Historical CD may help pique kids’ interest

Saturday, Jan. 29, 2000 | 9:37 a.m.

By scanning historical photos, saving them onto a CD, adding a script and recorded voices, Anita Watson is making state history a little more lively for Nevada students.

As an independent contractor for the state's Department of Library and Arts in Carson City, Watson has spent the past year pooling resources from various museums and historians and placing them on a multimedia CD that will be used as a tool to teach Nevada history to fourth- and fifth-graders.

Users can listen to an impersonation of President Theodore Roosevelt reading telegrams that he had sent to Gov. John Sparks regarding labor conflicts and mining issues in Goldfield. Another impersonator read Sparks' rebuttal in a letter Sparks sent to President Roosevelt.

"It's a way to make history more alive," Watson said.

By selecting from the five topics -- Landscape, People and Life Ways, Technology and Transportation, Earning a Living and Nevada government and politics -- students can learn Nevada history from the stories and photographs of early miners to American Indians to Irish and Chinese immigrants.

Under the topic, Nevada Government and Politics, students can learn about Felice Cohn, a Northern Nevada attorney born in 1884 in Carson City, who received her first teaching credential when she was 11. Cohn was an important figure in equal rights and women's suffrage, Watson said.

The head of the Nevada Women's History Project reads letters that Helen Stewart had written to her children.

Stewart and her husband owned the Mormon Fort in the 1880s and ran it as a ranch until 1902. Students at a Washoe County school sang songs and recorded phrases in the Washoe language.

The work of Grafton Brown, a black lithographer who in the 1860s drew a bird's-eye view of Virginia City and its buildings, has been turned into a game that enables students to take images of buildings and place them on a Virginia City map and recreate the city themselves.

The project will also include video segments, such as an 8-millimeter film of a family vacation at Hoover Dam.

"There are a lot of resources pulled from all over the state," Watson said. "It's a historian's dream -- no footnotes."

The multimedia CD is scheduled to be in schools this fall and will eventually be placed in libraries throughout the state.