Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging, Class Project

The History of History Teaching (Module 3)

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What elements of historical thinking have remained at the heart of history teaching over the decades?

Although different writers have given these elements different names, the process of historical thinking includes:

  • Posing a question that serves as a starting point for historical enquiry.
  • Gathering and weighing information about the past, distinguishing between primary and secondary sources
  • Unearthing and examining as many sources as possible, evaluating them for their time of creation and potential bias
  • Recognizing history involves interpretation and evaluation of information to form a narrative account
  • Developing historical empathy, the ability to recognize that people living in different eras than our own had different experiences and frames-of-reference than ours.
  • Understanding that historical accounts come from multiple sources that may offer contradictory perspectives, and that there often are multiple causes for an individual event. Historians acknowledge this multiplicity in developing a meaningful synthesis in their accounts.

How have history teachers responded to technological change in the 20th and 21st centuries?

Judging from the readings, at the K-12 and introductory college levels, not much has changed in the way history is taught: It still involves a “survey” that focuses on key people, events, and dates, to support “good citizenship” and inculcate social values into students.  The technology of the print textbook is little changed, although today “interactive” ebooks have been introduced that offer the opportunity to link to source documents, videos, simulations, and other materials. However, my experience as a textbook editor is that the interactive features found in these books have not been widely assigned by teachers and therefore not widely used by students.

In the public history sphere, there has been an embrace of digital history, beginning with a large effort by major institutions (such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian) along with universities to digitize their archival collections of historical maps, images, and source documents.  Google Books has digitized thousands of books, and sites like the LOC’s American Memory and commercial providers like newspapers.com have made large archives of historical print accounts available for easy searching.  This has given historians the ability to more quickly amass source materials that in the past.  Various interpretative sites have drawn on these materials, although most are only funded and kept current for a year or so after they are initiated, so there is a wide variety of sophistication and currency of material currently online.  Many teachers have drawn on this material to enhance their teaching and student learning, either through having students do basic archival research or to work with interactives developed by historical societies, museums, and other sources.

How have external expectations constrained teaching and learning in history and how might the digital turn disrupt those constraints?

All the authors note that the general public’s perception of history is that it’s just, in Henry Ford’s words, “just one damn thing after another.”  Rote memorization of names and dates is viewed as the major objective for history students and the advent of curriculum standards and standardized testing has only exacerbated this viewpoint.  Viewing history as an amalgam of “facts” has led to an ongoing public discussion of “who’s history” is valid.  Conservatives push for teaching the “great men” and “key events” that they see as central to American history, and balk at those who even suggest adding a few alternative voices or narratives to augment or enhance the story.  Liberal thinkers suggest that individual histories are all equally valuable, so that teaching any one set of facts over another is necessarily biased and dangerous.  This entire argument, of course, is predicated on the thinking that history is necessarily an exercise in defining national identity through a clear, compelling, and patriotic narrative of facts and events.

Digital resources could help history teachers break their dependence on the standard text.  Instead, they could draw on a much wider palette of source materials and interpretative sites to tell a richer story beyond the confines of a march of names and dates.  Rather than focusing on the ingestion of an approved set of facts, historians could engage students through encouraging them to practice the historical method.  This would include working with digitized primary sources, participating in virtual enactments, using mapping and analysis tools, and other approaches that are facilitated through engagement with the digital world.

Blogging, Class Project

Digital Learning Project: Preliminary Thoughts

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Digital Learning Project: Understanding Shuffle Along and Its Times

Topic/Learning Challenges:  The topic of this project is the musical play Shuffle Along which opened in May 1921.  It was the first Broadway production written, scored, produced, choreographed, and acted by an all-Black ensemble.  While it continued to promote certain stereotypical images of Black people—and its starring comedians appeared in blackface—the show depicted a wider range of Black life than any previous one, with characters including Black politicians, store owners, educators, judges, and other middle-class, “educated” people.  The cast appeared in contemporary dress—not in the ragged clothes of minstrelsy—and the production broke new ground in portraying the romance between its lead characters in a straightforward, dramatic way—rather than as a comic subplot.  The music and dance introduced Black rhythms and styles that were truly revolutionary and influenced all of the musicals—Black and white—that followed in the 1920s.  The limitations of the production—due to what was available to an all-Black company—led to new innovations, showing how Black artists have used seeming roadblocks to their advantage and overcoming prejudice through humor and guile.

The creators of Shuffle Along: Noble Sissle (lyrics), Aubrey Lyles (book), Eubie Blake (music), Flournoy Miller (book):  While Sissle and Blake always appeared on stage wearing tuxedos and never donned blackface, the lead comedians/authors, Miller and Lyles, wore blackface and stereotypical “raggedy” clothes on stage–but not in photographs promoting the show, like this one, that appeared in white newspapers.

The learning challenges for students of American theater will focus on interpreting and understanding several elements of the show, including the blackface humor and its use of dialect; understanding the prejudices of both the white and Black audiences of the day; understanding how the actors/creators used these prejudices to their own ends; and evaluating how this production paved the way for more enlightened portrayals of Black life on stage.

Primary Sources:  This site will draw on three sets of primary sources:

  1. Production photographs from the original production.
  2. Contemporary reviews and commentaries by Black and white critics.
  3. Recorded or written oral history interviews and documents created by the show’s creators and performers.

Audience and Engagement:  The primary audience for this project will be high school and college age students studying African-American culture and theater of the early 20th century.  These students will be engaged through a series of activities asking them to interpret the primary sources using historical procedures: images; written reviews and documents; and recorded oral histories.  They will be asked to evaluate the primary sources for their reliability and accuracy; interpret them as to what they tell us about the theatrical world of their day; and use them to create a set of research questions and preliminary conclusions to better understand the contribution of Black performers to 20th century American musical theater.

Blogging, Class Project

Thinking about Thinking Historically

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Historical thinking involves more than just learning the “facts” (names, dates, events, what some call the “substantive history”) of the past.  To be a historian involves interpreting these facts by using several different tools (or using the “procedural knowledge” employed by historians).  Historical research begins with posing a question—such as “Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?” or “What made Shuffle Along such an influential Broadway show?”  To answer these questions involves several steps.  Researching primary sources (documents, oral histories, personal writings) is the first step.  Collecting this evidence, evaluating its reliability (does the person who created the document have a particular axe to grind?), and choosing the best sources to address the research question comes next.  Setting each document in its historical context—what did other people write or say in this period; how does this document align with or differ from the general consensus?—helps us better evaluate the reliability of a primary source or at least understand the point-of-view being expressed.  Finally, the historian needs to interpret the evidence to offer a balanced answer to any historical enquiry.  Interpretation involves employing an empathetic understanding of why a person may have written or said what they did, what was the context in which they said it, and what audience were they trying to reach—among other considerations.

I’d like this course to address these questions:

  1. Can we tell a historical story accurately if we come from a different period and culture (i.e., for my research, can a white historian today tell the story of African-American theater at the turn of the century?)
  2. How should we judge oral histories or personal documents versus “factual” accounts? How do we value an individual’s perceptions of his/her actions versus documentary evidence?
  3. How can we judge historical narratives written during the period being studied—that may have privileged one perspective over another—and ensure that we aren’t replicating these same errors in our own interpretations?

Based on the readings, I think some preliminary answers would be:

  1. Historians need to bring empathy to their subject matter. Even people of the same ethnicity or social background today will have far different experiences than people of the same backgrounds a hundred years ago.  I strongly believe that we can overcome racial or social prejudices if we use historical methods to build understanding of the cultural norms of a different period and how artists overcame them.
  2. While oral histories often have “mistakes” in terms of a person’s recall of exact dates of events (compared to documentary evidence), I do believe they offer considerable value when compared with the “substantive history” and with others’ accounts who also witnessed the particular events. Understanding how a personal viewpoint developed and how that influenced a person’s subsequent actions is an important part of telling any historical story.  Feelings/viewpoints are a part of history as are “facts.”
  3. Understanding how previous historians shaped their narratives offers us a window into the cultural thinking of their day. They become, in effect, witnesses to their own time period—even though they may be writing about events that occurred hundreds of years previously.  Interpreting historical narratives as another set of “primary” documents—insofar that they illuminate the cultural prejudices and approaches of their era—is another way to understand an earlier time period.  Understanding how past historians failed to account for alternative narratives should make us humble in drawing our own conclusions and to question carefully whether we’re missing important documentary material that may not be “preserved” in traditional places.  We need to go beyond the standard archives to try to discover evidence that may have eluded past researchers.
Blogging, Class Project

Hello!

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I’m Richard Carlin, and I’ve been an editor and writer of books on the arts for over 30 years.  My latest book is Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm, and Race (coauthored with Ken Bloom; Oxford U Press, 2020), and I have published several books on country music and popular music history.

I am interested in oral history, archival research, and understanding the often “hidden” histories that lie behind the names and dates that are just the surface story of an artist’s life.

I hope to continue to hone my digital research skills and my abilities to create compelling digital materials including websites, blogs, and audio histories (podcasts).

I hope that this course will support my professional work as an Acquisitions Editor of academic books on music and the arts.  Increasingly, these books are sold in digital formats and/or accompanied by digital materials.

Blogging

Reflections on Public History

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Public history is becoming an increasingly important aspect of academia’s mission.  Too often in the past, the material that humanities scholars produced was primarily aimed at an audience of other academics.  Unlike science research that had “practical” applications, humanities scholars were open to the attack that they only served themselves and didn’t provide a “useful” product that would benefit everyone.  Clearly public history is a key way to reach out to a broader audience and can serve as one way of building support for the work that humanities scholars do.

Of course, serving the public can have multiple interpretations and raises additional concerns.  How are humanities scholars going to build a reliable way of involving their audiences in the planning and ultimate execution of public history projects?  What kinds of new skills and new training will be needed—not to mention financial support—to enable these important interactions?  Further, what levels of scholarship should be expected of the public historian; while the public may not be concerned about the documentation and verification of all sources, this is a concern of the scholarly community and one that can’t be simply ignored.

This course on public history has made me much more aware of the challenges and opportunities that this new area of study has opened for the field.  Even in projects that are not specifically aimed at the “public”—such as a specialized monograph on an academic subject—thinking about the audience through using methods like storyboarding, testing, creating personas, and surveying all can help make academic work more meaningful both for those who create it and those who consume it.  This does require that the academy open itself to feedback well beyond the university community, but that in itself is probably necessary and healthy for the humanities if the field is to survive.

I think one major area that needs further study is today’s emphasis on digital publication.  While at first ebooks were viewed as an inexpensive way to make specialized information available, it is clear that for today’s users digital sites need to be interactive, allowing for feedback and regular updating based on users’ needs.  For this to happen, there has to be some models developed for long-term maintenance of sites—or at least an up front acknowledgment of a site’s purpose and limitations.  For example, some scholars may simply want to present a “snapshot” of their findings at a specific time and will not want the responsibility—either intellectually or financially—to maintain a web publication over the long run.  Others may view their work as an ongoing process.  The academic community has to evolve sustainable models for publication in this new world that will both support humanities research and better dissemination of knowledge to a broader audience.

Creating my own podcast reinforced for me the necessity of having the funding for creative collaboration.  Trying to be the author, vocal talent, researcher, and audio editor all at once was very demanding, and certainly the podcast that I was able to produce did not reach the technical standards that I would like to have achieved.  Again, I think there has been a tendency among academics to underestimate the commitment and costs involved in creating digital scholarship.  Having a system for guidance and planning built in to academic support would be a worthy goal for all higher education institutions.

Blogging

Portfolio Post Number 3

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The podcast What Happened to Lottie Gee? probes the history of this early African-American stage actress to try to uncover some of the reasons why she was never able to develop a lasting career.  A well-known and successful performer in the late teens and early ‘20s, Gee was the star of Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical written, scored, produced, and acted by an all-Black company.  During the show’s run, her photo regularly appeared in both the Black and white press, and she was a celebrated and sought-after performer for benefits and nightclub appearances.  However, by the mid-to-late ‘20s, Gee—like many other African-American performers—was struggling to find work.  Despite her great popularity, she was never recorded or filmed, and her image never appeared on popular sheet music.

I wanted to tell this story through Gee’s own experiences and—as much as possible—in her own voice.  However, source material in Gee’s own words was scarce, and the few interviews that did appear in the popular press with Gee sometimes sounded as if they were carefully rewritten by the reporters themselves or the PR people involved in placing the article.  Through genealogical and archival research, certain facts could be established about Gee’s life and performing career.  Rather than present these through a third-person narration, I thought it was important to “reproduce” Gee’s own voice—at least through having her parts being recorded by a Black woman.  This involved writing a script in my own words to try to approximate how she might have told this story.  It meant I had to reimagine these facts through the lens of her life and experience and come as close as possible to relaying the information as she might have done.

Similarly, for contemporary newspaper reviews, I enlisted a separate actor to read this material rather than incorporating into the generic narration.  For the supporting material—including period recordings and oral history interviews with composer Eubie Blake and Gee’s contemporary Alberta Hunter—I drew as much as possible on the original materials, even though the audio quality was often poor.  I hoped that the actual period material would lend the podcast a certain level of authenticity and recreate aurally the period for the listener.

My central “argument” was that Gee’s declining popularity was a product of several forces at work in the wider culture.  First and foremost, it was always difficult for African-American performers—and particularly female performers—to achieve long-running success on stage.  Just to appear in a legitimate Broadway theater was revolutionary for the times.  And, yet, as other Black shows and performers following in the wake of Shuffle Along’s success, the white audience quickly tired of the novelty of seeing Blacks on stage.  Further, Black vocalists of Gee’s era were limited to a narrow palette of possibilities: their repertory was expected to be either sacred (in the form of spirituals) or secular (in the form of blues or risqué songs).  Gee emulated classically trained singers while striving to appeal to a white audience—at the same time that this singing style was being outmoded by blues and jazz vocalists.  Shuffle Along was progressive in its dance and music to a certain degree, but also looked back to earlier successful (white) models—and Gee was firmly a product of this uneasy marriage.  The result was as times and tastes changed, her career floundered.

I would evaluate my project based on the quality of the historical research; the use of source materials; the quality of the script (both as it tells the story and how it attempts to present Gee’s voice); and the overall assembly of the disparate materials into (hopefully) a coherent whole.

Blogging

Update on My Podcast, March 26, 2021

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Updates

  • Rerecorded narration
  • Found voice talent to record Lottie Gee’s narration; initial submission received
  • Found artist to record “Love Will Find A Way”; sample received

Challenges

  • I’m still trying to determine where to place music behind the narration. One reviewer found it confusing to have any music, but I think it makes the podcast sound less sparse and gives more of a period flavor.

To Do

  • Assemble second sample for review
  • Find early opera recording to use as possible background for Gee’s description of her early influences
  • Experiment with different background music for the narration and test with potential users
Blogging

Methodologies/Techniques that Influence Public History Today

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In the past, public historians were viewed as “authorities” who could provide vetted information about a particular person, event, or site to their audience.  The historian gave the information; the public received it.  Today, there is much more emphasis on communication between provider (historian) and receiver (the public).  Most current exhibits or online sites are developed by engaging potential users from the very beginning.  A user survey may be conducted or in-person or on-line focus groups to create a group of “personas” representing typical users or visitors to a site.  Historic reconstruction is viewed as a “shared enquiry” between multiple parties, from the historians and public to administrators, site designers (for web sites), exhibit planners (for physical exhibits), and others involved in “telling the story” related to a particular collection.  Techniques like crowdsourcing enable the public to be actively involved in the creation of new materials that can facilitate the work of future researchers and enthusiastic local historians.

Several new techniques have been developed to facilitate more fruitful dialogue among these interested parties:

  • Surveys: As mentioned above, drawing on data based on surveys of a selected group of potential users helps hone the means of presenting the material, the language used to describe it, and how exhibits or websites are organized to maximize user engagement.  Personas are used to encapsulate typical users and their needs.
  • Interactive websites: Increasingly, historians are using websites not to present a finished story but to allow users to interact with the material.  This can be as simple as offering a means to “respond” or comment to a posting to more sophisticated interactions, including manipulating maps and data; uploading related material to add to an exhibit; and transcribing and/or annotating historical texts, to mention a few.  Curation of this material becomes a challenge for the website administrator who must balance this open flow of dialogue with ensuring quality and appropriateness of all material.
  • Blogging: Often included as a feature of an organization’s website, blogs allow for posting new or additional information of interest to the site’s audience.  Multiple members of an organization can be empowered to contribute to a blog, allowing for different voices to be expressed.  Because blogs are usually updated regularly, they give users a “reason” to return to what might be an otherwise unchanging website.
  • Mobile apps: Increasingly, site designers want users to be able to access information while they are physically visiting a site or exhibition by using their smartphones.  Everything from audio narration (triggered by censors or by scanning QR codes), triggering of special lighting to emphasize key items; playing of related video material; or accessing additional information.  For example, the Histories of the National Mall website allows for “real time” access to historic maps and information about key locations spread throughout the area.
  • Oral history: Oral history has long been a key source of information told from the perspective of those who actually experienced events.  In the past, it was mostly accessed through edited transcripts, which left a large amount of recorded material inaccessible to easy discovery.  New digital initiatives have been developed, notably out of the University of Kentucky, that allow for indexing of video and audio recordings, enabling users to quickly locate key topics.  Crowdsourcing is being used to help index this material—another key technique used by contemporary archives to draw on the talents of their users.
  • Web search: “Optimizing” online historical materials for discoverability through search engines like Google is increasingly important to museums, historical societies, and others who want to be sure that their material is easily and quickly retrievable by their core audiences.  This involves an attention to creating effective key terms (searchable words) as well as interacting with other sites by cross posting.
  • Social media: Historians are increasingly using social media to reach new potential users as well as to create historical “reenactments” in real time.  Facebook pages help museums, archives, and historians to reach a much larger audience than would be otherwise possible, giving the opportunity to direct them to a primary website where they can learn more about an event, person, or project.  Twitter has been effectively used to recreate historical events in “real time,” with tweets sent on the exact day and time when an event was unfolding.  An example was created by a group of German historians to recreate the events of Kristallnacht.
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Podcast Update–March 21st

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Updates

  • Assembled initial segment for review; got feedback from 2 out of 3 of the original reviewers that led me to reconsider the structure of the podcast
  • Reworked narration so more of the story was “told” in the subject’s ( Lottie Gee’s) voice
  • Began re-recording my narration

Challenges

  • I’m still trying to determine where to place music behind the narration. One reviewer found it confusing to have any music, but I think it makes the podcast sound less sparse and gives more of a period flavor.
  • I’m not certain whether I’ll have all new recordings on hand to create an initial cut by early April.

To Do

  • Continue to record my narration
  • Locate additional vocal talent for Lottie Gee’s part
  • Experiment with different background music for the narration and test with potential users

 

 

 

Blogging

Historypin

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I used Historypin, a crowd-sourced platform that allows individuals and institutions to post historic images and text overlaid on a Google map.  The site appears to be uncurated and could benefit from some editorial oversight.  Multiple “pins” appear for the same site in many cases; the same image might be repeated several times; caption texts range from simple identifications to the type of explanations you might see in a historical society or museum.  I also wished that you could “toggle” between the current street view and the historic image.  Once the historic image appeared, it obscured the underlying view, which I suppose would be OK if you were at the actual site but not as useful if you are exploring at home.  I didn’t have the chance to test this on my cellphone due to Covid, but I imagine due to spotty WiFi that it might be challenging to use on the fly, and I’m not sure how quickly it would load using a cellular connection.  The site didn’t seem to privilege any particular historical approach, although it’s open-access, crowd-sourced nature does encourage local individuals to participate (along with the comment feature that allows individuals to add additional information to a posted/pinned entry).  With a little more oversight and more active outreach to local historical societies this site could be much more useful.