I sometimes refer to the Great Awakening as a time when my students really need to wake up. The honeymoon of days 1 and 2 is over and the class has started in earnest–we now have tests and papers to think about! Once you say that, Jonathan Edwards becomes more interesting. This is especially true…
“Where shall I begin?” asked the White Rabbit of the King in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop” was the King’s reply. When it comes to American history, where shall we begin? The answer I put forward in HIST, my textbook, was…
A few months ago, we had a vigorous debate on this blog about “uncoverage,” the method of teaching that doesn’t try to cover everything in the textbook but instead picks a few topics or event and dissects them deeply. The theory is that students won’t and don’t remember everything they are asked to understand in…
I begin every lecture with a song from the era we’re about to discuss. Sometimes the song has a story associated with it. “Solidarity Forever” has its moment, “Sweet Home Alabama” is a good reflection of the Southernization of American culture in the 1970s, “Born in the USA” gets at the bifurcated nature of American…
Two big conferences mean that Ed and I have been quieter than normal, perhaps the relief of more than a few. But those who are already tired of the family over the long weekend, the marvelous Plimoth Plantation has a nice history of Thanksgiving for you to peruse, if you want to show off over…
I too heart the Seventies, although I try not to call it that–too decadent (get it?).But it is a fun one to teach. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that a full three-quarters of my students knew roughly what Watergate was before I began the story: a hotel. They may not have known the…
Yes, it’s true. I hate “the Sixties.” This is mainly because of what popular culture has done to it. It’s all “peace, love, and happiness,” tie-die, pot smoking, free love, Jimi Hendrix, and youth culture. While that’s a slice of what “the Sixties” was (well, the late Sixties), it was just a small slice, and…
The civil rights movement is filled with so many great stories, and it’s perhaps one of the few things we can be certain our students have some basic understanding of: it’s got to be easy to teach, right? And yet, and yet…every time I finish my lecture on the subject I feel I’ve let my…
Every time I lecture on “Cold War Culture” I realize I’ve done almost the entire lecture without referring once to Joseph McCarthy. This can’t be right. His polarizing presence animated much of the possibilities of politics of the 1950s. Some have even called it the Age of McCarthy. But still, was McCarthy more important than…
Yesterday my department had a lunchtime brownbag discussion about Lendol Calder’s new way of teaching the survey (although, as you’ll see, him calling it “the survey” is a misnomer). The idea, articulated in an influential 2006 JAH piece, is that attempting to cover everything that happens from 1865 to 2011 turns into a plodding along…
