Teaching about slavery entails teaching about the archive. Punctuated with silences, scattered with compelling details, and laden with descriptions that oscillate between racist, harrowing, and heartbreaking, runaway ads provide a glimpse into the lives of enslaved people. The details embedded within them--or omitted from them--can also provide…

This article describes a book review assignment that is an application of enlightenment practices to a modern learning environment. This paper encourages both student learning in the content of enlightenment ideas and the methods of critical, accessible writing. Students engage in metacognition by using the critical reasoning capacities of their…

History teachers are frequently frustrated in their efforts to promote class discussion. Class discussion is useful to deliver or reinforce content and to explore or share ideas. Yet teachers learn quickly that they cannot expect good discussion, especially good whole-class discussion, to take place when they want it to. One approach to the…

Argues that understanding assignments is the first step toward successful college writing. Urges instructors to support students by helping them to decode assignments. Breaks down instructions into individual tasks including (1) writing an essay, (2) examining an issue, (3) reviewing articles and books, and (4) focusing on some texts. Defines each…

This article is an exploration of how the new early American cultural history can be employed in the first half of the standard American history survey. The author discovered that the New Cultural History can be an outstanding tool by which to introduce a highly culturally diverse student population to the multiracial, multicultural, and…

In this article, the author relates her experiences teaching a history course titled "Introduction to the Modern World." She relates how some of her colleagues immediately began providing her with unsolicited warnings regarding the difficulty of engaging students in world history and the impossibility of covering "500 years of the whole world" in…

Describes the University of California (Irvine) one-year humanities core course as hermeneutically and contextually oriented. Explains course development, structure, and organization and provides the reading list. Students assignments include essays and a dialectical notebook. Provides a three-day fall seminar for the teaching staff. Finds course…

Analyzes primary document from German Holocaust period in which German bureaucrats described in euphemistic terms the murder of the Jews. Illustrates how the document can be used as a teaching aid by having students replace the euphemisms using words with their intended meaning, and reading it aloud in class. References include sources of…