A unique approach to teaching history is being used to tell the stories of African Americans and Mexican Americans. Robert Miller, formerly Director of Educational Publishing at Thirteen/WNET, New York City’s flagship public television station, has designed a newspaper format to teach the history of Black Americans and Latinos. Both projects appear on a new Web site, http://www.ourthistoryasnews.org .

“This format is engaging, exciting, immediate,” Miller says. “Because we use advertisements, short news articles and original illustrations, as well as feature stories and editorials, we offer people with all levels of reading skills the opportunity to learn.”

The projects come as sets of newspaper – fourteen issues of Black Chronicle and nine bi-lingual issues of La Cronica. The Black Chronicle tells the story of African Americans from 1778, when Rhode Island Slaves were promised their freedom if they fought in the Colonial armies, through the Civil War, when over 400,000 black men fought in the Union Armies, though the lynchings and the founding of the NAACP in the early 1900s, the African American contributions in both World Wars, up through 1954, when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus and the Civil Rights movement gained powerful momentum.