Friday, October 03, 2008

Cartes de Visite in Education

I received an email last night from a woman who has, over the past two years, been researching Civil War veterans with her maiden name. She is also planning to speak to her son's sixth grade class about the Civil War, and this is why she contacted me: Her idea is to give each child a reproduction of a carte de visite of an identified soldier at the beginning of the lesson, and, at the end of the lesson, reveal what became of each soldier. She wants to represent the death toll by having one of every four cartes a soldier who did not survive his war experience.

I am eager to help! I pointed her to my Flickr photostream, which currently numbers sixteen soldiers, and plan to email additional scans.

This is such an unique way to educate children about the Civil War, and I am excited to provide materials to make it happen. It reminds me of two museums in nearby Washington, D.C.: The Holocaust Memorial Museum, which provides visitors with a card that contains the name of a person at the beginning of the visit, and later reveals what happened to that individual, and the International Spy Museum, which allows you to pick a undercover identity, then provides you with basic facts, name, hometown, reason for your visit, which you have to remember while you tur the exhibit.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Art Bergeron said...

The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, a part of Pamplin Historical Park near Petersburg, VA, uses this same concept. When I was the historian there, we established "soldier comrades" to help guide visitors through the exhibits. The impact upon some students when they learned that their comrade had died was tough to watch some times.

8:12 AM  

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