Halloween is over, Thanksgiving is coming, and the big box stores are pumping out Christmas tunes and sales galore. Meanwhile, our students are beginning to see the end of the semester. The pre-holiday distractions combined with the inevitable conclusion of the course often result in disengaged students. Some are thinking about family time and fun…
I was reminded this weekend while running errands at the big box stores that Christmas will be coming in the distant future. Then I got to thinking about the ornaments my sister and I made in school that still reappear on the tree every year. These ornaments, along with countless other crafts stored in tubs…
The fall semester started off with a bit of a bang last week when The Economist published a review of Edward Baptist’s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The comments to the piece were wonderful (a rare occurrence) and many posters there and on Twitter mentioned…
Today marks 149 years since Abraham Lincoln got shot at the theater, dying the next day from the head wound. So I thought I’d post about good old Honest Abe and a pretty nifty document that survives from those last fateful days. The paper, with a design drawn in ink and hand-colored with pencils, was…
Since it is women’s history month and I am a women’s historian I figured I should post something, but what to choose? Last Friday’s post at the AHA Blog of this amazingly awesome picture inspired me to talk about suffrage: Our student’s often come into the classroom knowing that most women did not have the…
I have been lucky to have many wonderful mentors in my life, but for this post I’m going to choose someone who we will all be familiar with: Tim Gunn. Currently, he is hosting a spin-off show called Under the Gunn (pun intended, it’s Lifetime people). The format is similar to Project Runway, but with…
I am a lecturer by nature, and will most often defend the lecture-based course over one dedicated solely to class discussion (seminars excluded, of course). I do, though, want to gauge opinion on the most effective ways to teach upper-division American history courses. I will begin teaching senior-level courses in the fall, and, although, I…
As promised back in November, I am writing this month about using material culture in the U.S. history classroom. I’m going to use two needlework pieces in the collection at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library as examples of how to go about reading objects as historical sources and giving a breakdown of what exactly material…
I’m delaying my second post on the needlework picture by Olevia Rebecca Parker until next month because I’d like to continue the conversation from posts by Ben Wright and Andy Lang on the usefulness of the new film 12 Years a Slave in the U.S. history classroom. This semester I’m teaching U.S. women’s history to…
As someone who studies material culture I try to bring this interdisciplinary field into my U.S. history classrooms as much as possible. I do this in several ways: choosing readings that are object-focused in their sources, assigning museum exhibits (or offering them as extra credit), bringing objects to class, and discussing images of objects as…
