Place-Based Education

Doing History

Doing History is a "fun introduction to local history" where visitors can learn about the letters, diaries, maps, and cemeteries that tell the stories of the people who once lived in towns like yours."

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Welcome to the Flow of History

The Flow of History is a history education network for Vermont and New Hampshire communities along the Connecticut River watershed.

Historic Burying Grounds Initiative - City of Boston

The City of Boston's Historic Burying Grounds Initiative website displays histories of the 16 burying grounds it manages, with ability to search historic headstones and gravestone iconography.

Historic Burying Grounds Initiative
Boston's historic cemeteries are important examples of the City's early landscape, linking contemporary Boston with a rich historical legacy. The City of Boston has sixteen historic burying grounds and three larger garden-style cemeteries under its jurisdiction which date between 1630 and 1892 and are located in thirteen Boston neighborhoods. The burying grounds house a rich collection of historic artifacts that tell many stories about Boston's cultural heritage.

The Historic Burying Grounds Initiative (HBGI) is a public/private cooperative program established within the Boston Parks and Recreation Department with the history of the initiative dating back to the early 1970's. Its mission is the comprehensive restoration, on-going conservation, and heritage interpretation of Boston's sixteen historic burying grounds."

A "MySpace" for Local Studies in Massachusetts

Announcing the launch of a new social networking site for "humanities practitioners" in Massachusetts, built on the Ning platform. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded this experiment, with additional support from the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston, and Mass. Humanities.

Check out the MAStudies Network at MAStudies.ning.com and join up if this collegial group of Commonwealth collaborators suits you!

Mapping Out a New Methodology to Study History

Placing History, a Book and CD-ROM from ESRI Press, Shows How Geospatial Technology Helps Historians Analyze the Past 

Redlands, California—Did poor farming practices cause the Dust Bowl in the 1930s? Was yeoman farming in colonial Concord, Massachusetts, environmentally unsound? What could Confederate general Robert E. Lee see at Gettysburg from where he stood? 

Historians and history students can consider these intriguing questions and others using geographic information system (GIS) technology, said Anne Kelly Knowles, editor of Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. 

[...]

See more: "Directions Magazine: The WorldWide Source for Geospatial Technology:" Press Releases - Directions Magazine.

Digital Storytelling: Using Technology to Tell Stories

Oral history projects are a dime a dozen.  It seems so easy: find a few local folks with good stories to tell,  and stick a microphone in front of them.  Many of us have learned the hard way that oral history projects - that is, those that result in interesting, usable primary source material - need to be carefully planned and executed.  Fortunately there are materials at hand like this website housed at our sister campus, UMass Amherst:

Digital Storytelling: Using Technology to Tell Stories

Created and Maintained by Kevin Hodgson, technology liaison for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, the site is aimed towards Windows users, but contains info that will be useful for oral history projects at all levels, and on all platforms.  Sections include:

Why Tell Stories?

What is digital storytelling?

Examples of digital storytelling

How to create a digital story -- a step by step guide

Rubrics for Assessment of work

Lessons and instruction for a unit of study

List of resources

Yahoo MapMixer

A map mashup tool that lets you combine two maps and fade in and out between them.  Great stuff!

See this example of modern Roman streets, with overlay of the Roman Forum, and dream of the local history possibilities:

Primary Research Documentary (Local History by High School Students in Beverly, MA)

This documentary introduces primaryresearch.org, a non-profit website dedicated to promoting local historical research at the high school level. Primaryresearch.org went online in 1999, then funded by a Documentary Heritage Grant from the Massachusetts Historical Records Advisory Board. Originally the website for Project Apprentice to History (PATH), it has grown to include online projects on Public School History, Landscape History, Women's Suffrage, Nathan Dane, New England Stonewalls, Architecture, Archaeology, African Americans in Antebellum Boston, Puritan Gravestone Studies, and more.

Students Trace Ancestry Through DNA

Approx. 1,000 students from Chicago, England, Jordan, France, South Africa and China are adding their DNA samples to the National Geographic's Genographic Project.

""When their results are ready, each student will discover how his or her ancestors journeyed from the cradle of humankind in Africa to populate the world," said Dr. Spencer Wells, a population geneticist and director of the project, which has collected more than 200,000 DNA samples in less than two years."

Interesting

Footnote: Web 2.0 site

"FOOTNOTE" is organized around primary source historical documents, many (most?) from the U.S. National Archives.  The site is well-organized, and offers a number of standard, useful Web 2.0 features:

• View and enlarge documents to discover hidden clues.
• Print documents to read later or add to your scrapbooks.
• Save documents to your Footnote Gallery.
• Search or browse all indexes on Footnote
• Create your own member page about histories, showcase original source documents, collaborate, or use it as a digital notebook.
• Share any document you find.
• Add People, Places, Dates & Text within any document, which then become searchable.
• Upload any image from your computer that you want to share with others.

The service costs $99 / year; there is no information on the site about educational pricing.  I wrote and asked them about this, and will let you know if/when I hear back.   Visitors to NARA facilities get free access to the site, and supposedly the records will be available for free on NARA's Web site (http://archives.gov) in five years.