I should have seen it coming. Really! But when I planned a class discussion on the origins of Medicare, I hadn’t considered the implications for our ongoing national conversation about universal healthcare. Fortunately, my students are more perceptive than I am, and they instantly made the connection for me. “So, even back then people were…
Recently, I taught a course on the Long Civil Rights Movement. In the course, students engaged the study of African American history in ways that transcended an exclusive focus on the 1950s-60s stories of voting rights and school desegregation. I wanted them to think as deeply about Washington and Du Bois as they did Arkansas schools…
I found Katie’s recent post on teaching material culture stimulating, in part because I am in the process of designing a course on the history of urban space in 19th-century Boston that will have its own material culture component, and looking for ideas and suggestions. In my previous life as a journalist I wrote quite…
I still remember the feelings of whiplash. As an undergraduate double major in history and education, I struggled to reconcile the wildly different pedagogical styles of my respective fields. I am deeply grateful for the rigorous quality of my undergraduate history courses, but the methods employed therein could not have been more different from the…
We live in a great age of visualization. Plummeting bandwidth restrictions and the growing availability of high-resolution images (owing in part to the advances of Wikimedia, Flickr, and other open image databases) have antiquated the pixelated images found in five-year old PowerPoint slides. YouTube, digital movie files, and a rapidly multiplying cache of fantastic visualization…
The nervous chatter was loud; the silence was louder. I had four U.S. history survey students in my car on Wednesday evening driving back to campus after watching 12 Years a Slave. Some students were animatedly discussing the film, some were wiping tears, some appeared stoic, but all were affected. The movie is powerful, and…
I tried something new in my women’s history class this term, and I’m really happy with how it went. I tend to get students from all over the university in this course, but noticed that there are a good number of education majors who show up. One of the papers I assigned last year was…
As someone who studies material culture I try to bring this interdisciplinary field into my U.S. history classrooms as much as possible. I do this in several ways: choosing readings that are object-focused in their sources, assigning museum exhibits (or offering them as extra credit), bringing objects to class, and discussing images of objects as…
My U.S. history survey class includes an exploration of different genres of historical presentation. The students are reading three autobiographies and then comparing them with works of academic, public, and popular history. In a recent post, I discussed the experience of comparing Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition with Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange: The Epic…
Last week I attended the 2013 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in St. Louis. One of the panels, a round-table discussion on the importance (or lack thereof) of emphasizing military history in American Civil War studies, generated a fair amount of passion in attendees and panelists alike. A number of distinguished historians served…
