The Love of Flags and Other Such Nonsense

I ended up in the clearly enviable situation of teaching, alongside my standard U.S. history load, two sections of Global History II this semester. Yes, that’s two sections covering the quick and unproductive time between 1500 and 2015…across the entire earth. This, my friends, to many, is the grizzle of the academic teaching world. But I found my golden apple, my talisman that will lead me and my brave cohort of mainly freshman and a few seniors into the abyss: flags.

My love of flags began long ago, when, as a seven-year-old snoot, I received my first atlas for Christmas. I spent hours, days, months maybe, staring at the colorful rectangles at the top of each entry. They wowed me, and, for some reason I have yet to understand fully, they stuck with me. To this day, I can describe and recognize, from memory, every national flag in the world. Why? Because I am clearly insane, and had too much time on my hands as a child—or maybe too much energy…

Anyhow, when I found out that I would be teaching this massive course, covering so much time and space, I started racking my brain for a way to attract students not only to the field of history—which, in the end, is the M.O. of all of our departments—but also to the seemingly distant, vague, and expansive subject matter of the course. Indeed, when I was a new college student years ago, even as one who knew he wanted to be a historian and entered as a history major, I had difficulty connecting with the subjects, timelines, and empires of Western Civilization I and II. Nothing sounded familiar, and I could find nothing in that past that reminded me of everyday life. Although my course covers a more recent period than, say, the time of the Romans, I wanted to avoid that disconnect as best as possible.

So I chose to focus on the movement of peoples, the creation of empires, the flow of ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, the establishment of nations and ideas of nationalism—those things that define our current world, and readily fall into a fluid narrative, providing tangible connections to the worlds surrounding each student. In the end, I wanted the students to turn on the news, The Late Show, or even their favorite sit-coms and recognize a genealogy of influence centuries in the making. Bold, right? Maybe not. But it gave me an idea.

This is where flags come in. For the fall semester, most of my posts will focus on creativity in the classroom—trying to avoid basic test-based, lecture-oriented class structures. Central to this noble endeavor, at least as far as this semester and this blog are concerned, will be what I have masterfully called the “Country Project” (trademark pending). Based on creative critical thinking and historical analysis, the project, which takes the place of a final exam in both sections of my Global History II course, brings five students together in the creation of a new nation. Grouped according to a short informational survey given last week (I have yet to tally the results), the students will receive a general area (Southeast Asia, West Africa, Central America, etc.) and a time period (1800-1850, 1640-1700, 1888-1940, etc.). Restricted to that information, and its historical reality, the group must create a historically realistic (and believable!) nation-state, designing a flag, naming and locating a capital, establishing (if at all) an official language, religion, legal code, and style of government, and providing basic demographics, major points of a constitution (if one exists), and the foundation of a profitable economy.

This type of assignment, I hope, will allow students to find a legitimate, creative interest in the past, focusing on levels of thinking often ignored in, or simply missing from standard history courses. It provides students with a hands-on experience of the past, and grants them the power to create, invent, and tell, rather than listen, “learn,” and repeat. We’ll see how it works.

Found work. Found pay. I’ll call again soon.

Love,

Andrew

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