Making Course Evaluations More Useful

Student evaluations are part of life for college instructors. Is there any way to make them more useful, or at least to mitigate the harm they can do?

Jason Herbert

Always Be Teaching: Historical Advocacy Outside the Classroom

You know the scene. It’s Alec Baldwin’s only scene. In just over seven minutes, Alec Baldwin’s “Blake” harangues four hapless real estate salesmen to Always Be Closing. The film, of course, is Glengarry Glen Ross, and its language should probably be kept out of your classroom. But there is an essential message to Baldwin’s diatribe: Go and…

Chris Babits

Keep Calm and Zinn On

On September 16, 2018, Slate published an excerpt from Sam Wineburg’s new book, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). The piece, “Howard Zinn’s Anti-Textbook,” comes from a chapter entitled “Committing Zinns.” As the Slate byline makes clear, Wineburg believes that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (originally published in 1980)…

Richard Blackett

Teach My Book: Richard Blackett’s, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery

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 Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, the author of The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves,…

Matthew Teutsch

Discussion Boards and Memos in the Classroom

For my literature courses last spring, I tweaked a previous assignment and started a new practice that assisted students in learning the material throughout the semester. Today, I want to briefly cover the ways that I changed my discussion board and how I incorporated post-class memos into the course.

Seeing Both: Teaching Students to be Healthy-Critical in a Polarized World

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. – James Baldwin James Baldwin said these words to a group of educators during a tumultuous time for teachers and all Americans alike–1963, the same year that segregation was being fought in Birmingham, Alabama and…

The Value of a Methods-and-Approaches Week

It started almost on a whim, but it was the best thing I could have done. Students responded eagerly. They found it fascinating to talk about history as a process of investigation, to puzzle out strategies for telling truer and more creative stories about the past. And they used these concepts later.

Teaching United States History at an HBCU

In August, I began an exciting new journey in my academic career. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University, a Historically Black university in Orangeburg, South Carolina. As excited as I was to begin this new chapter in my teaching career, I began to ask myself: what is my responsibility…

Teach Them What They Do Not Know

When I began to teach the United States survey course in Utah several years ago, I noticed that many of my students were not prepared to complete homework for my class and avoided participating during class. Besides struggling with critical thinking and document analysis, which I expected, my students did not know how to conduct…

Fostering Historical Empathy in the Age of Social Media

Last summer, as I prepared to teach the Modern U.S. History survey, I decided that I wanted to double-down on fostering historical empathy after I read the AHA’s Tuning Project’s Discipline Profile and Core Concepts. Right away, the Tuning Project identifies that empathy is required for the study of history. In an item under the…

American Indian History and the Crisis for Secondary Education Teachers

If you know me, you know my research. Seriously, I talk about it a lot. To anyone I can. I talk about history in general. And increasingly, gopher tortoises. (But that’s beside the fact.) The point is, I’m always talking about history to anyone I can find. So it was no surprise the other day…

Back soon!

Teaching United States History is gearing up for another academic year with new contributors and new conversations. Stay tuned for more about what we teach, how we do it, and why.

Using current events to teach historical thinking

In the past few years, it feels like there’s been more outcry for historians to engage with the public and “explain” the present to them, but it exists alongside the perpetual outcry about historians who might discuss current events with the public they engage with every day: their students. Professors, on the other hand, often…

“What do you produce as an English teacher?”

A few weeks ago, someone asked me a question that made me stop and think. The person asked, “What do you produce as an English teacher?” The inquisitor did not posit the question in a derogatory manner; in fact, I firmly believe that the person asking the question wanted to legitimately understand what I do…

Crowdsourcing the Study Guide

I’ve always had somewhat of an ambivalent relationship with study guides. Every semester, my students have clamored for a study guide for each examination, and each semester I go ahead and provide them with one. I think every instructor wishes they could respond to the “what do I need to study for this exam” question…