Fort Ticonderoga’s latest initiative continues to deliver award-winning educational programs and resources through the museum’s Center for Digital History. The courses can be found here: https://www.fortticonderoga.org/learn-and-explore/educators/micro-courses/.
New college-level “Micro-Course” videos taught by Fort Ticonderoga Curator Dr. Matthew Keagle are now available for free online streaming. These Micro-Courses were developed based on a national survey conducted with university professors. Each course provides a brief video exploring a wide range of historical topics and approaches based on Fort Ticonderoga’s rich museum collections. Discussion prompts or activities for engagement are provided to stimulate dialogue about the topic.
“The collections provide windows into so many aspects of the past,” said Curator Dr. Matthew Keagle. “We are excited to help provide these entry points, which have the flexibility to be used in many ways by educators. Whether in-class, or remote, as extra credit, additional material, or built into the syllabus of a new course, these Micro-Courses offer new and digestible perspectives on the historical topics which Fort Ticonderoga’s collection more broadly represents, with the benefit of being digitally accessible.”
Currently, three Micro-Courses are available building on strengths of the museum collection and exhibitions at Fort Ticonderoga:
Service and Citizenship: The Militia from Colonies to Nation builds upon Fort Ticonderoga’s new exhibit “A Well Regulated Militia: Citizen, Soldier, and State” and explores the legacy of the militia in colonial and early national history. This prompts students to think not only about the service of the militia historically, but what it tells us about the development of the American state and the evolving expectations and obligations of citizens.
Setting the World on Fire: Firearms in the Atlantic World explores the complex and fascinating history of firearms in the 18th-century Atlantic World. Firearms circulated across the world as currency, tools, weapons, and cultural objects in the thousands in the 18th century across a huge range of cultures. This course uses Fort Ticonderoga’s extensive collection to reveal how new organizations of labor produced literally millions of weapons that shaped the world we still live with to this day.
Sources and Methods for Holistic History look at how historians do the work of history. Using examples from Ticonderoga’s rich museum collection, we explore how different historical sources that tell us different aspects about the same topic, reminding students of history to be aware of the type of sources they encounter as well as what they record. By using a range of archival documents, as well as material culture, this course examines the range of sources that help us reconstruct the world of the past.
Micro-Courses are part of Fort Ticonderoga’s Center for Digital History, which provides a platform for educational resources featuring interactive live programs, virtual classroom presentations, museum artifacts through Ticonderoga’s Online Collections, access to over 100 videos on Fort Ticonderoga’s YouTube channel, and more.
About Fort Ticonderoga:
Welcoming visitors since 1909, Fort Ticonderoga preserves North America’s largest 18th-century artillery collection, 2,000 acres of historic landscape on Lake Champlain, and Carillon Battlefield, and the largest series of untouched Revolutionary War era earthworks surviving in America. As a multi-day destination and the premier place to learn more about our nation’s earliest years and America’s military heritage, Fort Ticonderoga engages more than 75,000 visitors each year with an economic impact of more than $12 million annually and offers programs, historic interpretation, boat cruises, tours, demonstrations, and exhibits throughout the year, and is open for daily visitation May through October. Fort Ticonderoga is supported in part through generous donations and with some general operating support made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts.