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. "Mississippi Blues trail curriculum launched today," Clarion Ledger , May 6, 2013 A new Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum launched online today will bring the state’s native arts and culture to the classroom by exploring Mississippi history through a Blues Trail lens. The free 18-lesson curriculum, with an interactive, multi-media resource page, was launched by the Mississippi Arts Commission Monday. With three lessons for each of six core areas — music, meaning, cotton, transportation, civil rights and media — the curriculum is available at www.msbluestrail.org/curriculum. >>> Jakob Schiller, "Civil War Lovers Can’t Leave the Past Behind at Awkward Reenactments," Wired , May 30, 2013 Some of our favorite photographers are ones that bring a fresh eye to a stale topic, which is what Anderson Scott has done with Civil War re-enactors — a favorite subject among photographers. In his recent photo book Whistling Dixie, Scott delves into the American ...

Randall Stephens Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University .  He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association .  He's also the author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995). Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this...

Dan Allosso I spent last weekend in the Twin Cities, doing a radio interview about my book and giving a talk on freethought history at the monthly meeting of the Minnesota Atheists .  At roughly the same time, Susan Jacoby was a featured speaker at the second annual Women in Secularism conference in Washington, DC .  A couple of people live-blogged Jacoby’s talk ( here and here ). Reading these transcripts and thinking about my own weekend as a presenter has changed my perspective on the role of historians in public discourse. According to a bio produced for Bill Moyers’ website on PBS , Susan Jacoby began her writing career as a reporter for THE WASHINGTON POST, is the author of five books, including WILD JUSTICE, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, she has been a contributor to THE NEW YORK TIMES,...

Randall Stephens While I'm at an American Studies conference in Sweden, the blog will be taking a short break.  In the meantime, have a look at this two past posts that deal with Memorial Day: Heather Cox Richardson, "A Thank You to Our Troops—All of Them—on this Memorial Day," May 30, 2011 Memorial Day came out of the Decoration Days held after the Civil War. This seems like a logical thing for me, a scholar of nineteenth century America, to write about today. Instead, though, I’d like to talk about a group of soldiers that often gets forgotten when we remember our troops. I mean the WACs, the more than 150,000 women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. >>> Randall Stephens, "The History of Memorial Day and the National World War One Museum, Kansas City," May 23, 2009 As Americans cram their faces with hot dogs and swill cheap beer, many will also reflect on the heroic efforts of countless men and women who have served their country over...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe "Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData . This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations, when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus. When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field shoul...

Craig Gallagher* It's likely that if you have already applied and been accepted to graduate school to study history, you’ve heard it at least once. You’ll hear it plenty more times before you get that masters or Ph.D. in history you’re putting aside a lot of time and/or money to acquire. In fact, if your decision to continue your education isn’t just about putting off the working world for a few years and is driven by a desire to change direction and start a new career, you’ll hear it so often that it will feel as though everyone thinks you’re running away to join the circus instead of pursuing another professional qualification. I’m talking, of course, about that constant refrain that hangs over graduate school like a surly cloud at the moment: “There are no jobs!” Now, I don’t wish to debunk this statement with a much rosier picture of the job market than has hitherto been offered, because I can’t do that. Not when respected publications like the Atlantic and the Chronicle of Hi...

Eric B. Schultz Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.   Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from A Jack Delano photo of migrants heading north from Florida, 1940. World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns . There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.   Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project , scheduled for completion in 2016. In his monumental What Ha...

Randall Stephens Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal , Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th Read the above at the BBC e future." ( "History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian , May 12, 2013). Here's a brief excerpt: For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't ten...

Heather Cox Richardson As the school year winds to a close, incoming graduate students have been asking me what they should read to prepare for the fall. That question has an obvious answer, and the answer brings up what strikes me as an oddity in the way we handle graduate education in history. Boston Public Library. Photo by Randall Stephens. It has always seemed to me bizarre that we treat graduate education as if it has little connection to undergraduate studies. A brilliant undergrad will understand facts, argument, and, with luck, historiography, as well as how to write. But one of the first things that brilliant undergrad will do in graduate school is to take a seminar in historical theory, where s/he’s supposed to converse intelligently about historical theories of which s/he has never heard. First year grad students are lost and frightened. (Except for that One Guy who throws around Foucault's name like they're long-time tennis partners.) My antidote to tha...

The following is a reposting of a May 6, 2011 piece. Heather Cox Richardson While I’m as happy as the next mom to get chocolate on Mother’s Day—or on any other day, frankly—I can’t help pointing out that “Mother’s Day,” did not originate as a way to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s empowerment and social reform in the late nineteenth century. Rather than starting in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother, it was an impassioned effort by women in the late nineteenth century to end war forever. The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what carnage meant in a modern war. Soldiers who had marched jauntily off to war discovered that long-range weapons turned the inaccurate volleys of the past into murderous waves of death. Their romantic notions of brave battle and either a victorious return or a clean end died even before the men did. They saw their friends trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, turned ...

Heather Cox Richardson The New York City Municipal Archives has put on-line more than 800,000 images. This is simply an astonishing collection . A must for anyone who studies New York City and the U.S. in general. Click here for more

Heather Cox Richardson On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law theChinese Exclusion Act . This hotly contested law was the first in American history to prevent voluntary immigration to the United States. It was also the formal rejection of one of the founding principles of the Republican Party: that the immigration of workers to the U.S. was fundamental to the country’s strength. An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must draw the line somewhere, you know." Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Chinese immigration to America began with the Gold Rush . Its flood tide in 1849 coincided with the economic catastrophe left in China by the Opium Wars, and young Chinese men came to “Gold Mountain” to earn money to feed their families back home. Chinese miners did well financially in California, but quickly came under fire from native-born Americans, who first passed a “Foreign Miners’ Tax” targeting Chinese ...

Steven Cromack The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform stunned Americans. Schools across the country scrambled to design content standards and implement assessments. Thirty-years later, history seems to be repeating itself. In an effort to improve K-12 education, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted and implemented the Common Core State Standards . As of 2013, Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska are the five holdouts. Members of the academy and secondary school history teachers should be euphoric about the Common Core, which mandates that middle and high school students actually do the work of historians. This includes, but is not limited to, reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources, as well as synthesizing such information coherently in written assignments. The crux of the Common Core is 21st-century readiness, i.e., putting a verb in a sentence correctly, and being able to read not “goo...

Joseph Stromberg, "Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism New archaeological evidence and forensic analysis reveals that a 14-year-old girl was cannibalized in desperation," Smithsonian , May 1, 2013 The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl. >>> "Study reveals cannibalism in first US colony," AlJazeeraEnglish , May 1, 2013    raherrmann, "Digging Out My Cannibal Girl Hat," The Junto blog, May 2, 2013 . . . . So, funny story. When I first submitted my article on cannibalism and the Starving Time at Jamestown to the William and Mary Quarterly, the piece strong...