Lincoln Telegrams

What is it about?

The Lincoln Telegrams project (http://lincolntelegrams.com) includes over three hundred digitized telegram memos written by President Abraham Lincoln between March 10, 1864 and April 12, 1865. In addition, detailed historical information is available on a project blog and a project wiki. The project is presented by the Digital History and Pedagogy Project (http://dhpp.org) and is the product of collaboration among teacher education students and classroom social studies teachers. This iPad app presents the telegrams and historical analysis conducted by project collaborators. The analysis was done using an historical thinking heuristic called SCIM-C, which was developed by Hick, Doolittle and Ewing (http://historicalinquiry.com) to scaffold historical thinking. The SCIM-C scaffold includes specific questions designed to support five cognitive activities inherent in historical thinking including, summarizing historical content, contextualizing the content, inferring from that content, monitoring these processes, and corroborating emerging historical findings. The telegram memos were scanned by teacher education students who also conducted the historical analysis presented on this app and the Lincoln Telegrams wiki (http://wiki.lincolntelegrams.com). Learners of all ages are invited to use the this app, as well as blog and wiki content to investigate a wide range of topics related to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Teachers can use the content to explore with their students a wide range of curriculum topics. For example, in science students can examine the technology of the telegraph and the use of dielectric electrical insulators on telegraph wires. English teachers and students can examine the communicative forms of writing that were used in telegram writing. History teachers and students can explore the ways in which Lincoln used telegrams to manage the Union war effort during the Civil War.