Chapter 10: Things Said and Done: Using Digital Tools to Enhance Historical Memory

We would like to offer a view of history, as Carl Becker noted in his 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Society, as the active construction of memory. History thus conceived is personal, relevant, and practical. History as memory helps us to organize our thoughts and plan for future actions. Without historical memory, as Becker (1931) put it, our “to-day would be aimless and [our] to-morrow without significance.” When students organize their memory (or as we sometimes like to say their knowledge of the past), they are actively creating meaning that helps define who they are and what their place is in the world. In this chapter, we examine various skills, dispositions, tools, and systems of support for engaging students in the creation of historical memory. We emphasize digital resources and provide specific guidelines for developing historical memory in the 21st century that include strategies for using information available online and ways to create, share, and communicate our memories online. This chapter includes a review of scholarly ideas related to historical memory and the current uses of technology in history. In addition to describing strategies for helping students thoughtfully develop historical memory, we also provide three detailed lesson plans.