This website is the product of a sabbatical project undertaken for Mott Community College during the Winter 2014 semester.
Although this project has a number of goals, the main purpose of it, and this website, is the enhance the ability of MCC history faculty (both full- and part-time) to engage students with both the raw materials of history as well as to teach broader skills that transcend the discipline.
Broadly, these skills fall into the three general education outcomes established by Mott Community College:
Not every course at MCC explicitly address all three of these outcomes, history courses, however, are well-positioned to do so. This is particularly true of survey courses, which reach a large number of students and provide ample opportunities to explain the importance of critical thinking, geographical awareness and citizenship. In addition to these general educational outcomes, each history course at MCC also has specific course outcomes in which students must demonstrate competence.
Each resource on this site is keyed to the specific courses, general outcomes, and course-level outcomes appropriate to that resource. Some resources may fall into several categories. For example, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution is significant to the study of the Reconstruction era in which it originated as well as to numerous Supreme Court cases in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In addition to their categorization under general education and course outcomes, resources are also tagged with general keywords such as gender, war, culture, philosophy, religion, and so forth to enhance searching for resources within conceptual frameworks as well as chronological ones.
This site–as well as the goals, ideas, and motivations behind it–are not unique or groundbreaking. Paul Halsall’s Internet History Sourcebooks at Fordham University, MERLOT, and the Hanover Historical Texts Project initiated in 1995 by the late Frank Luttmer (who hired me on to do create scan, OCR, and created webpages of never-before-seen-on-the-Internet historical documents) have been remarkable resources for the past decade or more. My goal in this project is to create a set of resources that go a bit beyond texts to maps, audiovisual, and other types of sources along with learning and assessment activities. I’m hoping that this approach, keyed to our four survey courses (World History to/from 1500, US History to/from 1877) will be especially useful for MCC’s history instructors. Of course, I also hope that it’s useful for anyone else.
Each document or resource has a source listing. This represents the place where I acquired the public domain text. If I acquired it from another website, that website linked may have further details on the provenance of the documents. I have made every effort to verify that materials used or excerpted here that are not my own are in the public domain or (where not in the public domain) that I am within the bounds of either fair use or the specific licensing requirements of the creators. If you are the owner of any material used on this site and you believe it should not be here, please contact me at aaron.gulyas (at) alinamin.net.
Unless otherwise indicated, material on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.
Special thanks and appreciation to:
