WELL I'LL START.

Anyone have any smart thoughts on doing history stuff on Twitter or other social media platforms? I have the somewhat dubious task of starting a social media presence from scratch at my new archives job. AGAIN, because I have started archives/library social media campaigns from scratch twice before actually, and I always seem to manage to leave just when the social media accounts are starting to get popular, and not just be venues for me to shove cutesy old pictures into the void. I still don't feel like I really know what I'm doing though, and all the published guides/advice from American Libraries or Archival Outlook are either too public-library-specific or just vague and useless.

Historians (of all stripes and levels), do you want an archives to tweet (or tumble, or facebook) at you, and if so, what sort of stuff do you want to see?

I’m not sure if pedagogical questions are allowed in this thread, but I was talking recently with a colleague about how much we dislike teaching precontact indigenous societies in the Americas at the secondary level. We basically concluded that we know of no good way to teach about these societies that comes close to the work being done in the academy. I am constantly amazed by how far apart high school instruction is with what I read in my spare time, with archaeological findings presented in the news, and with what I see on this sub. To me, it seems like the academic advances of the last twenty years have not yet trickled down to high school teachers, textbook makers, curriculum writers, and state-standards producers. As far as we could discern, there are basically two (very flawed) ways of covering the topic (keep in mind high school teachers generally have a week or less to cover everything pre-contact related):

1. Teach precontact societies like a petting zoo: “Look at this group. Now, let’s look at this group. Wow, look at this group’s engineering. Check out this art. Pretty neat, right? Okay, movin’ on.”
2. Compare and contrast investigations: Most commonly, I’ve seen many teachers compare the Maya, Triple Alliance, Inca to one another.

I know there are lots of scholars on Mesoamerica and the Andes here. I was wondering if anyone had suggestions, resources, or insights for how we could cover precontact societies in a more meaningful way at the secondary level that is more in line with what is going on in the academy among professional archaeologists and historians.