TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY PROJECT

 

A Content-Based Professional Development Program for K-12 History and Social Studies Teachers

Emphasizing historical imagination and historical inquiry methods and tools

Contact: TAHPDX

The Mighty Columbia River

Enjoy a sideshow from our June 2008 tour of the Columbia River (while listening to Woody Guthrie's "Roll On Columbia"). The pictures show the many faces of this mighty river - a tamed river, a working river, a source of beauty and wilderness, recreation, transportation, and livelihood.

[click here to launch the Flash Show] ATTN: Recommend using Internet Explorer browser (Mozilla seems to have trouble with the audio).

You will need FLASH PLAYER to view the sideshow [download here] and an MP3 player (such as QuickTime or Windows MediaPlayer) to listen to the song.

 

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CHECK OUT THE NEW VANPORT GOOGLE EARTH PROJECT

Built in 1943, Vanport was a hastily constructed public housing project designed to provide residences for thousands of workers employed at the Kaiser wartime shipyards in Portland (OR) and Vancouver (WA). At its peak, Vanport had a population of close to 50,000, many of them African-American, and was the second largest city in Oregon. A devastating flood in 1948 destroyed the city. Though Delta Park and the International Raceway now occupy the historic site, Vanport's imprint remains on the landscape, both physically and socially.

The Google Earth project contains layers that show the locations of the apartments, administrative and social buildings, the roads, and water features (the imprints of which can still be seen). Another layer provides points of interest. Click on the points to explore images and narrative about life in Vanport.

[Download the Vanport Google Earth Project]

Note: The Vanport Google Earth project is a zipped file. It will extract into a <Vanport_Google> folder that contains a KMZ file and a subfolder with the images. The KMZ file and the image folder MUST remain together. The Google Earth plug-in is required to launch the KMZ file (see information below).

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Here's another example of some of the wonderful historic GIS data and documents collected for this program.

Oregon Settlement GIS Project

The Oregon Settlement GIS project contains a point layer that shows the original Donation Land Claim holders for the upper Willamette Valley with both census and other genealogical data attached. The dataset also includes a georeferenced mosaic of the original cadastral surveys produced by the General Land Office around 1860. Where did people settle? What are their enduring legacies?

[Download the Oregon Settlement Project Description Here]

[Download the Oregon Settlement Metadata Here]

[Download the ArcView GIS Project File Here - Warning 108mgs]