A group of my students walked out of the classroom on strike, but it was not a bad thing.
They were in the midst of a role-playing activity in which they were the working classes during the years of quickening industrialization in the nineteenth-century United States. Debating the question “who built America?” after reading primary sources, taking in a lecture about the “hog squeal of the universe” in the Chicago stockyards, and reading about growing class conflict during the Gilded Age, the students took drastic action after two other groups of students—the upper-class capitalists and the middle-class managers—argued they, not the working-class group, were the key shapers of a modernizing United States. The students would only come back in the room if the other student groups granted that they needed the workers to keep “building America.” As they left the classroom chanting, we all laughed at their clever move, but without telling them I also felt something serious had occurred: they had begun to study history with more precision, clarity, and intensity. They were grasping the high stakes of history: understanding more deeply what happened then helps us consider what the situation is now and where we might go as a society in the future.
It was a good moment for me as a teacher, and it fit with my philosophy: to galvanize student inquiry into the past, its evidence, different ways of interpreting its empirical record, and the significance of historical understanding for how we wish to understand the full range of what happened and why it matters right up to the present. Sometimes when I teach, I want the past to come alive for students with an immediacy. They are allowed to go on strike when pretending to be the working classes. At the same time, I also help students adopt more balanced, objective approaches to the study of the past. I want to help them pursue historical analysis from a remove, with the benefit of hindsight, as scholars. Dialectically moving between the past as something immediately immersive and also available for careful scrutiny and study, students ideally emerge from my courses with a wider repertoire of skills in critical thinking, democratic citizenship, more meaningful investigation of the self, and better capacities to understand and communicate with others.
In all my courses, students work extensively with primary sources: not only written texts, but also images, statistics, maps, speeches, architecture, material culture, and more. With guidance, they practice gleaning historical information from these different types of evidence. How do we quote material? How do we cite? How do we paraphrase? Most crucially, how do we interpret primacy sources both on their own terms and in relation to other sources and contextual information? Then, through multimedia lectures, classroom activities, field trips, guest speakers, conversations, guided role-playing assignments, and digital projects, students and I rigorously contextualize source materials even more. What kinds of narratives do the sources support or disrupt? What do we do with contradictions and ironies and the messy complexity of the past? We also probe different methodological approaches: economic as compared to cultural analysis, top-down political power compared to bottom-up social movement activism, local and national frameworks compared to global and transnational and diasporic ones.
For instance, in my survey of US history since the Civil War, we compare the parallel stories that numerical data of the Great Depression tell compared to photographic images; we try to understand the unfinished project of post-Civil War Reconstruction; we listen not only to the roars of modernity in the Roaring Twenties but also loudly competing antimodern protests; we consider Cold War containment as both an explicit foreign policy and a domestic cultural mood; we listen to different versions of the 1960s song “Respect,” written by Otis Redding and most famously performed by Aretha Franklin, to explore the social movements of the 1960s; we look to the vexed legal decisions that undermined Native American sovereignty; we track the shift from beliefs in classic liberalism to the modern liberalism of state activism by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II presidential administrations and back, by the end of the twentieth century to a dominant neoliberal ideology; we probe the rhetorical differences between Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech and the various “morning in America” speeches of Ronald Reagan; we explore the coalitional politics of an ever-shifting two-party system; and we notice the technological and financial similarities across many decades between the rise of the railroads and of the computer.
I strive to make my classes far richer environments for learning through lectures full of multimedia clips and examples that invite commentary from students: we practice the craft of historical observation, noticing of details, description, paraphrasing, framing questions, dialoguing and deliberating, and coming up with compelling interpretations and arguments. I also like to move beyond the standard lecture format itself. In courses that focus on public and digital history, recent US history, the history of the computer in the United States, intellectual history, popular culture, the history of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, labor history, and other topics, students conduct oral history interviews, develop websites and audio podcasts, prepare digital slideshows, create timeline poster collaborations with graphic design students, design and publish “table tent” exhibitions, conduct intensive research and write essays based on original findings, focus on cultural sensitivity through collaborations with social work students, attend intellectual events of interest off campus, take field trips to museums and historical houses, and pursue role-playing activities that ask them to act out the past so that they can better scrutinize its dynamics and intricacies.
As a digital historian, I want students to harness new technologies in service of re-enlivening core historical questions and stories. How, for instance, can we use the digital domain not merely to speed up inquiry, but also to slow it down? Computers are tools not simply for automation, but also for augmentation. An approach such as digital annotation of primary sources allows students to write directly on primary sources, then converse not only with the past, but also with other students through the sharing of annotations themselves. Modular digital timeline construction helps students consider how selection of events shapes not only narrative, but interpretation itself as well as issues of periodization and chronology. Storymapping asks students to think about place, time, movement, and mobility as they interacted to shape the past. Podcasting and video editing shifts the form of communication, asking students to relay their ideas more clearly and effectively by moving out of the familiar formula of the classic analytic written essay. Database design asks students to break down materials into component parts for analysis. Data visualization and even “glitching” tactics bring out new dimensions of historical evidence by remixing it digitally. This allows students to become more aware of patterns within sources that they might not perceive at first. The overall goal with my digital history pedagogy is not to have students hand over analysis to computers, but rather for students to engage in fresh ways with historical inquiry itself through the surprising ways that digital technologies can reframe perception, explanation, and communication of knowledge about the past.
Digital history in the classroom also serves the crucial need for students to develop more effective skills of information literacy, digital fluency, and more empathetic understandings of a diverse, complicated, and increasingly integrated contemporary society. I even teach a course on the history of the computer which “flips the switch” on the relationship between new digital technologies and supposedly old historical approaches by arguing that without a historical understanding of the development of the digital computer itself, we cannot fully grasp today’s technological world. Digital history needs the history of the digital.
In addition to my use of new digital tools, I remain committed to teaching traditional historical writing skills. In my introductory US history course, for instance, a series of “scaffolded” assignments allow students to work on the component parts of a classic historical analytic essay. They move through assignments that allow them to practice forming a historical question; developing a hypothesis; articulating a thesis statement; creating a successful paragraph with a strong topic sentence, evidence, explanation, and a transition sentence; outlining an essay, drafting, and reverse-outlining the writing for additional revision; creating a catchy introduction; and formulating a strong conclusion. Students receive ample feedback on these sequenced assignments as they work toward bringing them together to assemble a final analytic essay.
As a teacher, I have received commendations and awards from students. So too, undergraduate students who have worked with me have won prizes for digital humanities projects and independent studies. I have also worked extensively with graduate students in traditional MA and PhD programs as well as in adult education settings and with secondary teacher education. I encourage graduate students to delve into both primary sources and historiographical debates through intensive reading, discussion, and multiple modes of writing. I have overseen thesis projects on a range of topics: the history of SUNY Brockport during the Vietnam War era; American nurses in the Vietnam War; the development of Old Town as a countercultural neighborhood in 1960s Chicago; the emergence of the contemporary craft movement; portrayals of the Civil War in high school textbooks; “scramble” marching bands at US universities in the 1960s; HIV-AIDS memorials; and muckraking novels during the Progressive Era. Interacting with and mentoring both undergraduate and graduate students has been one of my most rewarding intellectual experiences as a teacher and scholar. I have also created a graduate methods course, Introduction to Cultural Analysis, in which students across fields beyond history alone draw upon a wide range of intellectual sources to help access different theoretical approaches that can enhance particular research interests.
As a public historian, I partner with local libraries and institutions as well as with campus lifelong learning and alumni programs. I have received a teaching fellowship from the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a Diversity Fellowship from the SUNY Brockport Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Re-Placing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era fellowship to develop public history courses on the Brockport-born African American social reformer Fannie Barrier Williams. I worked with high school teachers studying the Vietnam War through a Teaching American History grant. And I received a SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant to create a SUNY HistoryLab that encourages faculty research and teaching and project collaborations across SUNY’s many campuses.
My teaching also includes a focus on how history and the humanities relate to civic engagement, public life, and applied learning. When COVID-19 arrived, students in my Digital History course pivoted from an on-campus oral history project to a digital exhibition about objects and material culture that communicated stories about life during the pandemic. As an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, I designed and taught a graduate seminar, The Challenge of the Citizen-Scholar, as the core course in the Center for Civic Engagement’s Graduate Engagement Opportunities Certificate Program. I teach a course in digital cultural and arts criticism and museum curation at SUNY Brockport and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, that draws upon my past work as a journalist and helps students develop their voices as critics and curators in the digital era.
Internships and public projects are also a key part of my teaching. At SUNY Brockport, I have coordinated the History Department’s internship program and the Interdisciplinary Museum Studies and Public History minor. Students have worked and learned at museums, historical societies, libraries, archives, municipal offices, and private companies in the Rochester area. I also oversee student research internships in my own public history work at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project and students complete internships in digital scholarly editing through work with scholars on book roundtables that I edit for the Society of US Intellectual History Blog and a new online publication I will be editing, The Carryall, which focuses on US cultural and intellectual history and digital scholarly editing skills for students to acquire for career readiness in today’s digital world.
Overall, my approach to teaching encourages students to grapple with the meaning of history as both a specialized area of scholarly inquiry and a foundation from which to address pressing issues in contemporary life. Whether in methodological, historiographical, or topical courses, I help students bring together primary materials, absorb existing scholarly debates, raise relevant questions, map out explanatory problems and quandaries, work with digital tools, connect the classroom to public life, and improve their skills of analysis and communication. I work to foster an inclusive atmosphere in which students can discover and relish history as a deeply relevant field of intellectual inquiry. Students blend their theoretical learning with hands-on, project-based skills acquisition. At its best, my teaching enables students to improve their capacities for research, writing, and communication; they can pursue career development and civic engagement through intellectual work that both pushes out into the wider world and brings an awareness of public life more robustly into the classroom; they practice the difficult skill of expressing evidence-based arguments cogently and precisely; they acquire the ability to debate and deliberate, to argue fiercely themselves and to listen generously to others; they sharpen their sense of critical awareness, historical consciousness, and how to try to handle the complexity of the world with dexterity, grace, and sophistication.