TUSH 2.0 coming soon!
Happy summer to all. With Ed and Kevin taking a backseat, Teaching United States History is rebooting with new contributors, new content, and new conversations. Stay tuned…
Eric Foner walks into a bar…
My partner told me this joke: how do you know you are at a conference of dorky history professors? Answer: Eric Foner walks into the hotel lobby and a quiet hush descends upon the crowd, as hundreds of bespectacled people (young folks in square hip glasses, old folks in bizarrely gigantic ones) begin to whisper…
“Everything that has a beginning, has an end”
As we approach the end of the semester and get ever closer to the “Age of Obama,” the pop culture element of my class shifts from the Rocky films to The Matrix. We examine how the digital age transforms our worlds and, as the films progress, the lines among human-machine-computer blur and sometimes erase. At…
Etiquette and Ethics
Another interesting wrinkle in teaching during the digital age is that private email exchanges can go public quite easily. This was the case recently in a conversation between a professor at NYU and a student in the MBA program. Basically, it is a story of contrasting interests, etiquettes, and ethics. I wonder how can one…
Asian American History in American Religious History
As a new article at the Huffington Post shows, researchers and statisticians have long undervalued Asian American history and have overlooked them in research studies. Over at Religion in American History, a wonderful three-part series recently addressed different ways Asian American history can build upon, complicate, and add new layers to American religious history. It…
In the Beginning … with Edward E. Andrews
You remember back to the beginning of this semester when classroom faces were happy (before first papers were returned) or when students read at least the first couple of pages of the assignments (now, when I ask, “be honest, who did the reading,” hardly any hands go up). But in the beginning (of the semester),…
Teaching with Television
Today’s Q&A comes from Elana Levine, associate professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Any book with a cover from Three’s Company is a must for me! 1. What television material do you find works best in…
Wikipedia as Historiographical Microcosm
While a TA for a class on religion in American history, I puzzled over why so many students insisted that Charles Sheldon should be considered the founding figure of Social Gospel theology (rather than Washington Gladden). We discussed both figures in lecture, and there it was, right on the top of page 307 of the…
Teaching With Sports
Today’s interview is the second in our two-part series with Dr. Amy Bass of the College of New Rochelle. Her first book, Not the Triumph, but the Struggle, one of the finest works on twentieth-century American history I have read, examines the “making of the black athlete” as a political, cultural, social, national, and international…
Teaching W. E. B. Du Bois with Amy Bass
If you follow me on twitter (@edwardjblum) or on Facebook, you know that I am a huge fan of the work of Dr. Amy Bass. A historian of race, sports, culture, and twentieth-century America and the Director of the Honors Program at the College of New Rochelle, she has written two fantastic books. We’re going…