Delaware History Day Date is Set!

Students, Teachers, & Parents!

The date for the 2012 Delaware History Day contest has been set! Mark your calendars and get ready for April 21, 2012. We can’t wait to see you all there. We know this year is going to be a great one!

-Kathryne

Wikipedia: Does it Have a Place in Historical Research?

Taken from the 2012 NHD Theme Book

Every year thousands of history teachers nationwide stand in front of their students describing the evils of using an open source encyclopedia for research projects. The teachers promise lower grades and a general unfulfilled life for any student who uses Wikipedia in a research bibliography. But, those same students, who listen to the fiery words and to the threats of their history teachers, continue to use Wikipedia as a “one stop shopping” for all assignments. Why? Partly it is due to the internal assignment alarm that rings twenty four hours before a due date and students find themselves in a “time crunch” to complete a project. But, the real culprit is the confusion for students between a research assignment which takes time and thought and a report which is a summary of a topic. Assigned reports are familiar. Students know the expected format: list the facts and the important events, i.e. the common knowledge about the topic. What better place than Wikipedia to find everything you need for a report? However, it is not appropriate for a historical research project.

 What is historical research?

The definition of historical research is “the process of systematically examining past events to give an account; may involve interpretation to recapture the nuances, personalities, and ideas that influenced these events; to communicate an understanding of past events.” In the classroom we can simplify this definition to mean historical research is the study of the past and we study the past through primary source documents and those who have studied primary source documents or secondary sources.

 Wikipedia is not a primary source. It’s not a secondary source. It can be a tertiary source with caution. But treat it very, very carefully as a tertiary source and here’s why: a critical part of research is to think about the authorship. Who wrote the text becomes as important as what was written. Who is the author and what are his/her credentials? Wikipedia makes the study of authorship impossible because it is written, edited and rewritten by thousands of authors.

 Most encyclopedias are written by a single author or a group of authors whose credentials can easily be researched and verified. Wikipedia is written by 91,000 active contributors. Who are the authors writing for Wikipedia? What is their expertise on the subject? No one knows. With almost 100,000 authors it is impossible to distinguish between what is written by a respected expert in the field and an unsubstantiated fact or opinion written by someone who has an interest in the subject.

Wikipedia readily admits this shortcoming on the “about” Wikipedia page. Wikipedia warns: “Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.”

 In short, the writers for Wikipedia run along a continuum of well respected historians, like James McPherson who contributes to the American Civil War Wikipedia page, to a private citizen who may or may not have any real knowledge of the subject. In the case of research and Wikipedia it can be argued: not all knowledge is created equal.

 If Wikipedia is bad then why is it so popular?

We live in a society where people get their news from 140 character twitter headlines. We like quick information and Wikipedia lends itself well to the summary report. By virtue of its name “Wiki,” meaning fast in Hawaiian, the lure is too great for the procrastinating nature of the high school student faced with mounting assignments. The lure of accessibility and prevalence of Wikipedia pages compound the trap for even the most well-intentioned novice researcher. Virtually every possible historical research topic has a Wikipedia page. The reality for the classroom teacher is with a boasted 78 million visitors per month as of January 2011- Wikipedia is here to stay.4 Teachers need a new game plan to combat the surface level research Wikipedia makes so easy. The answer is not telling students they cannot use Wikipedia but teaching students how to use it wisely.

 Use the Footnotes!

Students who have done historical research before are quick to tell you the golden nuggets of research don’t start appearing until you are at least three layers deep into websites or books. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a tool to use at the beginning of a research project to get ideas. The word encyclopedia comes from the Greek enkyklia paideia, which means “a general knowledge.” The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide an overview of subjects. In research, you stop at an encyclopedia, you look around and then you proceed. It is meant to guide you in the direction of other resources to get more information.

 Encourage students to use what each page offers as a toolkit to proceed onto the mother lode of the research. Point out the: Notes section, References, Further Reading (Historiography) and Outside links and explain how each will take you deeper into the research. The most appealing aspect of Wikipedia is that you can access so much in one place, but students who learn to ignore the temptation to stop at the first page, and instead, dig deeper: layer by layer, link by link, will benefit from Wikipedia. When used this way, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, can help students find incredible primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia is a research tool and should never appear on your bibliography as a historical source.

Think World History Topics Too! Mobs, Muskets, Mattocks, AND Martyrs

Revolutions often began with a government that acted without regard for the needs of a significant segment of society. For example, the Stuart monarchs in England attempted to raise taxes illegally without the consent of Parliament, a political conflict that would soon alienate the middle class gentry and divide England into armed camps of Royalist and Parliamentary supporters. As both the American and French Revolutions demonstrated, there is usually a group of discontented middle class members of society who galvanize support against arbitrary government policies, and they will often mobilize the masses of laborers in a climactic event – such as the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor, or the storming of the Bastille – to force the conservative members of the government to allow moderate gains.

 In most cases, the period of moderation does not last. Frequently a radical group will emerge and wrest power away from the moderates. In the example from the French Revolution, this was known as the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins effectively mobilized the working class sans-culottes of France to remove all opposition and established a republic founded upon the blood of the guillotine. During the Reign of Terror, a revolution was at its most radical stage, and it was a period in which absolute love of nation was required above all other devotions – including religious devotion –to remove all enemies. The National Socialist revolution in 1930s Germany created the idea of demonic rivals around every corner, enemies (namely Communist, Jews, homosexuals, and the mentally or morally “infirm”) that the Nazis said needed to be eliminated in the name of purifying the German Reich.

 There are important questions to ask of any revolution: When is the revolution over? How did society change? Was the society better? Did the changes indicate progress? Or, did the society suffer and were the results more negative than positive? These are the “So what?” questions that beg the NHD student to explain the significance of the revolution. As an example, the British Glorious Revolution of 1688 demonstrated that the Parliament had established Constitutionalism, which markedly differed from European Absolutism, thus demonstrating progress. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union in 1989 may be interpreted as the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution.

 Not all revolutions involve bloodshed, the toppling of antiquated regimes, or the removal of religion in favor of zealous love of the nation. Many of the most profound revolutions have occurred simply through the publication of a book, the spread of an idea, or the development of a new theory – all of which can have both dramatic and even dangerous, impacts on society. History is full of revolutionary ideas, and what made these ideas revolutionary is the fact that they challenged the status quo, destroyed old ways of thought, and ushered in new eras of thinking – a process that Georg Hegel refers to as “dialectics”. The world once stood still – or so everyone thought.

Nicolas Copernicus’s Heliocentric Theory of the universe argued that the Earth was not immobile, but moving constantly around a stationary sun. In just over a century, Sir Isaac Newton would prove through mathematics and experimentation that not only was Copernicus right, but that a thousand years of scientific philosophy had been wrong – nothing short of revolutionary! To what degree were these changes the result of their individual genius or the structure of scientific knowledge at the time? The Enlightenment was a time period in which liberal philosophes challenged the standard theories of government, religion, economics, and society, and applied progressive ideas intended to better society. Thinkers like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were jailed; they were censored; their books were burned; but the intellectual spark that they ignited set the modern world ablaze with new ideas that bettered governments and societies. If the Enlightenment is the structure by which these ideas took root, to what degree are the philosophes responsible for shaping the events? The cottage industries of Europe could never produce enough goods to meet the demand of large markets, thus the ability of modern capitalist business owners to harness the power of coal, steam, and labor in the Industrial Revolution not only allowed industrial nations to exceed existing demands for products, but also allowed them to spread their influence around the world. The workers of the industrial world had been subjected to dangerous and oppressive working and living conditions, and it seemed as though their governments were unconcerned. What roles did the leaders play in the shaping of events and bringing about the change? What were the courses of events and how did things change, for either better or worse (or perhaps both)? Societies and ideas often undergo a metamorphosis; however, this process often requires revolutionary changes to foster evolutionary progress. Whether they begin with a mob, a musket, a theory, or a pen, a revolution clashes with the status quo and brings about dramatic change. From the agricultural revolution to the information revolution, European and world history provides particularly fertile ground for the NHD student to analyze the causes, players, and course of revolutions.

 Authors: Thomas C. Rust, Ph.D. is the Montana Affiliate Coordinator and assistant professor of history at Montana State University at Billings. Shane Fairbanks is a European advanced placement teacher at Billings Central Catholic High School, Billings Montana.

 (This is an excerpt. To read the full article, log on to NHD.org.)