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Reconstructing Historical Demography in New Haven
A Work in Progress I want to reconstruct the historical racial demography of New Haven with the longer-term goal of connecting it with patterns in Medical Institution of Yale College student housing and the location of institutions like the hospital. (The Medical Institution has since become the Yale School of Medicine.) Today, housing in New…
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Death and Humors: Project Update
This week I’ve continued to explore using Twine to build the “Death and Humors” game I proposed to teach historical thinking. On the historical source side, I’ve settled on building the game around a subset of Galen’s canonical works about humoral medicine and have extracted some quotes to help direct the players. On the game…
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Introducing Historical Thinking with a Movie
Reviewing Amistad made me realize how useful it could be as a teaching tool, and I can envision showing it in a class on the history of slavery and/or abolition as well as one on representations and memories of slavery (or history in general). I’m particularly interested to use Amistad as a jumping-off point for…
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Amistad, A Review
Being in New Haven and researching local abolitionists and antislavery organizations recently inspired me to rewatch the Steven Spielberg-directed film Amistad (Prod. by Debbie Allen, Steven Spielberg, and Colin Wilson. DreamWorks SKG in association with HBO Pictures, 1997. 2hr. 35 min.). The film narrates the historical case of the slave ship Amistad in 1839 starting…
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Project Update #1 – Gaming Humoral Medicine
I’ve been continuing to think through how the humoral medicine game I proposed would work, especially how it would teach a historical form of thinking. To do that, I’ve experimented with an online game platform called Twine and looked for an appropriate primary source to shape the gameplay and to provide a concrete historical foundation…
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Teaching Humoral Medicine with a Game
As I wrote last week, I’ve begun conceptualizing an online game that teaches people about humoral medicine by having them practice it. By creating a game where players use humoral medicine to treat patients, I hope to have them practice a form of historical thinking that is often simply dismissed today. Reading about historical medical…
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The Unspoken Politics of Teaching Historical Thinking
When historians think and write about teaching history, they commonly point out that history is not just facts, rather it is the interpretation of sources. Accordingly, they have increasing emphasized teaching “historical thinking,” the skills of doing history, in the last few decades. Some historians have suggested that a focus on historical thinking also circumvents…
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Teaching Historical Thinking: What I’ve Learned and Hope to Learn
In the roughly fifteen years between being an undergraduate and earning my PhD, how history is taught at the college level has changed dramatically. Gone are the days when courses were simply a professor lecturing every class period, narrating historical events and their causes (or at least lectures are much less common). The emphasis has…
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Gaming Humoral Medicine
Humoral medicine was the predominant way to understanding sickness and health from the origins of the Western medical tradition in Ancient Greece until the middle of the nineteenth century, and yet people today tend to dismiss it as simply outdated and wrong. Over the summer, I’m going to explore creating an online, in-browser game that…
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The Limits of Digital Public History?
Since the mid-2000s, “Web 2.0” has become the dominant model of using and interacting with the internet. Rather than static pages simply delivering content (the Web 1.0 model), Web 2.0 enables users to add and modify internet content, whether on social media like Facebook and Twitter or on collaborative content platforms like Wikipedia. Public historians…
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Mobile Public History App Review: Clio
I’ve been exploring history and museum apps recently to see how place-based technologies are being used to deliver content and connect with audiences in new ways. I was particularly excited to try out Clio, which promised to be a wide-ranging platform enabling the cataloging and sharing of historical sites, museums, and tours. My experience, however,…
