Tag Archive

education

Bachelor Girls or Perverts?: Teaching Histories of Sexuality in Public History Courses

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In her 1903 work Social Culture, Annie Randall White encouraged unmarried women over the age of thirty to form domestic partnerships with each other: “Many of our ‘bachelor girls’ live together and are the happiest people imaginable.” [1]

Yet just two years later, Dr. Read More

Sharing Yemeni history in Coldwater, Michigan

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In 2015, the Tibbits Opera House in Coldwater, Michigan began a two-year project called “Cultural Exchange Coldwater” aimed at sharing the stories and experiences of Arab American residents in this southwest Michigan city. Arab Americans, most of Yemeni heritage, are the largest minority population in this largely white city of 10,000. Read More

James Oliver Horton: an appreciation

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James Oliver Horton, emeritus professor of history and American Studies at the George Washington University, died on February 20, 2017 after a long illness.

Jim Horton was, at heart, a teacher. A former student, Dr. Laurel Clark Shire, recalled his tremendous faith that “all history, no matter how sophisticated or basic, could be presented to any audience.” Read More

The American Civilization Institute: A case study in radical public history education

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Typically, the origins of public history education have been traced either to early twentieth-century applied history programs or to the first named public history program established in the 1970s at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Neither group of founders understood public history as a distinct field. Read More

Mass collaboration and historical synthesis in “The American Yawp”

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The American Yawp, the profession’s first multi-authored open textbook, contains thirty chapters and almost 300,000 words. It covers everything from indigenous creation stories to Instagram. How, with historical input accelerating and the scope of scholarship expanding, could any individual or small group of historians hope to capture the breadth of American history and to do so as expansively as a textbook demands? Read More