Making the History of 1989: Sources and Narratives of the Fall of Communism

Making the History of 1989: Sources and Narratives of the Fall of Communism

Making the History of 1989: Sources and Narratives of the Fall of Communism

The goal of Making the History of 1989 is to make visible to teachers and students the events of 1989 and the processes by which historians turn those events into sometimes conflicting narratives, thereby providing students with the sources and intellectual tools they need to be history makers rather than passive consumers of the past. To this end, Making the History of 1989 will create a free website with three key features: a substantial collection of high quality primary sources along with guidance on how to use those sources critically and tools for annotating and organizing the sources; a set of multimedia interviews that make visible the processes by which historians transform events and sources into historical narratives; and a body of teaching materials that give teachers direct guidance on how to teach about 1989 in ways that make “history making” visible and vivid.

04/01/2006

03/31/2009

Kelly Schrum

Mills Kelly

Kelly Schrum

Mills Kelly

Katherine Gustin

Gwen White

Laura Veprek

Pin Wang

Jeremy Boggs

Maureen Connors

Misha Griffith

Kristopher Kelly

Kristin May

Anastasia Mikheeva

Liz Moore

Emily Perdue

Misha Vinokur

Elizabeth Morrow Clark

Bradley Abrams

Maria Bucur

Padraic Kenney

Vladimir Tismaneanu

Gale Stokes

Tom Rushford

Matthew P. Romaniello

Jon Berndt Olsen

James Bjork

Tom Ewing

Cathleen Giustino

Irina Livezeanu

Brian Porter-Szucs

Jennifer Dikes

Laura Thompson

Cynthia Szwajkowski

Elizabeth Ten Dyke

Hugh Agnew

Melissa Bokovoy

David Doellinger

Maura Hametz

Kevin Deegan-Kraus

Jill Massino

Basia Nowak

Tricia Starks

Jennifer Walton

Alan Gevinson

Deanna Wooley

Joel Tannenbaum

National Czech and Slovak Museum & Library

University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Special Collections

Wende Museum

1. 300 primary sources in multiple media formats dealing with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, along with an introductory essay that provides students and teachers with a concise narrative of the central events that led up to the collapse of communism and its aftermath, and tools for analyzing and annotating these sources.

2. Historians Making History: Multimedia interviews with four scholars on how they use a range of sources (official communist documents, government propaganda, opposition polemics, and media coverage), how interpretations of 1989 changed after the communist era archives opened, and how their own interpretations (and those of their colleagues) have been shaped by evolving circumstances.

3. Putting History Making in the Classroom: six Teaching Modules that provide historical context, teaching tools, and strategies for sets of primary sources drawn from the website’s database and ten Teaching Case Studies by experienced scholars and teachers that model strategies for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources.

http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989

National Endowment for the Humanities

German Historical Institute

$190,000 from NEH; $10,000 from German Historical Institute

Cold War International History Project

National Security Archive

Omeka

High school and college students and professors