Author: Palin

"Was 1968 America's Bloodiest Year in Politics?" That question, the subject of a web article at History.com by George Washington University professor Matthew Dallek, became the focus of an end-of-year digital history project for my Advanced Placement history students. In attempting to answer the question, they set out to determine, quantitatively, what years within 20th-century… Continue reading Statistically, 1919 Was a Very Bad Year →

I got the blowback I anticipated when I shared my students' most recent digital history project, "If Jefferson had Used Twitter, and if Jefferson were Trump." More than one teacher said the project, in which students text mined Jefferson's papers and Trump's tweets in order to tweet as @notrealTomJeff, was politically biased and inappropriate for… Continue reading Defending @notrealTomJeff →

This post introduces Digital APUSH: Revealing History with Chronicling America, a web project I built with the help of fifteen AP U.S. History students in 2016. The project was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, winning the K-12 prize in the agency’s nationwide historic newspaper data challenge. Besides traveling to DC with a… Continue reading Using Big Data to “Hack” the High School Research Paper →

On the last day of school this year, my AP U.S. History students put the finishing touches on a digital history project they had started in May, following their AP Exam. The collaborative project, on which students contributed individual parts, shared research tasks, and worked with online tools, was my first classroom foray into the… Continue reading Digital History in the High School Classroom →