In the early modern era, Spanish missionaries, cosmographers, chroniclers, and physicians wrote major studies on botany, ethnography, navigation, Indigenous languages, war, and history, aided by capable, though often reluctant, Indigenous informants. They penned this rich body of scholarship using iron gall ink -- a mixture of tannins, sulfates,…

Inspired by participation in the 2014 version of the Stewardship of Public Lands seminar, hosted by the Yellowstone Association Institute and sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities' American Democracy Project, the author's first goal was the creation of a "Sophomore Seminar" course themed on "Parks,…

Timelines are a regular feature of almost all history education. Teachers and students create them on chalkboards, white boards, and an increasing number of web-based programs that allow multiple users to collaborate on a timeline's shape. Textbooks offer timelines to accompany the material they cover--chapter-by-chapter, students are told which…

On a June, summer day at Albion College, Byron Stokes and Dudleigh Vernor, two undergraduate members of the local chapter of Sigma Chi fraternity, sat down at the college organ in Dickie Hall and coined the most famous song in fraternity history, "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi" ("The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," n.d.a). The tune…

A group of private liberal arts colleges in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, formed a voluntary association called the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) in 1962 based on their self-perceived shared interests and missions. These institutions included Albion College, Antioch College, Denison University, DePauw University, Earlham College, Hope…

Current educational reforms have given rise to various types of "educational Taylorism," which encourage the creation of efficiency models in pursuit of a unified way to teach. In history education curricula, this has been introduced through scripted textbook-based programs such as Teacher Curriculum Institute's "History…

The author describes alternatives to traditional ways of conceptualizing the early American literature survey course, focusing on film ("1492" and "Black Robe").

The story of Kentucky's earliest foray into higher education, Transylvania Seminary, finds denominational influence writ large--Presbyterianism presents a guiding presence in the dynamics of early growth. The forces of liberal secularism are said to be ranged against those of conservative sectarianism; the victory of the former is a movement…

This dissertation traces the history of three of the colleges in Idaho's Treasure Valley during the 1960s: Boise State University (BSU), the College of Idaho (C of I), and Northwest Nazarene University (NNU). The time period examined in the study begins with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in late 1957 and ends with the deaths of students during…

Closing the "breach" or "distance" between teachers and historians has become a focus in teacher education and has gained greater prominence in the research on preservice teachers. Overall, most educational researchers now believe that a definition of historical knowledge includes not only a basic understanding of the facts, but also an…

Many history professors have been reluctant to authorize students to use Wikipedia in their classwork because they do not fully trust the open source encyclopedia. But as increasing numbers of scholars and teachers work with Wikipedia, its influence becomes undeniable. In this article, the author describes how Wikipedia works and how she made…

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

This paper presents a discussion of Howard Zinn's intellectual and political ideas. Through the analysis of selections from his immense body of work, several interrelated themes emerge. Drawing more attention to these notions of dissent and democracy is crucial to revitalizing education at all levels and vital to advancing the public discourse…

Each fall semester, on the first day of class of his upper-level American Military History course, the author informs his students that a major part of the class consists of a wargame in which they will participate. In this article, the author describes briefly how the class will be divided into two teams, and that on a specific evening during the…

This essay describes the results of an experimental class co-taught by an historian and a social studies educator. The class was designed to accomplish two things: to narrow the gap in disciplinary thinking between preservice teachers and historians, and to overcome the preservice teachers' compartmentalized thinking about the nature of their…