This year I’m teaching history surveys. A lot of them. Last year, as part of a postdoctoral teaching fellowship, I taught several small, narrowly focused, writing-intensive seminars at an elite private university. The seminars were a pedagogical dream: their small size and narrow focus offered wonderful opportunities to encourage critical discussion of common material, allowed…
A few years ago, I lost track of time while struggling to write a conclusion to a conference paper. When I glanced at the clock, I realized that I was supposed to be in the classroom in two minutes. Running from my office across campus, I started thinking about the relationship between teaching and writing.…
Hello there! Like Katie, I am teaching the first half of US Women’s History this fall, and I couldn’t be happier to be doing so. This is by far my favorite course to teach, and not least because it was in a women’s history college classroom that I myself figured out that I wanted to…
Greetings TUSH.O bloggers and readers! I’m using this post to introduce myself to the community and give you an idea of what I’ll be posting in the future. I am finishing my PhD in history at Rice University this year, entitled “Fashioning Slavery: Slaves and Clothing in the United States South, 1830–1865.” I also currently…
I have the great fortune of teaching freshman writing seminars at Rice University. Rather than approaching the art of college writing in a detached, theoretical, or “language arts” style, I thought it might be more useful to teach writing on topical studies. Thus, my seminars expose students to the historical origins of two contemporary American…
The American Civil War occupies a peculiar, significant (and unavoidable) place in the American imagination. For some it is a national tragedy, a source of division or even anxiety; others variously view it as a glorious episode in the march toward human equality. As a historian of the American military, and of the Civil War…
Note: Previous TUSH editors have produced outstanding textbooks. Keven Schultz’s HISTand Ed Blum’s Major Problems in American History are two of the finest available. You can request instructor copies here and here. Below please find a call for contributors for a new textbook project, The American Yawp. We will update TUSH readers as the project…
Like many historians, I have a lot of friends in the world of higher education. Each fall, I spend a good bit of time discussing the upcoming academic year with them. We compare notes on teaching strategies, talk about what works (and what doesn’t) in the classroom, and collaborate on various research or teaching projects. …
Beginning this fall, I want to encourage my students to think more reflectively about how the past is represented—not only in terms of content, but also in terms of form. Toward this end, I am giving my survey students a window into our quirky, insular profession. On the first day, I gave them a brief…
Teaching United States History is back! Beginning next week, you can expect exciting content from new voices and a continuation of the excellent discussions that have made this blog a clearinghouse for some of the most judicious and creative perspectives in the field. If you or someone you know are doing interesting things in the…
