Teaching
The way “Suffragette” depicts the use of social pressure to make and then ostracize a working class suffragette, drive her out of her home, lead the father to give up their child… Yikes! This film should inspire productive classroom discussions.
The federal government is now using force to suppress knowledge of the history of violence against Black people. Remembering the past is too painful for these weak tyrants, so they tyrannize the brave who would teach or learn it.
The AHA’s members and their colleagues teach students how to think, not what to think. Preparing future generations to read, think, and analyze provides a much stronger foundation for informed patriotism and civic participation. This executive order does just the opposite, providing a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy.…
– James Grossman, “On the K–12 Education Executive Order,” American Historical Association.
A Hard Thing to Teach
What was once seen as standing ‘outside’ history, demanding silent contemplation but resisting explanation or contextualisation, has now been firmly historicised. Comparative genocide studies, histories of colonialism and genocidal violence, studies of western penal practice and more besides have demonstrated that the processes which led to the Holocaust were integral to modern history, not an aberration from it.
Neil Gregor, “‘To Think is to Compare’: Walther Rathenau, Trump and Hitler,” History Today, February 20, 2017.
Georgetown University’s Massive Slave Sale
This New York Times story sure hits close to home: “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?" As a human being and as an alumnus, I find this startling. As a historian, I can’t think of a better way to make history relevant to students in the present.
2014 Archival Seminar Report
Here is my report on the 2014 Archival Summer Seminar in Germany. Besides saying what we did, it discusses why, and it considers the various specialties of those who attended.
Archival Summer Seminar 2013
The report for the 2013 GHI archival summer seminar is finally available. Stay tuned for information about applying for the 2014 trip.
Archival Seminar
I am excited to have the opportunity to lead this year’s summer archival seminar in Germany, which will bring me to Speyer, Cologne, Coblenz, and Munich.
Teaching Notes: Synthesis and Process
The main assignment for my graduate survey of modern Europe this summer was to write an essay that incorporated all of the assigned books and most of the assigned articles. I conceived of this assignment because of a similar one that I had had to do as a graduate student that I found especially productive, if difficult. (See Learning to Synthesize History.)
The essays my students wrote fulfilled or exceeded my expectations in some cases, but there were others that did not go as well as they could have. In part, this was due to the compressed nature of the summer term, but more than anything else, I think building a deliberate approach to teaching the process of synthesis into the course syllabus would have helped. Yes, these students were in an M.A. program and had taken many history courses in their lives, but few had ever had to do such an assignment.
Of course, we spoke about process both in class and in individual meetings, but the current senior research seminar I am teaching, which includes explicit work on process, suggests to me that I should formalize such efforts in graduate courses too, if I am going to require an unfamiliar writing task. That’s not how I learned as a graduate student, but so what?
Reflections after Class
One of those questions came up in class tonight with a group of MA students discussing Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2008), a question where I grow perhaps too animated, maybe conveying impatience, even arrogance, or, if I’m lucky, simply passion. What was the difference between communism under Stalin and nazism under Hitler?
The differences are stark, but there’s that pesky word “socialism” and the collectivist rhetoric that is so easily conflated or confused with “collectivization,” never mind the existence of economic plans, mass murder, and a host of apparently shared phenomena commonly subsumed under the heading of “totalitarianism.” So why does this question sometimes cause me to push back instead of letting students gradually begin to understand, taking as many intermediary steps as they need to get there?
I would like to blame the heat and my tiredness after a forty-eight-hour power loss at home, and there’s something to that. But this is also one of those topics that can get my goat under better conditions, unless I am prepared for it. I am ready these days when teaching History 100 (“Western Civilization”), but the question took me by surprise in the context of a graduate survey of modern Europe. I am beginning to think it should not have.
Perhaps it’s time to choose some primary sources for the students to analyze in at least a portion of our next class.
Something about this question can elude or confound even well-informed graduate students like those in my current class. Something is getting lost in translation from a past that grows more distant, more remote. The words “nazi” and “socialist” and “communist” are on many lips in these United States, but they’re employed in our own contemporary struggles over ideology, identity, and politics. They help us to create meaning in our own world, but this circumstance complicates the already difficult task of understanding the Germany and Soviet Union that existed in the 1930s and 1940s.
Requiring Students to Use Chicago Style (or Turabian or Whatever)
Consumption History Again
Park & Shop Shopping Center, Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC, via Library of Congress.
Yesterday I asked how I could integrate the consumption history I’m learning into my teaching, and I pointed to a couple examples where it’s already there. But I missed a glaringly obvious one: the Great War.
Consumption is a vital part of the story in Gerald Feldman’s classic Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914—1918 (1966), insofar as the purchasing power of labor was inextricably linked to Germany’s social and political stability and, therefore, the country’s ability to produce sufficient armaments to continue fighting. The point is more accessible in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914—1918 (1998 and 2004), which I have used in a course on the Great War and will use again next fall in one on modern Germany. There is also Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000), which I will be using in a graduate course on war and society this summer.
I also usually bring up a much earlier aspect of consumption history when I address the Enlightenment and the public sphere: coffee houses. To make this point, there is a delightful reading from before the Enlightenment on the Internet Modern History Sourcebook: “The First English Coffee-Houses, c. 1670—1675.”
Of course, none of this is informed by a specific historiography of consumption history, but it does point out how this topic is already in my teaching. But there’s a difference between including a topic and addressing it systematically. To think about war and society in Europe, I can at least draw on the periodizing nomenclature of “cabinet war,” “people’s war,” and “total war” to help describe the level of societal involvement in interstate conflicts over the past few centuries (Stig Förster et al.). If such language and periodization exists for understanding consumption history, I have not yet learned it.
Perhaps the main point is to recognize modern consumer societies as having a history in the first place, instead of taking them as a direct reflection of human nature and, hence, rendering them ahistorical, as too often happens in simplistic political rhetoric that opposes capitalism and communism—rhetoric that invariably finds its way into student spoken and written comments. I sometimes try to do this with economic thought in the early modern period, but historicizing capitalism should be a central historiographical problem for the modern era, too.
Editing and Consumption History
Since I began my editing job a little over a year ago, I have begun learning a little about a lot of history that I had previously never experienced. While my editing has included a variety of smaller projects as diverse as the interests of the institute's fellows and recent alumni, my main area of responsibility is editing a new series on consumption history. Two volumes are under contract, and a third will be very soon, but I've been forcing myself to sit on my hands and not go into details here until things are actually published.
Meanwhile, I have begun to wonder how I might integrate what I'm learning about modern consumer societies into my teaching. Connections sometimes come up spontaneously in class, but maybe I could do something more meaningful. Well, in the past I have used Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (aka The Ladies' Paradise), which I first encountered as a teaching assistant for Sandra Horvath-Peterson. And next fall I will use Uta Poiger's Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany in a survey of modern Germany. But how could I approach the issue more systematically (when I am able to make some time for reflection)
Using an iPad to Grade Student Papers
Caleb McDaniel offers a useful blog post on grading with his iPad. I find his take helpful, because he combines the practical with the pedagogical.
Foreign Language Competency in the U.S.
Francisco Marmolejo's "Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System?," which appeared on The Chronicle's website yesterday, is worth reading. I won't summarize it here, but I do wonder if the attitudes he describes have anything to do with a comment I sometimes hear when I ask a student if he or she knows another language or plans to learn one: "I'm no good at languages." I thought the same thing of myself thirty years ago. Fortunately, life circumstances and patient teachers later taught me that motivation and practice mattered more than mere aptitude.
Learning to Synthesize History
Hist 314: History of Germany (Fall 2010)
I have started a blog for my fall course, Hist 314, History of Germany in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. It is not much to look at yet, but I wanted to let students know who were looking for information on the course. Before I can do more, though, I shall have to finish teaching my current summer course.
Hist 388-B02, Approaches to European Military History (GMU)
Here’s my syllabus for the summer course. It is different than most I have done, because the class will help plan the content of more than half the sessions. Such collaboration is desirable, I feel, because it will help drive home some key lessons about the methodological and thematic diversity of the field.
The Politics of Identity and How We Learn History
There is an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about how Texas is changing the content of its American high school history textbooks. Instead of taking potshots at its clear abuses of history, however, the author locates it in a broader context of history curricula and identity politics over the past few decades. See Sam Tanehaus, "In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right."
Kevin Levin of the blog Civil War Memory thinks that the focus on textbooks in this newest episode of America's culture wars misses the point, however. He points out that much history teaching is no longer focused on textbooks. He has a point. Even those of us who still sometimes use textbooks and do not rely as heavily on the internet see history education in terms very different than those of the Texas Board. See "Texas, Textbooks, and the Battle For Our Children’s Souls" and "If I Should Teach American Exceptionalism . . ."
History without Reading
History 100 Again
I have been pretty happy lately with my [[thematic]] approach to George Mason University's required History 100 (Western Civilization); however, chronological confusion in many exams last semester made me long to try a textbook again. I might live to regret the attempt, since the course is only one semester long, but I have decided to try the abridged version of Mark Kishlansky et. al., Civilization in the West (Penguin Academics). Trying to squeeze everything into the syllabus was much harder this way, even after skipping the first 200 pages of the text, but I am hoping the textbook will assist me in conveying a better sense of the chronological terrain. I have never been against textbooks in principal. I just have not found them to be practical for a one-semester course of this kind. Will this book fit the bill? Ideally, of course, someone would write a shorter book specifically for this kind of class. Abridged histories are usually still too long. Nonetheless, I am hoping that this halfway affordable text will prove to be an exception.
There are two other reasons I am changing things. First, doing so might help to minimize chances of plagiarism, since there will not be a similar set of assignments already in circulation on campus. Second, change keeps my teaching fresh.
Plagiarism Again
I had no plagiarism cases this fall. Maybe it is because I had an unusually ethical group of students, but it probably also had something to do with analysis they did based on short documents instead of books commonly discussed on the internet. With few exceptions, there were no answers to be found on the internet, though I took some chances with the inclusion of A Doll’s House in some questions. Even then, I did not let students focus on Ibsen’s play, but instead forced them to relate it to short documents that I made available on Blackboard. I have made similar attempts in the past, but usually by asking big synthetic questions based on two or three books instead of narrower interpretive questions based mainly on two or three specific documents.
Another variable was length. These source analysis exercises were only two pages, if that, which might have been short enough to prevent the kind of panic that leads to some plagiarism cases. Of course, two pages is less than ideal, but I had more than 150 students this past fall. Even with a grader to help me 10 hours per week, there was an enormous amount of assessment to do, especially since there were three of these exercises.
On a related note, in the coming semester I am going over to the dark side with some quizzes and parts of my exams. By that I mean I will be integrating some multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank elements. As much as I prefer to have students actively produce knowledge in exams, there is a limit to how much grading I can and should do, a limit I far exceeded last semester. Moreover, I will still be having them do analysis. Unfortunately, multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions can raise the specter of copying in overcrowded classrooms. It is with this issue in mind that I plan to use multiple versions of quizzes and exams. I am just not sure if I will have to create these by hand or if there is an easy and free technological solution.
Contemporary Political Rhetoric and Teaching History
Earlier this month I did a post on my Hist 100 blog that might be of some interest to readers here [on Clio and Me], "Contemporary Politics and History." My audience was primarily freshmen in their first semester at university, most of them too young to have voted in the last election.
I have said this in class, but it needs repeating here: Our contemporary American political discourse about socialism and nazism has absolutely nothing to do with those terms and phenomena in actual history. While we are not in class to talk about American politics, I want to point out how language and history are being abused for political purposes. I am not doing this to undermine the stances of politicians who use hyperbole to make their points. There are perfectly good ideological and policy reasons that one can bring to either side of the health care debate, the energy policy debate, environmental policy debates, and so on. But none of these reasons has anything to do with Hitler, nazism, communism, or socialism—not if we are being honest, and as long as we are willing to see the slippery slope argument for what it is, a logical fallacy.
This abuse of history used to just offend me as a citizen who knew something about history, but addressing the abuse became part of my teaching job this summer when I had a student try to explain Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government." That is when I realized that not only was history being abused for political purposes, but our contemporary political discourse was getting in the way of students understanding the past. That's why I wrote a blog post on my own history blog sarcastically entitled, "What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom."
I could follow the logic of the student who described Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government," if I were willing to understand the past in terms of this country's contemporary self-image, but I am not. We need to take the past on its own terms and try to understand it in some detail before we attempt easy analogies. In other words, my concern relates to historical thinking, that is, that thing I began teaching you with the reading assignments from August 31st, including Gerald Schlabach's "A Sense of History."
Fall 2009 Semester
This is what I’m doing this fall: Hist 100 at Mason. I’m actually teaching in the first part of the day instead of splitting my workday between morning and evening. This circumstance makes me hopeful that I can get back to blogging history here.