Results for History Classroom

Syllabi Creation, History Courses, and More

September 01, 2013
The  blog will take a short break as the semester kicks in.  In the meantime, have a look at these posts on teaching, baseball history, syllabi creation, questions for the survey course, American pre-history, and classroom decorum.

For other posts on teaching, check out these essays, forums, and interviews in Historically Speaking.
Syllabi Creation, History Courses, and More Syllabi Creation, History Courses, and More Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 01, 2013 Rating: 5

History Classroom Roundup

August 22, 2013

Alastair Jamieson, "Germany's Angela Merkel teaches history class on Berlin Wall anniversary," NBC World News, August 13, 2013

German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew on her Communist-era experiences to teach a history class at a school on Tuesday - the 52nd anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Merkel, who is campaigning ahead of next month’s general election, gave a 45-minute lesson as a "substitute teacher" for a 12th-grade class in east Berlin.>>>

Sacha Cordner, "Lawmaker Considering Legislation To Cut Down 'Islam-Bias' In Fla. School Textbooks," WFSU-Tallahassee, August 5, 2013

A Florida lawmaker is considering legislation that would give the public input on the content found in Florida school textbooks. His overall aim is to cut down on what he calls the “Islam-bias” in state schools.

Melbourne Republican Representative Ritch Workman says Prentice Hall’s “World History” book not only puts an inaccurate spin on Islam, it also dedicates a whole chapter to the religion.>>>

E. C. Gogolak, "Using Baseball History to Teach Children Big Lessons," NYT blog, August 7, 2013

On a recent morning in the Longwood neighborhood of the South Bronx, residents on Fox Street were starting their day. Reggaeton played from a second-story window. A man whistled a nursery rhyme while briskly pushing a toddler in a stroller. A woman stood on the corner with rollers in her hair, smoking a cigarette. And in a room at the end of a hallway on the first floor of 830 Fox Street, about two dozen children, ages 6 to 12, sat before a big-screen TV mounted on the front wall.>>>

Ryan Arciero, "1912 eighth grade exam: Can you score highly on a revealing history test?" Examiner, August 12, 2013

A 1912 eighth grade exam is having quite a few students and adults alike this week wonder whether they can score highly on a test that many Americans’ ancestors may have had to take when in the single-school classroom. Thanks to a history museum’s donation of a test that’s over 100 years old, Web Pro News shares this Monday, Aug. 12, that some may be surprised at how much this exam truly reveals.>>>

Matthew Albright, "Delaware school district considers class about Bible," USA Today, July 24, 2013

WILMINGTON, Del. -- A school board in Delaware will vote Thursday on a proposal to offer a high school class examining the Bible's role in society and history, tying the state into a national debate over the limits of religion in schools.

Supporters say the elective class would not be a religious Bible study class discussing matters of faith, but would focus instead on the text's influence on history and society. Students would read the Bible and an accompanying textbook.>>>
History Classroom Roundup History Classroom Roundup Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 22, 2013 Rating: 5

Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup

August 08, 2013
Chris Beneke
 
Tom LoBianco, “Daniels Looked to Censor Opponents,” The Associated Press, July 16, 2013
“Emails obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request show Daniels requested that historian and anti-war activist Howard Zinn's writings be
banned from classrooms and asked for a "cleanup" of college courses. In another exchange, the Republican talks about cutting funding for a program run by a local university professor who was one of his sharpest critics. … The emails are raising eyebrows about Daniels' appointment as president of a major research university just months after critics questioned his lack of academic credentials and his hiring by a board of trustees he appointed.”

The Mitch Daniels email, February 9, 2010
“This terrible anti-American academic finally passed away. The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is ‘the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. … Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”

92 Purdue faculty members, “An open letter to Mitch Daniels,” July 22, 2013
“We trust our colleagues to introduce young people to the facts of history, but also to the much more difficult, much more essential practices of critical thinking. We trust our K-12 colleagues to know how and when to present challenges to received knowledge and how to encourage their students to judge such challenges for themselves. And we trust them to decide how and when to use controversial scholarship such as Zinn’s in their classrooms. This kind of academic freedom is essential to all levels of education, whether within a tenure system or not.”

American Historical Association, “AHA Releases Statement,” AHA Today, July 19, 2013
“The American Historical Association would consider any governor’s action that interfered with an individual teacher’s reading assignments to be inappropriate and a violation of academic freedom.   Some of the relevant facts of this case remain murky, and it is not entirely clear what in the end happened, or did not happen, in Indiana. Nonetheless, the AHA deplores the spirit and intent of former Governor Daniels’s e-mails of 2010 …. Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Howard Zinn’s text, and whatever the criticisms that have been made of it, we believe that the open discussion of controversial books benefits students, historians, and the general public alike. Attempts to single out particular texts for suppression from a school or university curriculum have no place in a democratic society.”

Robert Cohen and Sonia Murrow, “Who’s Afraid of Radical History,” The Nation, August 5, 2013
“Innovative history teachers across the United States have for decades used A People’s History at the high school level in similarly comparative and rigorous ways. High school teachers desperate to breathe some life into their classes have distributed Xerox copies of Zinn’s most provocative chapters to offer a contrast to state-mandated textbooks, seeking to engage students in historical debate so they learn that history involves sorting out competing interpretations of the past rather than mere memorization of names and dates. These teachers have been drawn to Zinn because he offered their students a uniquely accessible introduction to the new social history, which revolutionized historical scholarship beginning in the 1960s.”

Rich Lowry, “Daniels vs. Zinn,” The National Review Online, July 30, 2013
“The caterwauling in the Daniels controversy about the importance of academic inquiry is particularly rich, given that Zinn didn’t believe in it. He had no use for objectivity and made history a venture in rummaging through the historical record to find whatever was most politically useful, without caring much about strict factual accuracy. ‘Knowing history is less about understanding the past than changing the future,’ he said. He joined his propagandistic purpose to a moral obtuseness that refused to distinguish between the United States and its enemies, including Nazi Germany.”

Sam Wineburg, “In Indiana, history meets politics,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2013.
“The Purdue faculty dismissed criticisms of Zinn's scholarship by Handlin and presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as coming from the ‘consensus school of U.S. history.’ But their dismissal ignored the searing criticisms of historians with impeccable leftist credentials, such as [Michael] Kazin and Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote that for Zinn, ‘everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.’ … His [Daniels’] view of history, presented in his 2011 book "Keeping the Republic," is as one-sided from the right as Zinn's was from the left. … What bothers me most about the whole flap — about Daniels' emails and about the Purdue faculty's reaction to them — is the way nuance was sacrificed to politics. We've come to expect politicians under fire to engage in spin. But when academics respond in kind, they reduce education to a game of politics. The loser in this game is truth and the students we are supposed to teach about the value of pursuing it.”
Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 08, 2013 Rating: 5

Humanizing History

June 02, 2013
Steven Cromack

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


Students in my class examine how ideas and concepts travel from generation to generation and arrive in their own lives. They can see that what drives them to interact with their peers in school—the search for a community, something to which they can belong—resembles what drove immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 20th century. Does cutting a bad player from a team lead to better performance overall? Stalin rapidly industrialized the Soviet Union and the economy grew 400%. That progress, however, came at the cost of 20 million lives lost to forced labor and mass execution.

Ultimately, what is the value of a human life? Is the life of a Belgian worth more than that of a Congolese? King Leopold certainly thought so based on his European worldview. Is the life of an American worth more than that of an Iraqi? The 9/11 Victim’s Compensation Fund set the value of a life at fifteen times the annual earnings of a person. The average payout to the families of the 9/11 victims was $1.8 million. The United States government writes out a check for $2,500 to those Iraqi families who have lost a loved one from collateral damage.

These are not easy questions, and students have a difficult time grappling with them. Yet, by asking such questions, history becomes more than the study of the past, and more than the progression of events—history becomes a part of everyday existence. History now becomes personal.
Humanizing History Humanizing History Reviewed by Joseph Landis on June 02, 2013 Rating: 5

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

May 14, 2013
Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th
Read the above at the BBC
e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>
Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 14, 2013 Rating: 5

Apologia pro Common Core

May 05, 2013
Steven Cromack

The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reformstunned Americans. Schools across the country scrambled to design content standards and implement assessments.
Thirty-years later, history seems to be repeating itself. In an effort to improve K-12 education, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted and implemented the Common Core State Standards. As of 2013, Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska are the five holdouts. Members of the academy and secondary school history teachers should be euphoric about the Common Core, which mandates that middle and high school students actually do the work of historians. This includes, but is not limited to, reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources, as well as synthesizing such information coherently in written assignments. The crux of the Common Core is 21st-century readiness, i.e., putting a verb in a sentence correctly, and being able to read not “good,” but well. 

The standards themselves are not revolutionary. In fact, they simply mandate that teachers actually teach reading and writing. The best teachers have always done this. But at least with the Standards, teachers will be held accountable if they choose to use PowerPoint and the textbook as their sole methods of instruction. 

Members of the academy should be excited, too. With Common Core on the ground in high schools, the next generation of students should be better readers and writers. It is now time to double down and ensure that history undergraduates who plan to be teachers are introduced to the seminal primary source documents of American history so they can be prepared to teach the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Seneca Falls Declaration, among many others, to the upcoming generations.

Finally, Common Core reminds teachers of something that they perhaps take for granted: words are powerful. Whether they rally the troops before battle, convey universal truths, or declare new ideas about government, words are at the center of any society. Ideas can only be expressed through words. Words are like the ka of the Pharaoh, the lifeblood of any civilization. They are the written and spoken laws. They are nomoi (human conventions) and physis (nature). They are a means of grace, salus (healing), and salvation provided by the religions of the world. Words ended slavery and apartheid. Words relocated sovereignty from the King in Parliament to the American people. They toppled the Senātus Populusque Rōmānus and the House of Bourbon.  Words inspired nationalism and broke the yoke of colonialism. Words also sentenced prisoners to execution, inspired terror, and declared purges. 

History is not just the study of past events, but of words and their meaning. The Common Core Standards allow for history teachers to roll up their sleeves and rediscover with their students the words that have shaped our world.
Apologia pro Common Core Apologia pro Common Core Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 05, 2013 Rating: 5

Why History Students Should Love Big Data

April 09, 2013
Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

For the last year, you may have noticed, it’s been hard to escape stories about “Big Data.” In a world where everything can be measured—from your location to how well you sleep to how long you brush your teeth to all of your “Likes” on Facebook, Big Data is upon us with avengeance. Or, as it were, like a Cloud.

Some of you will be lifelong historians and wrestle with Big Historical Data for your careers. I happened to take a left turn into business school and ended up working at and running companies. In the process, I spent an awful lot of time pondering questions about marketing and strategy.

This is how strategy works: Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff, and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means. Sound familiar? I’ve had to do that kind of work in everything from baby products to pet food to Red Sox baseball to the global perishable supply chain. I thank my lucky stars every day for Professor McLoughlin.

Now, we’re being told, in the emerging world of Big Data there will be more and more piles of the stuff lying around. Is there any group in the world better trained to make sense of it all—to wade confidentially into the sea of Big Data—than historians? It’s not just about monitoring, data gathering, and quantitative analysis. (Though a course or two in statistics is a good replacement for the Greek most of us got to skip, and get yourself over to the Computer Science building and spend a semester or two doing some simple coding, just so you can see how the other half will live their lives.)

But in the end, conventional data analysis falls short. When Chris Anderson (of “long tail” and “information wants to be free” fame) wrote that “[w]ith enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” he was dead wrong. Causal analysis is an extraordinarily deceptive and nuanced thing. Data sets on their own are neutral and largely useless. Cobbled into relational information they begin to sing. But only when a storyteller comes along and provides context and human insight does Big Data really give up the goods.

Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, believes that integration is the new specialty—that someone with a renaissance view of the world is more likely to spark an innovation than a pure engineer. If you are learning the craft of history, that could very well be you.

I do not know exactly what Big Data jobs will look like over the next generation, but I couldn’t predict a decade ago that there would be thousands of “app developers” or positions called “Chief Evangelist” or professional bloggers. I certainly didn’t know to put “Pope” and “tweet ‘in the same sentence. But I stand firm in the belief that God blesses the storyteller; it is he or she who makes data human, and our only real chance to use it like a tool instead of a club.
Why History Students Should Love Big Data Why History Students Should Love Big Data Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 09, 2013 Rating: 5

Visual Learners and Historical Myopia

April 02, 2013
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation. 

This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar.

The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Connecticut. When I wished to illuminate my own area of expertise, the colonial mid-Atlantic, I came up short. No film of which I am aware follows Conrad Weiser through Penn’s Woods or brings to life the ascetic world of the Ephrata Cloister. In the realm of video pedagogy,  the years between witches and independence and the geography between Puritans and plantations cease to exist. 

New England’s comparative simplicity garners it a disproportionate amount of attention. The Pilgrims and Paul Revere bookend schoolchildren’s understanding of colonial history, with a brief pause for the horrors of Salem and slavery. Thus our politicians and the voters who elect them imagine a past of Protestant purity marred by slavery and superstition. Historians seek to disabuse students of this dangerous misperception. However, in a visual age, we need the assistance of historical films.

No doubt, my plea to move beyond New England in a blog from Boston seems strange.  I suspect that it requires the Puritans’ descendants to call for an expansion of the past beyond the Hudson. A clarion call from Harvard Square to the monied classes with expensive cameras might just do the trick.
Visual Learners and Historical Myopia Visual Learners and Historical Myopia Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 02, 2013 Rating: 5
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