Category: Teaching and Learning

• Making History in a Digital World

  How different is teaching and learning history in a digital world? Fundamentally, history is still about interpreting sources to construct an understanding of what happened how in the past. Yes, the internet has made it easier (and cheaper) for more people to publish more things, and those things can be misleading or purposefully wrong just…

• Introducing Historical Thinking with a Movie

  Reviewing Amistad made me realize how useful it could be as a teaching tool, and I can envision showing it in a class on the history of slavery and/or abolition as well as one on representations and memories of slavery (or history in general). I’m particularly interested to use Amistad as a jumping-off point for…

• Amistad, A Review

  Being in New Haven and researching local abolitionists and antislavery organizations recently inspired me to rewatch the Steven Spielberg-directed film Amistad (Prod. by Debbie Allen, Steven Spielberg, and Colin Wilson. DreamWorks SKG in association with HBO Pictures, 1997. 2hr. 35 min.). The film narrates the historical case of the slave ship Amistad in 1839 starting…

• The Unspoken Politics of Teaching Historical Thinking

  When historians think and write about teaching history, they commonly point out that history is not just facts, rather it is the interpretation of sources. Accordingly, they have increasing emphasized teaching “historical thinking,” the skills of doing history, in the last few decades. Some historians have suggested that a focus on historical thinking also circumvents…

• Teaching Historical Thinking: What I’ve Learned and Hope to Learn

  In the roughly fifteen years between being an undergraduate and earning my PhD, how history is taught at the college level has changed dramatically. Gone are the days when courses were simply a professor lecturing every class period, narrating historical events and their causes (or at least lectures are much less common). The emphasis has…