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…
Most survey textbooks and courses focus on LGBTQ history only a few times at most and usually only in the latter half of the twentieth century. For some time, Stonewall has been included in U.S. history textbooks and courses. Other topics commonly covered in more recent years are the AIDS crisis and the Lavender Scare…
Today’s guest post results from a roundtable at the annual meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. This roundtable sought to explore how instructors can integrate Carribean history when discussing the early republic. Two of the participants, Anne Eller and Rob Taber have synthesized the conversation for us here. Anne Eller…
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 Jelani M. Favors, Associate Professor of History at Clayton State University. Dr. Favors is discussing his new book Shelter…
I’ve had a lot of requests recently to write about how to use Historians At The Movies in history classrooms and I think now is a good time to talk about how we can use public history and film medium as a way of engaging our students. http:// Ok, let’s try this again. Fans of…
This guest post is from Daniel Gorman Jr., a history Ph.D. candidate, an Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow, and president of the Graduate Student Association at the University of Rochester. When applications opened at my university for summer courses — courses that meet three hours per day, four days per week, for four weeks…
I start every history course I teach with the same primary source. I put a colorful drawing on the screen and tell my students that the image comes from a diary that a fourteen-year-old kept while traveling with her family in 1935. Victoria Brown Travel Diary of Europe, 1935, SC 00002, Special Collections, Swem Library,…
The reaction to the New York Times 1619 Project has ranged from overwhelming approval to unabashed criticism. This criticism stemmed from those who do not see, or more importantly do not want to see, the ways that race and the institution of chattel slavery has influenced every aspect of our nation from its foundations to…
In one of the first assignments of the year, I asked my new eleventh grade American Studies students to “write ~2 pages on what America you live in.” The only other guidance I gave them was, “Some things you may think about are your location, citizenship, religion, race, class, gender, etc.” and “There is no…
“Dance is a cry and a celebration.” -Savion Glover I often experiment with how to merge cognition with affect in the classroom. I wrestle with if or how there might be ways to bring students into history through emotion. It is an experience I think many historians have had in archival or on site visits…
Intertwined: History, Disability, and Blues Music by Jonathan Lower (SUNY) Buffalo The classic folk story of American blues music recounts W. C. Handy’s discovery of the blues form while waiting for a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi. In his autobiography Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” remembers, “A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a…
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 W. Caleb McDaniel, Associate Professor of History at Rice University. Dr. McDaniel is the author of The Problem of…
