Recently, a panel of distinguished historians and authors discussed how they create American History textbooks.  General agreement?  Students don’t read them anyway. This assertion – that students do not read and you cannot get them to read no matter what you try – struck me as most strange.  If those who write textbooks don’t think students read them,…

Of course you have assigned your students writing projects. And you’ve probably had students write collaboratively.  (Collaborative writing is already the scholarly buzz word, and there are some great thoughts on that in Chapter 14 of this book.) But have you ever written with your students?  That is what happened to me last semester. The end…

Historians were once a fractured state in the academic nation.  They published or perished in their own clannish enclaves.  Oddly, they were less divided by chronologies and geographies than by styles.  There were intellectual historians, political historians, social historians, environmental historians, and others.  A generation has risen, however, who seem less obsessed with the Balkanization…

In the military, senior leaders use a telling phrase about young soldiers.  “They don’t know what right looks like.”  The job of senior leaders is to fix that problem.  This is a post about undergraduates, research, and how to show them what”right” looks like. What does it take to teach undergraduates good research skills?  Certainly,…

Recently, I taught a course on the Long Civil Rights Movement.  In the course, students engaged the study of African American history in ways that transcended an exclusive focus on the 1950s-60s stories of voting rights and school desegregation.  I wanted them to think as deeply about Washington and Du Bois as they did Arkansas schools…

These are lessons from a case of Twitter Failure. This semester I integrated Twitter into teaching an upper level course on Early America and introductory courses.  I was inspired by the remarkable digital pedagogy of our blogmeister Ben Wright and an ongoing forum at my University on the value of moving beyond the classroom. The idea…

This post is a broader application of Ben Wright’s post on organized lectures that don’t end with “that’s all we have time for today.” What about the semester?  The well-worn habit of college history surveys is to get bogged down in a particular period.  In and of itself this is not a problem.  The problems…