Bend, Don’t Break

Jonathan Rees

Fred Watson, "Bookstack," 1992, Northumbria
University, Newcastle, UK. Photo by Randall Stephens.

“Students WILL NOT, and absolutely refuse, to read anything. Give the assignment, and they just ignore it, even if there's a quiz on the reading.”
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- David Bordwell, film historian, University of Wisconsin Madison (via Roger Ebert)

Anyone who has taught in a college classroom over the last five or ten years can feel Professor Bordwell’s pain.  While I imagine the English professors must have it the worst (how can you teach novels if nobody has read the novel?), practically all the historians I know fret constantly about student reading because their discipline is also a literary art.  While it is possible to teach historical facts through lecturing or even just showing films, there is simply no other way for students to learn how to do history themselves except by reading book-length works by great historians.

So what is to be done?  I’ve already suggested that killing the traditional history textbook and replacing it with a smaller number of primary sources on this very blog.  That decision was, in part, a concession to the new realities of student life.  However, I don’t want to leave the impression that I support dumbing down the history curriculum in order prevent mass failure.  I’m of the school that professors should bend, but not break when it comes to reading because no matter what some commission in Tallahassee might think, the liberal arts really are very useful in life.  On the most basic level, graduates will never be able to work in any world of ideas if they can’t read well because that’s how ideas are conveyed.  Therefore, humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

No, I don’t mean re-learning their ABCs.  I’m talking about different kinds of reading.  In their classic How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren speak of Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, and Analytical Reading.  To get students to that third level, you have to read with them.  Open the book during class.  Make them read aloud to the class.  Discuss the implications of those ideas.  You don’t have to quiz them to make sure they’re learning from their reading if you make sure that the reading you assign them is central to your class.

Also, and this may sound like a given but it’s not in academia, you have to make an effort to assign interesting books.  I am not ashamed to say that I think David McCullough is great.  The best reaction I’ve ever gotten in any class was from freshmen non-majors when I assigned David Remnick’s biography of Muhammad Ali.  Certainly, spending time teaching reading skills takes away from the coverage of historical facts, but students will make much better use of those reading skills after they graduate than they ever will of most specific factual details. 

So while times are certainly tough in the history business, all is not lost.  Professors can’t expect all their students to care as much about history as they do, but it is more than reasonable to make them meet you half way.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs mostly about technological and academic labor matters at More or Less Bunk. He's the author of Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life.

George McGovern: Historian

Jonathan Rees

In the day since former Senator George McGovern died, I have read wonderful tributes to his campaign for the presidency in 1972.  Thankfully, President Obama mentioned McGovern’s heroism during World War II in his statement marking opposition to the Vietnam War and his ill-fated but noble the Senator’s death.  However, the only mentions that I’ve read of McGovern’s career as a professional historian seem somewhat surprised that he was ever a college professor. 

Of course, this confusion is understandable, and if I didn’t teach in Colorado I would probably share it right now even though I have been a huge George McGovern fan for a very long time.  McGovern ran for President when I was six years old, and I distinctly remember rooting for him both because my parents supported him and because I have always liked going against the crowd.  When I was in Middle School, I did a book report on his campaign biography.  I must have learned about his professional life before he entered politics then, but with no inkling of what my own profession would eventually be I’m sure I forgot.

In 1988, I was a volunteer at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.  At that time, I had a particular skill for recognizing politicians, but I really didn’t want to bother any of them.  I made an exception for George McGovern.  I walked up to him outside the hall, and said, “I’m really glad to meet you,” as I shook his hand.  He replied, “I’m really glad to meet you too,” and then he got swarmed by a throng of admirers.  I thought I’d never get a chance to meet him again.  I was completely wrong.


George McGovern earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University studying under the well-known Woodrow Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link in 1953 while simultaneously teaching at Dakota Wesleyan University.  His topic was what has come to be called the Great Colorado Coalfield War of 1913-14 (largely thanks to him).  As McGovern was just starting to run for President, Houghton Mifflin offered to publish his dissertation.  McGovern hired a writer named Leonard Guttridge to help smooth out the academese, and to do a little extra research.  The resulting book, The Great Coalfield War, was the first major publication to examine the infamous Ludlow Massacre of 1914, one of the bloodiest events in American Labor History.  The book remains in print today.

It is interesting to compare the book and the dissertation that preceded it.  The book offers more perspective, going back to about 1903.  However, Guttridge also prepared the publication for the scrutiny of a political campaign.  All of the barely concealed anger and the pro-union language of the original dissertation disappeared.  Still, the book was a pathbreaker, setting the tone for later works like Scott Martelle’s Blood Passion and Thomas Andrews’ Bancroft Prize-winning Killing for Coal.  However, the dissertation is much more fun to read.  George McGovern didn’t really need a co-author.  He was an excellent historian and author in his own right.

I know this because I teach in southern Colorado, near where the strike occurred.  For the last ten years or so I’ve helped organize commemorations of the Ludlow Massacre here at Colorado State University—Pueblo.  In 2004, my department, along with the Bessemer Historical Society—the people who are working to save the archives of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the largest firm that employed those strikers—invited McGovern to campus for a fundraiser.  He not only accepted, he cut his usual speaking fee by two thirds.

Me and a colleague from the Political Science department picked McGovern up at the airport.  Then we drove him to Peterson Air Force Base so that he could pick up his granddaughter.  Then he took us all to lunch at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs (famous, among other reasons, for being the place where George W. Bush decided to give up drinking).  That remains the only time that I have ever eaten at the Broadmoor.  Then we dropped off his granddaughter back at the base and drove to Pueblo.

We all chatted almost the entire time.  Of course, the same way that Elton John will have to sing “Crocodile Rock” well past his dotage, McGovern talked about the 1972 election.  His lines were interesting. (They included, “I would rather be me right now than Richard Nixon.” and “Nixon was incredibly intelligent, but completely amoral.”)  I could tell these lines were also very well rehearsed.

When the conversation turned to history, however, McGovern’s eyes lit up.  He began to talk about Arthur Link, and how he had suggested the Colorado topic because, “There’s this huge strike that happened and nobody’s covered it before.”  He talked about doing research in Colorado during the early 1950s, and how he went to the movies in Denver once and the entire audience (but him) booed a newsreel when they saw Mother Jones.  We talked about Consensus History and the New Social History.  I think he liked talking about Colorado History with me and at our fundraiser because nobody asked him to do so very often.

It would be a shame if the historical profession makes the same mistake in the wake of his passing.  After all, George McGovern was a historian before he was ever a politician.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University—Pueblo.  Occasionally, he writes about something besides MOOCs in this space and over at his blog, More or Less Bunk.

Kill Your Textbook

Jonathan Rees

In light of the interview I did with NPR a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d try to explain a little more here about why I stopped assigning a U.S. history survey textbook.  Since the decision to assign anything is almost always the teacher’s or the professor’s alone, this post is primarily aimed at my fellow educators.  However, as this decision has a tremendous effect on everyone else in the classroom too, I hope history students (or maybe just former history students) will chime in below with comments.

Before I made the switch to a no-textbook survey class, I was assigning a different textbook every year or two for about five or six years.  What made me unhappy with them wasn’t the quality of the scholarship.  Every one of them was solid in that department.  What made me unhappy with them was the alignment between what was in them and my lectures.  I came to believe that they were all teaching against me rather than with me.

What does that mean?  Well, like I wrote in my original post here on this subject a few months ago, anyone teaching the post-1877 US survey class has a lot of ground to cover.  With a limited amount of time and lots of history worth discussing, something is inevitably going to be left out.  Textbook writers have it a little easier.  They can include more material in print than I’ll ever get to during a 14-week course.  Yet it seemed to me that the relationship between what I was teaching and the material that appeared in whichever textbook I was using was getting further out of whack with each passing year. 

Of course, there were inevitable areas of overlap.  I teach the New Deal.  There’s a New Deal chapter in every textbook.  But I had started teaching the New Deal more as a series of themes rather than a long list of programs, which made having students read about programs that I no longer taught seem like a waste of their time.  And then there’s the material that I’ve been teaching for years that nobody seemed to cover well.  Take the 1960s, for example.  I think it’s important to teach the counterculture, but even the best survey textbooks treat Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey with kid gloves, assuming they bother to cover them at all.

Then there’s the elephant sitting in the corner of every introductory history classroom:  the fact that so many students don’t read the assigned textbook no matter what.  Sure, I always imagined that the best students could use it as a kind of encyclopedia, looking up the terms that they don’t really know, but that was a pretty expensive study aid that I was making them buy.  Ultimately, I was reading (albeit very quickly) so many textbooks in so few years that I lost interest in ever reading another one again.  Be honest with yourself now:  Do you read every new edition of your chosen history survey textbook?  Have you ever read even one edition cover-to-cover yourself?  If I wasn’t willing to read the textbook I assigned, how could I in good conscience make my students read it too?

Overcome with pedagogical despair, I wrote a post on my blog critiquing modern textbooks without having a really good solution to the problem.  That’s when a colleague of mine at our sister institution (who you may know as Historiann) left a comment suggesting that I adopt her approach and assign no survey textbook at all.  I remember exactly what first flashed through my mind as soon as I read her comment:  “You can do that?” 

Yes, you can.  As the secondary school teacher from Alaska suggested towards the end of my time on Talk of the Nation, there are plenty of principals out there who might look askance at high school teachers who tried innovating in this manner.  Perhaps there are some department chairmen out there who might frown upon contingent faculty who tried doing something that’s still rather novel.  People with tenure, however, have no good excuse.  You really can teach a rigorous American history course without a textbook, and speaking personally I’ve never been happier.

Please understand that it’s not as if I’ve chucked all assigned reading out the window.  I’ve replaced my textbook with edited primary sources.  Also, as always, I assign three other short books on a rotating basis covering subjects that I’ll explore in greater depth during class time.  I think of this arrangement as the equivalent of the Sugar Act of 1764.  Like the British Empire, I’ve lowered the reading tariff, but now it’s much more strictly enforced through things like ID quizzes and requirements for details on my essay exams.  Since the documents I select now correspond perfectly to what I cover in lecture, I’m also sending the unmistakable signal that this is the history that students have to know.

I don’t want to teach from a textbook.  I want to assign readings that reinforce the way I teach already.  Equally importantly, by killing my textbook I’ve killed the kind of coverage pressures that I discussed on NPR.  This not only gives me more time to teach the history that I want to teach, it gives me more time to teach skills like writing and reading that my students often desperately need in order to succeed throughout their college careers and beyond.

Unfortunately, the kinds of commercial demands that James Loewen famously described so memorably almost twenty years ago now still make it impossible for commercial textbooks to enable the kind of flexibility that history teachers should demand.  However, thanks to the vast array of primary sources that are now available to history teachers all over the world, it’s really easy to assemble textbook substitutes online or to use document banks assembled by publishers of all kinds.  This way, we can all teach what we want, not what they want – but only if we’re willing to break with the past and take the first step in a new pedagogical direction.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs about education technology, labor and American history at More or Less Bunk.  He is also a course editor and consultant for Milestone Documents.  His book, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction, will be released in September by M.E. Sharpe.

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>

When Is It Time to Stop Teaching Something?

Jonathan Rees

Those of us who teach the second half of the American survey course face a problem that only recent historians ever seem to face: our period keeps expanding.  Until there’s some kind of mass meeting where all we historians decide to move the dividing line in a two-course US survey sequence from 1865 or 1877 to 1900 or something, what counts as 1877 to the Present will only get larger.  This poses some problems for those of us who’d like to keep our courses current.

When I started teaching during the late-1990s, 1989 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that) was a natural time to stop.  A few years ago, I rearranged my entire survey course in order to make it up to September 11, 2001, without actually covering it as everyone I was teaching still remembered it perfectly.  Well, those days have changed.  Listening to my students talk, I realized it was time to recall the events of that day and at least a few of the ones following it because they were barely cognizant of what was happening at that time yet have been living in its shadow ever since.

Besides needing to make room for the near present, I’ve been trying to update some of my other lectures from further back in light of recent scholarship.  When I first started talking about the 1970s, it was all Watergate all the time.  After all, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened was the first book on that decade to come out after it ended.  Jefferson Cowie has absolutely torpedoed that stereotype forever.  I’ve also tried to include some of the absolutely amazing material that’s been written about the rise of conservatism in recent years by people like Kim Phillips-Fein and Bethany Moreton.

My problem, therefore, has not been what to include in the new lectures I’ve been writing.  My problem has been what to cut out.  Cover new ground in any depth and something has to go.  Since I’ve also tried to redesign my course to include less lecturing, some of these cuts have been quite painful.

For example, I used to work for Stanley Kutler.  If you know Stan, you know that he was the first academic historian to write a book about Watergate.  When you get Stan to talk about Nixon, he won’t stop.  Therefore, I picked up an enormous amount of information about Watergate almost by osmosis.  I’ve cut my Watergate coverage down from a lecture all its own to about ten minutes.  It just doesn’t seem as important as it once did, anyway. 

Another subject from the survey class I used to cover in much greater detail is the New Deal.  That was two lectures:  First New Deal in the first one, Second New Deal in the second.  The Depression got a lecture all its own.  It still does, but I’ve got the New Deal down to one lecture by simply admitting to myself that the long string of Alphabet Soup programs that history teachers have been teaching since about the time that Roosevelt died is actually rather boring.  I now cover the programs that I think were crucial (NIRA, Social Security, NLRA, and a couple of others) and let my students read about most of the rest.

Similarly, I used to have one lecture for the Populists and another lecture for the Progressives.  Maybe that’s because I was taught by so many political historians as an undergraduate and graduate student, but I’d rather be talking about scholarship that dates from after I was born, thank you very much.  If I enjoy it, I think they’ll enjoy it more.  Just because you learned it is no reason that you have to cover the exact same material that your professors did. 

Ultimately, I think the question of coverage is the key here.  As Lendol Calder has been saying for years, our survey courses do not have to turn us all into walking encyclopedias.  (In fact, if we do our jobs right many of your students will come back for more in upper-level courses.)  Since covering everything will get even harder as time marches on, perhaps its best to change your approach before defeat becomes inevitable.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs mostly about technological and academic labor matters at More or Less Bunk, but still writes about history there every once in a while.

Jump Right in, the Water's Fine

Jonathan Rees

In the new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society, Allan Kulikoff makes a series of suggestions about how to improve history education at the higher ed level. One of the problems he cites is that:

Historians have uncovered entirely too many social facts to digest. The glut in scholarship sets the stage for increasingly impenetrable survey textbooks, puts ever-longer lists of must-read books before graduate students, narrows the focus of dissertation research, and increases the flood of unreadable monographs.

There seems to be a budding consensus on the textbook part of that complaint, as no less a personage as David McCullough recently unloaded on them in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all.

Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."

I would take issue with the notion that the facts in most textbooks are comic in their political correctness, since McCullough and I clearly have different priorities. Nonetheless, we historians should probably all agree with the notion that fitting everything we want students to know and think about history between the covers of a single volume has become increasingly difficult in the last forty years, at least since the advent of the New Social History (which is, of course, now rather old). Textbook authors have to make choices, and it is inevitable that those of use who assign their books will disagree with many of the choices that they make.

While Kulikoff proposes a series of interesting suggestions attacking the entire crisis in history education (which I’ll let you read yourself by getting a hold of the JHS June issue), I have a modest proposal of my own to take care of the textbook problem: don’t assign one. No, I’m not kidding. I ditched the textbook in my survey class last semester for the first time and was delighted by the results.

While I’d like to credit a prominent history blogger from the northern part of my state for giving me the idea, the truth is that I had been thinking about killing my textbook for years, but never had the nerve to try it until I read that she had already done so. I had been switching textbooks about once a year for years and was unsatisfied with every text I tried before I started assigning primary sources instead. It’s not as if all textbooks are as badly written as McCullough suggests they are (although some clearly are), it was that none of them emphasized the same facts and themes that I did in class. I wanted a textbook that compliments my teaching rather than one that provides a competing narrative. Now I build my own reading list based upon what I teach already and have more time left to teach other skills besides memorization.

What did my students think? I did a special evaluation toward the end of the course and they seemed to like it just as much as I did. Yes, this might be expected when you’re giving them less reading, but I like to compare my new syllabus to the Sugar Act of 1764: I assign fewer pages than I used to, but I enforce the reading of the pages that I still assign much more stringently. Deep in my heart I knew that nobody read the textbook before, but now I see the documents I assign and teach get directly referenced on the best student essays. By pouring fewer facts into their heads, I’m convinced that fewer of them are coming out on the other side.

Why admit to such pedagogical heresies in a public forum?

I’m convinced that if more of us no-textbook professors make ourselves known, more historians will join the bandwagon. I was once afraid to go with my gut, but I’m through living in fear of the unknown. Just because you’ve assigned a textbook in the past (the same way that your teachers assigned you a textbook and their teachers assigned them a textbook), you do not have to assign a textbook in the future. Think of the students in your survey classes who will never take another history class. Do you really want their last memory of our discipline to be an overly-long, dull book without an argument and written by a committee?

If you’re happy with your survey textbook, then disregard this post. If not, then I say jump right in, the water’s fine.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo. He blogs about history and other matters at More or Less Bunk.

Where Should the Thesis Go in a College Essay?

Jonathan Rees

My 11th grade English teacher was named Joan Goodman, and she was very particular about how she wanted us to write our essays. The first sentence was where the thesis went. I’m sure she didn’t put it this way, but the second sentence was where you would repeat the thesis in different words in case the person grading it was too stupid to get it the first time you wrote it. The rest of the first paragraph was for elaborating on your thesis as you began to foreshadow what would appear in the body of the essay.
Ms. Goodman told us that her method was the same method they used to teach writing to the cadets at West Point. I’ve never checked into that, but I believe it because she was equally regimented in the way she drilled her model into our heads. Ours was not to ask why. Ours was just to do or . . . Well, maybe not die, but at least get a grade too low for us to get into the Ivy League schools to which we all aspired. I internalized her methods well and it served me well for a very long time, especially in history classes by substituting facts for quotes from the novel at hand.

As I don’t write college essays anymore, this structure no longer has a great impact on my own writing. It takes pages not sentences for me to get most of my arguments out, and thankfully the blog posts that I write, which are the length of some college essays, usually have no theses in them. (Otherwise, I doubt that I’d enjoy writing them so much.)

I do, however, subject my own students to the Joan Goodman/West Point writing model even if I pride myself in being a little less martial about it than she was. If you’re writing a paper that’s longer than eight pages, there’s no reason you can’t have one of those flowery introductions that most English teachers seem to love. You’ve got a lot of space to fill. The same thing goes for people who like to put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph. If it’s going to be a long paper, there’s no reason that you can’t elaborate on what the thesis means as well as the rest of the paper in paragraph number two.

However, when it comes to the four to six page papers that are the bread and butter of the upper-level undergraduate history course, I might as well be a drill sergeant. Even though I don’t remember Ms. Goodman ever explaining it this way, I have come to see the first sentence as the prime real estate in any college essay. It is not just the only sentence where a student can be assured of their professor’s undivided attention, it is the perfect place to set up for an explanation of what the student is thinking (which has always been my main criterion for grading).

A few weeks ago in my labor history class, I got the worst pushback I’ve ever experienced on this from one of my students. “I’ll give you your first sentence thesis, but next semester I’m going back to writing it the way I like it,” she told me. While I wish I had the quick thinking skills to compliment her on her newfound flexibility, my response was slightly different. “I don’t want you to write this way because I tell you so,” I explained. “I want you to write this way because you think it’s the best way to write.”

It’s at that point when I started singing. I don’t sing well, so I don’t do it often, but I do think it illustrates my reasoning (not to mention Joan Goodman’s) here well. Imagine an opera singer doing scales. They begin low, gradually get higher and end with a note that catches your attention. The problem with that in a writing context is that every note in a first paragraph should catch your attention. That’s the only way that anyone can make a complex argument well. A good first paragraph, in other words, should be all high notes.

In my experience, students who put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph think their heavy lifting is then over. Without explanation and elaboration, the thesis falls to the wayside for the rest of the paper and I’m left reading mostly book summary. Using the end of the paragraph thesis model is too often an excuse to stop thinking. Putting the thesis at the beginning forces them to explain what they mean in some detail before they ever get to the details of the history at hand.

I teach writing not just because I have to, but because I get better papers that way. This, in turn, makes my job more fun. So thank you Joan Goodman (as well as a few other excellent English teachers from the Princeton, New Jersey public schools). You’re why I take my students’ complaints that I secretly wanted to be an English teacher as the highest form of compliment.

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.

Index cards are so 1985

Jonathan Rees

Today's guest post comes from Jonathan Rees, professor of history at Colorado State University - Pueblo. He's the author of Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942 (University Press of Colorado, 2010). He also blogs about historical matters at More or Less Bunk.

I’ve never taken a poll on the subject, but I strongly suspect that many of my fellow historians first encountered a college library the same way I did: as a member of their high school debating team. If by chance you weren’t a debate geek like me, let me briefly explain the way the system worked (and still does). The National Forensics League, the big national high school debate group, would give all students in the country a big, broad topic. The one I remember most fondly from my years in high school was court reform. You would research a more specific reform to propose when you were taking the affirmative. My partner Ahmed and I proposed a federal reporter shield law that year. You had to have a case for reform with plenty of specific factual evidence ready before the summer was even over if you were going to compete successfully on a national level. That’s why you had to go to a college library, to find lots of relevant information fast.

The harder side to argue was always the negative. While you could prepare your affirmative case in advance, you never knew what reform the other team would propose until their first speaker started talking. That’s when you had to make a mad dash to your file box of index cards to prepare a crash course on just about anything so that you could convince the judge to shoot their case down. Speed was of the essence. If you couldn’t gather your evidence before it was your turn to speak, you might very well stand up there with no experts to cite, and who’d believe you then?

When I went to graduate school, I took my debate-ready research habits with me. My dissertation was like a big affirmative case with loads of index cards covering every aspect of my subject and huge piles of copies replacing the debate briefs that some firms sold in order to make arguing anything easier. Lucky for me, there was no time limit. I’m not talking about the overall project (which I got done in what was a very reasonable time for a history PhD, if I say so myself). I’m talking about finding individual quotations from sources that I’d copied or transferred to index cards. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent digging through cards and papers looking for something I knew I had read, but couldn’t exactly remember where.

When I started my second book in 1999, the one after my dissertation, I decided to rectify this problem. I bought an early-computerized notes program. After writing a different book in the interim, I just finished almost all of the manuscript from that earlier project in a major writing tear over this last summer. As a result of my delay, it took me ten years to realize how great computerized notes programs really are. It was hard enough back in graduate school to find things that I’d read only a month or a year before. Try finding things that you wrote down over a decade ago! Even the program I bought way back in 1999 allowed me to search my notes by individual words. This not only saved me time, it made it possible for me to quickly regain intellectual control over a huge amount of information.

Recently, I asked two separate historians whose work I greatly admire what notes program they used. In each instance, they looked at me like I was speaking Greek. I tried to explain to them the advantages that I’ve described here, but they were both of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of research. Certainly using pen and paper for notes won’t prevent them from doing more great work in the future (albeit slower than it would otherwise have to be), but I figure my students might as well keep up with the times. I’m teaching both the undergraduate and graduate history research classes this semester, so I’ve required them to use the newest generation in notes programs: Zotero.

Unlike the hundred dollars I plopped down in 1999, Zotero is free. It was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and it’s really quite an incredible program. It not only allows you to search through your notes by word or by category the same way my decade-old notes program did, it allows you to pull in PDFs or screenshots from the web and search through those too. Suppose you find a full-view book on Google Books that you like (a common occurrence for those of us who work on American history before 1923). Zotero will record the entire lengthy, complicated URL automatically so that you can get back to it easily. Furthermore, you don’t need a web connection to use Zotero, so you can enter information manually and search through that the same way that you find material in these easy-to-record web items.

Until very recently, I would have said the one pitfall of using Zotero is that it only worked through the Firefox browser, a browser that has looked less and less useful to me the more I experiment with other choices. It turns out they just took care of that problem. Indeed, you can now get Zotero as a stand alone program so that you don’t even need to use a browser at all.

With the introduction of Google Books, newspaper databases like Chronicling America from the Library of Congress and comprehensive journal databases like Jstor, history research has changed forever. You don’t need to be near a great library to have access to scads of excellent primary sources. The main problem that students and historians alike now face, if they want to write about the last two or three hundred years, is not too little information, but too much. In the future, the quantity of sources will tell us little about research, it’s the ability to find the right information for any given point that will matter the most. You can still write history using methods that stood in good stead back in 1985, but if there’s a new way to manage gobs of information faster, why wouldn’t you want to try it?