Featured Link: Doing History: Martha Ballard’s Diary Online
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Doing History: Martha Ballard’s Diary Online
Film Study Center, Harvard University
http://DoHistory.org
The combination of primary sources, interactive exercises, and scholarly background materials available on this site makes it a valuable one for students, teachers, and scholars. Martha Ballard, a midwife in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Maine, kept a daily account for over twenty-five years, chronicling her working life (including over 1000 deliveries), family events, and community news. Ballard was the subject of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s prize-winning book, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, as well as Laurie Kahn-Leavitt’s film for PBS’s American Experience, which has its own Website with numerous resources. In part, the "Do History" Website explores how Ulrich and Kahn-Leavitt developed their interpretations, and it incorporates material from both the book and the film.
"Do History" offers visitors the opportunity to engage in historical analysis and exposes them to research methods. Students will enjoy the "Magic Lens," which turns the handwritten diary into legible text. Adding immediacy are video and audio clips from Kahn-Leavitt’s film that accompany selected diary passages. In addition, there is a "History Toolkit" including instructions on how to read eighteenth-century writing, how to read probate records and graveyards, and how to make a time line. Viewers are invited to "do history" by examining materials related to two issues: male midwives and a rape case.
Of special interest on this Website are over three hundred primary-source documents, including the diary, related reference works like a 1737 manual on midwifery, letters, maps, photographs, and other relevant public records.
Developed by the Film Study Center at Harvard and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this Website was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Maine Humanities Council.