Blog #9: Historical Twitter Feeds

Like Youtube, blogs, and websites, Twitter offers a modern platform for educating the public about history.
One of the main advantages of Twitter feeds is that they are concise and easy to follow. This way, history can be broken down into small doses. Someone is more likely to read one line of text than a paragraph. At the same time, this can be a disadvantage, as it can create a situation when information is oversimplified and lacks context. It can also be a confusing website to use.
There are tons of different kinds of historical Twitter feeds out there. The most broad is a feed such as @PocketHistory, which simply posts random facts from anywhere in the world. Another feed is Archeology Rome, which focuses on presenting various links and information related to ancient Rome.
Local museums and archives have also realized the benefits of Twitter. @WichitaHistory is run by a local museum and provides facts related to Wichita's history. Similarly, @NS_Archives is a feed which shares items from the Nova Scotia Archives.
@WWIIToday offers daily tweets on a "this day in history" type theme. This kind of approach makes history directly relative to today. These kinds of tweets also work well with Twitter's character limit.
One unique feed is @Wendell_Howe, which is the fictional twitter account of Wendell Howe, a time traveler and anthropologist. I felt like this twitter had a lot of potential to be both fun and informative, as the main character would be experiencing history for the first time, just like the viewers. However, I found it sort of confusing, and I think that is mostly because of Twitter's character limit. There just isn't enough space to explain any background context.
@historicaltweet is a fun feed, which actually posts links to their website, which posts pictures of photoshopped "tweets". So it's not really a historical twitter account, but it's a similar idea. I found some of these "tweets" funny, but I think that in a lot of cases it's only funny to people who already know the history behind the image. It's not really a great source for teaching history.

Overall, I think that Twitter can be a great tool for teaching history, but I feel that at the moment it is not being used to its full potential. I was not super impressed with any of these feeds. Many of them were inundated with personal tweets or retweets, which was annoying when I wanted to find original content. Many of the tweets were just links to a website or a blog, so the tweets were acting more as advertising. In this case, there's pretty much no point in even reading the twitter, when you can just directly read the blogs websites it links to.