an oldie but a goodie

All the feedback from Ed’s post has inspired me to rethink the way I formulate my tests (note to current History 104 students who might be reading this: not for the upcoming test!). I do a few things differently, and a few things the same. My normal dictum, “when in doubt, do what Ed does,”…

Perhaps we ourselves should take a bit more care when we teach our own classes, but Don Cheadle puts in a stunning performance as Frederick Douglass playing opposite Will Ferrell’s Abraham Lincoln on this volume of Funny Or Die’s Drunk History.

While Prof. Blum wisely brings up the absence of medical advances in the survey, I’m worried about another absence that is connected to but not defined by technology and industry: the intellect. Does intellectual history make an appearance in the survey? Should it? Today I gave my favorite lecture, which wins this honor in part…

I’ve always had kind of a schoolboy crush on Margaret Sanger. Maybe it was the topic of her life’s work that initially sparked the fire, maybe some of her fetching pictures. Either way, she’s one of a number of people in American history who make me blush a bit. She of course wasn’t perfect, but…

This is a direct response to Ed’s post on the Gilded Age (the Guilded Age?). But rather than go at him personally, I think it better serves the broader question of the blog to air it publicly. Just a sentence or two on the Populists? Bryan gets beat up in a minute! The Midwest gets…

Because Ed called me out on how I chose to periodize Reconstruction in HIST (and rightly so), I think it’s worth dwelling on the subject of periodization for a moment, especially because all of us who teach the US survey have to draw lines around when a subject begins and when it ends in order…