‘Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye’: E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History

A visit to the book exhibit at the 2002 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians left me thinking that I had stumbled upon a CompUSA store rather than a gathering of professional historians. Strolling through the aisles I found a multitude of high-tech equipment, including flat-panel monitors, digital projectors, and laptop computers. What was going on? Publishers had their rows of new monographs and their displays of colorfully covered U.S. history texts, of course–staples of exhibits for decades–but they also featured numerous CD-ROMs and online resources. Some of the exhibited items were historical databases for research purposes, such as The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade CD-ROM published by Cambridge University Press and Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center, but the bulk of digital resources on display were for teachers, especially teachers of the U.S. history survey course. Are we witnessing a transformative moment in the history of textbook publishing, as many champions of educational technology would have us believe? Or is something less far-reaching and more problematic perhaps at hand? What does the entry of digital history into the college classroom portend for how we teach and for how students learn?¹

Long before the advent of personal computers, educators and others celebrated the potential of technology for improving the quality of instruction. “Is blackboard analysis of periods or subjects used?” was one of the categories listed in a table compiled by Carroll D. Wright for Herbert Baxter Adams’s The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, published in 1887. Over a decade later A. B. Hart devoted significant space to the use of maps in his “Methods of Teaching American History.” He even offered graphic advice on how to make one:

“A large outline map should be painted on a movable blackboard; it is significant to indicate the coasts. . . . A roll of strong manila paper, a few colored crayons, or, better still, water colors, a yard-stick, and a small map on which rectangles may be lightly ruled are all the materials necessary.”

And, most memorably, Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, wrote in the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1913,

“Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in ten years.”

Today’s advocates of educational technology often echo Edison’s proclamation of a new age of visuality, and they trumpet as well the supposed advantages of computer technology for institutional efficiency and student engagement.²

The all-too-familiar siren call of computer technology appeared at my very breakfast table as I wrote this essay. The New York Times “Circuits” section of August 15, 2002, featured the theme of students going back to school and highlighted the cool electronic gadgets that students can bring to class and the gigabit-speed networks and “smart” buildings at Case Western Reserve University. Yet amid all the celebratory remarks on hardware and other equipment, some cautionary flags popped up. A short box on “What Students Say” reviewed the Pew Internet and American Life Project report in which students stated that their teachers fail to grasp the real potential of the World Wide Web. One high school senior lambasted the “mundane use of the Internet” as a place to send students to “look up such and such lesson and I’ll quiz you tomorrow”–rather than as a resource for developing innovative and intellectually challenging assignments.³

This essay surveys the state of electronic supplements–either CD-ROMs or online Web sites–for various college-level U.S. history textbooks to see where we are and where we might be going. The emergence of e-supplements comes at the intersection of several developments in the areas of academic publishing, higher education, and American popular culture. The publishing industry’s concentration has provided economies of scale in bundling resources of print, microfilm, and digital form, while textbook publishers have pursued new revenue streams in the marketing of new electronic materials. Colleges and universities have jumped on the bandwagon by hailing technology as a means to enhance efficiency and engagement at the same time. Finally and most profoundly, I would argue, there has been a proliferation of digital sources posted on the World Wide Web by government agencies or university archives or just plain amateurs. Most impressive are huge Web sites such as the Valley of the Shadow, a virtual archive of two counties on opposite sides at the onset of the Civil War, and the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress. The American Memory site boasts seven million digital items contained in over a hundred separate collections, ranging from Ansel Adams’s 1943 photographs of Japanese American internment at Manzanar to sound recordings by American leaders during World War I and the 1920s. These are exciting times–and getting ever more exciting if your idea of a good time is locating (and displaying) materials with the click of a mouse (and a fast connection to the Internet).⁴

The first generation of electronic resources for the teaching of U.S. history came with the publication of textbooks in CD-ROM format early in the 1990s. Prognosticators announced that the age of the e-book was upon us and that students would soon be reading their multimedia texts at the computer screen. As it happens, we are still waiting for that day to appear. What happened instead in the mid-1990s was the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. In the wake of that phenomenon, publishers made materials available online rather than via CD-ROMs. But, even with the arrival of this second generation of e-supplements, the potential of computer technology for improving history education remains open to debate. My argument will be that technology per se is not the main issue. What demands our greatest attention is the pedagogical framework–how digital resources are best deployed to achieve our goals for teaching and learning history.⁵

Electronic supplements come in a variety of forms, but most have a consistent set of features: chapter goals and outlines, maps, quizzes, Web links, primary sources, and sometimes Web exercises and other student activities. Almost all supplementary resources are keyed to the textbook (even as publishers offer identical resources across their textbook offerings) and to a particular chapter of the textbook. Some publishers offer e-book versions of their print texts, such as Pearson Education’s interactive edition CD-ROM of The American People by Gary B. Nash et al.; others offer their supplements in identical CD-ROM and online versions, such as Vivendi’s @History CD-ROM and Web sites for their various history texts; a few have developed stand-alone Web sites for users of any of their textbooks, such as Thomson/Wadsworth’s American Journey Online; and there are separate CD-ROMs of maps such as Vivendi’s GeoQuest: United States CD-ROM or the McGraw-Hill series of After the Fact Interactive CD-ROMs of topical modules. (An appendix to this essay provides a list of the publishers, e-supplements, and textbooks discussed herein.) Surprisingly, few Web sites are readily searchable; you must go chapter by chapter through the site to locate information on a particular topic. Less surprisingly, many sites are protected by passwords. To get a password, a student must purchase a new copy of the printed textbook, which typically comes shrink-wrapped with a card bearing an access code. By this means, publishers discourage the use of secondhand copies and seek to increase their sales and profits.⁶

To a great degree, e-supplements follow the model of their print predecessors. Over the past twenty years, textbooks have made increasing use of multicolor maps and illustrations and of sidebars and multiple frames on the printed page. Those changes, I would argue, are linked to the dramatic changes in content presented in survey texts, especially the incorporation of more diverse voices in the central narrative of United States history for undergraduate students. E-supplements allow publishers and authors to go further in this direction by breaking the physical and economic constraints of printed works. (How many sidebars can you lay out on a printed page, and how many sources can you bind into a paperback reader?) With e-supplements, instructors have a wider range of sources to choose from when they customize their courses for particular mixes of students. The supplements also offer gateways to the wealth of Web materials, selectively grouped and sometimes annotated, and some have exercises and assignments based on those digital history sources. Supplements follow the textbook author’s lead in displaying a document such as a manuscript census document and explaining how we know what we know–making visible the process that otherwise is quite hidden in the textbook’s seamless narrative.

Yet publishers make more ambitious claims for the superiority of e-supplements over their print counterparts. According to W. W. Norton, with Inventing America’s Digital History Resources CD-ROM, students can “see and hear American history” and “explore subjects in detail.” Primary Source Media’s American Journey Online hails itself as “the future of research,” and the Thomson/Wadsworth History Resource Center claims to be “the most comprehensive collection of historical information ever gathered into one source.”⁷ The buzz word of the day is “interactive.” E-supplement activities are always “interactive.” On the Nation of Nations Web site, for example, each chapter offers ten different resources; four are labeled interactive. But when you look at how that works in practice, you discover that what is meant by “Interactive People and Places,” the first one I clicked on, is a Shockwave animation in which students are asked to drag the numbers from a column of names to the boxes of another column of events. Unfortunately, for many e-supplements, “interactivity” means a quiz about the chapter contents or after reading an online source–which can often be e-mailed to an instructor.⁸ This is hardly what I would call interactivity. Students need to be engaged and challenged, not just tested on their recall of material they have just read. Heightened student involvement comes from constructing active learning activities that make intellectual connections concrete. As Randy Bass has argued, compelling questions drive learning through engagement with resources, materials, and methods in a cyclical process:

“It is compelling questions that motivate expert learning; similarly it is in those moments when students are driven by questions that are compelling (or interesting) to them that they learn best. And, ultimately, it becomes its own “cyclical process”; it is inquiry itself that drives learning–and resources, materials, and methods that drive inquiry. The question confronting us as teachers . . . is how can information technologies play a role in the engines of inquiry that drive learning?”

Yes, rich multimedia resources can help “hook” students on active learning. But technology by itself does not automatically produce intellectual engagement. For educational technology to be truly effective, it must go beyond the presentational model and capitalize on the hypertext possibilities of multiple pathways and complex stories. Most important, it must enable students to pursue their own questions and in the process gain an understanding of the complexity and depth of historical research and analysis.⁹

Mapping the Past–Interactively of Course

Cartographic history is a significant part of historical studies today. Numerous monographs bear the title “mapping,” and their refined cartographic conceptions have reached wider circulation in textbook treatments and the e-supplement materials under review. We now look at maps with fresh eyes, no longer seeing them as faithful representations of space or terrain. J. B. Harley explains,

“Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations.”¹⁰

Interactive modern-day maps are perhaps the single best use of technology to be encountered in e-supplements. For a long time one could lay transparency upon transparency to trace the routes of the major European explorations in a classroom presentation or look at a textbook’s artfully used hatched regions or different colors that depict the growth of the United States territory–to see change over time. Several years ago scholars at the University of Oregon created the OSSHE Historical & Cultural Atlas Resource to “enhance teaching experience for students” with original maps that had been created using Macromedia Shockwave. The U.S. sections of the resource contained such series as “Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783-1898,” which showed the same historical phenomena as transparencies did, only now by means of a click of the mouse. Today clickable maps are available on almost every e-supplement Web site or CD-ROM; publishers own the maps created for their textbooks, which frees them from the complicated use of historical photographs or motion pictures and the issues of permissions and payments.¹¹

Historical maps are more of a challenge. Technically there are issues of how to present often large and difficult-to-understand maps containing strange symbols, accompanying text, and colorful cartouches. Conceptually, several e-supplements offer good questions, but there is room for improvement. Sites reflect new scholarship with such statements as “Maps explain change over time as well as tell us about the world of the people who construct them.” McGraw-Hill’s Nation of Nations site (where that quotation comes from) is linked to its print text, which stresses how cartographic advances were one of a series of technological advances that contributed to European globalization. The Nation of Nations site, however, is less successful in making that connection through its examination of the map itself.¹²

I was pleased to find a host of cartographic activities with different approaches and will discuss them in order of sophistication of inquiry and presentation. Four focus on Diego Gutiérrez’s 1562 world map. The American Pageant’s online activity builds on a print section titled “Making Sense of the New World,” but the activity’s designers do the least with the map itself. After a student reads the print feature (either in the textbook or online), useful questions are posed about how Europeans’ cultural conceptions might be glimpsed through geography and how those understandings or misunderstandings might redound in further exploration and settlement. Then the student is provided with a link to the 1562 map at the American Memory project–or at least to its thumbnail version–and asked to compare it to a 1540 map included in the textbook. What the e-supplement fails to note is that the Library of Congress has prepared an intriguing exhibit on the Gutiérrez map that would certainly give students far more material to reflect upon. A student activity on the Internet requires focus and structure–not just links to interesting materials.¹³

McGraw-Hill’s Nation of Nations site begins with a map identified as “Apian’s 1544 Charta Cosmographia” from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia. Clicking on the map brings up a larger pop-up version with four “hotspots” or outlined areas that, when clicked, bring up details of Charles V or North America or the “canibales” in the eastern part of South America. The questions that go along with those details are good ones such as “How is North America imagined?” The activity has seven such sections, moving next to the Gutiérrez map of 1562 and the Library of Congress’s exhibit, and then on to excursions at other impressive cartographic sites such as the University of Virginia’s Lewis & Clark: The Maps of Exploration, 1507-1814 and the University of Calgary’s tutorial The European Voyages of Exploration. The activity also contains additional research links. This exercise provides a much “thicker” passage through a wealth of material, but students are shunted off too often and for too much time onto other Web sites and receive too little guidance on looking through the visual sources. Most significant, the authors have neglected to provide their own material to frame the other sites’ virtual exhibitions or archives. Apian’s 1544 map appears at the front of the exercise but with no explanation about what is important about this map or its maker. Peter Apian turns out to be a significant Enlightenment figure with an academic position as a mathematician and a secondary career as a print entrepreneur. Born in Saxony, he was professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, the recipient of significant courtly patronage for his astronomical work such as his Astronomicum Caesareum (1540), and the producer of significant cartographic work as an editor and publisher. His maps followed Martin Waldseemuller’s early world maps, and his 1520 map is among the earliest to use the name America; the 1544 map featured on the Web site had a truncated North America, South America was called America, and it displayed the Straits of Magellan along with other details and flourishes.¹⁴

In McGraw-Hill’s After the Fact Interactive: Envisioning the Atlantic World CD-ROM, the Gutiérrez map is only part of an extensive inquiry into the process of historical investigation. The module, developed from the After the Fact text, contains ample materials for student inquiry: a timeline, a modern map where a viewer can see explorers and exchanges highlighted, a brief guide to various sorts of sources, Web links, and a bibliography. The CD-ROM’s collection of artifacts, maps, documents, and audiovisual materials can be examined in a general “archives” or through virtual “drawers” according to their object type. When a particular source is selected, such as “Gutiérrez Map (1562),” a student can utilize pop-ups or magnifying tools to study the map and, most important, find two substantial paragraphs of contextual information; indeed, each of the forty items in the “archives” receives this full treatment–from a 1565 astrolabe to a 1490 world map. After the Fact’s three-part process of “Ask, Research, Argue” offers a somewhat prescribed movement for the student through the material, from collecting questions through looking at data to making a presentation. However, there are alternative (and more open-ended) ways of examining its rich resources, which are presented in an engaging graphical interface. Student inquiry is foregrounded in the CD-ROM, which offers a far broader perspective on cultural exchanges of the early modern Atlantic world.¹⁵

Source window for Diego Gutiérrez, Americae sive qvarta e orbis partiesnova et exactissima description (Map of North and South America [1562]), and other maps. McGraw Hill, After the Fact Interactive: Envisioning the Atlantic World CD-ROM, 2002. Copyright McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

A Bedford/St. Martin’s Research Room module on “Envisioning the New World, 1562,” puts the 1562 Gutiérrez map at the center. This activity is the fullest and most interactive of the online materials at hand. The module is set up in frames–separate spaces in the browser window–with nine headings on the left and the particular material then opening in the main right space. An introduction explains the significance of the Gutiérrez map as the “largest known map of the new world printed up to that time.” Most valuable is the page of “Guidelines for Evaluating Maps,” which includes quotations from the publisher’s book A Student’s Guide to History and discusses how maps offer points of view and are embedded in their historical periods. The guidelines encourage a student to look at the type and title of a map, explain that maps are graphical instruments so cartouches should be looked at, and even provide a discussion of modern computer-generated interactive maps. Then the student can look at a full view of the map with several outlined details that open in separate windows with nice close-ups of figures in the map; each step of the way the module poses a series of questions that go along with the short statements about what one is seeing (for example, “What did the image of Native Americans as cannibals communicate to Europeans about how they could understand this new world?”). Only then are the students sent from the activity site to look at the Library of Congress presentation.¹⁶

“The 1562 Map: Detail Cannibals” for Diego Gutiérrez, Americae sive qvarta e orbis parties nova et exactissima description (Map of North and South America [1562]), from Bedford/St. Martin’s, Research Room, Critical Thinking Module: “Envisioning the New World, 1562” <http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/history/modules/mod01/frameset.htm >. Courtesy Bedford/St. Martin’s.

What is most impressive about the “Envisioning the New World, 1562,” critical thinking module in Bedford/St. Martin’s Research Room is not the technology per se, but the pedagogical process–the framing of the issues, the brief background, the guidance for seeing–all in a series of steps similar to a class discussion. All the e-supplements show the value of pop-ups, but seeing better means more than identification. Students need to learn to view maps critically, and for that they need good questions, contextual information, and tools for analysis. You do not want students just clicking wildly onsite or offsite or trolling through the Internet. The best-designed activities reach their goals by combining interactive and presentational modes of pedagogy. Of course, the presentational approach itself can become the subject of analysis, but self-reflexive inquiry is in rather short supply. One interesting approach for understanding the revolutionary period and the nature of these Web inquiries was the Bedford/St. Martin’s virtual tour of Colonial Williamsburg; the exercise frames the Colonial Williamsburg site, asking students to think about how the nature of Internet evidence is related to the issue of the presentation of history in the hypertext medium.¹⁷

Imaging American History

In his essay “‘Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity’: The Use of Images in American History Textbooks,” Louis Masur observes, “Hardly a page passes without a visual supplement to the written text.”¹⁸ E-supplements are no exception. Images offer a powerful means of engaging student interest, and the use of colorful illustrations will only expand with the spread of Web-based materials. But will our students have the tools of visual analysis to make critical use of the virtual museum exhibitions and other enhanced multimedia resources that CD-ROMs and Web sites can provide? I am skeptical.

The relationship between American art and the American Revolution can serve as a test case. The print version of Thomson/Wadsworth’s Liberty, Equality, Power includes an essay on “American Artists and the Revolution in Painting” in which the works of Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull are featured in a discussion of American accomplishments in painting–in Britain as well as the new United States. West’s success in court circles and in refashioning classical models of history painting is discussed in terms of a remaking of art. Vivendi’s textbook A People and a Nation uses Copley’s 1776 portrait of The Copley Family, a grand group portrait, for a discussion of the remaking of society based on the National Gallery of Art’s Web site. The People and a Nation site nicely frames the same visual materials with its own introductory comments. Students are informed that the Revolution not only changed forms of government but also altered attitudes about family and a host of other social and cultural matters–and that the Copley family portrait “limns some of these changes.” The study questions and instructor’s notes focus almost exclusively on art-historical concerns: pose, gaze, garb, color, composition, and foreground and background. Unfortunately there is no link to the National Gallery Web pages on Copley, which misses the opportunity to direct students to the painter’s biography or any of the other fifteen Copley portraits owned by the museum, each with its own separate image and discussions.¹⁹(There is a hyperlink to the home page of the National Gallery of Art http://www.nga.gov, but how would a student or instructor know that a wealth of additional information lies there?)

The Pearson Education History Place has a feature on a 1778 painting by Copley; “Watson and the Shark: Reading the Representation of Race” was produced by Saul Cornell (this site is one of the few where contributors are named). Here we have an exemplary discussion both in its technical and pedagogical elements and in its historical and interpretive paths. Students are provided with several screens of directed questions and links to additional information. The historical context of the artwork is set through discussions of the central figures of Copley and Brook Watson, artist and subject, along with additional material such as contemporary newspaper reviews and similar artworks of the period. What is most impressive is not the good design displayed–though that is apparent, with the lengthy exercise being broken up into several screens of readily visible text and images rather than long scrolling screens of information–but the layers of meaning and levels of information that are reflected in the design decisions. The hierarchy of information established by those screens and the links within those pages to subsidiary pages, made possible by the hypertext environment, is similar to labeling in museum exhibitions. For example, the several links on the page concerned with the painting’s contemporary reception allow interested students (and an instructor) to follow their interest and inclination to learn about composition details on a page about analyzing the painting or another contemporaneous work.²⁰

While painting often finds pride of place in the canon and the classroom, other visual forms and genres demonstrate that visual materials do not merely illustrate or illuminate history. Visual materials can even constitute historical events–none more so than Paul Revere’s engraving The Bloody Massacre. Many supplementary sites include the image in their revolutionary crisis sections–some, such as Thomson/Wadsworth’s American Passages, without source information, just “The Boston Massacre, 1770.” American Journey Online has quite an extensive module on the revolutionary crisis, with audio commentaries on various texts that include other images and texts. McGraw-Hill’s Nation of Nations has an extensive Web activity on Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1771) and Revere’s engraving. Its stated focus is on visual evidence and the decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet, besides a sentence on West’s composition, students find little guidance except for a link to Edward Papenfuse’s lecture notes on Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (1991) with its discussion of Wolfe and West. There is some good information about the comparative cost of the two engravings, but it is quite a jump to ask students to answer questions about colonial identity and revolutionary allegiances.²¹

Although the ease of incorporating visual materials into online supplements seems to have advanced the project of analyzing visual evidence, too often visuals are used to illustrate an event rather than as a means to understand the event’s very construction. More troubling is the continued reliance upon presentational format rather than creative implementation of the principles of interactivity. One can glimpse some of the possibilities of the technology at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Web site, in particular the exhibition George Washington: A National Treasure, which features Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of Washington (1796). The exhibition centers on an “interactive portrait.” Visitors can choose among various filters–symbolic, biographic, and artistic–and each path chosen offers the viewer a distinct interpretation of the whatand the how they are seeing. Likewise, the Worcester Art Museum’s Early American Paintings Web exhibition offers an initial graphical timeline of two centuries of early American history and the paintings of those eras; viewers can then choose to learn about the artists or the paintings, complete with artists’ biographies, technical notes, and scholarly discussions of the works’ artistic and cultural importance. Again, it is the multiple layers of meaning accessible through these design pathways that illuminate how images inform our historical understanding.²²

Jumping across the Civil War and the discovery of the daguerreotype, we find photography at the core of a burgeoning visual culture of newspapers, advertising, department stores, and other mass media by the late nineteenth century. The halftone process made possible the broad circulation of images, and flash photography allowed the camera to peer into interiors and other places. Photographic and then filmic technologies meant experiential changes, while the visual record grew exponentially along with the availability of images across the population.

At the center of this story resides Jacob Riis, a multimedia pioneer with his lantern slide lectures and illustrated reform texts. Indeed, Riis, Lewis Hine, and the ashcan school of painters have become almost canonical figures in the study of immigrant and urban life. Riis appears in every site’s sources and activities about immigration and ethnicity, the rise of the city and the new urban culture, the documentary impulse, and Progressive reform. But is this story properly presented? Maren Stange and others have studied the images’ use in their original contexts rather than in today’s more pristine museum settings, where large photographs hang divorced of their original and more cluttered but more complex environments. Stange has taught us to pay close attention to the relationship of text and image. Few do as good a job as Pearson Education’s The American People textbook feature “Recovering the Past: Documentary Photographs,” with its full treatment of Riis’s biography and descriptions of how he came to photography and how he used images to illustrate his lectures. Students can also read about Lewis Hine and the generally sympathetic treatment of his subjects in his child labor photographs.²³

Looking at the e-supplements’ sections on photography, I remain concerned that these powerful images frequently serve as screen window dressing rather than as the focus of serious historical analysis. While Riis appears often, he is not always identified. In Pearson Education’s History Place, for example, a photograph is identified as “Families Working in Sweatshops” with accompanying text about the dangerous and tedious work in unregulated sweatshops. This turns out to be a photograph from Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) in the chapter called “The Sweaters of Jewtown”; it is identified in the text with the title Knee-Pants at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen–A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop. Students deserve to know the source of the photograph, and they would benefit from learning more about Riis’s intentions as conveyed in his original titles. More generally, students should be introduced to the complexities of using photographs as primary sources. The People and a Nation site takes a different but equally flawed approach with its labeled excerpt from the same text; the introduction nicely tells about Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant and innovative flash photographer of the urban poor. The selected text comes from several chapters, including chapter 12, “The Bohemians-Tenement-House Cigar Making,” but there is no citation for these selections, which makes it difficult to follow. The authors tell students that Riis illustrated his book with several line drawings but do not provide any of them.²⁴

The American Pageant takes a different approach. From its print discussion of 1900 manuscript census data, it moves online to ask students to visualize the people in such documents through Riis photographs. Students are directed to look at the Museum of the City of New York’s virtual exhibitions on Riis and to find three photographs that connect to the census document. The museum site has a good introduction, but once again students are asked questions without any guidance on how to do visual analysis.²⁵

Bedford/St. Martin’s Research Room has a module on “Documenting Photography” through examining Riis’s photograph Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in Their Tenement. The accompanying text explains Riis’s project to engage people emotionally and to transform them into reformers through his use of the sometimes explosive flash photography. As in the Research Room’s other modules, there is an introduction, guidelines on how to evaluate visual evidence, photographs with selected details such as wall decorations, questions about what you see and how the original audience might react, what is included and what is omitted, and a final link to the text of the entire chapter 12 in David Phillips’s hypertext edition of How the Other Half Lives.²⁶ Like the History Place’sexercise on Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, the module focuses on the process of inquiry, set of stages, and here the multimedia of photograph, drawing, written text, and additional resources. But why no annotations or detailed pop-ups for text? Do not text selections bear the same weight and need for additional detailed analysis as images? A good model here would be the History Place’s “Estate Inventories of Early Virginians,” in which three of the often intractable probate inventories are analyzed, and one document’s perplexing terms are hyperlinked with pop-up boxes that provide definitions. This is a simple technology whereby students can examine the document, interact with it, receive more information, and go on in their investigation to begin to combine the sources.²⁷

More supplements should extend this example, perhaps emulating the much fuller DoHistory, which builds on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s study of Martha Ballard’s diary to “explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past.” Viewers can look at images of the diary pages, read a transcription, or even try their hand at transcribing. Also, an accompanying archive of primary sources–text, pictures, material objects–provides the context to move out from the document itself. Finally, you can progress through the site according to your interests, whether genealogy, medicine, diaries, or Ballard herself. Yet it is the online diary with its “magic lens” that translates phrases of Ballard’s eighteenth-century handwriting into standard print.²⁸

Also, more could be done with visual images. Examinations of images in their original context could lead to direct comparisons between social documentary photographs, commercial photographs, and academic paintings. The National Museum of American Art’s virtual exhibit Metropolitan Lives of the Ashcan school shows how the growth of the city and its “exotic” population fascinated photographers and painters alike. Again, e-supplements must move beyond illustration to interpretation. Students need to learn about the conventions embedded in artists’ works and how multiple audiences made meaning from these visual representations. Seeing is not easy work for us and our students, but digital tools can enhance our powers of historical vision.²⁹

Imagining U.S. History: Multimedia or Media-Made America?

Instructors have used records, audiotapes, movies, and videotapes in teaching history for some time. With the advent of “smart” classrooms, one can show a clip of a film or play a blues song at the touch of a button. So what difference does digitization make? Now sounds and moving pictures can be shown seamlessly in hypertext form, which also offers the possibility of easily navigating and combining different formats into one package. This fluidity of connection and juxtaposition crosses the border of existing genres to create something new. Again, I would argue that what makes electronic materials distinctive is not the increased ease of access (though one cannot argue with ease) but the experience of multimedia. There is an almost magical capacity of modern sound recording and motion pictures to capture history and transmit its feel to today’s students. This opportunity poses a question about our goals for the survey: do we want to emphasize the pastness of the past, or do we want students to be encouraged to make connections between the past and the present? Multimedia can work both ways. A palpable “sensory experience of history can be gained from archival audio and visual materials,” says W. W. Norton’s Inventing America; no text can match “the din of the weave room at the Lowell mills.” Yes, but my survey of multimedia resources reveals that too much of what is available is simply presentational. To date, producers of e-supplements have not come close to using these evocative materials to “imagine American history” as creatively as some other digital historians have done.³⁰

Several e-supplements contain original multimedia materials, and they often are very impressive productions. The supplement for Norton’s Inventing America includes four video clips ranging from “Slave Culture on Mount Vernon Plantation” to “Ellis Island and the Immigrant Experience.” Each video offers a dramatic lecture complete with slide show; we even get to see and hear Merritt Roe Smith speaking amid textile machines from the Lowell mills. American Journey Online provides expert audio commentary, including a discussion of Revere’s and others’ images of the Boston Massacre, for example, as students see those images on the screen. Yet as expert as these audio and video commentaries might be, novel as it might be for students to have their instruction pop up in a small window on their computers, the current generation of e-supplements does not explore fully the possibilities of multimedia.³¹

This situation might be a result of sites planned years ago, before personal computers-could handle files nearly as large as they do today. The American Pageant chapter “American Life in the ‘Roaring Twenties’” builds upon a print feature about the 1927 talkie The Jazz Singer. The text tells about the technological innovation but rightly stresses the film’s themes as appealing to a substantial portion of the Hollywood audience, especially immigrants, with its story of the Al Jolson character’s being torn between his father’s choice of career for him of a religious path and his own desire to be a jazz singer. Students can read about the complex issue of the Jewish immigrant’s path to assimilation through blackface and minstrelsy as a means of acceptance into American society.³² The development of these important themes is understandably limited when presented on the printed page. More surprising is that the textbook’s esupplement only utilizes the resources of the Internet for plot summaries (either short or detailed ones) and a contemporary movie poster. With a little more effort on the publisher’s part, students could be guided to clips of the film online or, better yet, be provided with those riches on the e-supplement Web site itself.³³

The Nation of Nations chapter on the rise of a new urban order points to cities as key sites of a new culture with the influx of new people and new cultural forms, particularly noting department stores, vaudeville, and professional sports. The accompanying exercise lists a series of Web sites on immigration, women’s temperance, Chicago, and Tammany Hall. In one case, students are instructed to go to the Learning Page of the Library of Congress’s collection American Variety Stage, 1870-1920, and answer a good set of questions about the differences among variety shows and their appeal to different audiences through an examination of two sections of the site. Students are also directed toward theater playbills and Harry Houdini’s biography. But unless they explore on their own, they will not discover that the Library of Congress site, described as a “multimedia anthology,” offers digitized and downloadable early sound recordings of comic skits and popular songs and sixty-one motion pictures of comic acts, burlesque routines, animal acts, and other vaudeville shows. Why not encourage students to see and hear, rather than just read about, the variety shows? Likewise, The American People’s Web activities for its chapter on the Progressive Era and industrial capitalism asks students to examine the lives of American composers of popular music from materials on the PBS site I Hear America Singing, but the e-supplement does not include samples of the music itself. Why not create something to contextualize the audio resources of The Red Hot Jazz Archive: History of Jazz before 1930? This site, an amazing online compendium, calls itself “an experiment in using this new multimedia technology.”³⁴

When audio and video clips are included in e-supplements, the assumption is made that their evocative power will be enough–a situation parallel to the use of images to spruce up a printed page. The Pearson Education History Place lists several audio and video resources among its primary sources, and more and more video is contained in the later chapters. For example, students can hear Woodrow Wilson or see a short clip of “Henry Ford’s Assembly Line.” The clip of Ford’s factory depicts workers assembling cars on a long, slowly moving platform; while quite vivid, the clip appears without any accompanying information. It turns out that the film (cited as coming from the National Archives) originally was a production of the Ford Motor Company film unit that documented many of the innovations and technological advances of the first half of the twentieth century. Would students not benefit from some guidance in thinking about the novelty of the assembly line, its meaning for workers, the use of film itself by the Ford Motor Company, and the larger application of film as a part of time and motion studies? The American Social History Project’s Who Built America, 1877-1914 CD-ROM includes narrated footage of the Westinghouse factory floor circa 1904 to raise some of those issues.³⁵

The Inventing America e-supplement’s mix of clustered documents, text, image, and audio clips starts to offer viewers a multimedia experience, perhaps not at the level of the publisher’s claim of allowing students to “see and hear American history” but moving us closer to the experiential power of multimedia history. The Ellis Island section asks one to “hear the voices” and view the buttonhook used by doctors to check for trachoma as well as a wealth of photographs of the immigrants. There is an outstanding body of over thirty audio clips of two immigrants: Bertha Devlin, an Irish immigrant in 1923, and Victor Tartarini, an Italian boy in 1921, who speak of their premigration experiences, passage, arrival, and new lives in America.³⁶

Multimedia materials need to be designed in a way to get students to interact with them creatively. Several years ago a student of mine in a “Historian and the Computer” class designed a simple Web site based on the National Park Service’s Ellis Island Immigration Museum. She posted a floor plan of Ellis Island and then had her students click on various rooms to learn about what they would experience at each step of the way. When you travel across New York harbor today to visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum you view the objects in the cases, see the vastly enlarged photographs that greet you at various turns during your tour, and stand in the Great Hall and other interiors of the famous site–all of this makes for a unique experience. Imagine the possibilities of evoking interactively the immigrant experience with a full-fledged virtual tour of Ellis Island or of an immigrant residence in simulation. Models exist for such experiential use of digital history. For the immigrant experience, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s virtual tour allows visitors to walk up the dark stairs, visit various apartments, learn about the families that lived in those apartments, enter different rooms, and–by clicking on “hot spots” in the Quick-Time movie–learn about objects in the rooms. This use of multimedia is evocative but also instructive and truly interactive. Students can pursue their own interests and proceed through various levels of information as they wish. Multimedia’s magical power, like the technology itself, needs to be harnessed to our pedagogical program; we cannot assume it will work by magic.³⁷

Wandering back to the Organization of American Historians book exhibit and reflecting upon its resemblance to a CompUSA store brings the realization that the market for educational technology reaches well beyond early adopters and “geeks.” Many teachers want to try digital history materials in their classrooms or at least assign them to students. E-supplements offer a guided encounter with those resources, restricted by their integration to a textbook’s organization and its presentational mode. However, they are readily available and dramatically expand the range of sources, especially visual and other multimedia ones. As Amy Greenberg wrote in a post to the H-Shear listserv, she chose The American People text because of its “great on-line primary sources” since her goal in introductory courses was to get students engaged and excited by history, and this was “most easily accomplished with clear thematic lectures and engaging primary sources.”³⁸ E-supplements often may close off opportunities for broader inquiry by their narrow presentational structure, but they can also be used to imagine more open possibilities.

The restored kitchen of the Confino apartment from the virtual tour at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum <http://www.tenement.org/Virtual_Tour/vt_confino.html >. Courtesy Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York City. The virtual tour was made possible through a grant from the Verizon Foundation.

We should ask more of publishers and their products. The World Wide Web started out as a means to transmit text files but has ended up as something much more. New media and e-supplements in particular can promote the vision of greater student engagement and complex historical understanding that many of us have for our classrooms. First, the hypertext form opens up the possibility of teaching multiple ways of looking at an object or text–to turn it around virtually and intellectually–to choose different stories and to see multiple ways of looking (and understanding). Web sites today demonstrate the limitations of sequential presentations and promote the power of multiple paths through a wealth of information and media. Second, the Internet increasingly has moved from pages of text decorated with the occasional graphic into a “pipeline” to deliver multimedia. Hypertext history is ideal for our project of expanding the range of sources, whether they be “collected” in vast digital archives or presented in the mini-archives of an online exercise. Finally, and most significant, digital e-supplements are moving and should move us toward having our students “do history.” If anything, the hypertext form is composed of pages where the construction of links makes concrete intellectual connections, connections that we scholars and teachers often follow instinctively but that our students need to learn and make visible. New media by themselves will not accomplish any of these goals. The promise of interactivity must be linked to the project of student inquiry. These are not lofty goals reserved for the rarefied research seminar; they can be advanced even in the undergraduate survey. E-supplements can be part of the active learning potential of hypertext history where we ask students to create narratives out of a wide range of sources, provide them with additional contextual information at the click of a button, and bring us closer to creating historical knowledge with those sources rather than merely feeding back information–interactively.³⁹