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Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Research, http://www .digitalhistory.uh.edu/. Created and maintained by Steven Mintz and the University of Houston, in collaboration with the Chicago Historical Society; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; American Voices: E Pluribus Unum; the National Park Service; and Teachers as Historians-Teaching American History. Reviewed Feb. 20-March 8, 2007.
Digital History is an ambitious and wide-ranging Web site that aims "to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges" through multimedia and interactive content. As such, it takes full advantage of the Internet's potential to offer students access to materials that transcend printed media. It provides, for example, downloadable video lectures presented by such prominent scholars as David Blight, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn; a series of "Digital Stories" that explore a number of topics, including slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; and a Flash-based overview of American history. An easy-to-use module allows users to create their own virtual exhibitions using images available on the site (users cannot, however, upload their own images, undoubtedly as a result of copyright concerns) that can be downloaded and e-mailed as hyper text markup language (HTML) files stored in a zip archive. One of the most innovative and useful elements of Digital History is the "Ask the HyperHistorian" feature, essentially a means for students to ask a professional historian questions that arise from their own exploration of the site's content.
Central to Digital History's content is a wide-ranging selection of over three hundred annotated documents, covering U.S. history from Columbus to the Civil War, which has been culled from the Gilder Lehrman Collection and was originally published by Oxford University Press as The Boisterotts Sea of Liberty in 1998...