This semester, I am teaching a course titled “Social Science Approaches to the American Past.” It’s in one of the interdisciplinary programs on campus, with the stated goal of teaching students how social scientists think. This has been an interesting challenge for me as a teacher and a historian (particularly a historian who leans more…
Last summer, I taught the second half of the survey (in my university system, that’s “U.S. since 1865”). The summer session was one of those lightning-round, five-week sprints. This semester I am proceeding at a more normal pace, again teaching the second half. I adopted/adapted a primary source analysis assignment that I have found to…
After having completed one-third of the semester teaching two freshman seminars, I have concluded that generating an effective class discussion is the greatest challenge that I face as an instructor. Conversely, I very much enjoy courses with a lecture format on which I have had great success in the past. I will always defend this…
As a Civil War historian starting a new academic appointment, I have had the great good fortune to start work at a university about a half-hour drive from a major national military park. Even better, the Chickamauga-Chattanooga NPS is presently celebrating the sesquicentennial of those battles, and for the next several months will enjoy an…
We begin our week with a guest post from Whitney Stewart, PhD candidate at Rice University. Whitney and her colleague John Marks are organizing an upcoming symposium at Rice University that will produce an essential volume for scholars of race in the Atlantic World, but the conference will also prompt important discussion for all of…
This week, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on teaching an important but challenging text. I’m curious to know whether people have found other texts or approaches helpful, and also what approaches seem to work when two or more sessions can’t be devoted to the novel. In teaching Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)…
“History has a liberal bias,” one of my undergraduate professors informed us on the third day of class. His comments were in response to a student who asked why all his professors seemed to be left-leaning. I thought about that statement a lot throughout graduate school, as I met professors and students who, with very…
This post is a broader application of Ben Wright’s post on organized lectures that don’t end with “that’s all we have time for today.” What about the semester? The well-worn habit of college history surveys is to get bogged down in a particular period. In and of itself this is not a problem. The problems…
As a quick reminder, I am teaching two freshman writing-intensive seminars on the historical origins of contemporary problems: national gun culture and the role of Confederate symbols in American life. So far, both classes have gone well; the students are, for the most part, engaged and curious.I have dedicated the past two weeks to the…
Nearly all undergraduate history programs have a required capstone course for their majors, an opportunity for students to draw on the knowledge learned in their history courses and use research skills to produce an original piece of scholarship. At my university (a mid-sized public institution), our capstone courses focus on specific topics ranging from “The…
