What is the role of local history in the American history survey? Should the history survey always be taught in the same manner, with the same emphases, and with the same material? Should it be taught, for instance, in Massachusetts as it is in Texas? In cities as in suburbs? In poor schools as in…
It feels like ages since Jonathan Rees wrote about YouTube in the AHA’s Perspectives and felt compelled to address the question, “Isn’t YouTube for Teenagers?” (here and, revisiting the topic in 2011, here). It’s no longer particularly radical or innovative to integrate clips from YouTube, Vimeo, or other online video resources into lectures and discussions:…
We live in a great age of visualization. Plummeting bandwidth restrictions and the growing availability of high-resolution images (owing in part to the advances of Wikimedia, Flickr, and other open image databases) have antiquated the pixelated images found in five-year old PowerPoint slides. YouTube, digital movie files, and a rapidly multiplying cache of fantastic visualization…
This forum works best when sharing practical strategies, pedagogical musings, and classroom innovations, but content’s important, too. And, when teaching the first half of the U.S. history survey, the first content question is a simple one: “When to begin?” Probing the origins of American history is not a hollow academic exercise, but a teachable problem…
This year I’m teaching history surveys. A lot of them. Last year, as part of a postdoctoral teaching fellowship, I taught several small, narrowly focused, writing-intensive seminars at an elite private university. The seminars were a pedagogical dream: their small size and narrow focus offered wonderful opportunities to encourage critical discussion of common material, allowed…
Note: Previous TUSH editors have produced outstanding textbooks. Keven Schultz’s HISTand Ed Blum’s Major Problems in American History are two of the finest available. You can request instructor copies here and here. Below please find a call for contributors for a new textbook project, The American Yawp. We will update TUSH readers as the project…
