In crafting assignments, we strive to help our students find depth of knowledge while allowing them to explore topics located off the beaten path. In my course, Witnessing the Sixties, students read classics like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and yet I also want them to encounter Sixties phenomena that are revelatory due to their…
Historical empathy can be a powerful tool for fighting hatred. But are we teaching it wrong?
Every semester I assign the chapter titled, “Turning People into Products” from Walter Johnson’s book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Marketto my survey-level American History students. As historians are painfully aware, slavery is one of the most misunderstood, overgeneralized, and downplayed topics in American history. My objective is to expose my students to…
Teaching United States History is excited to present Teach My Book, a series of posts where distinguished authors reflect on their work and how instructors might integrate their insights into the classroom. In this post, Ann M. Little, Professor of History at Colorado State University, explores how to teach The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright…
Last May, Donald Trump delivered the commencement address at the Naval Academy. There, he stated that “our ancestors tamed a continent,” and he followed this statement up by adding, “we are not going to apologize for America.” What does this mean? What does it mean to “tame” a continent? What does it mean to be…
We routinely offer courses on the transformative decades of US History. Departments place “The 1970s” or “The Eighties” in course catalogues, hoping these tidy chronologies will inspire enrollment. These deep dives are an efficient means of focusing our students on, say, Global Oil Shocks, Nixon’s machinations, or Ronald Reagan as a cultural icon. It…
Getting my students to complete the course readings is one of the biggest challenges I face as an instructor. I know that there are many debates about the effectiveness of a textbook, but I have found that most students feel comfortable with a text because it provides general information in chronological order that helps them…
Founding Friendships argues that friendships between elite men and women in the early American republic were more than possible—they were commonplace. These relationships exemplified key republican values of the era: choice, equality, freedom, and virtue. Men and women found affection, emotional and practical support, and political benefits from these friendships. The book begins with an…
Words, simply put, matter! The lexicon that we use to describe events or refer to individuals carry weight and meaning beyond what we may consider. On my blog, I have written about this topic numerous times. See, for example, “Our Linguistic Entanglements.” Lately, I’ve still been thinking about this topic, especially when I teach my…
“…the social world is always a part of the classroom, that classrooms themselves are social spaces and essentially microcosms of the world outside their wall. All learning, then, happens in a social context because we are learning with and from one another.” –Joshua R. Eyler, How Humans Learn, p. 66 In the above passage, Eyler…
At the beginning of each semester, I, like most others, spend some time evaluating my syllabus to assess if it meets the needs of my students. While over the years I have placed many assignments and activities on the chopping block, I continue to schedule a midterm and a final exam. When I first became…
Our students need to hear a historical perspective on the eighties, nineties, and aughts in order to understand the present moment in America.
*Author note: these are my prepared remarks (with some slight modifications) for a roundtable at the 2019 American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois entitled “The American Revolution in World History: A Teaching Roundtable.” For the last eighteen months I have worked as a social studies teacher in Highlands County, Florida as I researched…
During a recent session on the Dawes Act a student asked me how long American Indians had been in North America. I gave her the most honest answer I could. “Always.” I could tell this wasn’t what she was looking for. She was hoping instead for a longer diatribe speaking to Beringia, coastal routes, and…
[Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.] Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work…
