The American Brass Band Movement (1835-1892) is an important period within music history that is disproportionally and inadequately taught in collegiate music history classrooms. By learning about America's band history and by performing in these ensembles, future music educators will be able to have a more well-rounded understanding of the…

In this dissertation I examine four critical monographs on the history of higher education. This type of monograph represents an unacknowledged source of value for the field of higher education studies, which has typically relied on survey level texts that provide coverage and historical background. In contrast, critical monographs offer a narrow,…

In the middle of the 20th century, trustees, elected officials, and others in the southern United States required black and white institutions to forfeit academic freedom protections when faculty research and teaching threatened to undermine white supremacy. In the early 21st century, faculty who critique white supremacy are facing similar attacks…

Due to its direct approach and its detailed analysis of race, the "A More Perfect Union" (AMPU) speech makes for a likely primary source to be included in a lesson addressing Obama's racial significance. As social studies teacher-educators who draw from critical perspectives on race and racism, the authors hope to see Obama's speech used…

Although geographically rooted in the Southern United States, the U.S. poultry industry is best understood in a transnational, or even global, perspective that can be difficult to address in regionally bounded courses. In intellectual terms, the topic straddles a number of historiographic subfields that have steadily grown in recent decades. These…

History courses based on chronological narratives in textbooks often assume a linear format through which students accumulate substantial amounts of surface-level information, with the various pieces of that information being disconnected from each other and from larger historical contexts. In addition, such narratives are often dry and lifeless,…

In the fall 2005 semester, the author designed a course in the history of America's modern wars hoping to encourage students to criticize and oppose the country's current aggressions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Surveys of student attitude change suggest that the course did promote criticism but did far less to facilitate student activism. The author…