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…

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.