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.
Tag Archive for teaching
Exploring Modern Popular Meanings of Capitalism
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
Crowdsoucing Project: Bad Historical Websites

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!