Teaching History Online
Number 99: 17th August, 2003
1. First World War Encyclopaedia
6. Mountain Men and the Fur Trade
8. NativeWeb
Introduction
Spartacus Educational publishes Teaching History Online every week. The newsletter includes 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 to create a community of people involved in using the Internet to teach history. Currently there are 28,640 subscribers to the newsletter.
John Simkin
First World War Encyclopedia: A comprehensive encyclopedia of the First World War. 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. So far there are sections on: Chronology, Outbreak of War, Allied Armed Forces, Central Powers, Important Battles, Technology, Political Leaders, British Home Front, Military Leaders, Trench War, The Soldiers, Major Offensives, War at Sea, War in the Air, War Artists, War Literature, War Heroes, Women at War, Organisations, Strategies & Tactics, Weapons & Machines, Inventors and the War, Theatres of War and War Statistics.
History Matters: Designed for high school and college teachers of U.S. History courses. This site serves as a gateway to web resources and offers useful materials for teaching US history. The website includes Many Pasts (primary documents): Making Sense of Evidence (guides for analyzing primary sources); Past Meets Present (articles and resources that link the past with current ideas and events); Reference Desk (links to resources); Digital Blackboard (teaching assignments using web resources): Students as Historians (examples of student work on the web) and Secrets of Great Historians (distinguished teachers share their strategies and techniques).
Digital History: This website was designed and developed to support the teaching of American History in schools and colleges and is supported by the Department of History and the College of Education at the University of Houston. The materials on this website include a US history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library, supplemented by primary sources on slavery, Mexican American and Native American history, and US political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multimedia exhibitions; and reference resources that include a searchable database of 1,500 annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images. The site's Ask the HyperHistorian feature allows users to pose questions to professional historians.
American Women: Unlike most American Memory presentations, American Women is not a collection of digital items. It is a gateway - a first stop for Library of Congress researchers working in the field of American women's history. The site contains a expanded and fully searchable version of the print publication American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States. The guide has been redesigned for online use, with added illustrations and links to existing digitized material located throughout the Library of Congress website. These materials are supplemented by a small number of newly digitized items that provide a sample of the many relevant types of materials available in Library of Congress holdings.
First Nations Histories: Brief descriptions of different Native American groups. This includes the following: Abenaki, Acolapissa, Algonkin, Bayougoula, Beothuk, Catawba, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Chitimacha, Comanche, Delaware, Houma, Huron, Illinois, Iroquois, Kickapoo, Mahican, Mascouten, Massachusett, Mattabesic, Menominee, Metoac, Miami, Micmac, Mohegan, Montagnais, Narragansett, Nauset, Neutrals, Niantic, Nipissing, Nipmuc, Ojibwe, Ottawa, Pennacook, Pequot, Pocumtuc, Potawatomi, Sauk and Fox, Shawnee, Susquehannock, Tionontati, Tsalagi, Wampanoag, Wappinger and Winnebago.
Mountain Men and the Fur Trade: The primary purpose this website is to provide a virtual research center for Western Fur Trade History. The emphasis is on the Mountain Men in the United States Rocky Mountain region in the period from 1800-50. The first priority has been to provide an e-text collection of the most important historical source materials available. This includes the writings of William Ashley, Thomas Beall, William Becknell, Henry Brackenridge, George Catlin, James Clyman, Anthony Dudgeon, Warren Ferris, Washington Irving, Zenas Leonard, Stephen Meek, Robert Newell, Peter Ogden, Daniel Potts, Eliza Spalding and Nathaniel Wyeth.
Wild Bill Hickok: By the 1860s Wild Bill Hickok had developed a reputation as a cold-blooded killer. Apparently, he became concerned that these stories would get back to his mother in Illinois. He therefore persuaded a journalist, George Ward Nichols, to write an article about him. The article appeared in the February, 1867, edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Newspapers such as the Leavenworth Daily Conservative, Kansas Daily Commonwealth, Springfield Patriot and the Atchison Daily Champion quickly pointed out that the article was full of inaccuracies and that Hickok was lying when he claimed he had killed "hundreds of men". This website includes extracts from these articles and might make a good case-study on the creation of a myth in history.
NativeWeb is an international, nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to using telecommunications including computer technology and the Internet to disseminate information from and about indigenous nations, peoples, and organizations around the world; to foster communication between native and non-native peoples; to conduct research involving indigenous peoples' usage of technology and the Internet; and to provide resources, mentoring, and services to facilitate indigenous peoples' use of this technology. NativeWeb is concerned with indigenous literature and art, legal and economic issues, land claims and new ventures in self-determination.
Book Section
Martime Power: Of all naval actions in history, none are so glorious as those of the Nelson era. But they are not only
stirring; they are fascinating too in revealing a hidden constant of history - the inherent advantage whereby sea powers have, throughout the modern era, always prevailed over land based empires. Peter Padfield skilfully combines the drama of battle with the deep causes of victory. He also contrasts British power, based on trade and attuned to the needs of trade - individual initiative, freedom of information, and sound credit - with French power, based on conquest and centralised authority. (Peter Padfield, Martime Power, John Murray, ISBN 0 7195 5665 1, £25.00)
