A Friday Funny from the Newly Named “TUSH.0”

We don’t advocate alcohol abuse (or any kind of abuse) at this blog, but sometimes “Drunk History” is pretty funny. Today’s Friday Funny is about William Henry Harrison and his short presidency. A war hero from 1812, a Whig, and a part of the taking of Native American lands, Harrison fits a lot of big…

Reading them the riot act

Have you ever ranted at your students? Just flat-out told them they weren’t cutting it and needed to do better? Last week, as I was grading their third assignment, I realized that many of them weren’t improving in the way: (a) they should and (b) students in the past have done in this exact class.…

Matthew Bowman on teaching Mormonism in the American Survey

The Scholars Speak – Matthew BowmanToday’s guest post comes from Matthew Bowman, the author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. Professor Bowman teaches at Hampden-Sydney College and is the associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. We asked him to reflect on teaching Mormonism in the U.S. history survey.…

The New York Times must read our blog

In light of Ed’s brilliant piece about having his students evaluate his performance midway through the semester, the grey lady of newspapers published a whole piece on the subject of professorial assessment. It’s on page A-18 of today’s paper. The idea of both Ed’s and the New York Times’ pieces is that we spend a…

Together or Apart

Together or Apart Katniss and Peeta(I think it’s Peeta; I haven’t seen the movie yet) Maybe this is a stretch, but today’s post is based on my quirky thinking about The Hunger Games. Not to spoil anything, but one question in the novel is whether the participants should band together or remain apart. In the…

The Scholars Speak – Jennifer Graber

Prisons in Antebellum America Today’s edition of The Scholars Speak comes from one of our favorite historians and people – Jennifer Graber. She is the author of The Furnace of Afflication: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America and is currently writing a religious history of the Indian Wars of the mid and late nineteenth century.…

Midterm Evaluations

The Students SpeakSometimes I feel like Angela from NBC’s The Office. I like to be evaluated. Fans of the show will remember her excitement when Michael Scott would call her in for the annual “performance review.” But what I’ve never understood is that student evaluations are completed after the semester, and while they can benefit…

Teaching the New Deal

“Anachronistic Equivocation” Nina McCune I am an unabashed fan of the British monthly History Today’s “Contrarian,” Tim Stanley.  I not only like the content of his writing, I like how he writes- straightforward, provocative, thoughtful, and concise.  As a teacher of history, I’d like for my students to write like this – flexible and analytic…