The History Games The buzz all around San Diego is The Hunger Games and follow-up books by Suzanne Collins. North America is now home to several districts that must have their young people battle for resources and food. I haven’t read them (probably will this winter break), but they got me thinking. Could I have my…
This post comes from our friend Gale Kenny, the author of a tremendous book on American abolitionists in Jamaica, one of the incredible graduates from Rice University’s history department, and an American Council of Learned Society New Faculty Fellow at Barnard College. We hope to hear a lot more about this class. As I was working on a…
Lecture #1: That Was Then, This is Now … for Now Time to get out your camera – the first day of school is here (for us, it’s next Tuesday). Here’s what I do after rolling through the syllabus and addressing any “crashers” – the name we have for students who want to add a class that…
More on Assignments 2. Exams (30%). This is where I hit my students hard about reading the textbook and attending lecture. I want my students to learn the material that they are to debate and discuss. The first half of the exam is straightforward multiple choice questions and True-False assessments. These questions often ask for…
Assignments, part 1 Grading can be the worst part of the job. Maybe for a semester or two as a TA I enjoyed it. There was that rush of power. Sitting at a café with 60 bluebooks, I got to sit with an air of superiority. It nicely hid my overwhelming feeling of inferiority as…
Selecting Texts There are three types of texts I have traditionally assigned: the textbook; the primary document or documents; and secondary sources. Let’s begin with the textbook. My experience as an undergraduate history major and as a graduate student instructor was that everyone assigned a textbook, but professors never used it and students rarely read…
The Schedule It comes last on the syllabus, but I have learned the heart of my syllabus is the schedule. It’s like the great, ghastly tick-tock machine of Gregory Maguire’s magical novel Wicked – subtly controlling all other events (at least that’s what I think happens in the novel). When I first began teaching, I…
This is an invitation to discuss and debate how best to teach survey courses in United States History. This semester, we’re focusing upon the second half of the survey (so roughly the Civil War to yesterday). I started teaching United States history survey courses ten years ago. I’ve taught them in five different states, at…
