Tag Archives: motion pictures

April 14, 2014 · 12:43 pm

Videos for the Classroom: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Today marks the 149th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Maybe outside of the JFK killing, it is probably the most documented single homicide in American history. It has been written about to death–and also in reel after reel of film.

Sometimes it’s difficult to weed out the grain from the chaff.

Attached is a PBS documentary about the assassination that gives a pretty good primer about the basics: the planning, the conspirators, the moment at Ford’s Theatre and the aftermath. Just in case the film doesn’t download (as often happens with YouTube) I’ve downloaded a copy: Please email me if you want one.

Video for the Classroom: A Tour through Ancient Rome, courtesy of Khan Academy and Rome Reborn

This is the type of history video Khan Academy needs!

A Tour Through Ancient Rome is a collaboration between Khan and the Rome Reborn project, an initiative to create digital models of Rome from its foundation settlements to its depopulated self during the 6th century CE. This tour is narrated mostly by Rome Reborn director and University of Virginia professor Dr. Bernard Frischer.

The video juxtaposes a magnificent digital rendering of ancient Rome around the year 320 to various modern and ancient images of artifacts, buildings and ruins. Dr. Frischer’s narrative contains none of the boring, linear, rote stock pedantics of other Khan humanities videos. In fact, for a 14-minute video lecture, it’s surprisingly fun to watch.

Khan Academy had better take note: if it wants its history and humanities videos to get the same hits as its math and science films, it had better quit the light-pen Chinese takeout menu-look that it thrives upon and make the videos actually ENGAGING.

…I mean, God forbid kids actually ENJOY learning about history.

Videos for the Classroom: The Western Tradition

As regular followers of the Neighborhood can tell you, I was a pretty dorky kid.

It wasn’t enough that I sat and read the encyclopedia cover to cover. Nor was it enough as a precocious 8 year old explaining human reproduction to my mother–on a crowded city bus.

I actually got up early for school…to watch school on TV.

Especially during middle and high school, I would get up at a ridiculously early hour. Most of the time, it was simply to unwind and have some time to myself before I go off to the drudgery of classes. Usually I could watch a movie on the VHS, or an old show I taped the night before.

Eventually, I was hooked on the most surprising of programs–a college lecture.

Produced by the Annenberg Foundation and broadcast on PBS, The Western Tradition was a 1989 series of 52 televised lectures given by UCLA history professor Eugen Weber. It covered the development of Western civilization from the dawn of agriculture to the technological age, and wove many common themes together into a unified theory: trends in technology, social movements, government, economics, religion and art.

For me, it was an early entry into the world of higher education, and I was hooked.

Not only were the lectures rich, informative and compelling, they were delivered by a professor whose cadence even today is the benchmark for a great college history professor. Dr. Weber was born in Romania and educated at Cambridge, so his Eastern European Oxbridge lilt was both comforting and erudite. His pronunciation of names was impeccable–I thought all professors should sound like that.

Its not really for kids younger than high school age, but these lectures give a great overview of the main topics of Western civilization. They also give kids a heads-up on what is expected of college students–it sure isn’t “accountable talk” and Common Core, is it?

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Tagged as American History, Ancient History, Annenberg Foundation, Cambridge, Communications, Education, education reform, Eugen Weber, European history, History, motion pictures, PBS, religion, Social Sciences, Social studies, Teachers, Teaching, television, U.S. History, Western culture