Bunk for Educators

• Within the first few days of an event, when most reporting is still seeking to explain it and its immediate context, try searching for related themes in Bunk to situate the event in a deeper historical context.
• Over the following weeks and months, as that historical context begins to take shape in published commentary, revisit Bunk to see how search results using the same keywords begin to uncover a broader range of interpretations.
• To keep track of articles to share or to return to yourself, create and annotate a Bunk Collection. You can continue to update and re-finalize it with the same shareable URL as needed.

This collection on January 6th tracks public discourse from the days immediately following the event through subsequent attempts by scholars and journalists to make sense of it and situate it in a broader historical context.

• Start with one piece in Bunk that you would like to assign.
• To find another interpretation of the same specific event or topic, browse the items on that event or topic’s tag page, filter those items by another tag, or select one of the “Go Deeper” tags to find content connected to a narrower concept.
• Click through the Idea connections that appear alongside that first piece to see other pieces that share a cluster of specific themes — or a single, broad, abstract theme — with it.
• Click through the People and Places connections to find other articles that discuss the same historical figures and settings.

• From the tag page for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, you might decide to assign a Washington Post piece about memorialization, alongside one from Timeline that discusses it in the context of Jewish immigrant workers organizing for labor rights, and a third from Zócalo Public Square situating it within the broader history of “fast fashion.”
• Looking at the Idea connections for the Washington Post piece about memorialization, you might discover other pieces about monument design, such as this reflection on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by that memorial’s designer, Maya Lin.
• From the same Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire piece, you might also explore the Person connections, and find this piece in Contingent Magazine about Labor Secretary Frances Perkins’ work on behalf of immigrants, which was profoundly shaped by her labor activism in the wake of the fire. Or you might look at the Place connections to pair the piece about the fire with one about other notable events in Greenwich Village, such as the formation of the feminist Heterodox Club at around the same time.

• Search or browse to find a piece you would like to use.
• To find another piece that discusses the same themes but in a different timeframe, look at the “Previously” and “Later” Time connections.
• Alternatively, search or browse for an Exhibit on a theme you would like to address. Each exhibit column consists of a set of articles related to a subcategory of the exhibit’s theme, and is automatically updated as Bunk indexes new items relevant to its theme.

• You’ve decided to have students read this Nursing Clio article about Moravian women nurses during North Carolina’s 1779 smallpox epidemic.
• Using the Time connections, you might look for stories about earlier instances of smallpox, or stories about women’s nursing expertise in subsequent epidemics such as the 1918 flu.
• If you wanted to dig into the themes of that piece more broadly, you might check out the thematic exhibits on Epidemic Proportions or Gender in America.

Here are a few question to ask of any piece that uses current events to frame history writing or uses the past to comment on the present:

• What is going on today that reminds these authors of a particular historical event?
• What, if anything, do they think we can learn from comparing the present to the past?
• Do they see past events as continuous with those of the present?
• Do they see the past as fundamentally different from our present, or caution against making direct analogies? If so, how might a consideration of the past still be useful, even if it is not directly analogous to the present?

You’re teaching about McCarthyism, a historical episode that has been referenced in recent public discourse about a range of topics in the headlines.

Through a combination of browsing the tag pages of ideas and people that are relevant to the era (e.g., Second Red Scare, HUAC, Joseph McCarthy), and exploring Idea and Time connections on some of the articles, you find several possible readings:

• These three perspectives on the end of the Red Scare could form the basis of a conversation about how authors are using history to talk about our possible futures, and how the past can be a source of guidance through challenging times in the present.
• Offering students a choice between two articles on purges of federal workers, or two articles on the deportation of immigrants, could form the basis of a written response that expands beyond the themes commonly addressed in course materials about the Red Scare.

Working individually or in groups, have students select a story from Bunk that especially interests them. Then consider these questions:

• What did you think this piece was going to be about?
• What was it actually about?
• Does it connect with any events or themes we’ve talked about previously in this class? How?
• Is it making a case about continuities or discontinuities with the past?
• What sources or experts has the author consulted, and how is the author telling you about that sourcing?
• What, if anything, can you determine about the author’s training, credentials, or expertise, and why they think you should pay attention to their interpretation?
• What, if anything, can you tell about the author’s (or publication’s) ideological perspective?

As a recurring weekly assignment, send students to Bunk to find a piece that’s either newly published, or newly relevant because of the themes it covers.

• Have students browse Bunk Connections or individual tag pages to find one or two other articles that could be worthwhile to put into conversation with that article. How does having this additional perspective on the same themes deepen their understanding of those themes?

• Offer students a set of parameters to guide their explorations, and introduce them to the tools in Bunk that they can use to find related historical interpretations.
• Give students chronological parameters (e.g. 1890-1945), and offer a choice of broad themes to explore more deeply (e.g. environment, legal history, or Latinos).
• Send students to Bunk Places and suggest they try mapping several different key terms that might relate to their topic. Filter the results by date range, and explore the results, skimming or reading the preview excerpts of different pieces until they find three interesting stories from different places that they can then read in their entirety as the basis for a written or oral assignment.
• The assignment could be repeated throughout the semester – either by having students trace the same theme, or by offering different sets of themes for each unit.

Build a Bunk Collection that:

• includes three different perspectives on the same theme
• explores intersections between the course’s theme and another theme of your choosing
• tells a story about a theme, with a beginning, middle, and end
• profiles a place or a person
• consists entirely of pieces you disagree with, and explains what you find lacking in the authors’ perspectives 
• includes a cultural, political, and biographical approach to the same theme or event
• explores the history of something you like to do
• explores the history of something related to your major or prospective career

Courtesy of Gianluca Defazio, and two of his students, from an upper-level undergraduate Justice Studies class at James Madison University. Students were instructed to create Bunk Collections containing at least five stories directly related to the issue of racial violence AND another aspect of our past (e.g. Virginia, the South, gender, media representation, memory, etc.). Using the Annotations field, they were asked to summarize each story’s content and suggest at least one question or point of discussion spurred by that reading.

Sample student work:

• Collection on Lynching, Race Riots, and Police Brutality
• Collection on Media and Racial Violence

Explain that identifying a topic for research and familiarizing oneself with existing historical interpretations is an iterative process that includes finding materials, reading and analyzing them, and reframing questions based on new understandings.

• This can help set the expectation that this process will involve scanning titles, subtitles, and tags associated with some pieces and skimming the previewed excerpt; it will require more carefully reading the previewed excerpt for other pieces; and it will involve reading the full text of some articles in their original locations.

Introduce students to the various entry points into Bunk that they can use to begin their explorations. 

• To find interpretations of a topic, use the Search. 
• To browse a more general area of interest (say, religion, or foreign policy) select a Category. 
• To find materials about a particular location, browse the Places map. 
• To get ideas from scratch, start browsing – try looking at the Exhibits, Categories, Places, or Excerpts pages.

Suggest ways to find additional content related to a piece students have read. The tags listed in the Connection view, which show the themes that piece shares with other pieces, can also help make visible the themes they can use to understand and analyze the article itself, or provide ideas for additional search terms.

• To find another take on the same event or issue, browse the results on the tag page for your key term, filter by another tag, or select one of the “Go Deeper” tags to find a narrower concept.
• To find another article that shares a cluster of themes, or shares a broad abstract theme but approaches it through a very different example, look at the Idea connections.
• To find another article that discusses the same people or places, look at the People or Places connections.
• To find another piece that discusses the same themes but in a different timeframe, look at the “Previously” and “Later” Time connections.
• To find another piece that discusses different events that happened at the same time, look at the “Meanwhile” connections.

Show students how to begin building a Collection, and provide guidance on your expectations for their annotations. 

• One possibility is a collection that functions as an annotated bibliography, where students summarize each piece’s argument, or comment on why they chose it and what it adds to their project. Analytical writing could be required for the description and annotations to make the collection itself the final product. This may require students to record initial notes when they add the, but then read in full each piece they chose and write an annotation at the end of the process. 
• Another model may be a more informal collection that serves as a record of their path through Bunk, noting how they found each piece and what stood out to them as important.
• Use the Assignments tool to convey written directions to students, and to create a submission link that emails their completed collection URLs to you.

• Sample student-created collection on originalism.
• Sample collection as a record of work-in-progress, on public land in the west.