Getting Students to Read . . .

Randall Stephens

Over at Times Higher Education Tara Brabazon wonders how to get underaduates to care about reading ("Bringing Them to Books," March 9, 2011). I enjoy Brabazon's snarky reports from across the Atlantic. This one is particularly witty and relevant.

"One short sentence chills the expectations of teachers," Brabazon begins. "A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: 'I don’t like reading.' This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence." For Brabazon, "Reading is not meant to be liked or disliked: it is a way to understand the views of others." How should professors "support the act of reading," she asks. Brabazon describes her use of GoodReads, a social media site where readers across the world post reviews and comments about their books. "GoodReads enables students to comment on books, meet authors who are registered on the site and commence a dialogue with an array of interested groups." Sounds like a great idea.

In my classes I use other, rudimentary strategies. I usually give a very basic quiz on the day that a book is due in class. (Sounds awful, I admit, but it works.) The quiz is elementary, asking the most simple questions to ensure that students are at least reading the book that we will be discussing in class. In my experience students need to know that reading is not optional and the quiz tends to help.

Still, how can a professor "make" a student care about reading? I occasional begin my classes by describing a recent book--by a historian, sociologist, religious studies scholar--and then using that as a hook for the lecture of that day. I also start off classes by pointing out a history book or a newspaper article that connects the topic we are covering in the class with a current event or a larger historical theme. Maybe, just maybe, that will make students think about how reading and being informed makes their lives richer and more interesting.

We know that reading widely helps individuals develop as writers. So, I tell my students that if they want to fine tune their writing and become better writers, they should read opinion journals, newspapers, serious nonfiction, and the like. William Zinsser puts it well: "writing is learned by imitation." He suggests that students find a writer whose style they like. "Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course."

I'd be curious to know what carrots others use to attract students to the practice of reading.

Screening the Past: On History Docs, 1960s Counterculture Films, and Online Abundance

Randall Stephens

Werner Herzog once quipped: "It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means 'feature film' in disguise."* Perhaps that's a post-mod nod to relativism. It is true that there are documentaries and there are "documentaries," just as there are feature films and "feature films." Be wary about which ones you use in a history class. The History Channel's series of films on ancient aliens stand in contrast to episodes of PBS's American Experience. (Do history students know the difference?)

I've seen a few history-related documentaries in the last few months that are as enchanting as many feature films. I've also seen some feature films that view like weird documentaries, or period pieces, trapped in the amber of time.

While The Unseen Alistair Cooke: A Masterpiece Special first first aired on PBS in 2008, I hadn't seen it until a couple of weeks ago. The film, "chronicles Cooke's decades in America, friendships with Hollywood icons, celebrated journalism career and years as host of Masterpiece Theatre. Marking the November 2008 centennial of his birth, The Unseen Alistair Cooke: A Masterpiece Special turns an admiring eye on the master observer." It's a captivating story of an endlessly fascinating character. For anyone interested in exploring how Brits view Americans and vice versa, this is a fun one.

The latest installments of American Experience include some films that tie in to anniversaries. On the Civil War front, the Robert E. Lee bio aired in January. On February 28 Triangle Fire will run on PBS, marking

the 100th anniversary of that tragedy. HBO will be showing a similar documentary. "The PBS special is affecting," writes Aaron Barnhart at the Kansas City Star, "much more so than the overly talky HBO documentary on the fire airing next month. PBS also takes more liberties with the facts. In 1909, about a year earlier, the Triangle ladies had led a walkout that quickly spread to other Garment District shops. Crucially, some of New York’s leading aristocratic women, such as Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P.), joined them."

Moving forward in time and genre . . . I watched the 1970 film Getting Straight, which seems strangely proud of its relevance and counter cultural bona fides. (In full here.) The film stars that ubiquitous actor of the Me Decade, the hirsute Elliott Gould as a a former campus radical who returns to school with a single-minded purpose: He wants his degree and his fun, with no political strings attached. Complete with chamber-pop hippie soundtrack, Getting Straight features a young Candice Bergen, an even younger Harrison Ford, and an array of stock characters playing Baby Boomer roles. There's the Dionysian stoner, the African-American radical (who demands a black studies department), and various libertines and longhair sign carriers. It almost has the feel of a clunky play, with the youngsters squaring off against the hopeless, old squares in the admin. (Watching it, I was reminded of Christopher Lasch's line about the era: "Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy" [Culture of Narcissism, 33].) Getting Straight's cinematography borrows heavily from pop art in some visually appealing ways. The filming is playful, even silly at times. A great period piece, which can, at times, be grating.

I'm always on the look out for 60s films that can be used, in bits, in class. Maybe next time I teach America in the 1960s I'll use a clip or two from the Monkees colossal psychedelic bomb, Head (1968), or Roger Corman's The Trip (1967). The Graduate (1967), or the Strawberry Statement (1970) (watch the latter in full here) might work as a generational flick in ways that Getting Straight would not.

Much, much, much can be tracked down on YouTube or on the "watch instantly" feature on Netflix. Selections from two well made Rock docs, both on Netflix, come to mind: Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) (2010); and Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile (2010).

On accessibility/access to film clips, performances, historical movies Don Chiasson observes in his review of "Keif's" new biography ("High on the Stones," March 10 NYRB):

Anyone reading this review can go to YouTube now and experience Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly, or the first Stones recordings, or anything else they want to see, instantly: ads for Freshen-up gum from the Eighties; a spot George Plimpton did for Intellivision, an early video game. Anything. I am not making an original point, but it cannot be reiterated enough: the experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up.

It all makes screening the past in the history classroom much easier. More choices than ever, though.

Is Your Teaching Stuck in an Industrial Paradigm?

Jonathan Rees

A few weeks ago Heather Cox Richardson recommended a video embedded in a post on this blog. I’ve been kind of freaked out about what I heard and saw on it ever since. In it, among other things, Sir Ken Robinson (a guy who I can tell you literally nothing about other than the fact that he’s obviously much smarter than I am) suggests that education, as we know it, is organized along the lines that factories were during the mid-nineteenth century.

Time periods are divided by ringing bells. The instruction in particular subjects is neatly divided into different rooms. Children are brought through the system in batches based upon how old they are. This educational system that we all take for granted was conceived, Robinson suggests, in the image of factories in order to produce people to work in factories.

For me, the idea that I’m doing anything along the lines of a factory is deeply disturbing. Had you asked me why I wanted to be a professor before I started graduate school, I might actually have said in order to be sure that I would never have to work in a factory. I study labor history in large part because I have such great respect for the people who did work so much harder than I do for much less reward. And yet, I don’t want my classroom to resemble a factory setting in any way!

Sometimes, though, I know that factory thinking raises its ugly head while I’m teaching. Whenever I get in one of those funks brought on by a large batch of uninspired answers coming from the students in front of me, I always imagine myself as Brian in that scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where he addresses all his new followers from a window.

“You are all individuals,” he tells them.

“We are all individuals,” they reply in unison.

“You are all different.”

“We are all different.”

“I’m not,” says a guy in the right foreground, just to be difficult.

How do we get more students to think for themselves, even if (like that difficult guy in the foreground) they don’t even realize that they’re doing it? Robinson, who’s mostly discussing secondary school students, seems to be suggesting that the best way to break the paradigm is to give up on standardized testing. Don’t measure output. Measure creativity. Create an incentive system in the classroom designed to foster creativity—the same kind of creativity that kids see in the new electronic media that surrounds them every moment of every day other than when they’re in school.

Leaving the current assessment craze in higher ed aside, trying to break the paradigm in the college history class seems like a much more difficult task than it would be for secondary schools, as the vast majority of the colleagues I know would already rather retire than ever hand their students a standardized or multiple-choice history test. We grade on composition, not memorization, but an essay produced as part of a system conceived along the lines of a factory probably isn’t the best possible essay it can be.

So what can you do to foster creativity in our students other than just shout “Be creative!” and hope you don’t get a response like “How shall we be creative, oh Lord!”? (That’s a variation on another Life of Brian joke there, by the way, but I can’t explain it on a family-friendly blog.)

Trying to make myself feel better, it wasn’t too hard to think of a few things I’ve already done that at least in theory promote this effect. For instance, I’ve tossed out the textbook this semester (and have been blogging about it here). You can’t get much more top down than most textbooks, with their declarations of what happened coming from an omniscient narrator with the voice of God. No ambiguity. No nuance.

But now I feel like I should be doing more. Robinson alludes to collaborative work and implies that more interdisciplinary instruction can be done, but alas doesn’t suggest how. So what are you doing to break down the education/industrial paradigm or have you (like me) not yet fully come to terms with the fact that you’re perpetuating it?

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University - Pueblo. He blogs about history, academic labor issues and other matters at More or Less Bunk.

Plagiarism: Getting the Point Across

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I’ve tried everything I can to warn students away from plagiarizing. I explain, cajole, and threaten. I even have a set performance attacking plagiarism in the middle of the semester (the Plagiarism Lecture ought to win me an acting award).

It appears those of us who are soldiers in the war

against plagiarism now have a new weapon in our arsenal (from the University Library at the University of Bergen, Norway):

(If captions don’t appear immediately, click the cc button on the toolbar.)

There are pieces of this video that may be dicey for a classroom, but it does offer two crucial pieces of evidence that support our cause. First, it provides obvious proof to a student that plagiarism is not just the crazy hang-up of his or her particular teacher. It’s clear that a lot of money and time went into the making of this video. And it shows that plagiarism is hated everywhere, not just at a student’s particular school.

The way the video presents plagiarism as unacceptable is not how I present it. My own main point is that it is a profound version of theft. Still, educators I respect emphasize what the video does: that a student who plagiarizes cheats him or herself.

And in the era of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, poking fun at the issue to make a serious point might just work.

Historians Teaching Grammar

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I’ve experimented a lot with how to teach writing. Increasingly, I get a significant number of students who don’t even know what a sentence is. Of course this means I spend most of my time on the larger picture of writing: thesis statements, structure, supporting evidence and so on.

But at some point, I got tired of correcting the same grammatical errors for the thousandth time. That frustration made me play around with some new approaches. One of the ones that seems to work is to treat the mechanics of writing like mathematical principle. Rather than repeatedly marking certain grammatical errors that come up again and again, and reminding the students to pay attention to them, I have taught the rule AS A RULE and told the students that this is the way things are, just as 2 + 2 + 4. Always. Period. I told them I would not accept any more mistakes on that particular rule. I’m still experimenting with how frequently I can introduce a new no-break rule, but one a week seems an acceptable pace for now.

Far from resenting this rote method—which conjures for me that dreadful orange grammar text we dragged ourselves through in eighth grade—the students seem thrilled to have found something they can hang on to with certainty in their writing. Yes, they still mess the rules up, but far less frequently. And when they do, I can just mark the error without explaining the rule in my comments.

I recently put to paper my four favorite rules for high school students. These are the ones that if violated immediately marks an essay as grammatically problematic (although they are only the top four). I’d like to keep building this list, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know.

Four crucial rules for ratcheting up your writing:

1. Make sure your subject and verb agree. For example: "Bats in the tent behind the tree were (not was) black."

2. Get your verb tenses correct. (This one is the hardest one on the list. Let me give you some tricks to get it right. First of all, put everything in past tense. English teachers sometimes get upset at that advice because they argue that literature is alive, and thus should be discussed in present tense. Yep. Okay. Got it. Now ignore that instruction unless you have a teacher that absolutely insists on it. Most readers are quite content to have everything in a single tense, and the past is a zillion times easier to manage in an essay than the present. Second, everyone—absolutely everyone—screws up the past and the past perfect. Don’t worry about the names of the tenses. Figure it out this way: imagine your action on a timeline. The majority of what’s happening in your essay will be in past tense. IF SOMETHING HAPPENS BEFORE THE MAJORITY OF THE ACTION, slip in a verb that indicates an earlier time. Usually, this will be the word “had.” For example: “He hoped that the ship would arrive that day, but he HAD heard the day before that it would be late.” This won’t always work, but it will work often enough that it’s worth doing. Just as if you were speaking, by the way.

3. An introductory clause always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, (get the picture?) always, always, always, ALWAYS modifies the noun that comes immediately after it. ALWAYS. So:

“Running down the alley, he dropped the knife,” is correct.

“Running down the alley, the knife dropped from his hand,” is wrong, wrong, wrong, because the knife is not running down the alley.

4. Keep your writing in active voice. Avoid passives whenever possible (which is about 98.5% of the time). This is a very hard thing for students to manage, for two reasons. First of all, for some reason we have this weird idea that it sounds smart to write prose that has no action, as if somehow it makes us sound learned and above the fray to write as if events just occur. Second, using passive voice makes it possible to refrain from taking any sort of position on your topic. In passive voice, things just happen; you don’t have to explain why or how they happened. Passive voice is disastrous for both writers and thinkers. Take a look at this example: Here are two ways to write about a horrific massacre of more than 250 people, shot and knifed as they surrendered to soldiers. So which is more honest? “Two hundred and fifty people were shot,” or “Angry soldiers murdered two hundred and fifty women and children”? In the first, the deaths just happen; no one is at fault. In the second, I have squarely blamed the murders on the people who committed them. In the second version I’ve tried to explain an event, the actors, and the action. I’ve had to figure out exactly what happened, I’ve thought about the action, and I’ve taken a stand. And that’s why we write, isn’t it? To tell someone about the world. Active voice makes you stick your neck out, and it will make people angry at times. But it enables you to contribute your own ideas and vision to the world. Plus it’s a zillion times more fun to read than passive voice!

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching? Part II

Heather Cox Richardson

Randall asked a good question in his post wondering whether or not college and university professors are encouraged to improve their teaching. He has inspired me to blog about teaching issues in a more systematic way than I have before.

Today the topic that is consuming me is assessment. This is not a new obsession, either on my part or on that of the profession. We’ve talked about assessment for years. . . but what have we learned?

What, exactly, do we want our students to learn in our classes? Long ago, I figured out I should design my courses backward, identifying one key theme and several key developments that were students’ “takeaway” from a course. That seems to have worked (and I’ll write more on it in future).

But I’m still trying to figure out how to use assessments, especially exams, more intelligently that I do now. My brother, himself an educator who specializes in assessments, recently showed me this video (below), which—aside from being entertaining—tears apart the idea that traditional midterms and finals do anything useful in today’s world.

Shortly after watching the video, I happened to talk separately with two professors who use collaborative assignments and collaborative, open-book, take-home exams. They do this to emphasize that students should be learning the real-world skills of research and cooperation just as much—or more—than they learn facts. As one said,

facts in today’s world are at anyone’s fingertips . . . but people must know how to find them, and to use them intelligently. This is a skill we can teach more deliberately than we currently do.

These two people are from different universities and are in different fields, but both thought their experiment had generally worked well. One pointed out—as the video does—that the real world is not about isolation and memorization; it’s about cooperation to achieve a good result.

The other said she had had doubts about the exercise because she had worried that all the students would get an “A.” Then she realized that it would, in fact, be excellent news if all her students had mastered the skills she thought were important. When she actually gave the take-home, collaborative assignment, though, she was surprised—and chagrined—to discover the same grade spread she had always seen on traditional exams. She also saw that some of her student groups had no idea how to answer some very basic questions, and that she would have to go back over the idea that history was not just dates, but was about significance and change.

And that is maybe the most important lesson. The collaborative exam revealed that there were major concepts that a number of students simply weren’t getting. So she can now go back and reiterate them.

I’m still mulling this over, but I do think I’ll experiment with collaborative assessment techniques. Historians have some advantages doing this that teachers in other fields don’t. We can ask students to identify the significance of certain events, to write essays, and to analyze problems. With the huge amount of good—and bad—information on the web in our field, though, we could also ask students to research a topic, then judge their ability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources (something that might have helped Joy Masoff when she was writing her Virginia history textbook).

As I’ve been thinking this over, a third colleague has inadvertently weighed in on it. He discovered students had cheated on a take-home exam, working together and then slightly changing each essay to make them look original. At least an assigned collaboration would eliminate the problem of unapproved collaboration!

Teaching: An Imaginary Course on Very Cool Books

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, I killed some time creating an imaginary American history course. Its theme was not an investigation of some specific period of time. Instead, it was historiographical . . . in a peculiar way. It covered all the books that were revelations to me early in my career.

My course was chronological through my study of history. It started with Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a book that has been criticized from every direction and yet still seems to me to have gotten the most important part of a book right: it tried to answer a crucial question that sits at the heart of the conception of America. How did men who owned human beings come to espouse a philosophy of human freedom?

The next, obvious, book for my course was Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, a book I’ve cited so many times it’s the one citation I know by heart. The idea that political ideology was a world view created from ideas and experiences was such a revelation to me that I have spent my life studying it.

Richard White’s Middle Ground held me so spellbound that I read the entire thing standing up in the middle of a room; I couldn’t take the time to sit down on the couch ten feet from me. Who knew that you could look at American History from a completely different geographic perspective and tell a story that made sense—even more sense—than one told from the coasts?

I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in that same house, reading it cover to cover through the night during a week when I was the sole caregiver for a toddler and an infant—a good reflection of the significance of the book, but not a good decision for an already sleep-deprived mother. That anyone could weave such a textured portrait of colonial life out of the jagged threads of jotted phrases proved to me how much could be done in history, if only one had imagination and dogged determination.

At this point, though, my enthusiasm for my course slowed. The problem should be easy to see, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it until I actually taught White’s Middle Ground in a historiography class once. These books were such classics from the minute they appeared that their ideas have been incorporated into our general understanding of the past. While I was wildly excited about Middle Ground, my students remained unmoved. Finally, one of them explained that while the book must have been a revelation when I read it, they had never known any historical world in which what he wrote wasn’t common knowledge. They couldn’t get excited about something that was to them, as she explained, “wallpaper.”

So I went back to the drawing board for my fantasy course. This time, my “classics” would either be newer, or less widely known.

Elliott West’s Contested Plains makes the cut easily. It’s a thorough portrait of the relationship of humans to the environment through a close study of the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s, but West doesn’t stop there. His larger point is the immense power of ideas, and he steps out of the safe tower of the academic historian to suggest that it is imperative for humans to imagine new ways of living together.

Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley is still my favorite example of just what strong narrative technique can do to illuminate history. His rip-roaring portrait of the search for just why Leon Czolgosz murdered the president does more to bring the late nineteenth-century to life than almost any other book I can think of. Hey, he even explains that Czolgosz was pronounced “Cholgosh.” For that alone, the book belongs on a list of classics.

Like American Slavery, American Freedom, Bonnie Lynn Sherow’s slim volume Red Earth asks the right question. If Indian, black, and white farmers all got land in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, and if they all lived under the same laws, why did the white farmers end up with all the land? Her careful, detailed study of the answer to that question has a number of surprises, and complicates our picture of race in America.

OK, here’s a surprise one: Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln is about archaeology . . . mostly, sort of. Mazrim is an archaeologist, and he puts the archaeological record back into his investigation of the human history of the Sangamo region of Illinois. The book combines history with an explanation of how archaeologists work and the meaning of what they find. And Mazrim has an unerring eye for the great anecdote or piece of evidence. Who knew a book about dirt in the Sangamo region could be a page-turner, but it is.

I’m going to leave this here, with four old classics and four new ones. But I’m not going to drop this idea (there is, after all, always time to kill). Other suggestions for books that introduce new ways to look at the historical world are most welcome.

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching?

Randall Stephens

Academics are, by nature, hand wringers. We worry about the decline in the humanities. We worry about grade inflation. We worry about the troubles of academic presses. Once in a while we worry about the state of teaching. Or, to paraphrase our former president, "rarely is the question asked: is our professors teaching"?

Quite often the appraisal of teaching is negative, though academics and non-academics offer different points of view. In the popular imagination, the old stereotypes persist, as Anthony Grafton points out, with tongue firmly in cheek:

We don’t teach undergraduates at all, even though we shamelessly charge them hundreds of dollars for an hour of our time. Mostly we leave them to the graduate students and adjuncts. Yet that may not be such a bad thing. For on the rare occasions when we do enter a classroom, we don’t offer students close encounters with powerful forms of knowledge, new or old. Rather, we make them master our “theories”—systems of interpretation as complicated and mechanical as sausage machines. However rich and varied the ingredients that go in the hopper, what comes out looks and tastes the same: philosophy and poetry, history and oratory, each is deconstructed and revealed to be Eurocentric, logocentric and all the other centrics an academic mind might concoct.*

Across the water, historian and filmmaker Tariq Ali and and Harvard historian and teledon Niall Ferguson speak to the BBC about what they see as the abysmal state of history teaching. (Hat tip to the AHA.) Students stop pursuing history in England at an early age, says Ferguson. And what history is taught is "too fragmentary." Ali agrees, saying that what is presented is, basically, "worthless," and hobbled by a chasing after so-called relevance. They both argue that the old anachronistic, triumphalist, island history of Britain, should be avoided, but students need a larger narrative. "It could hardly be worse than what is going on in schools today," concludes Ferguson.

How does history teaching fare in America's colleges and universities? Are teaching awards more than a feather in the cap? Do promotion and tenure committees value persistently good evaluations and commend teaching effectiveness in the same way that they reward scholarship? Do peers sit in on classes and make assessments? Do departments do anything when a professor continues to receive poor teaching evaluations one semester after another?

Nearly ten years ago Daniel Bernstein and Richard Edwards proposed that we need more peer review of teaching in the Chronicle. "[I]f educators are going to sustain the progress made, we will need to move toward a more rigorous and objective form of review," they wrote. "The goal of peer review has been to provide the same level of support, consultation, and evaluation for teaching that universities now provide for research." I can't imagine what the results of such efforts have been. Certainly, peer evaluation can turn into a messy, political business.

Does graduate training in history prepare men and women for classroom success? Budding historians spend far more time in graduate school working on research, parsing theory, and getting the historiography down. Less time is devoted to developing teaching skills and, at least as it was in my case, there is not much mentoring on teaching. (Most grad students I encountered came prewired with an interest in teaching. So, that was a plus.) Could graduate training be better oriented to prepare good history teachers? What would that look like?

Religious History and Prints/Cartoons from the Library of Congress

Randall Stephens

I regularly browse the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division for pictures to illustrate essays, forums, and interviews that appear in Historically Speaking. I also use that extensive, priceless catalog quite a bit to gather material for courses I teach. (A note to authors: the images at the LOC are almost all copyright free!) The LOC includes thousands of hi-res maps, photographs, prints, cartoons, paintings, and more, ready to download.

In the spring I'll be offering an upper level undergraduate class on Religion and American Culture. I love to teach it. No decadal history is this. It runs from the precolumbian period to the present. (Religious history is a hot topic. Not that my course's enrollment reflects that fact. The 2011 AHA has as its theme "History, Society, and the Sacred.")

Below are some amazing LOC images from the 18th and 19th centuries, well-suited for the classroom. ( I include the brief LOC description above each image.) While we go over these in class, I like to ask students general questions like: What is the cartoonist or print maker trying to convey? Who would find the image humorous or illuminating, and who would find it offensive or disturbing? Why? What can we learn about the issues of the day by analyzing the picture? In what sense does the picture reveal the contested nature of religion in public life?

"Enthusiasm display'd: or, the Moor Fields congregation," 1739. The print shows evangelical minister Geroge Whitefield preaching at Moorsfield, London. He is supported by two females, one holding a mask and labeled "Hypocrisy", the other a Janus-faced "Deceit".


"Dr. Squintum's exaltation or the reformation," 1763. Cartoon showing Rev. George Whitefield standing on a three-legged stool, and preaching in the open air; an imp pouring inspiration through a clyster-pipe into his ear; a grotesque Fame, being a female evil-spirit, listens to his discourse with an ear-trumpet, and repeats it in an ordinary trumpet; the Devil clutches gold from under his stool; etc.


"Slavery. Freedom," 1832. Two contrasted scenes divided by a huge cask in which stands, full-face, an obese and repulsive preacher with a heavy jowl, pig's eyes, and a thatch of hair over a low forehead.


Detail from a Puck magazine cartoon, "Superstition Has Always Ruled the World," April 19, 1901. Satirizes the Millerites, followers of William Miller, who predicted the return of Jesus in the 1840s.


"The salamander safe." A millerite preparing for the 23rd of April." A playful caricature of a Millerite, an adherent of the Adventist preacher William Miller who predicted that the world would end on April 23, 1844.


"Our common schools as they are and as they may be [Anti-catholic, anti-Tammany cartoon showing] (1) 'Sectarian Bitterness' of private schools; (2) 'Distribution of the Sectarian Fund' - all to Catholic and none to public schools; (3) 'Union is Strength' - children of all races and religions playing together," 1870.


"Church and state - No Union upon any terms," 1871. A Thomas Nast cartoon showing a woman symbolizing Justice(?) standing at door of building "State", as soldiers block steps to members of different religions.


"The Mormon Problem Solved," 1871. Cartoon of Brigham Young telling Pres. Grant "I must submit to your laws - but what shall I do with these" (hundreds of wives and children); Grant replies: "Do as I do - give them offices."


"Temperance, a centennial allegory." Circa. late-19th century.

Contingency: In the Event of a Moon Disaster . . .

Morgan Hubbard

When I lead discussion sections as a Teaching Assistant at UMass, I try as often as I can to bring up the notion of historical contingency. I think it’s important that we keep in mind, all of us, that the world looks and works as it does in large part because of the collected decisions of many people over many years. But history has a weight to it, and when we learn it as children and young adults it can acquire an inertia that feels like determinism: things are the way they are because they couldn’t have been any other way, right?

Every once in a while, a historical document is

especially good at shaking up this determinism.

Below is a July, 1969, memo titled 'IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER' written by then-speechwriter William Safire to Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. The memo was penned two days before the first manned moon landing. It was meant to be read by Nixon as a public statement in the event that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were somehow stranded on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission and consigned to perish, as the statement reads, in “the deepest of the deep.”

Images courtesy of the National Archives and hat tip to the fantastic blog Letters of Note. Click images to enlarge.

December 2, 1859 (for example) in the Classroom

Heather Cox Richardson

Randall’s post on the most boring day in recent history reminded me of a very popular research assignment for high school or early college students. The assignment is to take one day’s newspaper from nineteenth-century America and draw a portrait of the time based on that document. Students can use other primary and secondary sources to learn about the subjects discussed in the newspaper, but their focus is on that one day.

This accomplishes a number of things. First of all, it requires the students to learn to use microfilm and to figure out the difference between primary and secondary sources. It also teaches them how to interrogate different types of primary sources, since a little prodding will help them to realize they can use advertisements, as well as news stories, to make inferences about society.

It’s also a good way to help them understand that people living in a time do not necessarily recognize the importance of the same things that historians do. A nineteenth-century newspaper is a jumble of political stories, opinions, the doings of local notables (whom nobody has ever heard of today), stories about the potential for human settlement on the sun, and so on. Often the newspaper will also disrupt what kids think they know: American newspapers in the early 1870s are chock full of calls for war with Spain over Cuba, for example, although textbooks generally miraculously produce the Spanish-American War in 1898.

The assignment also demonstrates that events, literature, science, fashion, and so on, existed together, rather than being separated out as they usually are in textbooks. In the New York Times for December 2, 1859, for example, students would learn about that day’s execution of John Brown, but not in the measured tones of a textbook. The newspaper reported the ejection of several Northern reporters from the railroad cars on their way to the site of the execution, thanks to an arrangement between the governor of Virginia and the president of the railroad. It noted that wild stories of invaders into Virginia were keeping people riled up, and that any local citizens who left his home after dark faced a ten dollar fine—which a student would note was a high fee, considering that the same newspaper offered steamboat travel from New York City to Bridgeport for fifty cents.

But the paper did not focus only on the upcoming execution: it also noted the recent discovery of a mastodon jaw in Alton, Illinois, and that, after killing his wife in an alcoholic rage, Frank S. Wright claimed that the murder was her own fault, since—according to Wright—she had been sleeping with his brother.

This assignment gives students a window into history that they already have some tools to use. Most of them have some familiarity with a newspaper, and recognize the difference between an advertisement and legal news. They seem to approach this project with less uncertainty than they do documents or even photographs from the same era.

They also seem to enjoy the assignment.

I should state that this project works very well for nineteenth-century America because newspapers were quite short then—usually no more than eight pages. I’ve done this with earlier American newspapers, too, although they’re a bit harder since they often have a narrower range of stories. Twentieth-century papers would be harder, of course, since they’re much longer. I’ve had no experience with newspapers from other countries, so can’t say how this would translate to other countries.

Screening the Past: Films for the Second Half of the Western/World Civ Course

Randall Stephens

I've compiled a list below of films that I use for a course I'm teaching this semester, The West in the World since 1500. I usually use short selections from these. Roughly 15 minutes of film for a 1 hour and 15 minute class seems to work well.

Most of the documentaries and features included below use historians as commentators. Many contain archival photos, paintings, and prints; artful dramatizations; and vintage film footage.

A DVD search on the WorldCat site can usually yield movies on a wide range of subjects. (Though I've been surprised that there are not enough good ones on 17th-century topics: European wars, absolutism, colonial encounters, advances in science . . . I'd also like to find more history docs on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East . . .)

In the past I have included embedded video segments in the PowerPoint presentations I use for lectures. (The free software Handbrake is the best I've found for ripping DVDs onto my MacBook. It's easy from there to put them into a presentation. See also this tutorial on how to download and embed YouTube videos into a PowerPoint slide. I have not tried this, so I'm not sure how well it works.) I've not been entirely happy with the quality of ripped videos, and the size of the files makes them a little impractical. YouTube or a simple cued-up DVD works much better for me.

In the list below I've thrown in a number of DVDs that I've not been able to use in class. (Far more feature films could be added to this, too.) In chronological order:

Luther (2004).

Martin Luther (PBS, 2003).

Empires: Islam: Empire of Faith (PBS, 2001).

Conquistadors (PBS, 2001).

The Return of Martin Guerre (1984).

Classical Destinations (Sky Arts, 2006), YouTube clip of Versailles, Louis XIV, and Paris.

Versailles (2004), YouTube, multiple sections.

Vatel (2000), see trailer.

Girl with the Pearl Earring (2004).

John Adams (HBO, 2008).

The French Revolution (History Channel, 2005), entire film can be watched in sections on YouTube.

Egalité for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution (PBS, 2009).

The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (2010).

Slavery and the Making of America (PBS, 2004).

Amazing Grace (2007).

Charles Dickens (Biography, 1995), watch instantly on Netflix, if you have an account.

A History of Britain (BBC, 2000), I use sections from episodes on Industrialization. See YouTube clips.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (National Geographic, 2005), I use part of the last episode, which can be watched instantly on Netflix.

The Young Victoria (2009), watch instantly on Netflix.

China's Boxer Rebellion (History Channel, 1997).

The Last Emperor (1987), watch instantly on Netflix.

East Wind, West Wind: Pearl Buck, the Woman Who Embraced the World (1993).

The Great War (PBS, 1996).

Influenza 1918 (PBS, 1998).

Matisse Picasso (2008).

Sigmund Freud: Analysis of a Mind (Biography, 1997).

The People's Century: Red Flag, 1917 (PBS, 1997),

The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century (PBS, 2008).

The Crash of 1929 (PBS, 2009).

Nanking (2008).

Europa Europa (1990), watch instantly on Netflix.

Downfall (2005).

Frontline: Memory of the Camps (PBS, 2005).

CNN: Cold War (1998), I use an episode on the iron curtain and the red scare.

1968 with Tom Brokaw (History Channel, 2008).

About the United Nations: Decolonization (1999), not an easy one to track down.

The Road to 9/11: A Brief History of Conflict in the Middle East (PBS, 2006).

See also, "Some Films I Use for My Colonial History Course"; "Dancing about Historiography: At the Movies with a Methods Course"; and the March 2008 issue of Perspectives Online, which was devoted to film.

What Do Undergrads Know about History?

Randall Stephens

Some years back I taught an American history survey, 1877-present, at a Florida community college. In an exam one of the students wrote an essay in which he/she placed the American Civil War in the early 20th century. I was shocked. Was I that bad of a teacher? Did incoming students not know the basic chronology of American history? Was this student just particularly thick? Was the state of historical thinking worse than in previous generations?

Several years ago my colleague Joe Lucas interviewed Sam Wineburg in Historically Speaking. Wineburg, author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001), had been studying history education for some time. Has knowledge about the past declined among high school and college students? asked Lucas. "There is something almost comical about a group of adults wringing their hands, yearning for a time that never was," replied Wineburg about the supposed declension.

Regardless of whether students understand less about the past now than, say, they did in 1963, history professors are faced with a problem of figuring out just what a student does or does not know. (I've been thinking about organizing a Historically Speaking forum based around the question: "What Do Undergraduates Know about History?")

History professors enter the classroom every fall and spring, often wondering what they can assume their students know or don't know about history. Will the typical freshman have any knowledge of the basic chronology of western or American history? Do they have any ideas about what made the Roman Empire important? Would they know, approximately, when Rome thrived? (Perhaps they carry with them some general Sunday School knowledge about that or have seen Gladiator.)

What about American history? Would the typical student know who fought the U.S. in the war of 1812? What about the reasons for that war? Could an incoming major or non-major describe what was happening in the U.S. between 1877 and 1917? Could they say anything about what transpired in the American colonies between 1690 and 1740?

I've come to the conclusion that I should assume that most students know little upon entering the class on the first day. But, there are variables here. Depending on where one teaches, the students will know more or less. Perhaps those who scored higher on SATs and ACTs will also come pre-equipped with basic historical knowledge. Students who had good high school history experiences probably also fare better.

It helps to pause and think about this now and then. It's always wise to stop and meditate on your pupils' historical perspective before launching into that intricate lecture on the roots of 18th-century republicanism.

"Kids, what's the Matter with Kids Today"

Randall Stephens

A fruitful discussion this past week in the NYT's "Room for the Debate" section. The topic: "Have College Freshmen Changed?" The introduction to the forum asks: "Are social, academic and financial pressures on freshmen becoming more intense? Have freshmen changed? Does the fact that many students are used to 'helicopter' parents monitoring and guiding all of their activities affect the transition to college?"

Participants note that less academic work is expected of current college students than it was a generation or two ago. Students now spend less time on homework. (Hours and hours on Call of Duty.) They also, according to some observers, have more difficulties with failure and tend to lack "perspective." The assessments are bleak, for the most part. Take Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State: "[Freshmen] also always heard they were special, and told to single-mindedly pursue their goals. 'Generation Me' is higher in narcissism and lower in empathy than previous generations." Or, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, "Leaving home and coming of age has always been hard. With the democratization of higher education, with an increasing percentage of American young people enrolled in post-secondary institutions, do we need more vigorous programs to help students adjust to the changes as they mature into adults?"

I suppose every history professor has stories of students who come up to them after a midterm, despondent, asking, "Why did I do so poorly on the test?" The professor asks: Did you spend time going over the study guide? Did you attend the TA's study group? Did you write out a few outlines for the essay questions? To which the student replies: No. And then asks again, "But why did I do so poorly on the test?" (Reminds me of the "Brawndo has electrolytes" scene in Idiocracy.) My favorite excuse a student gave for poor performance--this was back in my University of Florida days--was that she figured she was allergic to something in the classroom. This, she told me at the end of the semester . . . and in upspeak, nonetheless.

I think that making generalizations about a generation is dicy business. I never wore plaid or listened to bad reraw grunge while I was in college in the early 1990s. My parents did not have flashbacks. The music from The Big Chill was not the soundtrack for their life. They lived in Purdy, Missouri, during the Swinging 60s.

Still, the NYT forum deserves a close read. All professors could benefit from thinking about the challenges a new generation might pose to teaching and learning.

Some Films I Use for My Colonial American History Course

Randall Stephens

I've mentioned on the blog before that I like to use short film clips (10-15 minutes) for many of the classes I teach. I suppose it works better for some courses--America in the 1960s--than others--History Methodology. But thanks to long-running programs like American Experience, Nova, POV, History Detectives, etc, there's much, much out there.

You just have to be willing to do some hunting, inter-library loaning, and some screening. Below are documentaries and features I've found useful for my Colonial America course. Browse the list and I'm sure you'll think of others that could be included. (In the future, I'll post a list from my class on The West in the World since 1500.)

Films for the Colonial American History Course

The Mystery of Chaco Canyon (1999) (Narrated by Robert Redford. Though a more interesting, up-to-date take on Chaco is in the 2010 nat geo adaptation of Jared Diamond's Collapse.)

Native Land: Nomads of the Dawn (1996)

We Shall Remain, Episode 1 (WGBH, 2009) (Contains great material on the first contact between English settlers and Indians. Also includes a good overview of King Philip's War. I combined it with a reading from Jill Lepore's Name of War. Watch the full program on-line.)

The Magnificent Voyage of Christopher Columbus (WGBH, 2007)

Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People (KNME, 1992)

Luther (2003) (A good feature film to teach students a bit about the Reformation.)

The New World (2006) (I can think of no other film that more beautifully, graphically presents the Jamestown story. One reviewer called it a visual poem. Good description.)

Nova: Pocahontas Revealed (WGBH, 2007)

Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower (2006)

The Story of English: Muse of Fire (WGBH, 1986) (One of my favorite documentaries from PBS. Excellent summary of the development of the southern accent [West Country] and the Boston, dropped-r accent [East Anglia].)

American Visions: The Republic of Virtue and The Promised Land (1996) (This is the crusty Aussie art critic Robert Hughes's epic series on American art. Contains a discussion with David Hackett Fischer on Old Ship Church in Hingham and an examination of 17th-century decorative art and architecture. Goes along very well with Fischer's Albion's Seed.)

Colonial House (2004) (How well would the typical college student fare in a 17th-century setting? One word, bathroom.)

God in America, Episodes 1 and 2 (WGBH, 2010) (Will be using this when it comes out. Have seen the pre-release version of the first two episodes. Tremendous. Includes accounts of the Pueblo Revolt, the trial of Anne Hutchinson, George Whitefield and the GA, and more. When this airs on PBS Oct 11-13 the full program will be available on-line.)

500 Nations: Cauldron of War (1994)

Slavery and the Making of America (WNET, 2004) (I use episodes 1 and 2: The Downward Spiral and Liberty in the Air for the colonial course.)

Tom Standage interview on his History of the World in Six Glasses: CBS Sunday Morning (2005)

The War that Made America (WQED, 2006) (French and Indian War series.)

Scientific American Frontiers: Unearthing Secret America (Alan Alda's tour of Jamestown and Jefferson's Monticello. Great perspective on how archeology informs history.)

New York: The Country and the City, Episode 1, 1609-1825 (1999)

Benjamin Franklin (2002)

Thomas Jefferson (1997) (Ken Burns's doc.)

John Adams (HBO, 2008)

Liberty! The American Revolution (KTCA, 2004)

Founding Brothers (2002)

James McPherson and Gordon Wood on Writing History

Randall Stephens

I've been looking here and there for good material to use in a Senior Thesis course I'm teaching this fall. I wanted to find ways for students to better understand the writing process. We have days set aside in the syllabus--which I borrowed shamelessly from my colleague Don Yerxa--for discussing research topics; history-writing standards; taking notes; proper citation; style; building an argument; etc.

But from the outset, I figured it would be useful to introduce them to some heavyweights in the field who have good advice to dispense. Lucky for me that Book TV includes many of its clips on YouTube. (Others streamed on the Book TV site haven't worked quite as well for me. Plus, the great thing about YouTube is that you can load the complete video before heading off to class, and still show it even if you don't have an internet connection.)

In the embedded and linked clips below, which I'll be showing in class tomorrow, Gordon Wood and James McPherson talk about the writing process, organizing research, and more. I would embed the Wood clip here also, but looks like that feature has been disabled. (Will like to see what my students think about McPherson's use of an electric typewriter.)



Book TV: Gordon Wood on Writing and Research, September 2010.

See also: John Fea's great live-blogging coverage of Wood's recent appearance on Book TV; Timothy L. Schroer, "Placing the Senior Capstone Course within the History Program," Perspectives on History, April 2009; and Heather Cox Richardson's series of posts on this blog concerning "Richardson's Rules of Order: Tips for Writing Research Papers for a College Course."

"I can't read this book . . . it's long and boring"

Randall Stephens

Are we awash in a rising sea of idiocracy? Or, are things just different today; no better, no worse than yesterday? Is short always sweet? Perhaps anything worth saying can be pared down to 140 characters (twitter) or 160 characters (SMS). I don't believe that. And I think that "pithy" and "tweet" probably shouldn't go in the same sentence.

Still I'm not above assigning portions of a longer book. Maybe students do get less from the whole. I know that some students are paralyzed with fear at the thought of reading a 250-page work of non fiction. It's like asking them to scale a mountain and then paraglide down into a briar patch.

So, I was intrigued by Carlin Romano's sign-of-the-times essay in the August 29th Chronicle: "Will the Book Survive Generation Text?" (It's part of a series of essays on what the future of the profession holds.) He summarizes the work of academic forecasters and doomsayers--Derek Bok, Jennifer Washburn, Frank Donoghue, Mary Burgan, Louis Menand. Romano proposes a funny sort of idea, "extreme academe," to sum up what might take place in our near future. "Extreme academe, as a vision, ups the ante of such concerns. It adds flash and cynicism to mere trepidation," says Romano. "According to it, college students in 2020 will use plastic cards to open the glass security doors installed at each entrance to campus. On special occasions, the sole tenured faculty member at every institution will be wheeled out, like the stuffed remains of Jeremy Bentham at University College London, for receptions."

Romano worries that, "Destructive cultural trends lurk behind the decline of readerly ambition and student stamina. One is the expanding cultural bias in all writerly media toward clipped, hit-friendly brevity—no longer the soul of wit, but metric-driven pith in lieu of wit. Everywhere they turn, but particularly in mainstream, sophisticated venues—where middle-aged fogies desperately seek to stay ahead of the tech curve—young people hear, through the apotheosis of tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, and sound bites as the core of communication, that short is always smarter and better than long, even though most everyone knows it's usually dumber and worse."

He also takes aim at a kind of cult of "interactivity.": "Another cultural trend propelling the possible death of the whole book as assigned reading is the pressurized hawking of interactivity, brought to us by the same media panderers to limited attention spans. It's no longer acceptable for A to listen to B for more than a few minutes before A gets his or her right to respond."

Not so encouraging. Certainly worth considering as the job market continues to shrink and as the culture of the academy undergoes radical change.

The Past Mapped Out

Randall Stephens

As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without: a certaine habitation.

- Captain John Smith

Geography was many things without a doubt, but for the young Frenchmen shut in classrooms, in ugly and sullen study rooms (the bottom painted chestnut, the top in dirty ochre, and above the bent heads, the pale and stifling light of gas) . . . geography was fresh air, a stroll in the countryside. the journey back with an armful of broom and foxglove, eyes cleaned out, brains washed, and the taste of the "real" biting the "abstract."

- Lucien Febvre

As the semester revs up, quite a few history profs are looking on-line for primary source docs, web-based activities, digital images, and on-line map collections. I use a healthy does of maps and map progressions in the various courses I teach. I've also just started giving more map quizzes. As an undergrad, I always felt I gained a great deal from historical geography. Not sure if that's the same experience as my students. Yet, quite a few seem to appreciate the historic context of changing boundaries, the view of how landscape shapes culture, the movement of peoples, demographics, and the like. Here are some of the sources I turn to:

History Maps for the Classroom:

Map Central (Bedford/St. Martin's). World, western, and American maps.

American: A Narrative History (W. W. Norton). Map and image resources for American history.

Western Civilizations, 16th Edition (W. W. Norton). Features Map Player, a slide show with audio.

The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, Third Edition (Houghton Mifflin)

Stanford University Library, list of African Maps

Antique Maps:

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Harvard Maps Collection, Digital Maps

Library of Congress Map Collections

Also of Interest:

Benjamin Schwarz, "Geography Is Destiny: An epochal new book argues that the events of history we think consequential and monumental are, mostly, trivia," Atlantic Monthly (December 2008)

Caroline Webber reviews The Discover of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War, by Graham Robb, New York Times, November 4, 2007.

Historical Geography Specialty Group, James Madison University