The Romantic Chronology

1. Take a tour of the Romantic Chronology, in order to learn more about how it works, and then encourage your students to take this tour at:
   <http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/update/chrono/using.htm>
   
   
2. A menu of dates on the Chronology Home Page can be used to see every entry available in the database, chunk by chunk. But one can also customize chronologies based on topics, authors, kinds of events, etc. One can generate chronologies, print them out, and distribute them to students; or, one can ask students to go to the chronology and generate chronologies for themselves. Familiarize yourself with the various ways that one can search the Romantic Chronology in order to figure out how to customize chronologies and generate assignments:
   
   
   • Check the list of topics used by editors of the chronology: go to the Romantic Chronology Home Page, and then click on "Topics Catalogue" under "Chronology" on the navigation bar at the left. Clicking on any one of these topics will generate a chronology of events related to them.
     
     
   • Using a simple Search of the Chronology, one can search by date or by any words in the event description, including author, publication, or type of activity ("riot," for instance).
     
     
   • A simple Search of the Link Archive, by Keyword, URL, author, or topic, will allow students to generate a list of resources available on the Internet.
     
     
   • An Advanced Search of the Romantic Chronology allows one to generate chronologies based on: dates, event descriptions, notes and citations, persons or type of persons, works or type of works, years of composition, years of publication. You can ask students, for instance, to find out when an author composed a particular work, and then what was being published at the same time.
     
     
   • The Advanced Search of the Link Archive will allow you to search by web creator and by description of web sites.
     
     
3. After devising an assignment for students, try it out yourself following all the steps you have asked them to follow. The chronology may be missing certain events that you would like to have come up when either you or your students generate your own chronologies by doing various searches. If some events are missing, contact co-editor Laura Mandell; she can add the events very quickly, in time for you to generate the chronology you need to distribute or before your students begin their research projects.
   
   
4. Sample Searches and Assignments:
   
   
   • Go to the Chronology Home Page; click on the "Topics Catalogue," and then on "Abolition." Print this chronology out to distribute to students for a unit on the Abolition Movement in Britain.
     
     
   • Ask your students to decide whether they think that the Romantic era was a relatively peaceful time or not by using a simple search, and putting into the "Event Description" box words that might denote turbulent times ("riot," "arrest," "protest," "revolution," "rebellion," etc.)
     
     
   • When reading Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" or Shelley's "England in 1819," or any poem or literary work at all, ask students to visit the chronology and do a simple search and entering the years that the poems describe.
     
     
   • Ask students to look at the kind of essay being written during the period by going to the Advanced Search engine, clicking on the drop-down box under "Type of Work," clicking on "Essay," and then clicking the "Search" button. Although 200 entries come up, students can scroll through them looking at titles, just to get a sense of what kinds of issues are being discussed.

top