How Digital Humanities Is Democratizing History and Civic Education
What If Every Learner Could See Themselves in the Story of America?
I have spent over half my life in a classroom—as a student, classroom teacher, and K12 curriculum specialist, and more recently as I began this third chapter of my journey, working with historians, museum educators, park rangers, geospatial information systems (GIS) analysts in the digital humanities, journalists, and most importantly, classroom teachers and their students.
My love for history and geography, and teaching and learning, is somewhat genetic—my father was a high school history teacher, and several aunts, uncles, and an older sister were all educators. Our family vacations were mapped around frequent stops at historic sites, and weekends were often spent at museums or taking day trips to DC or Williamsburg, the scenic route along Skyline Drive, or exploring Richmond. The Smithsonian was our Disney World. I learned to read by studying the comics section of the Washington Post, and between the pages and maps that arrived in our mailbox each month from National Geographic magazine.
I started my teaching career in Richmond, Virginia in 1989, and within those first three years, two opportunities changed the way I thought about teaching and learning. First, I was “voluntold” to attend a month-long summer institute sponsored by National Geographic, held on the campus of Virginia Tech. It was here I was first introduced to GeoLiteracy as a bridge to teaching all other content, and where my colleagues and I first became aware of something called the World Wide Web. It was also here that geospatial technologies, once reserved for top-secret military intelligence and scientific research, were beginning to find their way into higher education; during our summer at VT, we were trained to become “GeoEvangelists,” tasked with teaching others to use simple GIS maps in the K12 classroom.
Upon returning to school that fall, the second opportunity presented itself at a statewide social studies conference. It was there I discovered a remarkable archive of Civil War records, maps, images, and personal narratives curated by a young professor at the University of Virginia (UVA), Ed Ayers. His session on The Valley of the Shadow project, first launched on the internet in the fall of 1993, and later packaged as CD ROMs, was a portal for our classroom community to explore the human stories behind the Civil War in two opposing communities: nearby Staunton, Virginia and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Using 5 newfangled iMac computers and a dial-up modem, we no longer focused on memorizing battles and generals, but on people—their conflicting stories, beliefs, and lives all intertwined and digitized, as if we could virtually dig through their attic or peek into their diaries and personal correspondence—their life stories before, during and after the war, were at our fingertips.
I continued to explore more digital humanities projects and began integrating them, alongside GIS maps, into my teaching practice. For over 20 years in the classroom, we accessed rich digital content about the people, places, and events that shaped our country, but access to digital tools also brought to light stories that were not in the adopted curriculum, and I began to question my own high school and college history courses. Why didn’t we read more about Indigenous peoples or the lives of enslaved Africans? Why when we visited these early presidential homes was there no evidence on the physical landscape of anyone else who lived and worked there? And why was there an entire avenue of statues that divided our city in half, segregating neighborhoods and perpetuating a version of history grounded more in nostalgia than historical fact?
I began to reframe my “Why.” I went back to school, reading scholars we hadn’t considered in my graduate courses, Indigenous voices like Brenda Child, civil rights activists including Julian Bond and Fannie Lou Hamer, and literature from other voices including Rita Mae Brown and Alice Walker. I stopped using the textbooks and started with examples of local history, then widened the lens to frame the broader, interconnected stories of America. We listened to BackStory on the radio, visited local cemeteries to study immigration through genealogy, and invited Chief Atkins of the local Chickahominy tribe (whose granddaughters were in my class) into our school to share contributions of Indigenous peoples and the many ways their history had been erased from the narrative or distorted in popular culture. We created a local history museum adjacent to the library, and our students curated their own exhibits and gave tours to other classmates. The park rangers at nearby Maggie Walker’s house introduced us to Jackson Ward, a thriving African American business community, one of many bulldozed over in the 1950s-1970s during Urban Renewal to make room for the interstate highway system. We mapped these changes using GIS software and disposable cameras. Holocaust survivors from the Virginia Holocaust Museum shared their stories of loss and survival, and World War II vets allowed us to interview them for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. Our students were now doing history, not just memorizing facts to pass a test. As teachers, we were learning to show and not tell! We were learning alongside our students, becoming facilitators and releasing control to make room for student agency, voice, and choice.
Moving from the classroom to a division-wide role in Charlottesville allowed me to see that our elementary colleagues were under-resourced, with little access to accurate and rich historical content. We replaced outdated worksheet packets with floor maps, hands-on artifact trunks, picture books, and graphic novels that looked like those comics I used to read as a kid, but brought to light the stories of Americans like John Lewis, Shirley Chisholm, and T. Thomas Fortune. Students who previously thought they hated history were now engaged in exploring the toponyms of the streets where they lived, and the names on their sports jerseys, and they had questions—so many questions! “Why do most people in the history books all look the same?” “Didn’t anyone who looks like me ever do anything important?”
We worked with local museums, university faculty, and community civic leaders to develop a local history curriculum where our students could see themselves in American history. Then, in the summer of 2017, came the Unite the Right rally. Suddenly, Charlottesville was a #hashtag, and our local history became national news. Rather than allowing the 24HR news cycle to control the narrative, we created spaces for our students and our community to tell their stories, and Charlottesville’s stories, through art and cartography, and to speak for the voices from the past who were silenced.
Shortly afterward, my path intersected again with now award-winning public historian and past President of the University of Richmond, Ed Ayers, through a mutual friend at UVA. He was still creating digital scholarship projects, including a revamped version of the Valley of the Shadow and using GIS to create interactive maps, presented as a digital atlas entitled American Panorama. At this time, Ayers was launching a new tool, connecting current events to the past with a tool he created called Bunk, and hosting a PBS series, The Future of America’s Past. He thought that some high school Advanced Placement US History teachers might be able to use some of these tools and resources. I quickly shared with him that AP students would certainly benefit, but those kids were already doing pretty well—it’s everyone else we needed to share them with, to help them see themselves in the story of America.
That is when Ayers shared his vision of helping America’s schools and imagining a new way to engage students in exploring the past. What if we empowered teachers and students to use rich digital tools in all K-16 classrooms to explore the untold stories of American history? What if we could let students drill down to see the ways history happens right in their own backyards, including all of our own stories? We launched our New American History website just a month and a half before the pandemic shut down schools across the country, and suddenly, there was a great need for digital tools and resources freely accessible with no passwords, no logins, and no paywalls. Suddenly, communities previously not connected found funding and innovative solutions to connect, and we were poised to meet those challenges in real time.
We expanded our work these past 5 years, bookmarked between the violence and turmoil we saw ignited in Charlottesville, and the Black Lives Matter protests exploding in communities across the country amidst a global pandemic. These events resulted in two of the most contentious election cycles in modern US history, as documented in Bunk, and our digital atlas. These open educational resources invite students, teachers, and learners of all ages and across the country to make connections between past and present. They model inquiry-based learning strategies designed to teach students and community members to ask better questions and seek answers from multiple perspectives. To support the acquisition of these skills, we include opportunities to engage in data analysis, support a claim using evidence, and discover ways to both commemorate and critique our founders, our nation, and our communities. We support high school cartographers mapping stories now used in statewide curricula and as part of museum exhibits. Others are conducting archival research, uncovering and reuniting descendant communities in their rural communities, and publishing their own StoryMaps and editorials in their local newspaper.
New American History welcomes collaborators from across the country, including schools, museums, and non-traditional educational organizations. We are not erasing or rewriting history—we leave that to the TV pundits and rage farmers on social media. We make these tools and resources easily accessible to encourage the next generation of educators, public historians, environmental stewards, first responders, scientists, and policymakers. We wish to spark curiosity and nurture engaged citizens and solutionaries, with a broader understanding of the past, to solve modern problems like climate change, food insecurity, and racial injustices.
This charge may seem daunting, but there is growing support for more inquiry-based curricula and durable skills in all grade levels and content areas. Educators may familiarize themselves with the exemplars linked throughout this essay. A few additional resources are included here to share with your professional learning communities:
On the day Steve Jobs died, I remember I was at a crosswalk in Charlottesville, waiting for the light to change so I could cross the street to teach a middle school civics lesson. When my phone lit up with the news, I paused. I knew that the lesson I had prepared could wait, and for the next hour, I shared with students my personal connection with Jobs, as an educator in Henrico County, Virgina, one of the first 1:1 divisions districts in the country. I shared some thoughts on how remarkable it was that almost every person on the planet was finding out about his passing because they were all holding a device in their hands that he helped to create. I challenged them to think about their own BIG ideas for their futures, and what role they might play in finding innovative ways to identify, research and solve problems on a local to global scale, and improve the lives of others. How might they become the next Steve Jobs of their generation, and how might students sitting in a civics class 100 years from now remember their legacy? It may be one of the best civics lessons we ever had, unscripted, and in the moment.
In a time when civil discourse, data, science and history seem caught in the political crosshairs, I think about those civics students, now in their mid-twenties, working as doctors, lawyers, and teachers (and at least one is a preacher!). Some of them are parents, most of them are still neighbors, and hopefully, all are registered voters.
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Annie Evans is the Director of Education and Outreach for New American History at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Annie has spent over half her life teaching history, civics, and geography in Virginia’s K12 public schools. With New American History, she collaborates with a network of educators across the country to create learning resources to inspire the next generation of educators, public historians, and community leaders. Embracing inquiry and place-based learning, she serves as co-coordinator of the Virginia Geographic Alliance and a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow and Certified Educator.