Blog

Collaboration Conversation

Becca Beck — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:00:00 -0400

In March, I wrote a blog post about our collaboration with Decatur Middle School and Valley Mills Elementary School on an activity for our upcoming Indiana Bicentennial Train project. I met with this group of bright young people last week and wanted to share their idea.

The team chose a 1907 railroad map from our collection as the basis for a game visitors can play when they visit the Train this fall. Emma Key, one of the 8th graders on the team, said her objective was to make it active. "We wanted something active with competition, and that's when we got the idea for a game," she says.

Using the railroad routes and stops on the map, visitors will engage in a race to travel across the map. Miniature depot icons will mark where players need to stop and answer a question in order to move forward. The questions will focus on the locations with some broader Indiana history to make connections to the academic standards.

The next step is for the team to write a few questions for each depot site and for the IHS team to figure out the best way to fabricate the map so it is large enough and holds up in the elements. We are excited to work with Decatur Township learners and are looking forward to featuring this activity at the Train!

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Becca Beck is the assistant director of education and communication engagement at IHS. She loves making Indiana history fun for students.

The Civil War from Gettysburg to Appomattox

Suzanne Hahn — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:55:00 -0400

: This circa 1864/1865 image of the entrance to Camp Morton is featured in the new exhibit in the Rosemary McKee Lanham Gallery on the fourth floor of the History Center.

Abe Lincoln here. Although it has been 100, two score, and eight years since I was shot to death while attending a play with my Mary, Major Rathbone and his fiancée, Miss Harris, I decided to stop by the Lanham Gallery on the fourth floor of the History Center to see the exhibition commemorating the sesquicentennial of our Civil War. The people there have put up the second part of the exhibition, covering essentially the second half of this bloody conflict. Its title is The Civil War from Gettysburg to Appomattox and it includes items depicting the war from the beginning of 1863 through Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. I was killed less than one week after that.

The exhibition includes representations of events, places and people of particular interest to Hoosiers, including myself, as it was in Indiana where I spent my formative years. These include Confederate Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan's raid into Indiana; a panoramic photograph of an 11th Indiana Battery encampment at Chattanooga, Tenn.; photographs of Camp Morton in Indianapolis, which held Confederate prisoners of war; a diary entry from a Miami County soldier in the 26th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment; and an emancipation record of a former slave who became a member of the Weaver Settlement in Grant County.

There are also prints illustrating battles at Vicksburg and Gettysburg; 1864 election-year political cartoons; a couple of illustrations by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly; maps; letters; lithographs of my generals and admirals and of my little speech at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, Penn. (which I am surprised to find has been remembered all these years); and depictions of the fall of Richmond, Va., and Gen. Lee's surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. There are some likenesses of me hanging on the walls of this gallery, but it was a strange experience to encounter a life-size statue of myself.

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Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. When not performing as the rapper One-Cent, he enjoys attending Civil War reenactments to point out to participants what they are doing wrong.

Using Social Media for Your Museum – Is it Worth It?

Jeannette Rooney — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:25:00 -0400

I’m a fairly private person, so it has taken me a while to warm up to social media. I’ve only been on Facebook for three years (yes, only three!), and I only have about 100 friends (yes, only 100!). I haven’t yet sent my first tweet or created a profile on LinkedIn. But even so, social media has now become a daily part of my life. I check out what my friends and favorite organizations are doing every day. I watch everything and anything on YouTube. I log on to Pinterest when I’m in need of aesthetic nourishment. In short, I can interact at the level I want, with the content I want – and I have tailored my social media use to fit my life.

So how do museums fit into this picture? Even though, by many standards, I’m a social media newbie and minimalist, I am engaged with the world virtually in many ways I couldn’t be offline. Often, I only learn about new animals at the zoo or what happened this day in history or an event I really want to attend at our local museum through social media. This, I suppose, is the crucial point. I don’t have to search for the news – it comes to me. And it makes me feel connected to these people, sites and organizations on a personal level because they are taking the time to share their world with me.

Even if I hadn’t decided to sign on, social media is here to stay. The sites may change, and perhaps Facebook (currently with 1.06 billion monthly active users), Twitter (500 million users), YouTube (4 billion views per day), Flickr (8 billion photos) and others will be replaced by new outlets in the years to come (data source: Digital Marketing Ramblings). But no matter the platform, museums who want to continue to engage with their audiences in creative ways are using social media to achieve this. Of course, social media can never replace the value of face-to-face communication and the authentic experience in a physical space, and it won’t reach everyone. Yet these virtual platforms, when used well, can be powerful tools to help you make new friends and keep more people connected to your museum.

Here are a few interesting resources to check out:

Do you use social media for your museum or history organization? Share your thoughts with us below or on our Local History Services Facebook page. Like us and we’ll like you back! And watch for our first tweet soon!

I hope you already like the IHS Facebook page. If you're on Twitter, you can follow IHS at @IndianaHistory.

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Jeannette Rooney is the coordinator for Local History Services at IHS. She travels the state with her LHS team members to assist local history organizations. Why? Because history rocks (and we get to make lots of ice cream stops)!

Beekeepers and Bank Robbers

Suzanne Hahn — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:50:00 -0400

So, I never knew my great grandparents were bee keepers.

This might not sound like a big deal, but when you are researching your family history, finding fun facts like these can make the story that much more complete and interesting. I found a reference to their involvement in a beekeeping convention in a 1920 newspaper article from the Mooresville Times.

We have been discovering a lot of interesting facts about people and events with our new newspaper database. Researchers have found ancestors on both sides of the law (both arrest records and reports of stopping crime). We have found texts of speeches made to the state legislature, how Hoosiers coped with the 1913 flood, and advertisements to early businesses in the state.

Newspapers can be a great source for research and now they are much easier to search and access. The Indiana Historical Society recently partnered with Newspaper Archive to digitize 5,625 reels of microfilm, which represents more than 2.5 million newspaper page images dated 1924 or earlier. Now, 760 individual Indiana newspaper titles representing the vast majority of the state are now available for research on the web. Researchers can search newspaper pages by keyword or browse particular issues. To make the news even better, folks can access the database for free in the reference room of IHS’s William Henry Smith Memorial Library.

The Library is open to the public fro 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. If you are unable to visit, personal subscriptions are available for purchase through NewspaperArchive.com. Come and try the new database – maybe your ancestor was a beekeeper or a bank robber!

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Suzanne Hahn is director of reference services for the IHS Collections and Library. She loves helping people find the information they seek and is perhaps the only librarian ever to get shushed for laughing too loud in a library.

Stuff of Life: Bowling Trophies and Gadgets

Becca Beck — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:10:00 -0400

: Gramps

My grandfather passed away three weeks ago. I'm 31 years old, and this is the first grandparent I've lost. I consider myself very lucky.

After the funeral, we gathered at the house to start going through his stuff. The voice behind the stories was gone but the stuff remained. The bowling trophies and golf equipment. The clocks and wind chimes. The crazy as-seen-on-tv gadgets. Pieces of a life well lived.

In the history field, we work with objects from the past all the time. Artifacts are categorized, labeled, assessed and conserved. Decisions about what to keep are based on a collections policy. But I didn't know how to translate my professional knowledge to this personal situation. It was overwhelming to see all of his things knowing he wasn't there.

We each handle death and grief in our own way. I chose to remember my grandpa by taking his bowling pin clock, the 1963 newspaper announcing Kennedy had been shot he had shoved in the rafters of the basement and the teddy bear I made for him when I was little. Each triggers memories of him so they remain out of sight for now. That's how I assigned value to his things – what reminds me of him the most?

So, until I find a great spot for that bowling pin clock, here's to the memory of my grandfather, Kent Loofbourrow. Rest in peace, gramps.

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Becca Beck is the assistant director of education and communication engagement at IHS. She loves making Indiana history fun for students.

History Education in a STEM World

Matt Durrett — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:35:00 -0400

: The History Center's 1913 exhibit features and assembly line where students work together to build relief bundles.

If you have followed politics and education trends over the past few years you have probably noticed the shift in focus toward a few key subjects, for this blog posts' sake, most notably the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) initiative. There are many critics of STEM, both for and against, and all of their points are for a different blog post. What I want to talk about here is how we use STEM ideas for the newest You Are There Experience: 1913: A City Under Water. Whether you love it or hate it, STEM has serious influence in the education world today which only seems to grow with time.

First, some context: STEM supports many things, notably for our purposes, "a strong emphasis on learning environments on hands-on, experimental, inquiry-based and learner-centered student experiences and activities" and "integration of STEM-focused activities ... directed at learning environments outside the K-12 classroom." To me, the prior quote is a fancy way of saying that we as educators should not be presenting to or at the children, but involving them as active participants in our experiences and activities. And the latter, well, that's us. So, kinesthetic learning and establishing a culture where learning exists not solely in the classroom? Sign me up.

The 1913 experience puts visitors in Wulf's Hall, the second floor of a saloon-turned-relief-station in Indianapolis in the wake of a massive flood event. Our task as educators was to develop an activity that related to STEM subjects, met the ideas mentioned above while staying true to the people, the time and the event.

: Students interpret information on cards to determine the supplies and quantities needed to complete a task.

In this experience, students assemble relief bundles for flood sufferers who need supplies like bread, beans and rice. Upon entering the space, they receive relief cards with a family and the supplies requested. Students then work in teams to determine how much of each supply go into the bundles based on the number of adults and children in each household. This is an activity that occurred in the Wulf's Hall in 1913, staying authentic to the space, while the students work with math, fractions, problem-solving and teamwork skills. Ideally this activity will drive conversation with interpreters while changing the space itself, as students deposit their assembled bundles in an area for delivery. Another activity is the supply depot, where students measure and count bags of supplies that will go on the assembly line.

While environmental science seemed like the natural (pun intended) focus, it would have been difficult to include that in the context of the 1913 recovery inside the space. However, flood science is discussed in a supplemental content room and will be featured in an upcoming flood science cart. With the science cart, students will consider the story of the 1913 flood, a pre-human settlement flood, and what a similar event would look like today, using maps and experimenting with water saturation of different building materials from each time period.

We feel that all of these activities stay true to the history of the story while also integrating STEM subjects and principles. What STEM-related activities would you like to see in You Are There 1913: A City Under Water?

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Matt Durrett is coordinator, National History Day in Indiana. Usually laconic and reserved, he has recently acquired the nickname “The Quiet Storm” around the office for his rare yet tempest-like outbursts.

Those Darn Kids: Texting in Museums

Tamara Hemmerlein — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:30:00 -0400

Often when I visit museums, I overhear bits and pieces of conversations and random comments. Frequently I hear people complaining about kids walking around museums, holding their phones and texting.

“Those kids are not paying any attention.”
“They’re being disrespectful and not listening.”
“How can they be in a museum and not be completely absorbed by the history and art that’s right in front of them?”

I have one of those kids. She’s attached to her phone. It’s her connection to the world beyond school and family. I’ll admit that I’ve been frustrated on occasion because I want her to communicate the way I did when I was 15. But, she doesn’t. She is very much of her generation. And, she texts when we’re at museums.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who also happens to be the director of a small museum. Our conversation was about kids, cell phones and museums. She said that very often those kids are texting about what they’re doing at that very moment. They’re sharing information about their world. My friend told me that if they’re texting about her museum, that’s great. She says that a kid will listen to another kid and that they’re communicating with each other in a way she never can.

In fact, my daughter volunteers at the Carnegie Museum of Montgomery County. At their recent Pi Day event, she texted some friends about what she was doing that day. Later, those friends came to the museum. It seems to me that we should stop being frustrated by those kids and their phones and embrace the fact that they are our connection to new audiences.

Kids communicate better with each other than with adults. They do what their peers do. They share their cool moments. When those cool moments include museums, they’ll text/tweet/chat about it.

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Tamara Hemmerlein is the Hoosier Heritage Alliance coordinator at IHS. She will be traveling all over Indiana to advocate for good collections stewardship. Tamara loves mashed potatoes and ice cream, but not together.

Defining a History High

Wilma Moore — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:45:00 -0400

: Indianapolis High School was located on Pennsylvania the years that Mary Rann attended. The school moved to the Pennsylvania building in 1872, the year that Rann started her freshman year. (Bass Photo Co. Collection, IHS)

One of the things that I enjoy about my work at the Indiana Historical Society is the interrelatedness of our collections and, through those collections, my introduction to ordinary people – the common men and women of history, many who have done extraordinary things.

Though we have much material at the William H. Smith Library dating from the Old Northwest Territory period and earlier until the present time that focuses on the famous and infamous, most of our more than 50,000 printed cataloged items (including books, pamphlets, periodicals, broadsides, sheet music and maps), 1.7 million photographs, 5,400 manuscript collections, 3,400 artifacts and paintings, and 57,000 online digital images give evidence to the lives of little- or lesser-known individuals.

: Records from Indianapolis High School in 1876 reflect that its first African-American student, Mary Rann (see line 25), graduated with an 84 average. Her highest grades were in chemistry and literature. (Click to see larger image.)

Several years ago when Laura Sheerin Gaus wrote Shortridge High School, 1864-1981, in retrospect, she included a reference to Mary Rann, the first African-American student to gain entrance to Indianapolis High School (later Shortridge). Prior to Gaus’ 1985 book, Pastor Moses Broyles (History of Second Baptist Church) detailed the advocacy work of he and others to get Rann enrolled in the high school in 1872.

The school was located on the northwest corner of the Circle and Market Street, later moving to Pennsylvania Street, before opening at 3401 N. Meridian St., its current location. With help from Abram C. Shortridge, then superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools, Rann enrolled and graduated in 1876.

One day when I was in the vault researching an unrelated reference inquiry, I looked at the Record of Examinations, 1868–1883 (M0482, Shortridge High School Collection). As my eyes scrolled down a page, I came across some 1876 student grades. Before I thought to look for it, Mary Rann’s name stood out on the page. I was ecstatic.

It was a history high moment.

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Wilma Moore is senior archivist, African-American History at IHS. She loves her family – especially those grandchildren – and helping her patrons find historical context, facts and texture for their story boards.

Historical Marion County Court Record Index Available Online

Teresa Baer — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:20:00 -0400

: Marion County Courthouse, 1920. This building served as the Marion County Courthouse from 1877 to 1962.

The Indiana Digital Archives has made available new materials for researchers interested in Indiana’s heritage. The Marion County Court Records Index includes information on nearly 130,000 court records created between 1822 and 1930. The database includes case files, bonds and licenses, summonses, subpoenas, jury lists and coroner’s inquests.

This index encompasses most of the records transferred to the Indiana State Archives during the early 1960s by the Marion County Clerk. It includes the first session of the Marion County Circuit Court in 1822, the 1829 establishment of a probate court, the courts of common pleas, and the 1871 establishment of the Superior Court of Marion County.

“The inclusion of the Marion County Court records into the Indiana Digital Archives creates one of the best resources for legal research and genealogy in the state,” says Jim Corridan, Indiana State Archivist." This database brings to life the stories of thousands of Hoosiers and the legal conflicts faced by our ancestors.”

While not all of the Marion County Court documents have survived, Marion County court order books and complete record books are available at the State Archives for further research. Marion County court documents created after 1930 are not included in this database.

The Marion County Court records were indexed by Indiana State Archives volunteer Mary Etta Boren, who began working on the project in 2005. Friends of the Indiana State Archives volunteers have been hard at work for nearly two decades creating indices for many of the state's records. From before statehood in 1816 and on through to its approaching bicentennial, Indiana has been home to millions of settlers and immigrants. The Digital Archives enables Hoosiers and people worldwide to view the vast collection of historical and vital records housed at the Indiana State Archives.

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Teresa Baer is managing editor of Family History Publications at the IHS Press, which includes THG: Connections, Online Connections, ethnic and migration history, and children’s and young adult books. She loves playing with her grandkids, exploring the great outdoors and discovering information about her ancestors.

Let's Put Our Heads Together

Becca Beck — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 10:45:00 -0500

The Indiana Bicentennial Train will make its debut this fall in northern Indiana. An exhibit on the train will look at pieces of Indiana's 200 years of history while tents outside the train will contain hands-on activities, a first-person interpreter, and a community art space. It will be free to visit, and school groups are encouraged to make a reservation and attend.

While brainstorming activities for the tent, we hit a road block. We knew we wanted to use maps from our library's vast collection but struggled to come up with a way to get young people engaged on site. Our solution was to go straight to the source: collaborate with a school.

Luckily for us, Decatur Township Schools on the southwest side of Indianapolis were already doing project-based learning with their kids. They present learners (students are called learners in this environment) with real-world problems so they can work on solutions that are relevant and usable. Corporate and organizational partners are used as much as possible. Each learner has a netbook and is encouraged to use Twitter to communicate. (Follow them @ApexNTCommunity.)

I met with a small group of bright 6th and 8th graders yesterday and was impressed with their professionalism. I gave them an overview of the train project, a list of suggested maps from our collection and sent them on their way. We regroup in a few weeks to see what ideas they have come up with. I am so excited to work with this group and can't wait to hear their ideas.

Often in our "adult" world, we try to create things we think kids would like. Then, we evaluate our ideas after they have been completed. I challenge my colleagues in the museum world and beyond to think of young people first and get their ideas in the brainstorming phase. Kids are smart – let's treat them that way.

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Becca Beck is the assistant director of education and communication engagement at IHS. She loves making Indiana history fun for students.

Three Weeks to Go!

Sarah Anderson — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:35:00 -0500

This is my favorite part of exhibit design. It's that time in the process when all the planning and designing starts to come together. Last week, you might remember the You Are There space looking like this:

Well, as you can see from how it looks this week, our fabricators, Roger and Jim, are well on their way to completely transforming the space:

After removing all the brick and painting everything black, they are now installing the wood planks that will make up the walls of our 1913 relief station.

We have big plans for the room that prepares our visitors before they travel back in time. Some of you might remember the little room that we had for our Prohibition exhibit being on the cozy side. Our team decided to extend that space into a larger exhibit room that will be able to adequately house all the important content we have planned.

Our design interns from Herron School of Art and Design, Cory and Ellie, spent a lot of time in the room during its construction. Being in the space with your sketchbook in hand really helps your designs translate from drawings into physical objects.

Roger and Jim extended the walls, drywalled and prepared the space for painting.

The space will be very dramatic. We are blowing up two images of the destruction from the 1913 flood from our collection and wallpapering the space. Our interns from the Art Institute of Indianapolis, Lani and Jojo, painted the walls last week. This creates a nice smooth surface for the large images.

Things are very busy in our studio. The team is working hard on all the little elements that will come together over the next three weeks.

Lani is making a custom font based on period appropriate hand writing just for this exhibit. We will use the final font throughout the relief station. We always reference original items from the time period when dressing the space. These custom reproductions make each You Are There space unique and realistic.

The larger items are worked on, in stages, by multiple people. The Senior Director of Information Technology, Luke, has been spending time in our studio testing out an interactive developed by our design intern, Ellie.

Ellie has been designing and developing this beautiful touchscreen interactive for the exhibit for many weeks. When using the touchscreen, the user will feel like they are looking at images through a window. Roger built this custom box for the touchscreen inside a vintage window. It is gorgeous in person. I can't wait for the touchscreen to be installed inside and see it hung on the wall.

It's all starting to come together. Check back in a week to see how far we've come!

You Are There 1913: A City Under Water opens to the public on March 26th.

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Sarah Anderson is the exhibit designer for IHS. Sarah is a TEDTalk loving, digital artist with a passion for design thinking.

Waiting, Wondering and Worrying About the Weather

Amy Lamb — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 08:55:00 -0500

: WISH-TV Chief Meteorologist Steve Bray tells viewers what's on the way for March 25, 1913.

Each year, as I prepare for my family’s annual summer trip to Michigan, I pull up the 10-day extended forecast. Without it, I am powerless to pack, as the temperature can fluctuate more than 40 degrees from year to year. If it looks like a lot of rain is heading that way, we might even adjust our travel dates in an effort to enjoy sunnier skies.

While modern weather monitoring and tracking have been beneficial to me on things like this, today’s ability to predict the arrival of severe weather has helped people prepare for (or even flee) catastrophes and saved countless lives. Unfortunately for Hoosiers from a century ago, they couldn’t flip on a television set to get the latest, breaking coverage as events of the Great Flood of 1913 began to unfold. But what if they could have?

To arm our guests with some background and perspective that will help them maximize their experience in our upcoming You Are There 1913: A City Under Water, we teamed up with our friends at WISH-TV 8 to create an imagined but fact-inspired newscast for March 25, 1913 – when the waters were rising in Indianapolis, but the levees had not yet broken.

The report features Daybreak anchor Scott Sander relating local and regional news and a report from chief meteorologist Steve Bray about what weather has contributed to the current situation – as well as what is still on the way. Guests can even catch a phone-in, eyewitness account of the rising waters from 10-year-old Indianapolis resident Adeline Claghorn (voiced by Emma Hermacinski, daughter of WISH-TV reporter Jay Hermacinski).

It’s hard to imagine how modern meteorology would have changed the lives of the characters you’ll meet when you step back in time to the Wulf’s Hall relief station on March 31, 1913. Even so, I think you’ll be inspired by the way Hoosiers were able to band together to help one another in the wake of disaster. I hope you’ll visit us when A City Under Water opens on March 26!

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Amy Lamb is media relations manager at IHS. While she believes in being personable and professional, she also understands the value of having a well-stocked candy dish in her office.

Online Games of Today = Secret Societies of the Last Century?

Stacy Klingler — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:00:00 -0500

At a recent In Your Neighborhood meeting, Erin Kelley (our director of Education and Community Engagement) noticed an interesting collection of costumes and props from a secret society on display at the Dearborn County Historical Society. She compared the way people would dress up and take on a role in those secret societies to what today's online gamers do in creating an avatar or virtual character and playing a role within the game.

Her observation really made me think. When I've read about historical secret societies (like The Supreme Tribe of Ben Hur), they've seemed so foreign to me. How strange to imagine grown men dressing in costume or performing rituals. And there is also the darker side of many of these groups which frequently excluded people of color, non-Protestants, and women when they were formed. While it was clear that the appeal of "being a member of the club" was compelling, I just couldn't see the attraction.

But I know lots of people who really enjoy creating avatars and interacting with each other. In the gaming world, you have the chance to be whatever kind of person (or creature, for that matter) you want to be. You can do things you wouldn't normally do in your regular life. And you belong to a community.

Now when I imagine a secret society functioning in the same way, I get it. Erin's comparison suddenly opened up a new way for me to connect to an unfamiliar piece of the past. That is what all good historians, storytellers, docents and teachers do.

I shouldn't have been surprised that Erin might make this kind of observation, because she is often thinking about ties between popular culture and history. We always benefit from stealing some time from other IHS staff members to talk with local history organizations. I can't wait to see how her summer program, which includes public health response to disease outbreaks (like polio), disaster response (like that to the Flood of 1913), zombies, and oral history turns out!

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Stacy Klingler is assistant director of Local History Services at IHS. Along with the other LHS team members, she travels the state assisting local history organizations. She loves her job because it’s never the same thing twice, unless she has to make a U-turn at Main Street.

A Reintroduction to National History Day (in Indiana)

Matt Durrett — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:00:00 -0500

In her call for improving history education in the US, Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day argues, “The media, policy makers, and pundits are quick to point out the negative and report on what is not working. But where are the discussions on the demand for evidence-based, wide-ranging, effective, innovative approaches to teaching history?”[1]

Indeed, just as National History Day has been around since the 1970s, it has withstood the test of time and continues to serve as a valuable program for teachers and students across the nation, including more than 4,000 in Indiana. Here is why:

This spring, hundreds of those sixth- through 12th-grade students, teachers and families will gather on college campuses around the state to take part in the National History Day in Indiana program. Local district contests will take place at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame on February 23, IUPUI in Indianapolis on March 9 and Brown County High School in Nashville on April 6. Finalists from each contest will advance to the State Contest at Marian University in Indianapolis on April 27, where state winners will advance to the national contest in June.

National History Day students work in groups or as individuals with an annual theme on a topic of their choosing, whether it is ancient or modern, local, state, national or world history. This year’s theme is Turning Points in History: People, Ideas, Events. Students will present projects in the form of exhibits, documentaries, websites, papers and performances at each contest.

Through creating these projects, NHDI students will conduct primary and secondary research, analyze information and build projects reflecting their interpretations of history, and then defend their work through interviews with professionals. Students have the opportunity to study a topic of their choice, work with a medium of interest to them and practice and develop important 21st Century Learning skills through teamwork, academic research and analysis, time management and interviews.

National History Day has been endorsed by several national professional organizations including the American Association for State and Local History, Organization of American Historians and the National Council for the Social Studies. Arguing the importance of historical literacy for the modern job market, Norm Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin even endorsed NHD, stating that the skills developed with History Day are “skills needed across a broad range of subjects and disciplines.”[2]

Because there are so many options with History Day, students who traditionally struggle in social studies and other classes often excel with NHD. Further, studies have shown that participating students perform better in social studies and other classes, on standardized tests and are better writers than their non-participating peers. The same students also show improved interest in academic subjects which may wane in high school.[3]

So if you are tired of hearing in the media about what doesn’t work in education, come be a part of what really does. Whether you are a teacher, student, history or education professional or just a history buff, we encourage you to get involved with this program. Teachers can tailor the program to meet the needs of their students, classroom, or history club and NHDI relies heavily on volunteer judges for contests.

National History Day in Indiana is sponsored by the Indiana Historical Society. For more information about the program, visit www.indianahistory.org/historyday or call (317) 233-9559.

This article appeared in the winter ICSS Viewpoints Newsletter.

[1] Cathy Gorn, “National History Day Works,” OAH Magazine of History 26, no. 3 (2012): 9-12.

[2] Norm Augustine, “The Education Our Economy Needs,” Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2011.

[3] National History Day Works: National Program Evaluation, http://www.nhd.org/nhdworks.htm

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Making of You Are There 1913: A City Under Water

Sarah Anderson — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Our latest You Are There exhibit will take visitors back in time to experience an Indianapolis relief station in the midst of the 1913 floods that ravaged the Midwest.

The flood exhibit is being installed in the space that once was You Are There 1920: Busted! Prohibition Enforced. While it is sad to see an exhibit go, especially one that was as beloved as our 1920s police station, I do love a good before and after.

This tear-down has been quite remarkable! Our fabricators, Roger and Jim, have been working very hard, tearing down walls and pulling down the brick, even moving an extremely heavy vintage jail cell!

I will be posting weekly updates of the build so you can witness the transformation yourself. Be sure to come check out this exhibit on March 26!

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Sarah Anderson is the exhibit designer for IHS. Sarah is a TEDTalk loving, digital artist with a passion for design thinking.