Dickinson College / Gilder Lehrman Institute

Category: Digital Storytelling

Old Courthouse

I thoroughly enjoyed the short video on the Old Courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I have a much clearer understanding of the Underground Railroad after viewing this video. Using local historical sites is an excellent way to motivate students. While I realize this, it is often difficult to even know the local history to use it in the classroom. For instance, I lived in Denton on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for two years. l did not know until today that it was possibly through this town that Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom or that Frederick Douglass was born in nearby Tuckahoe and worked on the Wye Plantation in Easton. I learned this in my research when I visited Maryland Public Television’s website.

While I was not teaching U.S. history, it is surprising to me that I was not aware of the historical significance of this place. I do not recall any historical markers nor was it ever mentioned by anyone in the two years that I spent there. That does not excuse my ignorance, of course.

I would like to say that today I incorporate local history into my classroom, but I truly don’t. As a civics teacher, I have attempted to use local and personal history in my classes, but those efforts are few and far between. For instance, on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I did have my students complete an oral history interview with someone from the community who lived through the integration of the schools here in Virginia. I am currently trying to develop a lesson on the power of the presidency vis-à-vis the military, using General Douglas MacArthur (who is buried in nearby Norfolk) as the prime example.

I will have to make a concerted effort to develop more community resources and expose my students to more of their local history.

Looking for Harriet

Ready for the adventure to begin! I typed “Harriet Robinson Scott” into the rectangle marked “search” and nothing. Really, it said “zero”. How could that be? I know she’s in the G L database somewhere. Hmm, well, let’s try “women black history” and see what that yields. Okay, more like it. Lots of choices, but Harriet is not among the them. There are lots of goodies though. I’m like a small child wanting to grab the shiny images and click on the weblinks. Even though my mind is chanting history, history, I have to steady my hand away from the mouse. Regroup. Focus. I know Harriet is in here. But she’s not, even when I type in “Adam Arenson” the author of Freeing Dred Scott. The search still says “zero”. I am going to do like my students. Google. Sure enough. There is the article I saw Professor Pinsker discuss twice (I watched the video of the recap session.) Where is the “web guide” he put together for us? Oh, well, time to focus on Harriet. Here’s what I learned from the Arenson essay:

Harriet Robinson Scott (I like referring to people with their whole names–especially those enslaved!) was born in PA, was illiterate, she was Dred Scott’s second wife (interesting!!) she was proud of making a living separate from her husband (early feminist–I like her already) and when a reporter asked her to encourage her husband to go on a speaking tour after the trial, she replied, “Why don’t white man ‘tend his business, and let dat n—– ‘lone?”

She was quite the power house! But, there’s a mystery in Arenson’s article. He mentioned when Harriet died in Missouri on June 17, 1876, she was buried, next to her famous husband, in Greenwood Cemetery’s unmarked grave section.

Huh? Didn’t I have an image of her gorgeous tombstone in my last post? It seems in 1957, the 100th year anniversary of the Dred Scott, the granddaughter of Scott’s owner, donated the monies for a gravestone for Mr. Scott, but nothing was mentioned about Mrs.’s maker. Did the tombstone appear during the 150th anniversary in 2007? Google to the rescue again. Seems the grave yard was abandoned land by 1994, but a group of historically minded folks pitched in time and money to revitalize it. “Harriet’s Hill” complete with the tombstone and pavillion was dedicated in 2010.

Funny how the scavener hunt to find Harriet yielded the most information on her grave, but doggone it, not her. Still looking for Harriet.

 

Old Courthouse

 

Excellent!  I was awed watching the “Old Courthouse”. The video capture the era and tension perfectly. The human elements were there to make it come alive. It spoke of a “national uproar” that took place at the time and the experience was magnified by adding quotes from 15 year old Dickinson student Montigue Conway.  This was very moving.

I was a 15 year old when another “national uproar” occurred, the Kent State shootings.  I was a high school sophomore at the time and remember being confused by what was going on.  My high school was literally three blocks from the University of Pittsburgh campus and I remember the demonstrations going on after the students were shot.  To compound matters, one of the students who was shot and died lived only a few miles away.

The video was very powerful as it added the human elements that are so often left out of historical events.  I believe it is our duty as educators to put a human touch on the history we teach, this video provides excellent examples.

Use of video clips to help students understand the Civil War

As teachers today, we need to (or are implored to) consider the students learning styles whenever we plan a lesson.  Some students are visual learners, while others are more hands on learners.  If we plan lesson that include a little bit of everything, we ensure that all students are successful.  In the case of my middle school students, I have found that they have a hard time visualizing the whole picture.  From this, I learned to include video clips that help summarize an idea or a whole idea.  I personally do not recommend showing entire videos as students tend to tune out within the first half hour, but short clips 5-15 minutes keeps the students engaged and interested because they know they are going to move on to something else.

One of my favorite videos is the Civil War in four minutes which is offered by the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum.  This video used to be online, but has since been taken down due to copyright issues.  You can still purchase this video for 12.99 and it is totally worth the price!!  It shows how the battles influence the line of control between the north and south.  The fact that it is only four minutes enables students to stay engaged.

Do you have any favorite video clips?

 

 

Why (More) Black People Should Study The Civil War

Me on the left with two of my best high school friends, circa 1992

Growing up in Jamaica, I learned virtually nothing of American history as a student. In high school, my classmates and I were taught the history of the Caribbean within a British context. To say I was not interested in history would be an understatement. In my mind, I could not see the value or how it related to me. The fact that I was convinced that my history teacher hated me also turned me off from the subject. She would probably fall out of a chair now if she knew I was a history teacher! In college I took art history as a humanities requirement, and my teacher was fascinating. However, once that course was complete I figured that my engagement with history was too.

Harriet Scott, wife of Dred Scott

Last year, my second as a high school teacher, was the first time I taught American history. Prior to teaching, I practiced law for almost 10 years and people have assumed that I was taught history in law school. Not quite; I learned case law, but not necessarily the complex history in which decisions were handed down. I had never even taken a course in American history. Today Professor Pinsker taught us about the concept of coverture as it related to Harriet Scott’s role in her family’s legal case. It was my first time even hearing the word. (Apologies to my law school property professor if I was sleeping had not paid attention during that particular lesson!) Though not by choice (thank you Principal Chang!), as I waded through unfamiliar academic territory, my love affair with history was ignited. So much, that I am currently working on a Master’s degree in the discipline and now consider myself a historian-in-training. It is never too late to look with new eyes, and an open mind.

Bus Ride to Zora Neale Hurston's Gravesite, July 2012

Technology is a huge passion of mine and I am very excited to share the Gilder Lehrman Resources not only my students, but with my classmates who are also educators. Textbooks often leave the readers feeling that time periods come in neat little packages, with the people in history waiting on standby for the next era to begin. Professor Pinkser offered complex perspectives of Dred Scott, John Brown, and the time period before the Civil War, which left my mind reeling with the possibilities for new approaches to teaching the material. He mentioned a quote (Can I hear that one again please Professor Pinsker?) by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Dred Scott decision, which sparked my interest in Emerson’s role in the Civil War. The House Divided resources are excellent, especially for discussing quality academic research. With students who are digital natives, new methods must be incorporated into making history come alive and the interactive nature of these primary resources provides just that.

11th Grade History Class Field Trip, April 2012

This past school year I viewed American history through a lens that was not much different from that of my students, and was challenged with making the subject one with which they  (read: we) could relate. I remembered exactly how it felt to be sitting in my high school class thinking, why do I even need to know this? Most of my students were either immigrants or descended from immigrants, and did not believe that American history related to their lives. They did not know the history of their home countries, moreover how any of it related to America. As the first person in my family born in the United States, I could understand how they felt and this perspective helped me to connect our histories.

Members of Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, at Fort Lincoln, Maryland. During the Civil War the regiment lost nearly 300 men. (Library of Congress)

In Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of how black Americans see no greatness in themselves, and “thus no future glory”.  On a field trip to Gettysburg he felt no connection to the history of the Civil War. Coates’ understanding as a middle-school student at the time, was that the legacy of the Civil War belonged “not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property”. If this was the case for American students, imagine how it must be for students of different countries and cultures. My district required that I teach from three different history texts, yet in none of them would my students ever read about the role of black people during the Civil War besides Americans. This is one reason why primary source analysis played a crucial role in my classroom; textbooks alone are never enough.

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, radical American abolitionist missionaries drew from their experiences in Jamaica.

My students and I are mostly from the Caribbean, so in order to make the connections for us I pored over the available research. We learned that the Union blockade created an economic hardship for the people of Jamaica, and of the role our Jamaican and Haitian ancestors played in the Civil War. In the Journal of the Civil War Era, Matthew J. Calvin in his analysis of Gale L. Kenny’s Book Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica 1834-1866 stated, “Historians are only now beginning to recognize what American abolitionists long understood, that the end of slavery outside the United States had an important effect on the movement to secure its end inside the United States.” In the Civil War History Journal in an article titled A Second Haitian Revolution: John Brown, Toussaint Louverture, and the Making of the American Civil War, Calvin discussed how the events leading to revolution in Haiti “had a profound impact on the American mind”. These are some examples of why I am so excited to learn and share with my students about the Civil War, and how much our history as Caribbean blacks is woven into the fabric of the United States.

Blogging the Civil War Era

Abraham Lincoln with son, Tad

It is possible that no war in American history has been as well preserved in the words of its participants as the Civil War.  The soldiers and their families were products of a society where literacy was highly valued and where communication technology had not yet developed to the point where ordinary participants could easily dispense with paper.   The result has been a war richly documented with letters, diaries, newspapers, speeches and all types of written artifacts.   By contrast, today’s conflicts threaten to prove far less transparent to future historians because it’s so much easier for us to talk, Skype, tweet and communicate in so many ways other than in long, expressive written sentences.  It will prove hard to answer the question of “why they fought?” by relying on sources that kept within a 140-character limit.

However, there is at least one digital format that offers some hope for the future historian.  Blogging is a convenient but also a reflective media.  To demonstrate this proposition, we are asking participants in the Civil War & Reconstruction online graduate course to blog about their learning experiences over the five-day session.  There is no minimum or maximum requirement, nor any particular format required, but we are hoping that every participant will at least experiment with blogging on this WordPress platform to see if it offers value as a educational tool.  Our hope is that everyone will benefit to a degree and that some of you might become devoted and regular educational bloggers.

There are a number of models to consider.  First, please check out the Blog Divided from the House Divided Project at Dickinson.  It is not a typical blog, but it is a resource created for teachers about the Civil War era.  The New York Times has sponsored a beautifully written and important blog series on the war called, Disunion, that should be featured in every high school and undergraduate course on the Civil War.  Civil Warriors is another excellent and well written blog series on the conflict with a focus on military history.  Teachers might especially enjoy Civil War Memory from former high school instructor Kevin Levin because it deconstructs various efforts at remembering the conflict.  Another blog that might prove particularly useful to teachers is Civil War Emancipation from Donald R. Shaffer, since he focuses on a topic that nearly everybody teaches at every level.

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