Found a very interesting
website today while googling history news. Here is the description from the site:
Picturing United States History: An Interactive Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence is a digital project based on the belief that visual materials are vital to understanding the American past. This website provides online "Lessons in Looking," a guide to Web resources, forums, essays, reviews, and classroom activities to help teachers incorporate visual evidence into their classrooms. The Picturing U.S. History site will also serve as a clearing house for teachers interested in incorporating visual documents into their U.S. history, American studies, American literature, or other humanities courses.
I went to the
Lessons In Looking page and started reviewing the White into Black link at the top. Fascinating! It showed various media from antebellum America and used visual references in an interactive way to point out significant details in the figures that affected the way that the audience of that day perceived the figure. There are four different subjects at this time in this section.
Next I glanced at the
Web Resources and found a long list of visual history resources. This is annotated which makes it even more useful. There is a grand variety. The first listing goes to Exploring Themes in American Art and includes commentary as well as pictures of works. In a later page, I found a link to a blog called
Stripper's Guide. No, it has nothing to do with taking off clothes! It is by Allan Holtz, a comic strip historian. Comic Strips would be a delightful segue into history for a visual learner.
I should have started with this
page, Using This Site. It describes how and why "Picturing U.S. History came into being. It is an interdisciplinary project that involves scholars in history, art history, and American studies as well as other areas of humanities. They want to help learners sift through the enormous number of images available to find those that are most helpful in understanding the past as well as teach ways of looking at this data in order to fully interpret it.
From the website, a series of questions are listed to be used when looking at a piece of visual historical evidence:
• Look at the image: describe what you see.
• What is most important in the image? How did the creator or creators construct the image to emphasize the aspect that you think is most important?
• Who created the image? What medium was used (painting, sculpture, drawing, print, photograph, etc.)?
• For whom and for what purpose was it created?
• How did people originally see the image? For example, was it displayed in an exhibition, published in a periodical, etc.?
• And also consider:
—If there are other contemporary images that seem similar or refer to the same subject.
—If the image changed over time and use. Was it later altered, edited, or cropped? Was it later used for purposes different from its original uses?
Considering that this has been created by academicians, I would expect to find some liberal bias at times. This will be an issue for some homeschools and a non-issue for others. I personally find it relatively simple to discern and discuss bias in any resource that I am using at home. I can foresee many fruitful discussions arising from the resources in this site in my homeschool.
Although the site seems directed towards the classroom teacher, it is a treasure trove for the homeschool as well. Certainly a great advantage of the internet is bringing so many resources that used to be open to only a privileged few to the masses. This site purports to be a prototype and they ask for feedback from its users. If you find this resource used, let them hear from you and be a part in shaping a potentially valuable resource.
