I experience my life through music. When my father left, my adolescent afternoons were spent gripping his abandoned Tom T. Hall record. I listened to “Sneaky Snake” hundreds of times, perhaps trying to incarnate “a-gigglin’” and “a-kissin’” – even from a snake. Years later, with a girlfriend neither named Gina, nor one who worked the…
After a year in gigantic United States history survey courses (500ish), I now have the chance to teach small research seminars (15ish). It’s nice to know their names, recognize who got their hair cut this week, and celebrate who recently got engaged. For me, one of the best elements of the smaller class is that…
As we approach the end of the semester and get ever closer to the “Age of Obama,” the pop culture element of my class shifts from the Rocky films to The Matrix. We examine how the digital age transforms our worlds and, as the films progress, the lines among human-machine-computer blur and sometimes erase. At…
Another interesting wrinkle in teaching during the digital age is that private email exchanges can go public quite easily. This was the case recently in a conversation between a professor at NYU and a student in the MBA program. Basically, it is a story of contrasting interests, etiquettes, and ethics. I wonder how can one…
As a new article at the Huffington Post shows, researchers and statisticians have long undervalued Asian American history and have overlooked them in research studies. Over at Religion in American History, a wonderful three-part series recently addressed different ways Asian American history can build upon, complicate, and add new layers to American religious history. It…
You remember back to the beginning of this semester when classroom faces were happy (before first papers were returned) or when students read at least the first couple of pages of the assignments (now, when I ask, “be honest, who did the reading,” hardly any hands go up). But in the beginning (of the semester),…
Today’s Q&A comes from Elana Levine, associate professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Any book with a cover from Three’s Company is a must for me! 1. What television material do you find works best in…
Today’s interview is the second in our two-part series with Dr. Amy Bass of the College of New Rochelle. Her first book, Not the Triumph, but the Struggle, one of the finest works on twentieth-century American history I have read, examines the “making of the black athlete” as a political, cultural, social, national, and international…
If you follow me on twitter (@edwardjblum) or on Facebook, you know that I am a huge fan of the work of Dr. Amy Bass. A historian of race, sports, culture, and twentieth-century America and the Director of the Honors Program at the College of New Rochelle, she has written two fantastic books. We’re going…
I have been so busy reforming the nation (during the Progressive Era) and then learning all the new dances of the 1920s (hat tip to Terra Schultz for help locating this video on the “Black Bottom”) that I haven’t been able to show our blog the attention she deserves. So I come to you in…
