Throughout our lives, we create memories, then we reconstruct those memories, and they appear again and again within our mind. For me, one memory that always pops up concerns a time when I was a kid, riding a four-wheeler at my grandfather’s camp. I sat down on the seat, my dad sitting behind me, and…
In my first Teaching US History post, I spoke about the concept of teaching students to “see both”–to realize that both the good and bad are tangled up in almost every topic in history or current event we study. I wrote: Seeing both starts with us as educators. Regardless of our own political and historical…
For the past year, I have taught an American history survey course online. I inherited the basic structure and assignments of the course from other instructors I underwent a learning curve during the first semester. One of the main obstacles I faced during the first semester was that I found myself frustrated over the number…
Last October, Jennine Capó Crucet gave a talk at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA. The university chose her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015) as the campus-wide first year experience book. Crucet’s novel chronicles a Cuban American woman’s experiences at an elite college as a first-gen student and daughter of Cuban immigrants. After…
As a warm-up the first day of my youth cultures class, I asked my students to write down the characteristics, habits, and spaces that they thought of when I said “youth” and “youth cultures.” While I expected them to write down social media and the internet, I did not expect these words to fall into…
For the past couple of years, I have taught my students to understand the role that nature played in historical events. Viewing the past from the perspective of the natural world helps students to check their biases by thinking about how different people, groups, and organisms understood the spaces they inhabited. Each semester I introduce…
During the spring of 2016 I began looking for a program that would help me to improve my ability to teach writing in the history classroom. What I found wasn’t exactly what I thought it was, but something much better. During my first Google search for “Teaching Historical Writing” I found information on the Bard…
In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine uses the term “historical selves” in one of the vignettes in section one. There, the speaker, addressing the reader, talks about you and a friend. The friend argues that Americans battle between the “his- torical self” and the self self.” This battle causes tensions between you and the…
In every class, I choose to teach a few new texts that I have never read. Sometimes this will include one texts. Other times it will include more. For this semester, in my multicultural American literature course, I chose two new texts that I had never read before: Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses and Omar ibn…
Over the summer, I attended a professional development experience called the White Responsibility Teach-In. At this multi-day workshop, we heard from about a dozen leaders in the fields of education and anti-racism, but no voice was louder and bolder than that of Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race? One quote…
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. Our thoughts today come from Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History and Professor Emerita in the Institute for Research…
I am not sure about all of you, but mid-semester is rough for me. I am exhausted, my students are tired, and I find the Fall semester particularly difficult because of the holiday season. A few years ago, I introduced a movie into my American History survey curriculum to give my students a break from…
Using primary sources in the classroom is a great way to show students how to make historical arguments based on evidence. In my colonial Latin American history course, I translated a Spanish-language eighteenth-century sodomy case for students to use throughout the semester. With the case in front of them, students noted how formal language could…
This semester, I am teaching an upper-level multicultural American literature course. Each of the students in this course are education majors, so as I prepared the syllabus, I was thinking about texts that would help them think about their own pedagogy in the classroom. With this thought in mind, I added texts such as Jacqueline…
In a world in which young people are inundated with information, accusations of “fake news” are common, and tensions are high between those who differ in opinion, our students need to know how to consume information, vet other people’s claims, and share their own opinions in respectful ways. As history teachers, we help them do…
