What If?

Recently, several casual conversations with some of my history majors have veered toward historical counterfactuals. Counterfactuals, or the fictional incarnation of the historical counterfactual, “alternate history,” posits a world in which one or more historical variables is different than the actual past. We’ve all played this game at some point, and undergraduates seem to love…

Finding Lewis and Clark

It’s good to be back from summer hiatus. Like many of you, over the summer months I devoted quite a bit of time to preparing courses for the fall semester. One of my courses this fall is a senior-level readings seminar devoted to the 19th Century American West, drawing on collections of primary sources, scholarly…

Constructing the 19th-Century West

The title of this post is a little misleading. I’m actually building a course, and have run into some thorny questions. This fall I’ve agreed to offer a course I haven’t taught before; an upper-level seminar on the American West in the 19th century. As I’ve conceived it, the course will cover roughly 1803 (the…

Incorporating the Visual

It’s that time of year… the time when we get our course evaluations back. I’m pleased to say that mine were pretty good this semester. However, something that more than one of my freshmen requested more of in my U.S. history survey courses was that I incorporate more “visual aids” for those who are “visual…

Heat, Light, and History as a Problem

Last week I attended the 2013 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in St. Louis. One of the panels, a round-table discussion on the importance (or lack thereof) of emphasizing military history in American Civil War studies, generated a fair amount of passion in attendees and panelists alike.  A number of distinguished historians served…

A Taxonomy of Civil War (And Other) History Students

The American Civil War occupies a peculiar, significant (and unavoidable) place in the American imagination. For some it is a national tragedy, a source of division or even anxiety; others variously view it as a glorious episode in the march toward human equality. As a historian of the American military, and of the Civil War…