Gilded Age Lecture My first historical love was the Gilded Age. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was because the names were familiar. As a child, I had heard of Carnegie and Rockefeller. We lived near New York City and Rockefeller Center was where you could ice skate. Carnegie Hall was where really good musicians…
While the Civil War gets all the glory of movies, celebrations, and heroics, Reconstruction is rendered a sad story. It’s a tragedy. It’s a travesty. Healing defeated justice. Dreams were deferred. It led to the “nadir” of black history. I hate sad stories, even though I often find myself writing or talking about them as…
Because Ed called me out on how I chose to periodize Reconstruction in HIST (and rightly so), I think it’s worth dwelling on the subject of periodization for a moment, especially because all of us who teach the US survey have to draw lines around when a subject begins and when it ends in order…
<http://cdn.calisphere.org/data/13030/jm/hb167n97jm/files/hb167n97jm-FID4.jpg> I just cracked open my “Reconstruction” PowerPoint and shook my head in disgust. The first slide starts with a lie: “Reconstruction: 1865-1877.” First off, even though my opening is from 1865 (the devastation of Charleston, SC) and the first song is “I’m a Good Ole Rebel,” (which is part of Major Problems) but some…
There are so many great digital resources out there, and we wanted to share a new blog that has documents from the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives. This comes from Daniel Rice, a graduate of the University of Arkansas and now resident of Chapel Hill. Once we figure out how to put “blogs we…
Week 1 Roundup Bureaucratic tip:“You are #31 on the wait list,” I email back to yet another student hoping to add the class. Sadly, the cap is 50 and it’s staying there. At my institution, students can try to “crash” a course. They need an add code and it gets tricky. One student is a senior…
Introducing the concept of historiography to undergraduates in the survey is not altogether that difficult to do, although not without problems. In my first “real” lecture, on Re-con-struction “(Re-con-struction)”–any Grease fans out there?–I start the class off by asking if any of them have heard of W.E.B. DuBois. Maybe a third of the class raise…
The History Games The buzz all around San Diego is The Hunger Games and follow-up books by Suzanne Collins. North America is now home to several districts that must have their young people battle for resources and food. I haven’t read them (probably will this winter break), but they got me thinking. Could I have my…
Ed’s first day of class sounds like mine, only better executed. He actually takes a picture of the kids! In my opening session, I do have them look around at the physical appearance of the classroom, something they have been doing for the previous ten minutes anyway. Then I show them an image of the…
This post comes from our friend Gale Kenny, the author of a tremendous book on American abolitionists in Jamaica, one of the incredible graduates from Rice University’s history department, and an American Council of Learned Society New Faculty Fellow at Barnard College. We hope to hear a lot more about this class. As I was working on a…
