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Lisa Clark Diller I will admit to having been a re-enactment virgin until the weekend of September 21, 2013.  As readers of this blog are well aware, we are in the midst of all things Civil War in the United States. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is marking its own big battles all this fall.  Specifically, the engagements at Chickamauga occurred 150 years ago, September 19-20.    As someone whose research reflects a great deal on another civil war (one in England in the 1640s), I have tended to smile blithely through local history enthusiasts’ explanations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the role played by East Tennessee in that conflict. However, as a teacher of a first year seminar who is always looking for the required “bonding experience” for my students, this year it seemed appropriate to participate in some local history.  I don’t think this was one of the most effectively executed re-enactments (others with more experience have confirmed this opinion)....

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...

Alastair Jamieson, "Germany's Angela Merkel teaches history class on Berlin Wall anniversary," NBC World News, August 13, 2013 German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew on her Communist-era experiences to teach a history class at a school on Tuesday - the 52nd anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Merkel, who is campaigning ahead of next month’s general election, gave a 45-minute lesson as a "substitute teacher" for a 12th-grade class in east Berlin. >>> Sacha Cordner, "Lawmaker Considering Legislation To Cut Down 'Islam-Bias' In Fla. School Textbooks," WFSU-Tallahassee, August 5, 2013 A Florida lawmaker is considering legislation that would give the public input on the content found in Florida school textbooks. His overall aim is to cut down on what he calls the “Islam-bias” in state schools. Melbourne Republican Representative Ritch Workman says Prentice Hall’s “World History” book not only puts an inaccurate spin on Islam,...

Steven Cromack When I teach, I deliberately make an effort to connect big history to the personal lives of my students. At the heart of my world history curriculum are three main ideas: Walker Evans' photo, "In front of 310 East Sixty-first Street," 1938. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. How each individual sees the world matters. Reality is a construction based on an individual’s worldview. It is difficult to reconcile an individual’s interests with those of a society. It is my hope that as we examine history with these ideas in mind, students can begin to think about their existence on a deeper level; that as they go about their daily lives, they have the skills they need to grapple and engage with their world; and that they will learn to face not only their own beliefs and sense of morality, but also those of others. In immersing oneself in the world, the individual turns information into meaningful enlightenment. For, as John Dewey once wrote, “Education is not pr...

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...

Randall Stephens On a recent browse through the loud, garish halls of YouTube I found several interesting history clips.  Without diminishing the importance of LOL catz videos and the endless Fail compilations, I'd like to praise/point to some of the history gems on YouTube .  In the last 5 years YouTube has served as a go-to source for me.  Interviews , documentary films , and materials on teaching draw me in.  It's been a boon to my teaching and research. For example . . . Hear the late esteemed historian and former master of Balliol College, Oxford, Christopher Hill speak about his work on 17th-century England.  He also reminisces on why he became a historian, the nature of revolutions, and more. ("Conversations With Historians: Christopher Hill," BBC Radio 4, October 14, 1991) In this much more recent video (April 11) see historian Taylor Branch discuss the critical year of 1963 and the context of the black freedom struggle.  Branch pieces together ...

Eric Schultz Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be? “If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.” Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges. Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data —though it would take 35 years to...

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...

Chris Beneke Guided tour at Lowell National Park.  Photo courtesy of www.nps.gov/lowe If the experiences of my kids are at all representative, the glum accounts you’ve heard or read about elementary and secondary education in the U.S. have some basis in fact. Public school students move in virtual lock-step with their classmates, get a meager fifteen minutes for recess, and take tests with unsettling regularity. Meanwhile, their hardworking teachers and principals must manage both rigid curriculum standards and large classes. In light of these oft-repeated concerns, my perspective brightened last week while chaperoning my son’s fourth-grade class trip to the Lowell National Park , the splendid and well-preserved site of the famous textile mills where America’s industrial revolution took off in the 1830s and 1840s. I didn’t come away feeling like a Finnish parent probably feels after accompanying his or her child on a field trip. Still, the experience left me much more ...