Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Research, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/

Abstract

The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/, publishes regular reviews of Web sites. The reviews appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at http://www.historycooperative.org/) and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than one thousand Web sites for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the best Web sites and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers. The Web reviews are edited by Kelly Schrum; please contact her at kschrum@gmu.edu if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/websitereviews.shtml. Digital History is an ambitious and wide-ranging Web site that aims “to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges” through multimedia and interactive content. As such, it takes full advantage of the Internet's potential to offer students access to materials that transcend printed media. It provides, for example, downloadable video lectures presented by such prominent scholars as David Blight, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn; a series of “Digital Stories” that explore a number of topics, including slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; and a Flash-based overview of American history. An easy-to-use module allows users to create their own virtual exhibitions using images available on the site (users cannot, however, upload their own images, undoubtedly as a result of copyright concerns) that can be downloaded and e-mailed as hyper text markup language (html) files stored in a zip archive. One of the most innovative and useful elements of Digital History is the “Ask the HyperHistorian” feature, essentially a means for students to ask a professional historian questions that arise from their own exploration of the site's content.