History Engine

The History Engine is an online educational tool designed by the University of Richmond intended to help students “do history.”  It gives students the opportunity to learn about a topic by doing the work of a historian. They do the research, the writing, and the publishing (to the website’s database). I believe that used correctly this could be an interesting a beneficial tool to use in my classroom.  As described by the HE website, their main goal is to make history creative and collaborative in the classroom. They also don’t want the database to recount well known events that are likely in the textbook or curriculum, but rather small pieces of history that make up the bigger picture. The database is available to other registered users, as well as the public.

Each entry published by the student is called an “episode,” and is uploaded as a final draft. Each episode is a story. It can be from a battle, a person, a congressional act, to a correspondence of letters, or a series of newspaper articles. A finished episode will have a title, a time frame, a location, and tags. The text itself should be comprised of one more primary sources, and they should be contextualized within the framework of secondary sources. At the bottom of the entry there are citations for everything referenced in the episode.  

I played around on the website for a bit, and found that it was easy to use. Aside from the database search and about tab, there are pages for the teacher and for the student. For the teachers, it has a guide on how to get started and how to work HE into their syllabus. There are a ton of tips and way to formulate an assignment and get the full advantage out of it. Under the students tab, there are options for research, writing, and “your goal.” I was unable to log in or create a log in, but the research and writing pages have a lot of tips of how to research.  Registering for HE seemed pretty easy and straightforward.

Searching for a topic was also user friendly. I find that a lot of databases can be confusing or overwhelming if students aren’t familiar with them, but this was just a simple key word search. There was an option for a basic search, as well as an advance search. You can also explore tags and subjects. The results are also laid out so that you can get most of the information you need at a glance. Here’s an example of a search result:

It has the date this event happened (March 25^th, 1911), the location (New York, New York), and the subject tags. It also shows the first couple lines of the entry.

By using this technological tool, students will (hopefully) gain a higher appreciation for primary sources and integrate them into their future researches.