*Author note: these are my prepared remarks (with some slight modifications) for a roundtable at the 2019 American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois entitled “The American Revolution in World History: A Teaching Roundtable.” For the last eighteen months I have worked as a social studies teacher in Highlands County, Florida as I researched…
During a recent session on the Dawes Act a student asked me how long American Indians had been in North America. I gave her the most honest answer I could. “Always.” I could tell this wasn’t what she was looking for. She was hoping instead for a longer diatribe speaking to Beringia, coastal routes, and…
The timing of the Civil War is suspect. While we might trace the conflict to April 12, 1861 and the shots fired at Fort Sumter, one could argue that it began in Kansas four years earlier. Still others would argue that the civil conflict was raging in 1850, 1820, or in 1787 as delegates wrestled…
You know the scene. It’s Alec Baldwin’s only scene. In just over seven minutes, Alec Baldwin’s “Blake” harangues four hapless real estate salesmen to Always Be Closing. The film, of course, is Glengarry Glen Ross, and its language should probably be kept out of your classroom. But there is an essential message to Baldwin’s diatribe: Go and…
We all have cIasses from high school and college that we remember with fondness, and others we remember with terror. Probably even more common is a subject that we associate with boring assignments on long forgotten material. When we encounter someone who has dedicated their life to an academic subject, it’s hard not to immediately think…
We often tout that history, and indeed the liberal arts experience, teach critical thinking skills. We are often less clear what that phrase actually means. I’ve been trying to define critical thinking over the past few weeks and have decided that it has a few possible meanings. An ability to assemble and disassemble an argument…
We’ve all had them—ancient professors who dress poorly, haven’t shaved in between three and four lifetimes, get covered in chalk and don’t seem to notice or mind, and go through lectures with a clarity and calmness only possible after the thousandth iteration. This, it seems, is the image of the “Ivory Tower,” the “absent-minded professor,”…
I ended up in the clearly enviable situation of teaching, alongside my standard U.S. history load, two sections of Global History II this semester. Yes, that’s two sections covering the quick and unproductive time between 1500 and 2015…across the entire earth. This, my friends, to many, is the grizzle of the academic teaching world. But…
