Next semester (like every semester), I am going to try something new in my U.S. History survey courses. At the beginning of this semester, when I asked students in my U.S. history survey courses what they wanted to learn, many of them said something like “anything and everything” or “I just want to learn about…
In a previous post, I noted that I liked teaching the U.S. History survey course at Washington University in St. Louis because I did not use a textbook. Students tend to use textbooks as crutches rather than as supplements to their own knowledge, reflexively deferring to the textbook and repeating back its interpretations. I still…
Last month, I began a new position as Assistant Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA, teaching both halves of the U.S. history survey. I love the job, not only because I get to teach the survey, which, as I’ve already explained, I thoroughly enjoy, but also because of the students I…
As far as I’m concerned, the toughest task a history teacher faces is getting students to make responsible connections between past and present. I think this is essential to doing good history. Even for professional historians, it is a major challenge, since we also want to understand the past, as much as we can, on…
For the past seven months, I have worked as a consultant for Chippewa County Historical Society, in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The experience has taught me a lot about the resources available at local public history institutions, and how little I knew about their possibilities for use in the classroom. Because it’s in a small…
I’ve already mentioned in a previous post my own aversion to assigning secondary sources in survey courses. But I do think it’s very important to involve secondary sources in upper-level history courses. While it’s always a challenge deciding what to assign, I’ve found it’s equally difficult figuring out how to introduce historiography into my lectures…
On the heels of Emily Conroy-Krutz’s excellent post about primary sources, I ask the following question to my fellow history teachers: What’s your favorite primary source to use in class, that is outside your area of specialty? I ask because we all have to teach outside our comfort zones, and if you’re like me, you…
Last semester, I offered an advanced seminar course on the ratification of the Constitution, thinking it would be a great way to delve deeply into the contentiousness surrounding the document with a small group of juniors and seniors. In keeping with my academic training, I took the problematic nature of the Constitution as a given,…
Mary Dalzell died in 1764 and was buried in Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, the same cemetery where Albert Gallatin and Alexander Hamilton are buried. But unlike these more illustrious historical figures, she left behind no voluminous collection of papers, and no detailed accounts of her life exist. What we know about Mary Dalzell comes…
My relationship to the U.S. history survey is quite unique, at least in comparison to my colleagues. Most of my colleagues began their careers teaching the survey as grad student T.A.s, grading tests, leading discussion sections, perhaps giving a lecture or two. As teachers, they model their survey courses after the professors they assisted, copying…
