Tweeting the Past

I found an execellent article in the NY Times that is a great example of how history is being re-lived and taught on Twitter.  The article, The Tweets of War: What’s Past Is Postable (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/arts/re-enacting-historical-events-on-twitter-with-realtimewwii.html?_r=0) Explains how one man decided to tweet some events during WWII in real time as though they were occurring in the present.  The project focused on Germany's invasion of Poland and how people would have felt during the time.  The uncertainty and stress about the war are meant to felt through the tweets as if the invasion was occurring in your own backyard.  The author of the  the Twitter feed RealTimeWWII, Alwyn Collinson would tweet up to forty times a day about what was happening at the exact same time 72 years earlier.  This project attracted many new followers to his Twitter feed, proving how interested followers are in history being represented in a new interactive way.

Some historians say this a novel way to represent history even though it lacks what readers can find in a " coherent narrative and analysis only books can provide".  That being said I think this represents a great way to get people, especially younger people, interested in history.  New media sites, especially social media opens the door for many new ways of learning about a particular topic other than through boring textbooks and sitting in a classroom where they may not be so engaged with the subject.  Everyone can remember reading through textbooks being bored out of their mind and not absorbing anything the authors had to say.  When people experience and learn through new and inventive outlets such as the one mentioned in the NY Times, people are more likely to learn and absorb more than through traditional techniques.

Collison's twitter feed is just one of the few who are taking this new approach to history.  Others such as @PatriotCast, about the Revolutionary War (although it no longer exist) and Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1911 polar expedition, have also taken this approach to a new way of enveloping people in history as if they were there themselves.