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Web Site Review
Kelly Schrum
Contributing Editor
The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/, publishes regular reviews of Web sites. The reviews appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at http://www.historycooperative.org/) and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than one thousand Web sites for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the best Web sites and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers.
The Web reviews are edited by Kelly Schrum; please contact her at kschrum@gmu.edu if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/websitereviews.shtml.
| Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Research, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/. Created and maintained by Steven Mintz and the University of Houston, in collaboration with the Chicago Historical Society; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; American Voices: E Pluribus Unum; the National Park Service; and Teachers as Historians—Teaching American History. Reviewed Feb. 20–March 8, 2007.
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| Digital History is an ambitious and wide-ranging Web site that aims "to support the teaching of American History in K–12 schools and colleges" through multimedia and interactive content. As such, it takes full advantage of the Internet's potential to offer students access to materials that transcend printed media. It provides, for example, downloadable video lectures presented by such prominent scholars as David Blight, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn; a series of "Digital Stories" that explore a number of topics, including slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; and a Flash-based overview of American history. An easy-to-use module allows users to create their own virtual exhibitions using images available on the site (users cannot, however, upload their own images, undoubtedly as a result of copyright concerns) that can be downloaded and e-mailed as hyper text markup language (HTML) files stored in a zip archive. One of the most innovative and useful elements of Digital History is the "Ask the HyperHistorian" feature, essentially a means for students to ask a professional historian questions that arise from their own exploration of the site's content. |
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Central to Digital History's content is a wide-ranging selection of over three hundred annotated documents, covering U.S. history from Columbus to the Civil War, which has been culled from the Gilder Lehrman Collection and was originally published by Oxford University Press as The Boisterous Sea of Liberty in 1998 (edited by David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz). A well-structured teaching guide complements the collection, providing a step-by-step framework for using these documents in the classroom to introduce students to historical context, important historiographical debates, discussion questions, and critical analysis of primary sources. The site also empha The Journal of American History 1330 March 2008 sizes ethnic and immigrant history, providing a useful mix of historical context and extracts from memoirs and other personal documents to illuminate the complex experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans. External links to hundreds of other important documents, images, historical maps, audio recordings, and even movie trailers relevant to U.S. political, legal, cultural, and social history are also provided; unfortunately, a small but significant number of these links were broken at the time of this review. |
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