Suzanne Judson-Whitehouse models a visit to a local archive, Northampton's Forbes Library. (6:35 minutes).
CREATE LOCAL HISTORY PROJECTS WITH STUDENTS
Visit a local archive
- What is your goal for students? To observe physical archives? To learn about their community’s local history? To create and publish local histories?
- Start with staffed archives. They know their collections and can guide novices.
- Brainstorm possible topics and time periods, yet keep an open mind to what stories and facts local sources and local experts have to tell.
- Call in advance to set up an appointment.
- Scan Library of Congress and other online resources–including maps, newspaper articles, and photos–to gain context and primary sources to contextualize the history of your community.
Browse project guidelines and examples from local history projects
Download slides from Emerging America’s Windows on History graduate course.
- Project Guidelines – Plan your project slide presentation.
- Civic Engagement Through Service Learning – Local History Projects:
- Student Project Examples – Browse student websites.
- Analyze elements in Emerging America's own online exhibit of a local story with national significance: Radical Equality: The Northampton Association of Education and Industry.
Additional Resources for Organizing Projects
Library of Congress
- From photographs and town maps to newspaper articles and oral histories, the Library of Congress digital collections offer a profusion of resources for communities throughout the U.S. Start with this blog post by Danna Bell.
- Chronicling America offers hundreds of newspapers from the 1780s to the 1960s. Follow this link for Massachusetts newspapers.
- The Geography & Map Reading Room holds local maps from across the United States.
- Find a list of multimedia timeline tools at this discussion post on the TPS Teachers Network. (You must join this free network to access.)
The National History Education Clearinghouse
- The National History Education Clearinghouse offers a mix of resources on local history projects, including this blog post from Daisy Martin.
National History Day
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National History Day programs state affiliates can help organize local history research and offer opportunities for students to showcase their projects.
Emerging America Online Local History Projects from the Past
Components of Emerging America’s Windows on History program are based on prior work by the Center for Educational Software Development (CESD) at UMass with area schools and historical organizations. Visit these excellent interactive examples of local history projects!
Historical Investigation into the Past: The Lizzie Borden/Fall River Case Study
Using late nineteenth century primary source materials from the Lizzie Borden murder trial and from Fall River, Massachusetts, this project teaches students at all levels to reconstruct the historical past using their own ideas to explore the evidence at hand.
Goody Parsons
The Goody Parsons website explores the story of Mary Parsons, who lived in Northampton, Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century, and was accused of witchcraft. The site provides primary source documents, transcripts, narrative text tailored to elementary school students, and interactivities. Local teachers provided lesson plans and other curricular materials for download from the site.
Local History Online
The Local History Online project seeks to expose students to historical methods by putting at their fingertips primary source materials pertaining to a place or event from their community’s history. The project allowed students to share their work through the creation of their own websites. It involved elementary school students from Amherst, Hatfield, Pelham, Petersham and New Salem, Massachusetts. The project website includes a Teacher Guide with ideas about project implementation. (Note that over time, many of the links to student sites have gone dormant.)
Forge of Innovation
Forge of Innovation is a multi-part project on the Springfield Armory in United States history, comprising five periods, or “postholes,” of which one is in place: The Industrialization of the Springfield Armory, 1812-1865. This period saw the development of precision manufacturing with interchangeable parts and mass production; the primary source documents, essays, images, video clips and inter-activities in the site explore the effects of these innovations on the workers, the local community, and the nation as a whole.