Taking a Walk on the Civil War’s “Dark Side”
This year, I am embarking on a rather foolhardy ambitious scholarly agenda, and my central project is a textbook for the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. I know, I know…there’s a crying need for...
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On Auditory Imperialism
Los Leones, Colorado, was the site of a longstanding Mexican settlement in the upper Rio Grande Valley, until it disappeared from the map in the 1870s. The town itself remained, physically at least,...
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After a couple of good Twitter conversations about my idea of “auditory imperialism,” with good questions that really made me think why I used “auditory” instead of maybe “discourse” or “linguistic”...
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The Case of the Missing Adjective: Writing and Choosing Whiteness
Consider the following sentences: “…learning absorbed the lives of southern youth prior to the Civil War in substantial ways.” “A belief in Manifest Destiny cut across partisan and sectional...
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The Research Paper is Dead. Long Live the Research.
Why do we assign research papers? My labors shall be a model for History majors for all time We’ve all asked this question, usually at about one in the morning during the last week of classes when...
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I Will Not Argue About the Confederate Flag.
The murder of nine Americans by a terrorist in Charleston Wednesday night, besides being a monumental tragedy, also gave us the absurd spectacle of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (a woman of...
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Getting Medieval with Team-Based Learning
Last fall, I began teaching a section of my department’s Medieval World course, a prospect which made me equal parts nervous and excited, as I discussed here. I’m pleased to report two related...
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Launching the Great Student-Blogging Experiment
At the beginning of the summer, as I settled into planning for this fall, I made the decision to jettison the traditional research paper assignment–which had heretofore served as a capstone...
View ArticleGuest Appearance on The Junto Blog
In case you missed it, or aren’t immersed in the community of historians on Twitter and other online spaces, Sean Wilentz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday that many of us...
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There Are No Independent Variables: Pedagogy and the Dismantling of Structures
When I took the research and methods seminar in my undergraduate History major, one of our texts was E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, a profoundly important and trenchant work, but also one I was nowhere...
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An Argument for Continental History
If you watch sports regularly, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “East Coast Bias.” Teams from places New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, can seem to dominate the coverage among sports...
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No, the Oregon Wingnut Army is not the Second Whiskey Rebellion.
As the “occupation” of the abandoned headquarters of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon has unfolded over the last day or so (See the Oregonian for regularly-updated coverage), there have been a...
View ArticleIn the Shadow of the Civil War’s Beginning
As a scholar engaged in a study of the Civil War Era in the United States, It’s been my job lately to think about the way we remember and interpret this period. And the more I think about it, the more...
View ArticleWhat is “Historical Literacy?” I Wrote Some Things.
My first post as a Contributor to the Teaching US History blog is up today. In it, I ruminate a bit on our love-hate relationship with the survey course, and think about what it means to be...
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Objective History is Impossible. And That’s a Fact.
There are facts, and there are historical facts, E.H. Carr reminded us years ago. Fact: lots of people crossed the Rubicon. Historical fact: Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE. A fact is...
View ArticleThe Great Student Blogging Experiment: Some Results
Early last fall, I wrote about my plans to add a fairly elaborate blogging component to my upper-level Latin American history course. This semester-long blogging assignment was, I hoped, a way for me...
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