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Elliot Brandow Wikipedia is ubiquitous. It's at the top of your Google results, of course. And since 2012 it's in the right-hand sidebar of your Google results, dubbed the Knowledge Graph , as well. With this year's Apple iOS7 upgrade, when you ask Siri factual questions, those are Wikipedia entries you'll be offered in response. Even some library systems, like Serials Solutions' new Summon 2.0, can include Wikipedia entries alongside your list of books and articles. It's also our dirty little secret. We know that students use it , but faculty use it, librarians use it, we all use it. Why? We like it for the same reasons that we've always liked encyclopedias: it's fast access to basic information on a topic you know nothing about. It gives you an overview in language written for a novice, offers you key terms that are helpful when you proceed with your search to more scholarly resources, and it increasingly cites some of that scholarly material right ...

The  blog will take a short break as the semester kicks in.  In the meantime, have a look at these posts on teaching, baseball history, syllabi creation, questions for the survey course, American pre-history, and classroom decorum. Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, "Visual Learners and Historical Myopia," April 3, 2013   Randall Stephens, "The Plagiarism Gamble and Theory of Mind," August 31, 2011 Dan Allosso, "American Pre-history," February 6, 2012 Bill McCoy, "Key Questions for a World Civ Seminar," July 11, 2011 Jonathan Rees, "Jump Right in, the Water's Fine," June 27, 2011 Heather Cox Richardson, "Richardson's Rules of Order, Part X: A Word to Athletes (or Musicians, or Artists, or Anyone Who Has a Significant Interest Outside of the Classroom)," October 19, 2009 Chris Beneke, "Why I Teach Baseball History: A Brief, Self-Serving Manifesto," January 9, 2013   For other posts on teaching, check out these ess...

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

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation.  This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar. The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Con...