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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 3, 2005

Contact: Contact: Mike Emery
713.743.8186 (office)
713.415.6551 (pager)
pemery@uh.edu

HOUSTON, May 3, 2005 – Breathing life into century-old events can be a difficult task, as University of Houston History Professor Steven Mintz knows all too well. The solution, Mintz believes, is to revive the old events with a new approach, and his foresight has recently paid off, literally.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Mintz and his collaborator, Sara McNeil, a specialist in instructional technology and associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction, a grant this month to expand their Web site, “Digital History.” The Web site provides resources and strategies designed to facilitate history research for middle school, high school and college teachers and students.

The grant gives Mintz and McNeil almost $200,000 to expand and enhance the Web site. Their new project, “My History: Students and Teachers as Historians,” will improve “Digital History” with two significant additions.

The first innovation will be called “My Inquiries,” and will give students and teachers access to primary sources on specific topics, such as the music of the American Revolution’s patriots and loyalists and the battle of the Alamo. Mintz hopes this component of his Web site will motivate students to enjoy research and to become historians.
“We seek to transform students from passive recipients of knowledge into active researchers,” he said.

The second major feature, “My Exhibitions,” will give students and teachers the tools to build individualized multimedia presentations. The database infrastructure that powers this innovative tool allows users to draw from more than 800 photographs, art works and digitally stored letters, as well as 500-plus trailers of historically significant films and hundreds of pre-1923 songs.

“Many teachers lack the resources and support they need to teach effectively,” Mintz said. “One of our goals is to provide teachers and students with a wealth of high quality historical materials from leading archives and museums.”

With 15,000 to 20,000 unique visitors each school day, the Digital History Web site seems well on the way to accomplishing this goal by, as Mintz puts it, reaching far more people than could be reached by a printed book.

“Digital History offers a wealth of history resources for audiences that range from middle school teachers to university students, and it is available to the global community totally without charge or advertising,” said McNeil. “With the online textbook, multimedia materials, visual histories, and interactive activities, Digital History provides an extensive selection of learning materials for all ages as well as all types of learners.”

Mintz, a specialist in the history of families, childhood and slavery, has been teaching at UH since 1981. He has authored 12 books, most recently the award-winning “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” which was published in fall 2004. In addition to receiving the NEH grant, Mintz and McNeil’s Web site “Digital History,” initially established in 2000, was also named one of the Top Five Web sites in U.S. History by Best of History Web sites. It also was selected as one of the best Web sites for secondary teachers by the International Society of Technology in Education, and was placed on NEH’s EDSITEment list of exemplary resources in the humanities.

McNeil and her students in the Instructional Technology graduate program in the Curriculum and Instruction Department designed the Digital History Web site and continue to develop both the visual and multimedia elements. McNeil has been teaching in the College of Education at UH since 1995 and has received both the University’s Teaching Excellence Award and the Distance Education Teaching Excellence Award. She will continue to work with Mintz creating the exhibitions, chronologies, templates and databases for the Web site, and transforming the historical content into innovative and exciting hands-on activities.

For more information on the Digital History Web site, visit www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.

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