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Museums are everywhere. Along the Northern Rail Trail in Franklin, New Hampshire, the author came across an old train yard with an interpretive sign indicating, \"the granite blocks you are looking at are all that remains of this eighteenth-century railroad table.\" Of course, trains did not cross the region until the nineteenth century. Not far from this example of inaccurate history, there was a different outdoor display with black and white panels featuring beautiful old pictures of small stations that had once stood along the tracks. A local high school had created these fine interpretations, correctly stating that railroads fueled the growth of mill towns along New England's raging rivers. That walk revealed both the perils and promise of public history exhibits. These panels also suggested that there is nothing new about classes constructing historical exhibits. What has changed is the increasing need to do so--and not merely to get the facts straight. Teaching creatively at the intersection of historical and museum studies offers new opportunities to engage students. At Georgia Tech, undergraduates can take a social science general education class in the history program called \"Introduction to Museum Studies.\" Having taught the class six times, the author has become more convinced of the course's immense value--not just for students who are planning careers in museums. Curation has become a crucial skill for all. This essay seeks to share useful guidelines for other historians who would like to teach such classes, so that more schools can add history studios to the curriculum offerings.

The digital world has unhooked information from authority and created a post-truth ethos, yet it also allows for access to the building blocks of deliberative democratic discussions: sources, evidence, and databases. This article describes an approach to teaching the American history survey utilizing primary source databases as the students' main reading material. This approach, including Open Educational Resources, online teaching strategies, and a shift from \"coverage\" to understanding, created a culture of engagement, motivation, and deliberative discussion. The experience of this online course has turned some students from history haters to history lovers, and from detached civic participants to thoughtful first-time voters. The author will demonstrate how direct access to primary source databases resulted in a class culture of active learning, or \"doing history\"; of critical evaluation not just of historical, but also contemporary sources; and of deliberative discussion among people from diverse perspectives, class positions, and ethnic backgrounds.

Significant research has documented the benefits of using primary materials in the classroom, and for a long time, textbook authors and scholars have collected such materials for in-class student use. Teachers and researchers regularly engage with physical and digital archives as resources for their own research and for classroom materials. At the same time, pedagogy research has begun to explore the benefits of the \"flipped\" or \"inverted\" course model, in which content is delivered outside of class time and hands-on learning occurs in the actual classroom. In this article, the authors discuss the course collaborations of Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) and Bard Early College New Orleans (BECNO) with The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC). Instructors at Xavier and at Bard worked with THNOC staff members to create weekly, semester-long classes held in the archives that engaged archival materials, generated discussion around historical research methods, and resulted in a final presentation of research projects by individual students. In both of these collaborative courses, \"Introduction to Historical Research and Writing\" at XULA and \"Stacks on Stacks on Stacks: From Archival Research to Museum Exhibit\" at BECNO, the instructors and THNOC staff have found teaching directly in the archives to be of immense value. The authors argue that this model provides a highly effective way to (1) impart the value of primary documents to students; (2) inculcate students in proper research methods and practices and empower them as knowledge-producers; and (3) expose students to the careers and praxis of the history graduate.

The investigation of time is at the heart of historians' pursuits. Many also recognize the importance of space, since the chronology of action and ideas necessarily occurs in the physical world. The conscious integration of time and space has found growing favor among scholars recently as the \"spatial turn\" has influenced research across historically minded disciplines. Spatial history approaches have been demonstrated to engage students with the natural and built environments that influenced historical events and decision making. For this reason, many historians are learning to use geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial technologies in their teaching. In this article, the authors argue that historical GIS (HGIS), especially when taken out of the lab and into the landscape, is also well suited to achieve another important pedagogical goal: community-engaged teaching. Many universities and teachers incorporate community engagement and service-learning into their curricula to connect content with real-world applications and to help create civic-minded graduates. This article provides three case studies in which an interdisciplinary team of faculty and graduate students used mobile HGIS technologies to engage students with local communities and heritage organizations. The authors argue that HGIS-based projects integrate space and time in ways that make history immediately relevant and accessible, and, in so doing, promote the cultural value of history in the daily lives of students and their communities.

As a project in a History of American Sport class, the author charged students with researching individuals or issues in Trinity University athletics history in the period from 1950 to 1991. After investigating their subjects in the university's special collections and archives, examining past issues of San Antonio-area newspapers and Trinity University publications, and interviewing at least two individuals, students created an online exhibit dedicated to their subject. To display their work, students used Omeka, which is a free, flexible, and open-source web-publishing platform created for the display of scholarly collections and exhibitions. The author collected data from extra credit interviews and a set of reflective questions that students were required to answer upon completion of their project. Five general categories stood out when the data was examined. Regarding student benefits, they practiced multiperspectivity, frequent critical thinking, and learned different types of life lessons. In terms of the actual project, students expressed higher motivation due to its local history components, and pride in creating a viewable product that displayed their work.