Three videos.

My friend Al Jacobs played these three videos for our TAH teacher colloquium this afternoon. They are all well worth your time.

For instructions on how you can borrow them for classroom use, click here.

There goes a big chunk of my summer.

When my friend Richard Facebooked “Salt of the Earth (1954)” over the weekend, I almost lost it. For one thing, here was one of the best labor movies ever made entirely online. For another thing, the ENTIRE thing was on YouTube. I had never seen that before.

Then I went to the channel where the movie was posted, and lost it again. Cinevault’s Openflix is an absolute treasure trove of old movies in their entirety. Sure, some of them probably stink, but I’ve seen enough excellent ones there to know there’s a lot of gems too like the best Frank Capra film ever made, “Meet John Doe (1942). Then there’s this piece of great timing, “Royal Wedding (1951).” and more Charlie Chaplin films than I’ve ever seen for free in one place. Mostly it’s shorts, but they also have “The Kid (1921).”

Lord, I’m going to have to stop sleeping now in order to get anything done.

Sounds like I wrote it, but I didn’t.

When Jonathan Nash, the guy with my second favorite Twitter feed after SteveMartinToGo, h/t’ed me on a post entitled “Presidential Libraries on YouTube,” I assumed he must have confused me with one of the several thousand other academic Jonathans out there in the world. But no! AHA Today has indeed built a really good post on that subject playing off the two articles that I’ve written for Perspectives on that subject.

You should definitely read it, and if you already have then go here and volunteer some clips that you use in the comments. While you do that, I’m going to spend the little free time I have today poking around those presidential library resources and save the long post in my head about what a post-coverage model survey class would look like for tomorrow.

Greetings AHA Perspectives readers!

Greetings to all of you who have come over here from my article in AHA Perspectives. If you haven’t, those of you who are AHA members (and therefore have access to it) should definitely click the above link and give that essay a read.

The subject of my piece is teaching history with YouTube. This is actually my second Perspectives article on the subject. [You can read the first one here even if you don't subscribe.] The first article was about where to find video for the history classroom. This one is more about the mechanics and pedagogy of how to use them.

When I wrote that first piece in 2008, the whole idea of using classroom video was novel enough that pointing people to YouTube as a source was a good enough suggestion for Perspectives to print it. When that article came out, I tried to get people to went from that article over to this blog to make some suggestions about what videos they use. Perhaps it’s because people are shy or perhaps it’s because the idea of teaching with YouTube was way ahead of its time, but that post has gotten a grand total of zero comments in all the years since I wrote it.

Eternal optimist that I am and knowing that a lot more people now are teaching history with YouTube than they were back then, I think I’ll repeat the same question I asked three years ago:

What are the best YouTube clips for use in the history classroom?

Please offer your suggestions with links in the comments below.

1960 Kennedy – Nixon Debate (excerpt)

When I first tried teaching history with YouTube, I was immediately struck by how bad the clips from this debate were. This edited section from John F. Kennedy’s opening statement suggests the manner in which he linked domestic politics with the broader Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. It’s also the first video where I’ve tried editing, and while it’s not particularly good editing, at least it’s short.

Timothy Leary’s Last Trip (excerpt).

I hadn’t realized he went to West Point or that he was the first Harvard Professor to get fired since Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Make Mine Freedom,” (1948) (excerpt).

Now that I can edit video, I continue to go a little YouTube crazy. The reason I like this this cartoon produced by the notoriously right wing Harding College in Arkansas is the not-so-subtle insinuation that just about anyone could fall prey to the hidden communists among us:

“The Plow That Broke the Plains” (excerpt)

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I just got back from an iMovie workshop at the Apple Store in Colorado Springs. Despite some problems with converting file forums, I’ve now learned how to edit clips. My plan is to use this knowledge and my YouTube account to download large movies from public sources and edit them down to a size suitable for classroom use, like the one I’ve embedded above.

Look for more appearing in coming days. If you have any suggestions, leave it in the comments.

From “The Jazz Singer (1927).”

I haven’t added a video to my list of YouTube videos for survey classes in a long while, but this one seems fitting: