the third main element on the course web page, was in part a substitute for the weekly hour I did not meet my class. Each week students had to respond to a question I pose. Again, the nature of those questions evolved over the semester. They began as fairly straightforward responses to assigned readings, and gradually became more sensitive to the possibilities of online teaching. For example, by the time we arrived at studying World War I, I asked students to search a photograph database,17 and to attach a downloaded image file to their Discussion Board response to Wilfred Owen's 1915 war dirge Dulce et decorum est. The download procedure is not difficult in Blackboard. I provided step-by-step instructions and all students were expected to complete the technical part of the assignment successfully. When we studied the American home front in World War II students had to respond to the debate over security and civil liberties (literally the news of the day, since we discussed this within hours of President Bush's decision to use military tribunals for trying foreign nationals accused of terrorism) by reading a digest of Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 Supreme Court decision that sanctioned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. Students were asked to examine selected materials from two of the many web sites dedicated to that topic.18 Finally, the Discussion Board has also served as a useful clearinghouse for questions about upcoming exams, a kind of asynchronous online tutorial. As the screen indicates, Blackboard has many more features than these; its capabilities go much beyond the fairly simple uses my hybrid course requires. But this was what I needed, and my instinct was to keep my use of the software as uncomplicated as possible. 21
     Despite every effort to work simply, indeed cautiously, each step I took toward instructional technology seemed to demand some measure of change or adaptation. The web dictates that teachers must organize, practically and conceptually, denser masses of materials. It similarly dictates that students, to be successful, must follow the instructor into the thicket, trusting that the teacher has indeed come with a plan. In the simplest sense that may mean taking the time to winnow through many sites and many pages to locate the document or image required for a particular task. More ambitiously, it may mean using newly available resources to reconceive course content, perhaps by exploring new thematic connections. When they studied the 1930s, for example, my hybrid students had the option of examining the question of race, law, and politics in two contexts, each of which is richly documented on the web: the trials of the Scottsboro Boys and Kristallnacht.19 I received essays on each subject, but no essay writer took up the more difficult comparative option I offered. Perhaps next time someone will, but their exploration of these sites nonetheless left my students with a broader contextual understanding of both Nazi racism and the Jim Crow regime. Exercises of this kind can easily expand to fill more time than a harried survey course instructor reasonably has available. Opening curricula to the web while carefully directing student activities invites a kind of rational digression away from content "coverage" and toward problem-based inquiry that may turn in totally unexpected directions. For teacher and student alike, doing this well requires willingness to leave the beaten path, to explore and navigate a more densely packed instructional field. Of course, not everyone will make this commitment. Some will prefer simpler, less challenging tasks and, at worst, unprepared students posting rote, thoughtless answers online are certainly no improvement over unprepared students in a classroom. 22
     Much has changed since my office at Clarkson was wired in 1994. The change is continual, in fact, and makes any conclusions about teaching with technology necessarily provisional. In the two and a half years since I went to the George Mason conference, the "digital divide" seems less noticeable as computer access among BCC students seems to have risen significantly, if only anecdotally. A permanent instructional technology infrastructure of equipment and personnel is slowly taking shape at BCC. Online course offerings on the campus continue to expand and fill up. The City University has appended a "Technology Fee" to tuition costs beginning in September 2002 and at BCC new budgetary plans have been drawn to use the money for a three-year overhaul of all lab equipment and an expansion of technology services to students. Were I to write this essay again next year, it would certainly reflect the instructional technology norm: revised and reconsidered experiences and continually altering circumstances. That said, some tentative observations still seem appropriate: 23

  1. Teaching with technology demands a commitment to rethinking one's working method. Web resources and web course delivery challenge teaching practices. They force practitioners to examine what they are doing while remembering that teaching, not technology, must remain the underlying focus.
  2. Maintaining web-related teaching materials requires steady attention to detail. Hyperlinks have to be checked periodically lest carefully planned assignments lead to dead links. Crafting such assignments, and integrating them into existing course work, takes time, thought, and attention.
  3. As both of the above observations suggest, work requirements tend to ratchet upward. Preparation time increases as the instructor searches out web sites, perhaps designs new web materials, and figures the ways to bring them into a class. Similarly, the conceptual demands on students also intensify. In a community college survey course such as History 10, integrating new sources with old, and teaching students to evaluate the worth of sources (an especially important task), significantly raises the intellectual ante.
  4. Taking "baby steps," introducing new skills and tasks slowly, cautiously, and incrementally, tends to minimize missteps. It's best to avoid jumping in too quickly, which tends to exacerbate the inevitable challenges and (sometimes) to provoke greater resistance to any change whatever.
These brief reflections suggest that technology can enrich and deepen the study of history only if teacher and student alike are willing to do the necessary work. In the biggest sense, of course, the Web is a vital new means of communication that will continue to remake many aspects of our economic and cultural life for some time to come. Its educational value is potentially immense. And though I count myself among the more active "early adopters" among historians, I harbor no utopian illusions. Skilled teachers who want to take on the work will benefit themselves and most of their students. Similarly, poor teachers will bring bad habits with them, and no one who is coerced into the task will do anyone any good. Institutional support varies enormously, from the encouraging pat on the back to fully staffed and well-equipped instructional technology centers. Whatever the circumstances, and however deep the perceived need for change or reform, technology is not "the answer" to the many dilemmas facing educators. It is one answer, and only if its potential is cultivated with great care. For history teachers, however, this much is indisputable: the Web offers unprecedented access to otherwise unavailable resources and, again potentially, the capacity to open broader and deeper perspectives for everyone. In my view, that alone makes the effort worthwhile, and it goes a long way to explain why the Web has become, for many historians, an inescapable companion. 24

Notes

1. Originally a project of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL), UnCover was acquired in 2000 by Ingenta, a British-based company that markets itself as a "global research gateway." Though UnCover's (and now Ingenta's) principal service is the faxed or electronic delivery of full-text articles for a modest charge, I have always used its database as a very convenient (and free) way of checking on the contents of a remarkably full range of periodicals. The service can now be found at <http://www.ingenta.com>.

2. Roy Rosenzweig, "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web," Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001): 551.

3. My review of A. Breidlid, et al., American Culture: An Anthology of Civilization Texts (Routledge: New York and London, 1996), first appeared on the H-Review web site in June 1997. <http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3941889816736>.

4. Howard M. Wach, "American Identities and American Studies: A View from the ESL Classroom," American Studies Association Newsletter 20, no. 3 (September 1997): 18–19.

5. Links to this archived exchange can be found at <http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/interroads/toc.html>.

6. The seminars are part of ASHP's ongoing "Making Connections" program in American History and Global Studies. <http://www.ashp.cuny.edu>

7. Our mentor was Dr. Agatha Taormina of Northern Virginia Community College. Dr. Taormina's advice and encouragement were critical to our project. The work of Dr. Taormina and her colleagues at NVCC is a very useful model. See their web site on the Dogwood Project: <http://www.nv.cc.va.us/dogwood>.

8. For good examples of these web-based activities, examine the lessons found at <www.ashp.cuny.edu/lessons.html>.

9. For the Center for History and New Media, go to <http://chnm.gmu.edu>. For a full description of the CCHA conference and associated college projects, see <http://chnm.gmu.edu/conference>.

10. Bronx Community College Coordinating Planning Council Annual Report, May 2000.

11. For a rich discussion of exactly these issues, see 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 (American Studies Crossroads Project, American Studies Association, 1998), pp. 9–42.

12. To view the History 10 Web Site, go to <http://www.bcc.cuny.edu/history>, then click on the History 10 Web Site link.

13. Arnold Toynbee, "Lectures on the Industrial Revolution," excerpted in Documenting the Modern World, eds. Andrea Finkelstein and George J. Lankevich (Whittier Publishing: Island Park, New York, 2001), p. 23.

14. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ITmanchester.htm>.

15. The Spartacus site provides no attribution for the Tocqueville quotation, a common and troubling phenomenon on the Web. The quotation resembles (but does not duplicate) the quotation used by Steven Marcus (drawn from Tocqueville's 1835 Journeys to England and Ireland) in his classic study Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (Norton: New York and London, 1974), p. 66.

16. The PBS site is part of a series on Charles Darwin and evolution and features an essay by the noted historian of science Daniel Kevles, while the American Philosophical Society's page includes several photographs illustrating the cultural environment in which the eugenics movement took root. Both sites are organized around the figure of Francis Galton, founder of the American eugenics movement in 1882. See <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/nameof>, and <http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/exhibits/treasures/aes.htm>.

17. <http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~kansite/ww_one/photos/greatwar.htm>.

18. The two sites combine a good mix of textual and visual materials. One is an online exhibition mounted by the Museum of the City of San Francisco, which includes both photographs and dozens of newspaper articles describing mass arrests and the deportation of San Francisco's large Japanese-American population. See <http://sfmuseum.org/war/evactxt.html>. The other, from the University of Utah library, features photographs of the internment camps, in Utah and surrounding states, in which Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during the war years. See <http://www.lib.utah.edu/spc/photo/9066/9066.htm>.

19. For Kristallnacht, see the material housed on the Simon Wiesenthal Center site: <http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/pages/t042/t04201.html>. For the Scottsboro Boys, see the PBS American Experience site: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/scottsboro/timeline/index.html>.

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