Archive for Teaching

Apparently the Liberal Arts Aren’t Irrelevant

Translating technology into a human context.

Translating technology into a human context.

I have been noticing an increasing drumbeat in recent months of arguments that despite all “evidence” to the contrary, the liberal arts are neither dead nor irrelevant.  These arguments tend to emerge out of one of two motivations, either passionate defense of deeply held personal values by the liberally-educated, or contrarian quarrelsomeness by those looking to stick a thumb in the eye of the current political consensus in favor of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).  File this current example from Forbes in the second category, since it is penned by a business journalist who is interested in “the surprising value of a liberal arts degree in our tech-crazy world.”  The article’s broader argument is the even tech companies need employees with social and cultural training to sell their products to actual human beings.  I’m not sure I’m overjoyed that the measure of the liberal arts’ value is their ability to train better salespeople for the doublespeaking masters of the universe in Silicon Valley, but in the current climate of political skepticism about the value of humane education, I’ll take whatever allies I can get.  Oh, and speaking of historians and high tech, this video still makes me want to die laughing.

Capitalism is an Empty Signifier

Yes, definitely, assuming anyone can tell you what capitalism actually is.

Yes, definitely, assuming anyone can tell you what capitalism actually is.

Back in January, I posted about a project that my Cultural History of Capitalism seminar was undertaking this semester.  Students in the class had to go out and interview three people about how they understood both the meaning of capitalism as well the history of capitalism, and then they had to write a reflection post on their conclusions about popular meanings and histories of capitalism, and how those popular understandings match up with the scholarly literature on the subject.  The project is done, and it has turned out to be an interesting and revealing, if not particularly surprising, exercise in muddiness.  The class’s interviewees often had strong feelings about capitalism, which showed a good deal of variation from strongly positive to strongly negative to deeply ambivalent.  But when we pushed harder, the interviewees generally had a difficult time saying exactly what capitalism was, and an even harder time tracing its history.  People knew it had something to do with “markets,” and often “freedom,” and that it came from England, and that Adam Smith was an important guy.  Beyond that, most of the interviewees demurred.

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Yik Yak is the Id of the University

"Ride the Yak."  Ewwww.

“Ride the Yak.” Ewwww.

It has been a tumultuous 24 hours at UMW, since the Virginia State Police rolled in last night and arrested some protesters who had been occupying the administration building for the past three weeks in an attempt to get the university to divest its portfolio from fossil fuels.  It has been interesting, to say the least, to watch the controversy play out in different media.

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Exploring Modern Popular Meanings of Capitalism

Thomas Hart Benton's A Social History of the State of Missouri, 1936

Thomas Hart Benton’s A Social History of the State of Missouri, 1936

This semester I am teaching a new course that I’m very excited about, which I’ve titled Cultural History of Capitalism, which will mostly focus on the United States.  It’s a senior-level undergraduate seminar, in which we will study some economic history in order to understand the origins, evolution, and importance of capitalism as an economic system, but in which we will mostly read scholarship from the recent historiography on the cultural history of capitalism. As the class dives into this new scholarship, I plan to explore the moments of contingency where capitalism was implemented, the lived experiences of capitalism, and the specific social and cultural processes by which capitalism came to be seen as the natural and proper economic system for the United States and humanity as a whole. I hope that the course will ultimately work to understand and displace modern narratives of capitalism’s inevitability by showing how it was constructed and legitimated in history. Read more

Discussing My Cliometric Odyssey

Poster for our talk.

Poster for our talk

Next Wednesday, April 16th, I will be talking with the Department of History and American Studies about an ongoing cliometrical research experiment I have been undertaking this academic year.  With a research team of two outstanding senior history majors, Leah Tams and Julia Wood, we have built Excel databases of American geographical publications from 1800 to 1860.  We specifically targeted gazetteers, “geographical grammars,” and tourist guidebooks.  Using data pulled from the WorldCat union library catalog, we have attempted to make each of those databases as comprehensive as possible.

Then, using Leah’s graphing skills as a math minor and Julia’s GIS skills as a geography double major, we have experimented with developing visual representations of this data that can give us new insights into the ways in which the market for American geographical knowledge changed during the first half of the nineteenth century.  Leah’s charts and wordclouds illustrate the topical convergence and increasing seriality of guidebook publications, while Julia’s maps show how the publication of different genres was commercialized in uneven ways.  In each case, their visual representations reveal long-term trends starkly and strikingly.

All this work is contributing to my larger project on tourism and the commodification of experience in the nineteenth century.   It reveals how the print culture of geographical knowledge was increasingly commercialized and industrialized in the years before the Civil War, turning knowledge of space into a commodified experience of space, available on the shelves of booksellers across the United States.

Crowdsoucing Project: Bad Historical Websites

What a terrible website!  (Just kidding.  Thanks, Geocities-izer!)

What a terrible website! (Just kidding. Thanks, Geocities-izer!)

On Wednesday, I will be leading a discussion in my undergraduate History Practicum seminar about learning to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources on the wide-open Internet.  The students have been assigned to bring in an example of a good and a bad historical website on their topic, but I would like to have my own examples of some spectacularly bad history websites to pick apart in class.  I want websites that are factually wrong, absurdly presentist, politically problematic, and straight-up plagiarized.  So what’s your favorite example of bad historical website?  Email it to me or post it in the comments below.

Oh, and I guess I’m also interested in your favorite example of good history websites, too.  Thanks, collective cloud-brain!

Making a Collaborative Reading Notes Wiki

Screen shot of the wiki in progress; click to enlarge.

Screen shot of the wiki in progress; click to enlarge.

This semester I am experimenting with using MediaWiki as a platform for the students in my History of Manhood in the US course to build a collaborative set of reading notes.  After being less than completely satisfied with my Twitter experiment last semester, I was looking for a new way to integrate an online component into my courses.  One of the problems I had with student tweeting is that it generated a lot of noise; there was a lot of talking and very little listening.  I had a hard time keeping up with all the tweets, and it seemed unreasonable (as well as unproductive) to expect the students to do so.  In previous years, I had found that response-blogging suffered from a similar problem; there was an awful lot of expression and not a lot of contemplation.  So I found myself searching for a different kind of online community, one in which the students wrote less but more thoughtfully, and actively engaged with what the others were contributing.   Read more

Teaching is About Relationships

Rural school near Milton, North Dakota, 1913.  Courtesy of Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo.

Rural school near Milton, North Dakota, 1913. Courtesy of Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo.

This week’s readings were all about using technology to open up teaching and learning and to take advantage of the “abundance” of teaching materials, expertise, and networks.  These pieces all strike me as fine, as far as they go, but they mostly reveal an understanding of what makes for good teaching that is fundamentally different from mine. Read more

Congrats to the Mack Pack

Mac Pac 1I had a great bunch of thesis students this year.  I learned halfway through the semester that a bunch of them had been carpooling to the Library of Congress and had dubbed themselves “the Mack Pack.”  (Also, apparently they dubbed my feedback a “Mack Attack,” which wasn’t meant to be complimentary.)  They all presented their work at the History and American Studies Symposium last Friday, and they all did a great job.   Read more

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