There was an interesting article in the NY Times on Monday about a history fan who is using Twitter to “live-tweet” the events of WWII as if they were happening in real time. The Twitter feed now has hundreds of thousands of followers.
The “live-tweeting” of historic events gives them a real-time urgency and feel. As Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale said “People in the past weren’t living in the past, they were living in their own present. These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”
The article also links to TwHistory (“Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it”) and the Washington Post’s Civil War “live-tweeting” that shows how the Civil War unfolded day by day 150 years ago.
I think both of these projects, and many of the links on the NYTimes article to other projects, could be useful in WHII or USHistory classes. They could spark an inspiration for a classroom project on twitter that could capture students interest as they “live-tweeted” a historic event or era, or even used twitter’s 140-character posts as a “micro-review” for midterms.
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Re-enacting Historical Events on Twitter With RealTimeWWII – NYTimes.com
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This ex-History student is live-tweeting World War 2 – The Next Web