So I’ll be posting on Wednesdays for a while… weekly until my classes begin in Sept, then probably every other week. This post is a preview of my history survey syllabus, starting with page 4, the guidelines for the “SkillBuilder” assignment (click on the image to download the page’s PDF). Just what ARE the basic…
We teach about schools, teaching, and education. Whether discussing the New England Primer, the rise of public schools, school segregation litigation in Boston, the rise of colleges, Brown v. the Board of Education, prayer in school, or school shootings like the Kent State massacre, our history classes bring us to the realm of education.And, we…
I’m pretty sympathetic with Bruce Shulman’s argument from The Seventies, that if we really want to locate the origins of our own current times, we could hardly do better than look at the transitions, left and right, that took place in what I call in my lecture on the subject “the most embarrassing decade.” But…
Following up on Ed’s recent post about balancing a book’s beauty with its gee-whiz visual aesthetics, I wanted to continue the conversation about survey textbooks and formats. I’ve also been thinking about Gail Collins’ article that appeared in the NY Review of Books (which I finally got around to reading using Pocket last week) about…
I’ve been watching The Newsroom during its first three weeks of life and, much as many felt The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin’s tonic during the George W. Bush years, The Newsroom is his tonic for today’s news-as-rating’s-driven-entertainment culture. Why report on important things like the economy when stories about Snooki’s most recent nip slip…
Rhetoric Race and Religion: Racial and Sacred Imagery in Abraham Lincoln, Vamp…: by Edward Blum *Special to Rhetoric Race and Religion The novels of Seth Grahame-Smith are drawing a lot of attention these days. His boo…
Since we’re famous here at TUSH.0 … we get contacted all the time. Some want to sell their products online; others hope we’ll mention their book. And then sometimes we get neat new resource information that could perhaps help us teach better. Here is one from findthedata.org. They collect, collate, and display various information about…
The Whitewashing of Civil War America There are so many more reasons to feel sick about Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – both the film and the novel. The take home message to me (and again, I have yet to see the movie) is that it presents American history in such a way that whites have…
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter failed at the box office. I haven’t seen the movie (I’ll rent it for $1.31, unless redbox’s prices jump again), but I did read the novel. In part, I grabbed it because a group of junior high and high school teachers told me their students were reading it. I enjoyed Wicked,…
Today we celebrate. TUSH.0 has been named the 47th best blog ever created. Hooray for us!!! (and by ever created, I mean on US history and by some online college blog we don’t know much about) http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/07/02/the-50-best-american-history-blogs/
