Teaching History Online
Number 2: January, 2001
Contents
Introduction
The
Supreme Court and the United States Presidential Election
United States Presidential Election
The
American Presidency
School History
Website
History
Learning Website
The BETT Educational
Technology Show
The
Struggle for Civil Rights
Euroclio
The
Aerodrome: Aces and Aircraft of World War I
Historical
Association Training Consortium
Introduction
Spartacus
Educational will be publishing Teaching
History Online every month.
The newsletter will include news, reviews of websites and articles
on using ICT in the history classroom. Members of the mailing list
are invited to submit information for inclusion in future editions
of Teaching
History Online. In this way we hope create
a community of people involved in using the internet to teach history.
John Simkin
spartacus@pavilion.co.uk
The Supreme Court and the United States Presidential Election
The decision yesterday by
the US
Supreme Court to reverse the judgment of the supreme court of
Florida has created considerable controversy in Europe. Many will
share the views of the dissenting John Paul Stephens when he argued:
"It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial
system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one
day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's
decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know
with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's
presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear.
It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian
of the rule of law."
British newspapers have been quick to condemn the political appointments
of judges in the United States. However, it is worth remembering that
the system produced outstanding justices such as
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis
Brandeis, Hugo Black, Felix
Frankfurter, William Douglas, Frank
Murphy and Thurgood
Marshall.
At least the US system is openly political whereas in Britain the
dominant conservative ideology in the judiciary is maintained by our
class-based educational system.
1876
Presidential Election
Students of history
will not be surprised by the various legal rulings that has given
electoral victory to George Bush in the US presidential elections.
These events have closely mirrored the last time the US judiciary
was involved in the resolution of a contested election. In
the 1876
Presidential Election the Republican
Party
candidate, Rutherford
Hayes,
was expected to defeat his Democratic
Party opponent, Samuel Tilden. When
the votes were counted Tilden (4,284,757) had won 51% of the vote,
against 48% for Hayes (4,033,950).
After the election the Republican
Party
challenged the validity of the voting in South Carolina, Florida and
Louisiana. These three southern states were still under post-war military
occupation, and over the next few days votes for Tilden were disqualified
and this shifted the majority to Hayes. Members of the Democratic
Party
were furious and many refused to accept the new voting figures. Florida
sent two rival sets of electors to the electoral college and left
it to Congress to decide who should become president.
Congress was itself split with the Senate being controlled by Republicans
and the House of Representatives by the Democrats.
To solve the problem both houses agreed to set up a special Electoral
Commission of 15 senators, representatives and supreme court justices.
In an attempt to produce a non-partisan decision, it was agreed to
appoint seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent justice
to the commission. However, at the last moment the independent justice
was offered a senate seat in Illinois and was replaced by a supporter
of the Republican
Party.
During the investigation by the commission some voters claimed they
had been physically intimidated during the election. The committee
also discovered several cases of fraud including attempts to destroy
ballot papers. However, at the end of the investigation, all members
of the commission voted on party lines and Rutherford
Hayes
was given the electoral votes for all three states. Hayes was therefore
elected with 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184.
Leaders of the Democratic
Party
continued to challenge the election result. Further negotiations took
place and it was eventually agreed that Samuel
Tilden
would accept the result in return for federal troops being removed
from southern states. This decision enabled the whites to regain the
political control of the South that they had lost at the end of the
American
Civil War.
In most of these states Black Codes
were reintroduced and a large
percentage of African Americans lost the right to vote in future elections.
The
American Presidency
In the United States educational publishers
are major suppliers of free teaching materials on the Internet. The
Grolier Corporation's 'The American Presidency' contains detailed
biographies of a large collection of presidents, first-ladies and
vice-presidents. These biographies are cross-linked with a range of
different articles that appear under headings such as 'Presidential
Scandals' and 'Presidential Programs'. There are also linked pages
to the important political parties and pressure groups in the USA.
As well as the results of the American presidential elections since
1789, there is an interesting database of political cartoons. The
'Grolier Online Exhibition Hall of Presidents' contains three short
documentaries about Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald
Reagan. This part of the website also enables the user to hear speeches
made by fourteen of the presidents, including one made by Grover Cleveland
in 1892.
School
History Website
Since completing his PGCE two years ago Andrew Field has developed
an impressive website for history teachers. Andrew admits that his
initial objective was to create a resource " that would be useful
for my own history teaching - both research and direct teaching."
This included providing categorised links to useful sites. Since the
launch he has had added online lessons, downloadable worksheets and
CD-Rom activities. See
the article, Using
the Internet in the History Classroom, for
an
account of why this website was developed.
History
Learning Website
Chris Truman of Sackville Community
College, East Grinstead, admits that until a couple of years ago he
was a "was a supporter of books,
chalk and talk" However, he is now a strong advocate of using
ICT in history. Over the last couple of months he has been developing
his own website, History
Learning, for his students. See the article, The
Yalding Project,
for an account of his conversion to active learning.
BETT
Seminars
BETT Educational Technology Show will be taking place at Olympia,
London, on 10th to 13th January, 2001. BETT is still the best single
point of access to see the latest developments in teaching and learning
with ICT. If you want a chat I will be based at the Guardian
and Learn
stand for most of the week. I will also be attending Ben Walsh's seminar
on Method and Media: Establishing
a mutually beneficial relationship between History and ICT
(Theatre D, 12.30 pm, Friday, 12th January)
The
Struggle for Civil Rights
The
Struggle
for Civil Rights in the USA is
the latest of the Spartacus
Educational Encyclopaedias. Each entry contains a narrative, illustrations
and primary sources. The text within each entry is hypertexted to
other relevant pages in the encyclopedia. In this way it is possible
to research individual people and events in great detail. The sources
are also hypertexted so the student
is able to find out about the
writer, artist, newspaper, organization, etc., that produced the material.
Campaigners : 1860-1900:
John Quincy Adams, Richard Allen, Susan Anthony, Charles Ball, Henry
Ward Beecher, Henry Bibb, James Birney, Amelia Bloomer, Olympia Brown,
Henry Box Brown, William Wells Brown, Martha Browne, Henry Clay Bruce,
Martin Van Buren, Annie Burton, Mary Ann Cary, Maria Chapman, Salmon
P. Chase, Lydia Maria Child, Joseph Cinque, Levi Coffin, Samuel Eli
Cornish, Prudence Crandall, Offobah Cugoano, Henry Winter Davis, William
H. Day, Martin R. Delany, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Olaudah Equiano, James Forten, Francis Fredric, Henry H. Garnet, Thomas
Garrett, William Lloyd Garrison, Joshua Giddings, Lewis Clarke, Moses
Grandy, Horace Greeley, Angelina Grimke, Sarah Grimke, Frances Harper,
Walter Hawkins, Samuel Gridley Howe, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs,
Thomas Johnson, John Jones, Elizabeth Keckley, Charles Langston, John
M. Langston, Abraham Lincoln, Mary Livermore, Elijah Lovejoy, Benjamin
Lundy, Lucretia Mott, Solomon Northup, Robert Dale Owen, James Pennington,
Wendell Phillips, Robert Purvis, Charles Remond, Moses Roper, David
Ruggles, Austin Steward, William Seward, Gerrit Smith, Edwin Stanton,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens, William Still, Lucy Stone,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jacob Stroyer, Charles Sumner, Arthur Tappan,
Lewis Tappan, Suzie King Taylor, Henry David Thoreau, Sojourner Truth,
Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Bethany Veney, Fanny Garrison Villard,
Benjamin Wade, Theodore Weld, Ida Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley,
Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, Fanny Wright, Zamba Zembola
(92)
Campaigners : 1900-1980:
Ralph Abernathy, Jane Addams, Ray Stannard Baker, James Baldwin, roger
Baldwin, Marion Barry, Mary McLeod Bethune, Julian Bond, Arna Bontemps,
Edward Brooke, H. Rap Brown, Ralph Bunche, James Chaney, Stokely Carmichael,
Eldridge Cleaver, Jonathan Daniels, Charles Darrow, Angela Davis,
Benjamin Davis, Morris Dees, Oliver DePriest, John Dewey, David Donald,
Edmund Duffy, L. C. Dyer, William Du Bois, Elizabeth Eckford, Medger
Evers, James Farmer, Louis Farrakhan, James Forman, Eslanda Goode,
Andrew Goodman, Alex Haley, Oliver Harrington, Fannie Lou Hamer, Benjamin
Hooks, Charles Houston, George Houser, William Dean Howells, Langston
Hughes, William Bradford Huie, Harold Ickes, Jessie Jackson, Jimmie
Lee Jackson, James Weldon Johnson, Stetson Kennedy, Coretta Scott
King, Martin Luther King, James Lawson, Herbert Lee, Joseph Levin,
John Lewis, Viola Liuzzo, Mary Mahoney, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Mauldin,
Claude McKay, Charles McDew, Floyd McKissick, James Meredith, Inez
Milholland, Anne Moody, Harry T. Moore, Robert Moses, Elijah Muhammad,
Anna Pauli Murray, Abraham Muste, Scott Nearing, Edgar Nixon, Mary
White Ovington, Rosa Parks, James Peck, Philip Randolph, James J.
Reeb, Walter Reuther, Rubye Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Josephine
Ruffin, Charles Edward Russell, Bayard Rustin, Michael Schwerner,
Fred Shuttleworth, James Silver, Modjeska Simkins, Lincoln Steffens,
Mary B. Talbert, Mary Church Terrell, Norman Thomas, Fanny Garrison
Villard, Oswald Garrison Villard, William Walling, Booket T. Washington,
Ida Wells, Walter F. White, George H. White, Hosea Williams, Roy Wilkins,
Richard Wright, Andrew Young, Whitney Young, Samuel Younge, Malcolm
X (102)
1840-1900: Issues, Events & Organizations:
Black Codes, Radical Republicans, Kansas-Nebraska Act, Fugitive Slave
Law, Reconstruction Plans, Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction
Acts, Ku Klux Klan, Wade-Davis Act, Freemen's Bureau, Civil Rights
(1866), Civil Rights (1875), 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment (14)
1900-1980: Issues, Events & Organizations:
Niagara Movement, UNIA, NAACP, Lynching of Rubin Stacy, Strange Fruit,
American Democratic Action, Nonviolent Resistance, Randolph Institute,
Jim Crow Laws, Fair Employment Act (1942), Little Rock High School,
Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Riders, Lynching of Emmett Till ,
Segregated Lunch Counters, SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality, SNCC,
Black Muslims, Black Panthers, Black Power, Freedom Summer, Freedom
Schools, 16th Baptist Church Bombing, March on Washington, Selma March,
Mississippi Burning, March Against Fear, Head Start, Black Panthers,
Southern Poor Law Centre, Civil Rights Memorial, Watts Race Riot,
Civil Rights Act (1957), Civil Rights Act (1960), Civil Rights Act
(1964), Immigration Act (1965), Voting Rights Act (1965) (38)
Euroclio
Encouraged by the Council
of Europe, the representatives of national and regional associations
for the teachers of History in Europe established Euroclio
(The European Standing Conference of History Teachers' Associations)
in April, 1993. The organisation now represents about 65,000 history
teachers in more than 40 countries. Visit the Euroclio
website to find out more about the bilateral and multilateral projects
concerning history teaching in Europe.
The
Aerodrome: Aces and Aircraft of World War I
Scott
Hamilton is responsible for this beautifully designed and easy to
use website. As the title suggests, the website contains details of
all the main First World War aces and aircraft. The database includes
biographies of aces from sixteen different countries. The entries
are extremely detailed and very good use is made of hypertexted links.
Other features include a Discussion, Forum and Today in History, where
information is provided on all the significant events that took place
on that particular date during the war.
Historical
Association Training Consortium
The Historical
Association and Actis have
joined forces to provide ICT Training for British teachers. Unlike
most other organisations working in this area, the HATC concentrates
on training history teachers. All its training materials are firmly
based on what goes on in the history classroom. For further details
see the article, The
Historical Association Training Consortium.
Please email John Simkin at spartacus@pavilion.co.uk
if you have information you want included in next month's edition
of Teaching
History Online.
