Teaching Economic History with Online Primary Sources

J. Douglass Klein
Professor of Economics
Union College
Schenectady, New York
e-mail: kleind@union.edu
URL: http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/ECODEPT/kleind

¨ ¨

for presentation at
SYLLABUS99
San Jose, California
July 27, 1999 4:30-5:30 pm

Background

As part of its General Education curriculum, Union College requires all freshmen to take one of several two-course history sequences. Students are then required to take two other courses in literature or civilization that relate to the same period of history. The Economics Department offers a companion course to the American history sequence called Competing Philosophies in U.S. Economic Policy (http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/ECODEPT/kleind/Eco17) which traces important economic policy debates in early U.S. history. The course is taught without a textbook, using almost exclusively eighteenth and nineteenth century primary source materials, and information technology is revolutionizing how the course is taught.

The course examines the differing economic, political, and social philosophies that influenced United States economic policy from colonial times to World War I. The policy issues covered in the course include British mercantile policy in the eighteenth century, tariffs vs. free trade, the establishment of the Bank of the United States, the role of the federal government in funding internal improvements, slavery, women’s suffrage, monetary policy, antitrust laws, and regulation of industry. None of these issues was without controversy, and students look at the economic rationale for the various positions presented by contemporaries. The course also examines current policy debates and encourages students to relate the historical debates to see if and how the issues have changed over time. Advances in information technology have allowed both the content and the design of the course to evolve continuously over the ten years during which it has been offered. The course has become more interesting and more fun from the perspective of both students and teacher.

Teaching in an Electronic Classroom

The first change occurred in 1997 when the course moved from a traditional classroom into an electronic classroom. This room was electronic in the sense that the instructor had a full range of information technology presentation tools. In conjunction with moving into the electronic classroom, course materials were placed online. Initially, the web materials were simply edited versions of the syllabus and research guides previously handed out in class. Quickly, the web site became much more; first with links to supplementary materials and online research tools, and then with links to class notes.

The method of instruction also began to change. Presentation software like Powerpoint has been the butt of many jokes in academia, and we have all seen mind-numbing implementations. There are alternatives. In economics it is certainly true that a picture (or a graph) is worth a thousand words, but economics pictures require a certain logic and vocabulary to understand these pictures. Powerpoint can be used to build up economic graphs a bit at a time, and furthermore, the graphs can be animated, showing the dynamics of a market, for example. The advantages of this approach over a blackboard are threefold.

First, the graph can be drawn with great accuracy. Except for those drawn by the neatest graphic artists, blackboard diagrams often rely on the "big dot" theory, where lines are made to intersect at the desired spot by means of a large dot on the board. This can be very confusing for students. Where exactly is the dot?

Overhead slides, either professionally prepared or prepared by the instructor in advance, can solve this problem, but this leads to the second advantage of computer presentation software. Computer presentations can be animated in ways that are either impossible or awkward on transparencies. (Sliding one overhead transparency over another does not produce a very precise animation.)

Third, in-class presentations can be distributed on the web for students to review (or if desired, preview) outside of class. Notes can be placed on reserve, but that is subject to all of the restrictions of the printed page and the library reserve room.

Graphs are certainly not the only illustrations made more effective in the electronic classroom. Maps can be tailored to illustrate exactly the desired point. A very nice product developed in the mid-1990s at the University of Maryland, called the Great American History Machine, incorporates historical census and election data (from 1790 through 1996) with detailed county-level maps of the United States to permit the visual display of a great quantity of historical social, political and economic data. The electronic classroom permits the rapid display of anything from nineteenth century money, to political cartoons, to today’s newspaper headlines. The best electronic presentation will never replace personal interaction between teacher and student, but it can provide an excellent supplement. It can permit material to be presented more clearly, it can permit points to be emphasized much more quickly and clearly than using a blackboard, and in my experience it permits a greater quantity of material to be covered.

Access to Primary Sources

Access to primary source materials has been one of the biggest challenges in designing and teaching the course, and also an area in which technology has played the most significant role. While there are a number of print anthologies of edited historic documents, none really suited the objectives of the course, which is to introduce students to enduring controversies that have driven economic policy. Union College is more fortunate than many schools in that it has a number of nineteenth century periodicals in its library, and also has a collection of historic government documents on microfiche. It was from these collections that the first set of readings for the course were drawn. There were a number of difficulties. First, nineteenth century documents are often not well indexed. Congressional debates, for example, are indexed only annually. The nineteenth century print index Poole’s Index to Periodic Literature (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,1893) covers many periodicals, but with little detail. Chadwyck-Healey (http://www.chadwyck.com) has published a subscription service on the web called the Periodicals Contents Index. This index covers over 3,500 historical periodicals from 1770, specializing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It offers the benefits of electronic searching, but subscriptions are unfortunately quite expensive.

One very practical problem of researching in historic periodicals is the poor physical condition of many of the documents. The high-acid content of the paper on which the periodicals were printed makes them fragile to handle, and difficult or prohibitively expensive for libraries to maintain. Microfiche, while solving the deterioration problems, is not amenable to casual browsing or searching.

Information technology offers solutions to most of these problems. Digitized texts could be more widely available, less subject to deterioration (although we must still be concerned with media obsolescence), and easily searched and browsed. A number of publishers are making available current publications online. Many newspapers have online editions, some free (like the New York Times; http://www.nytimes.com), and some by subscription (like the Wall Street Journal; http://www.wsj.com , and publishers of academic journals are making their products available to subscribers. The Ultimate Collection of News Links (http://pppp.net/links/news) connects to over 10,000 newspapers around the world. Publishers make available to varying degrees back issues, and search capabilities. Most of these efforts do not go back in time more than a few years.

The JSTOR project, initially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.jstor.org) is a project centered at the University of Michigan with the goal of digitizing over 100 important twentieth century journals in many disciplines. The goal is "to ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide adequate stack space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly journals" (www.jstor.org/about/background.html). This is also a subscription service.

For the purpose of the Competing Philosophies course, however, the most exciting development is the Making of America (MOA) project being done at Cornell University (http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/moa-main_page.html ) and the University of Michigan (http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa), and also funded by the Mellon Foundation. This project has, to date, scanned nearly one million pages from nineteenth century books and periodicals. Pages are first posted on the web as graphic images, but the project’s goals include converting the images to text, so that full text searches will be possible. This project holds the promise of allowing scholars of the nineteenth century to gain a window into a very broad spectrum of writing, an ability previously reserved for more specialized writings, like the plays of Shakespere, the Bible, or Greek tragedies. The appendix to this paper lists a number of other sites with historical sources online.

Both the reading list, and required student research in the Competing Philosophies course is greatly aided by the availability of large quantities of searchable online texts. This means that the course can become much more responsive to current questions and interests. When a student asks, for example, what people thought about issuing greenbacks during the Civil War, research that might before have taken weeks can now be done in minutes. Questions like this can be answered on the fly in class, or better yet, when the course is taught in a computer lab, groups of students can be given the question as a lab assignment.

For more information about teaching economic history with technology, and for updated lists of resources, contact Prof. J. Douglass Klein at (518) 388-6056, e-mail kleind@union.edu, or visit the course web-site at www.union.edu/PUBLIC/ECODEPT/kleind/Eco17. I also maintain "Site of the Week" which contains links to resources which I find particularly useful in designing courses for electronic classrooms. "Site of the Week" contains an extensive list of links to the primary source documents listed above, and others. Suggestions and comments are always welcome.

Appendix: Evolving Electronic Resources for teaching History

The following is a very brief list sources for online primary source materials related to U.S. Economic History, to supplement the sources mentioned above in the text. These resources should be considered as a starting point only, since the web is such a fluid place. More resources are available every day. All of these sites are included in the "Site of the Week" at: http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/ECODEPT/kleind/sow

Carnegie Mellon: The On-line Books Page, and The Universal Library
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html
http://www.ulib.org/
 
Univ. of Pennsylvania: Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI)
http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/
 
Univ. of Michigan and Cornell Univ.: Making of America Project
http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa
http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/moa-main_page.html
 
Northwestern Univ.: Douglass: Archives of American Public Address
http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu
 
Univ. of Virginia: Papers of George Washington; Crossroads project on American Studies; Electronic Text Center
http://minerva.acc.Virginia.EDU/gwpapers
http://xroads.virginia.edu
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu
 
Texas A&M Univ.: Program in Presidential Rhetoric / Presidential Speech Archive
http://www.tamu.edu/scom/pres/archive.html
 
Georgetown Univ.: American Studies Web
http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/asw
 
Yale Univ. School of Law: Avalon Project Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm
 
Columbia Univ., Bartleby Library: Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents; also literary texts
http://www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/inaugural
 
Univ. of Kansas Library: Full-text electronic library
http://www.cc.ukans.edu/carrie/carrie_main.html
 
Univ. of Colorado: Excellent primary source links
http://www.uccs.edu/~history/index/historg.html
 
Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Metalab, library of online books
http://metalab.unc.edu/metalab.shtml
http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/docs/books
 
Furman Univ.: Nineteenth Century Documents Project
http://alpha.furman.edu/~benson/docs
 
Okahoma Univ.: A Chronology of U.S. Historical Documents, Pre-Colonial to 1998
http://www.law.ou.edu/hist/
 
Ohio University: Economic History Services
http://www.eh.net/
 
Rutgers University Library: Documents in British and American History
http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rulib/socsci/hist/amhist.html
 
U.S. Library of Congress: American Memories (audio, video & film as well as text)
http://www.loc.gov 
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem
 
Niskayuna (NY) High School: FDR Cartoon Archives
http://www.wizvax.net/nisk_hs/fdr/FDRcartoons.html
 
Boondocks project
http://www.boondocksnet.com
 
Wiretap: eclectic collection of primary source documents
http://wiretap.area.com/
 
Don Marby: Links to historical documents
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/9061/index.

Page created and maintained by J. Douglass Klein, Union College.  Last modified: 07/24/1999.