Some Teaching Resources for Your American or European Survey

Randall Stephens



Once again it's that time of year. About a decade ago when I first started teaching, I spent quite a few late nights blasting my way through lecture prep and scouring the web for resources and information. (The interweb was still steam powered then).



So, for those of you in the middle of it now, I post here some helpful sites that might give you a leg up. Of course, this only represents of fraction of what's out there.

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Contains thousands of images dating back hundreds of years. Many are high resolution.



The Beinecke Rare Book and Map Collection, Yale University

Do a keyword search of "photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books from the Beinecke's collections."



Internet Archive

Browse for original documents, audio, and movies. The collection of films on here is amazing.



Map Central, Bedford/St Martins

This site is a little dated, but the maps for teaching are quite good.



Harvard Digital Maps Collection

". . . one of the oldest and largest collections of cartographic materials in the United States with over 500,000 items. Resources range from 16th century globes to modern maps and geographic information systems (GIS) layers. A selection of our materials has been digitally imaged and is offered both as true picture images and georeferenced copies."



Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library

Like the above, "dedicated to the creative educational use of its cartographic holdings, which extend from the 15th century to the present."



W. W. Norton's Make History Site

Some publishers lock there on-line content. Not so with Norton. Access loads of maps, images, websites, and original documents.



Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

This is "a nonprofit organization supporting the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation." Access material for teachers and students. The site contains wonderfully useful teaching tools.



American Experience on-line

If you have a high-speed connection in your classroom, you can view full episodes of American Experience.



Historical Society's Resources for Teachers

We created this a few years back. It includes links for environmental history, American, and world history.



Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress

"Search America's historic newspapers pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present."



American Religion and Culture On-line Resources

I created this site for a course I teach on the topic.

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.

In Defense of Facts and Memorization

Randall Stephens

I recently had a student in a large survey class who did not appear to be prepared for an exam. That's not unusual. But this student answered the essay question on the test in a very unusual way. She/he wrote a poem describing how much she/he hated "history." (I was glad to be spared from his/her wrath, at least in the poem.)

This got me thinking about why students say they despise history. It certainly could be related to how history is presented to them: dry-as-dust fashion, or one-damn-thing-after-another mode. Perhaps such students think of lectures, textbooks, and history classes in general as producing storms of useless facts, unconnected to reality. Some non-majors complain that they did not come to college to learn about the past or irrelevant dead people.

Some students might not have an aptitude for history, plain and simple. That's fine.

But how much of the undergraduate complaint against history has to do with an unwillingness to learn content? Surely one needs to know real details about the past in order to understand it.

It strikes me that historians can be a little too defensive about teaching too many of the facts, the details of history. To be sure history is not a collection of pointless facts, as I tell my students. Among other things history helps us undertsand who we are by examining who we were. I like how Peter Stearns puts it in "Why Study History" on the AHA site: "The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier."

A student will need to know what actually happened in the past before he or she can go on to write history, tell a story, formulate arguments, and do the interesting work of interpretation.

That's not unique to history. Content and some basic memorization are a the heart of most disciplines. Biologists have to learn anatomy and classifications. Others in the hard sciences must memorize formulas and need to have a grasp of mathematics. Language requires plenty of memorization. And on and on.

History professors, though, blush a bit when they ask students to memorize a list of names, ideas, dates, and the like. A student of Antebellum America should know the difference between John Calhoun and John Brown. A student in a course on the Early Republic should be able to distinguish a Federalist from an Anti-Federalist. A student in a colonial history course will need to know that the French and Indian War came before the American Revolutionary War.

OK, I may be overstating the case, or grossly oversimplifying things . . . But, I'd like to say nothing more than this . . . facts matter, memorization has its place, and history does require exposure to and understanding of real content.

Oh . . . and George Washington never drove a Dodge Challenger.