In 2012, a study of news habits revealed that those who watched the partisan outlets Fox or MSNBC were actually less informed about current events than those who watched no news at all. Those who were well-informed listened to NPR and watched The Daily Show. In other words, a liberal bastion full of fake news…
One of the perennial challenges of the U.S. history survey is that its classes tend to be large. Here in Texas, for example, all undergraduates, regardless of major, have to take the course to graduate. At UTEP, our smallest classes start at 120 and our largest are 270. Regardless of where things fall along that…
As I’ve written previously, I’ve structured my survey this semester around publicly available primary documents and “clicker” software. This software allows me to sync slides to students’ phones and computers as well as to ask questions in different formats and get immediate responses. This can be obviously be used to generate mini-quizzes: using multiple choice…
Part of teaching the history of the United States is teaching the history of ideologies of white supremacy and their institutional expressions. And one of the techniques of white supremacy has been the dehumanization of non-whites with racist language. Because of slavery and the centrality of anti-blackness to white supremacist ideas, the “n-word” remains probably…
By way of brief introduction, as this is my first post, let me say that this semester I will be teaching a U.S. history survey for the first time, at the University of Texas at El Paso. I was trained in Latin American history, and have taught surveys in that subject area. But the U.S.…
