Online Portfolio

The digital world we live in today has drastically changed both how we receive information and the different types of information we receive. It has never been easier to learn something new or to find the answer to any question we may have. Using Internet search engines like Google, we can find hundreds, even thousands or answers to any question we may have within seconds. There are both positives and negatives to this massive amount of information now available in the digital world. The positive is the vast amount of information that any individual can easily access. However, as history educators, this overwhelming amount of information available with the simple click of the mouse presents certain challenges in presenting the past.

The main challenge that the digital world presents for history educators presenting the past is that anyone can post whatever information they want online, whether or not the information is factually correct.  As Sam Wineburg states in his 2016 article “Why Historical Thinking is not About History,” “The Internet has obliterated authority. You need no one’s permission to create a website. We live in an age when you can practice historiography without a license.” (14) While there are many online websites that do provide quality historical content, there is also a large amount of websites that do the exact opposite. The internet has created a space where anyone can create a website in which the individual or group responsible for the website, can make any historical claim they want no matter how inaccurate or lacking historical evidence the claim may be. This creates a problem for individuals conducting historical research using the Internet. As Wineburg goes on to discuss in his article, “The most critical question facing young people today is not how to find information. Google has done a great job with that. We’re bombarded by stuff. The real question is whether that information, once found, should be believed. And according to some recent studies, young people are not doing so well in that department.” (15) The problem is that when conducting a Google search, the websites that appear at the top of the search results are not always the most reliable or even contain accurate historical information. For students conducting historical research this presents a major problem if they are only viewing the websites at the top of the search results that contain information that is not historically accurate.

For history educators, the historical inaccuracy of some information presented on websites poses a challenge to the way that they present the past. The question is how to history educators combat this vast amount of historically inaccurate information available to anyone in mere seconds. The solution is not to simply tell their audiences to avoid the Internet for historical information, as this dismisses the vast amount of historical information on the Internet that is accurate and can be used for historical research. Instead, history educators should teach their audiences the skills of historical thinking and how to use them to assess the quality of the historical information found on a website. This would include teaching members of an audience to look at who the author/owner of a particular website is and what sources are used to support whatever historical claims the website makes. By teaching the skills of historical thinking, history educators can help individuals to determine what information on the Internet is historically accurate and what websites are best to use for historical research. By doing this, history educators can begin to combat the challenges that the digital world has created in presenting the past.

While my final project is still a work in progress, I have been making great progress in developing and putting my project together. This week, I was able to accomplish three major objectives in completing my final project. First, I was able to select and organize the various images that I want to include to add a visual element to my project. Second, I started writing the text for the background information that will provide the context for the primary sources that my audience will analyze. Finally, I decided on the organization and layout of my project and how I want my project to look to my target audience.

My project deals with the historical narrative of the United States being a “Melting Pot.” This narrative became popular in the early years of the twentieth century, a period that saw the influx of millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants arrive in the United States, and is still used today in discussions of historical immigration to the United States. The “Melting Pot” narrative is that various immigrant groups coming to the United States shed the ethnic identities and traditions of their homeland to become “American” and adapt to their new home. With my project, I want to challenge this commonly accepted narrative and demonstrate how the “Melting Pot” narrative is an oversimplification that ignores the hardships and struggles that newly arrived immigrants faced in the United States.

I will accomplish this by focusing on one particular Eastern European immigrant group, the Carpatho-Rusyns, and the struggle and hardships they faced in their process of Americanization because of their unique Greek Catholic Faith. To tell the story of the Carpatho-Rusyn people in the United States, I will have my audience examine nine documents that religious conflict that occurred between the Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyns and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These documents demonstrate that for the Carpatho-Rusyns, the importance of their Greek Catholic faith was a major obstacle and source of contention in their being accepted as Americans, thereby complicating the “Melting Pot” narrative.

The intended audience for my project is first year undergraduate students taking their first college level history course. The purpose of my project is to help these students learn the skills of historical thinking that are crucial to the work of historians. My goal is to help first year undergraduate students discover, that through the close examination of primary sources, many of our most commonly held historical narratives are either untrue or grossly oversimplify that which is much more complicated. I want to demonstrate to my audience the importance of carefully reading and analyzing primary sources in constructing historical narratives.

The next step in completing my final project, is to write all of the background and context information that I will need to provide for my audience in order for them to fully examine and analyze the primary sources I have included in my project. After I have all of the information written, I will then need to upload and arrange all of the materials I have for my project on the project website, so that they can be viewed by my target audience.

Right now, the biggest challenge I am encountering with completing my final project is figuring out how to get my project website to look the way that I want it to, and to make sure that it is visually appealing to my target audience. To resolve this challenge, I have been spending time with WordPress to see what I can change and manipulate to make my project website look the way that I want it to look.

This week, in focusing on my final project, I have been able to make great progress in creating a digital learning opportunity for my target audience. I decided that my final project is going to consist of a website built to engage undergraduate history students, just starting college, in learning to both examine and challenge commonly held historical narratives. My goal is to help these students discover, that through the close examination of primary sources, many of our most commonly held historical narratives are either untrue or grossly oversimplify that which is much more complicated.

I will accomplish this by focusing on one of the most well known historical narratives about the United States, the idea of the United States being the “Great American Melting Pot.” When discussing immigration to the United States in the history classroom, the story is presented that various immigrants who arrived in the United States all came together in a “melting pot” to become American and live harmoniously. However, when we examine primary source documents written by the immigrants themselves, we find that the American immigrant experience was often one of conflict between the ethnic groups already present in the United States and the newly arrived immigrants. By describing the United States as the “Great American Melting Pot,” we are overlooking many of the bitter and decisive conflicts that newly arrived immigrants faced when trying to establish themselves in their new homes.

To challenge and push back against the historical narrative of the “Great American Melting Pot,” I will have students examine primary source documents that tell the story of one Eastern European immigrant group who first arrived in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, the Carpatho-Rusyns. The sources I have chosen highlight the hostility and bitterness the Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyns faced from the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. For the Carpatho-Rusyn people, their unique Greek Catholic faith made them stand out in the United States and led to a long struggle for these immigrants to find their place in the United States. I am using these sources and the story of the Carpatho-Rusyn people in the United States, to demonstrate to students that commonly held historical narratives are often oversimplifications that ignore the experiences of people in the past.

So far I have made good progress on completing my final project. I have established the goals for my project, what I want my target audience to take away from my project, and the framework of my project. All of these I have described above. In addition, I have also went through Father John Slivka’s 1978 book  Historical Mirror Greek Rite Catholics 1884-1963, that provides hundreds of primary sources written by Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants during the early years of the Greek Catholic Church in the United States, and picked out nine primary sources that I want students to examine. The sources I have picked, highlight the conflict between the Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyns and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. From these nine sources, students will be able to gain an insight into the struggle Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants faced to establish and practice their unique faith in the United States. In addition to finding the nine primary source documents, I also gathering images that I will include in my final project to provide a visual element to the sources that students will examine.

The next step in completing my project will be to first figure out the layout and design of the project website itself. This will involve designing the website in a way that students can easily navigate through the different elements I will include and that my target audience can understand the way I want them to navigate through the content of my project. From here I will then write the background information that I will provide to students viewing my project along with getting my primary sources and images onto the website in a format that is easily accessible to my audience. Finally, I will provide students with a set of questions to answer after they review all of the primary sources I have provided to help them think about what they read and how it challenges the historical narrative of the “Great American Melting Pot.”

Exploring the interviews with former students and the educational digital history projects has provided me with important elements to keep in mind when creating my own project. These include to design my project in a format that is easy to navigate my target audience, to make sure I provide clear context and background information to my audience, and to make sure that the lessons and learning objectives are clear and evident in my project.

Film Metadata:

Title: Lincoln
Year: 2012
Producers: Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy
I have a copy of the film on DVD that I watched.
The film was based in part on the 2005 biography of Abraham Lincoln Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. In the biography, Goodwin used both primary and secondary sources in writing the book.

Big Themes:

The film Lincoln focuses on the last four months of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and life and focus on the major themes of the ending of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment by Congress to abolish slavery. The film depicts various events that took place between January and April 1865 including Lincoln’s visit to the Petersburg, Virginia battlefield on April 3rd, Lincoln’s meeting with representatives of the Confederate government on April 2nd, the debate in the House of Representatives over the passage of the 13th Amendment, and the vote in the House of Representatives on January 31st where the 13th Amendment was approved by Congress. Many of the key scenes in the film, such as the one where the 13th Amendment was passed by the House of Representatives, are considered to be accurate representations of the historical events they depict based on primary source accounts of the events. The film is also considered to be historically accurate in the characterization of Abraham Lincoln. The film accurately captures Lincoln’s personality, mannerisms, and style of speaking based on the first hand accounts of the people that actually met and knew Lincoln. The one part of Lincoln that is not entirely historically accurate is the introduction of the 13th Amendment to Congress. The film gives the impression that it was Lincoln who first proposed the 13th Amendment and that it was first brought to the House of Representatives in January 1865. While Lincoln was undoubtedly a major supporter of the 13th Amendment and campaigned vigorously to get support for the amendment in the House of Representatives, Lincoln did not create the 13th Amendment nor was it first introduced in the House of Representatives in January 1865. What the film leaves out is the fact that the 13th Amendment had originally been introduced in Congress the previous year and on June 15, 1864, had actually failed to get the required votes to pass the House of Representatives. However, this even with this one historical inconsistency, the film is overall mostly historically accurate.

HIST 689 Final Project Poster 

The use of film offers history educators a different way of presenting information to students then the typical lecture provides. While not meant as a replacement to the typical history lecture, the additional use of film allows the history educator to engage with different types of learners and ensure that a larger portion of their audience is engaged with the material being presented by the history educator. A typical history lecture with an educator standing in front of a group talking only really engages those that are auditory learners, who can learn history from the lecture format. However, the lecture does not engage those that are visual learners. This can instead be accomplished through the use of films. By using both lectures and films in their teaching, history educators can ensure that they are engaging both auditory and visual learners.  An example of a topic that this method of teaching could be used for is discussing the role of African-American soldiers in the Civil War. The history educator could give a lecture and then have their students watch the 1989 film Glory, that tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.

The one thing that is crucial for history educators to address with their audiences is the historical accuracy of an film they will use. There are some films that are more historically accurate than others. It is important for a history educator to inform students of the historical inaccuracies in film. This can be done by having students compare the way a historical event is depicted in a film with the primary sources written about the particular event. This activity can help students discover the ways that the historical narrative can be changed for a specific purpose and can lead to a discussion about the way that historical narratives are constructed and historical events are remembered.

Another way that media can be used in history education is through scholarly digital storytelling. In this method of teaching, the history educator could have students create a video documentary about a historical topic that is of interest to them or relates to the subject matter being taught in a history class. The students would be responsible for choosing the topic, conducting the historical research, writing the script for their story, filming and editing their story, and presenting their story online. While the student would be able to receive help from the history educator, the major decisions in creating their digital story would be theres to make. This type of project would teach students what it is like to be a historian and the type of work that historians do and the decisions they make. By completing this project, students would have to use the skills of historical thinking that are crucial to the history profession.

For my final project I have started to narrow down and define the focus of the project. The overall theme of my project is going to emphasize the diversity of the different European immigrant groups that came to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  I want to emphasize to my audience that the various European ethnic groups had different experiences in the United States based on cultural and religious differences. Specifically, I want to highlight the religious differences between Roman Catholic immigrants and the Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants. I want my audience to be able to understand the source of those differences and how religious differences between these two groups of Catholics led to conflict in the United States.

So far I have done research on the establishment of the first Greek Catholic Churches in the United States by the initial Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in the 1880s, the Greek Catholic perspective of the conflict with Roman Catholic in the United States, and the various reactions of the Carpatho-Rusyn people to the conflict. I am planning to conduct more research on the perspective of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the Greek Catholic Church’s presence in the United States, and the response of the Vatican to the conflict between the Roman Catholics and the Greek Catholics.

So far most of the primary sources I have found are newspaper articles, letters, and papal decrees that were compiled together into a book by Father John Slivka called Historical Mirror: Sources of the Rusin and Hungarian Greek Rite Catholics in the United States of America 1884-1963. This book presents sources about the establishment of the Greek Catholic Church in the United States and the conflict the arose between the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic priests from the perspective of the the Greek Catholic priests.

My biggest challenge so far has been in deciding how I want to organize and design my project. So far I have not been able to decide how I want my audience to interact with my primary sources and how best to present the information to my audience.

The next steps are to find some sources from the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and then to gather all of the primary sources I have together in order to better organize them.

The image I have chosen to include in my final project is an 1893 image that depicts members of the Greek Catholic Union at their first formal gathering in Scranton,PA. I chose to include this image because it depicts the early founders of the Greek Catholic Union, the first and largest organization established by Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants to preserve and promote their unique culture and religious faith against attacks like those of the leadership of the Roman Catholic  Church in the United States. I will provide my intended audience with some background information about the Greek Catholic Union and they will analyze this photo alongside some articles from the Greek Catholic Union’s newspaper Amerikansky Russky Viestnik. 

My final project will examine the conflict that arose between the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and the Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholic priests at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States. My goal is not to present the conflict from just one point of view but to allow my target audience to observe perspectives from both sides. The audience will be able to read and examine primary sources written by both Roman Catholic leaders and Greek Catholic priests in the United States to construct their own historical narrative of this conflict.

I will use both digital media and digital tools to present the audience with a variety of sources that present the target audience of my project with multiple different perspectives on the conflict between Greek and Roman Catholics in the United States. The audience will be able to read and examine digital copies of letter written by both Roman Catholic bishops and Greek Catholic priests that highlight their unique perspective. By presenting these different perspectives together, the audience will be able to see for themselves that the conflict between Greek and Roman Catholics was multifaceted and that there are several different ways to view and examine the conflict, allowing the target audience to engage in the practice of historical thinking.

Since this project will be digital, I want to make sure that my final project is designed in a way that is appealing to my target audience. In order to engage the audience I want to do more then just simply present them with a series of primary sources documents and have them examine and analyze those documents. I will make sure to provide clear background information not just about the documents themselves, but also on the conflict itself, the Greek and Roman Catholic Churches, and the main historical figures involved. I also plan to use photos to provide a visual element to the historical material presented in my final project pitch.

Since the subject of history was first introduced into the American classroom over a century ago, there has been a debate over how history should both be taught to and learned by students. From the beginning, historians argued that the study of history in schools provided students with numerous valuable critical thinking and analytical skills like historical thinking. In order for students to achieve these skills, historians have emphasized certain methods of teaching and learning history. However, historians do not have unilateral control over the teaching and learning of history. External expectations, coming from outside the academic field of history, have placed various constraints on both the teaching and learning of history.

The history curriculum that is taught in the classroom is often not created by professional historians, but instead by educational committees at the state level. These committees create standards that define what single historical narrative should be taught and learned in the classroom. These historical narratives are created to present the United States and its history in one particular way, emphasizing certain elements of American history and excluding others. These states will also insist on the use of textbooks in the classroom that present this one singular narrative of American history. Many of these state standards also define history as unchanging and set in stone, meaning that the historical narrative that is defined in their standards is the absolute truth and cannot be subjected to different interpretations.

The adoption of a singular historical narrative that must be taught in history classrooms has led to history classes being organized around a single learning structure. A typical history class consists of students simply memorizing names, dates, and other historical facts and then being tested on their ability to recite these facts. This type of learning misses the fact that history often does not consist of a single narrative and that a historical event can often have multiple different historical interpretations. The memorization approach to learning history is problematic because it does not teach students the skills of historical thinking that are crucial to the work of historians. As any historian would note, the past is often not just one simple narrative, any historical events often consists of many different conflicting perspectives and narratives of that event. Historians argue that the history class should not only teach students historical facts but should also teach students to challenge those facts based on historical evidence.

It has only been within the past few years that teachers in the history classroom have been able to move beyond just teaching history as a set of facts to be memorized and instead can emphasize and teach elements of historical thinking to students. Before the digital age, the only resource that history teachers had available was the history textbook, that often presented one singular historical narrative. Today, there is a wealth of resources online that teachers in a history classroom can use to teach historical thinking to students. Teachers can find different primary and secondary sources about a historical event that can allow students to view the event from multiple different perspectives and viewpoints than what is presented in a typical history textbook.