Mystifying History: the Great Mysteries Project

The paper describes the marriage of the new pedagogy to the potential of the new technology to create virtual archives around a single event or subject. It focuses on the work of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project which has created three virtual archives of historic documents and images, each focused on a compelling murder, and proposes to create 10 more.

The project has taken the innovative approach that history can and should be fun and internet technology can help make it so. It is not just that each of the websites uses the near universal interest in the mysterious and the macabre to draw students in. What is novel about this project is a teaching method which focuses on giving students the skills to be historians, while providing them with the context needed to make historical judgments. The standard method for teaching history has tended to make students passive consumers of a history which others have put together for them. Not only is this usually uninteresting but students do not acquire the historical skills that would allow them to tell good from bad history: assessing credibility, critical reading, reading for bias, or creating a narrative.

This involves giving students access to archival and other historical records compiled from the main archival repositories, transcribed and translated, so they avoid the most frustrating activity of reading archaic, faded writing and are able to engage in their own language. Previously, only professional historians could justify the time and resources to travel to several archives to compile the necessary documentary record.

The project draws on the new historical pedagogy, sometimes called active learning or Document Based Inquiry, aimed at making students historian-detectives. It is a staged approach to teaching the skills of an historian as early as middle school and making the tasks more complex through high school and to university. The session title Mystifying History is ironic since the main point of using historical mysteries is that through the detective work needed to solve the crimes, the project de-mystifies the complex skills that go into creating a historical narration and argument.

Each virtual archives houses approximately 250 unique documents, 100,000-125,000 words when transcribed (the equivalent of a scholarly book), 100 photographs, 10 maps and the next phase will include 3-dimensional reconstructions of a component of the historical landscape. The project is already in use in over 300 high schools in Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Teachers' guides are available and the websites are available in French and English. They are provided to schools totally free of charge.

John Lutz is an associate professor of history at the University of Victoria and is co-director of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project. Phase One of the project has won two prestigious North American Awards, the NAWEB and MERLOT awards.