There is nothing like the feeling of bliss after your press submit on your final grades. I think of it as one of the few moments of completeness that an academic gets. Everything related to the class is over and done. Unless you are like me and you can’t seem to let go of the…
This semester I offered my first U.S. elective as a hybrid. The course, America Meets the Modern, 1920-1945, met once a week for an hour and fifteen minutes, with the other “half” online. Teaching in hybrid, or blended, format brought up similar feelings I have regarding the lack of comfort I tend to have with giving up “coverage,”…
As one listens to John Coltrane’s “Central Park West,” one’s mind begins to wander to distant places. Personally, it brings me to a cold night, any cold night, ambling around the street of that same name, looking for life, peace, warmth, quiet, loneliness, happiness, those things that keep us all going in one way or…
Next semester (like every semester), I am going to try something new in my U.S. History survey courses. At the beginning of this semester, when I asked students in my U.S. history survey courses what they wanted to learn, many of them said something like “anything and everything” or “I just want to learn about…
We welcome a new contributor today. Barry Goldberg is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research examines the development of interracial politics on the Lower East Side in the post-World War II era. A recent edition of my neighborhood newsletter had a front-page article describing a controversial Department of Education plan to rezone…
Over on Twitter, Michael Landis has started a new hashtag #NativismSyllabus. Go check it out, there’s some great stuff on there. One of the first things that comes to my mind when I think about Nativism is, of course, Thomas Nast. I’m on year three now of doing a Nast unit in my Integrative Studies…
As a scholar and teacher of the Civil War era, I am in the midst of contributing to debates surrounding the proper place of military history in academic settings. The field’s professional journals and influential blogs have even launched an intense but necessary conversation on how best to balance military studies alongside cultural and social…
During the course of this semester, I have turned our attention to the topic of teaching U.S. history online. In this last discussion of this topic, I intend to reflect on how my online teaching experiences and the discovery of new tools have shaped my teaching in the Face-to-Face (F-2-F) format–particularly how I call upon…
A few months ago, someone invited me to a hidden Facebook group for college-level instructors to ask questions, share successes, and vent frustrations. I recently left this group after having enough of the unceasing student-bashing. The most common complaint among these instructors is similar to the one I hear most from friends and colleagues, “these…
History came alive for me when, as an undergraduate, I learned that historians argue. I was already a history nerd who enjoyed learning (really, memorizing) the names and dates of the past. But the sense of satisfaction I derived from “knowing” the past paled before the enthusiasm I experienced when I began “engaging” history by…
