In 2014, at Rollins College, a liberal arts college in central Florida, the history department completely revised its curriculum. Like their peers across the history discipline, Rollins history faculty saw a disconnect between its traditional curriculum--with a stress on lecture and memorization--and the actual process of doing history. Colleges…

Too many history students struggle with the citation practices that are central to the historical method. They document their sources incorrectly--or not at all--and do not know what to do with the footnotes and endnotes they encounter in the scholarly texts they read. This article describes the "Follow the Footnote" exercise, which…

Recognizing the limitations of traditional research assignments, the two authors of this article--one a librarian and one a historian--set out to redesign a history capstone seminar to focus on the research process as much as on the research product: tipping the iceberg to look at what is underneath. The article begins with a brief overview of the…

In this article, the author offers a summary of the major research assignment she has developed for HIST 100, as well as the successes and struggles she has had along the way. The project requires students to experience research as a difficult process that demands their patience, perseverance, and assiduousness. Group work in class clearly plays…

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is written and edited solely by volunteers who have no qualifying credentials save an internet connection. With over 3.1 million articles in English, Wikipedia is indeed a formidable reference web site. From a research standpoint, Wikipedia is both the sinner and the saint: because anyone can make…

Treasures await students and researchers on the shelves of libraries and archives across the country, but unfortunately they often remain unknown to the "modern" researcher who limits his/her research to using the Internet. The process of physically going to the library stacks and browsing the shelves in a subject area is on the decline…

In this article, the author reviews his unsuccessful and successful strategies for teaching research and analytical skills, which illustrate changes in his assumptions about and attitude toward teaching. Older and perhaps wiser as well, the author no longer assumes that students already know how to do what teachers expect them to be able to do by…