It’s good to be back from summer hiatus. Like many of you, over the summer months I devoted quite a bit of time to preparing courses for the fall semester. One of my courses this fall is a senior-level readings seminar devoted to the 19th Century American West, drawing on collections of primary sources, scholarly…
Many of you may remember me from last year. I taught first-year seminars at Rice University, instructing 15 students per class. Such an intimate setting offered both rewards and challenges, many of the latter revolving around just how to teach such a small number of students. I learned much about myself and my teaching style…
Thank you for visiting our new website. Since 2011, Teaching United States History has been the premier forum for critical reflection on pedagogy in the college-level U.S. history classroom. But we are working to make this site even more useful. Links along the top of the homepage will soon house a host of primary sources,…
We’ll see you next fall with new conversations and a few new voices. Stay tuned.
Recently, a panel of distinguished historians and authors discussed how they create American History textbooks. General agreement? Students don’t read them anyway. This assertion – that students do not read and you cannot get them to read no matter what you try – struck me as most strange. If those who write textbooks don’t think students read them,…
Despite its exciting growth over the past couple of decades, disability history still gets relatively little little space in U.S. history textbooks. This is a shame, in part because the work on disability reveals so much not just about the lives of the disabled, but also about the evolving politics and meaning of “normalcy” in…
Like most Ph.D. students (especially in the humanities), most of my thoughts during the last two years of graduate school centered on one question: Will I have a job after graduation? For obvious reasons, I didn’t spend much time considering the larger political realities of the academy. I basically assumed that being a college professor…
The title of this post is a little misleading. I’m actually building a course, and have run into some thorny questions. This fall I’ve agreed to offer a course I haven’t taught before; an upper-level seminar on the American West in the 19th century. As I’ve conceived it, the course will cover roughly 1803 (the…
In the spirit of continuing my week of post-conference active learning to stave off end-of-term slacking (theirs AND mine)… here’s another one that worked especially well this past week. I should explain – many of my non-lecture lessons are done off the cuff, “just in time,” or slapped together at the last minute (choose your…
Hey, I just got back from the OAH last week also, which had two consequences: returning to campus invigorated with a renewed willingness to experiment BUT having had very little prep time before Monday morning’s classes. So I turned to something I could pull off without a lot of prior work, to keep it from being entirely a…
