Comments on: Crowd-sourcing the curriculum: build your Rotisserie League of American historians!

By: history_gal

history_gal — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:17:07 +0000

Late to this thread, but I’m going to add a plug for my own approach. If you’re hiring a modern US person, try to get someone who’s comfortable teaching about all of the major political movements of the period. My training & research is in women’s history, but my favorite class to teach is one I call “Grassroots Politics in Twentieth Century America,” where we do the politics of gender and race and class all together in one big mash-up. It’s a fantastic class that allows the students to easily see the similarities/commonalities among all the movements. But many scholars are still trained to do primarily race OR gender OR class, and aren’t comfortable – especially right out of grad school – wading into what they perceive as other people’s pools.

By: In Defense of Online Teaching and Learning… | Stillwater Historians

In Defense of Online Teaching and Learning… | Stillwater Historians — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 23:01:29 +0000

[...] a great piece on his blog about dumping the coverage model for the history survey. Historiann, in a recent comment thread, toyed with the notion of dumping the survey altogether. We seem to have reached a point where we [...]

By: Historiann

Historiann — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 03:58:21 +0000

I think it’s the job of Canadian historians to teach Canadian history. But aside from a few U.S. departments in border states like Maine, New York, and Michigan, Canadian Studies doesn’t have a whole lot of purchase in the Pays d’en Bas. I can’t speak from the perspective of other Anglophone countries, but I’d be surprised if Canadian history is ever taught outside of Canada and the contiguous U.S. borderlands.

I say this as someone doing Canadian history (albeit pre-1867, New France stuff) who is unfailingly greeted with surprise and amazement that a U.S. historian 1) gives a $hit about Candian history and 2) speaks/reads French. I have been welcomed generously and treated with tremendous courtesy and deference in Canadian archives. But for all of that, I will confess that I teach only a smidge each semester about New France, and nothing about post-Confederation Canadian history.

By: Civilian

Civilian — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:42:32 +0000

Who’s task is it to teach Canadian history? Do early americanists do that? Or an Empire person? I ask because I regret knowing so little about it and it seems canadian history would provide a nice challenge to american exceptionalism.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:11:16 +0000

Western Dave: I so hear you about the difficulties in teaching material with which one is very familiar! It’s so much easier when you don’t know what you’re leaving out, or you don’t appreciate the subtleties, isn’t it?

In grad school, I TA’ed a Western Civ course for a Very Famous French historian whose work was on the Revolution. Her own student-TA’s pointed out how much tighter & better organized her lectures were when she wasn’t lecturing on the Rev.!

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 18:31:41 +0000

@ Historiann I don’t think somebody should have to teach both halves of the survey, but rather the ability to teach both halves is an indication of intellectual flexibility so that in 15 years when a new sub-discipline comes along and you can’t hire for it, they can read up on it and tackle it. Best course I ever had in college was American Foreign Policy taught by a labor historian. Her Social History seminar (which was much closer to her own field) was less interesting because the topics and themes were less clear. There were a fair number of “well, we have to do this” topics whereas she felt much less guilty chopping and adding with the Foreign Policy to create a great course.

I have the same issue with my world surveys which are very tight and coherent compared to my US survey which goes off on tangents and where I have trouble making it pass the New Deal every year.

By: "Willing to Learn"

"Willing to Learn" — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:50:00 +0000

Thank you all — this gives me and my department a lot to think about!

By: Historiann

Historiann — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:48:57 +0000

Great point about material culture, History Maven, which reminds me that I should have put in a plug for public history generally. PH is a growing field, one that’s become newly popular as a hiring field because of the training it can give students for working in history outside of K-12 and university classrooms. So: work for federal & local government agencies, historic preservation, museums & material culture, archives, etc. The federal government is the largest single employer of historians in the U.S., which makes sense when you consider that so many agencies have their own historians, to say nothing of the Forest Service, National Parks, and the Smithsonian.

Public historians also typically wear more than one hat–I would say that most of them are modernists, if not exclusively 20th C that field seems dominant, so they will also teach non-PH courses in modern U.S. history. Many of them are also Native Americanists, women’s historians, labor historians, social historians of various stripes, so there’s more value-added there, too.

Having just been on the committee for a public history search in my department, and having interviewed four outstanding candidates on campus, I can say that it’s a very strong field, because in part of the double-duty that those in academia must perform: functioning as public historians WHILE ALSO meeting the same traditional publications requirements of academic historians. Sadly we could offer only one job, but it was a remarkable search in which the entire History faculty would have been happy to hire all four.

By: History Maven

History Maven — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:16:34 +0000

Thanks to Feminist Avatar for mentioning material culture–it may be booming in U.S. History right now because of the renewed emphasis on jobs in public history/museums.

Having been a material culture studies scholar for over 20 years now, I can attest to the fact that it’s difficult to get the respect of colleagues in history departments. (When I taught in American Studies programs there was no problem.) At many colleges and universities, exhibitions don’t count toward tenure and promotion in history departments as they do elsewhere in the university. When I substituted for a colleague in a college-level meeting about new tenure requirements, the dean omitted exhibitions and other public history work from the list–even though the university had a public history program for several decades. His response to my query? “I thought that was something only art types did. I didn’t think that historians did that kind of stuff.” This is the sort of thinking the National Council of Public History and the Organization of American Historians have been trying to understand and fight for some time. I counsel my younger material culture colleagues to ask the right questions and look over the contract when they are hired in a History department. And I ask them to think about NOT having a teaching collection of artifacts if there are no funds to create one.

Material culture studies invites students not only to write “history with non-traditional sources” but to create other types of scholarship–websites, exhibitions, etc. The Mellon Foundation has been giving post-docs to college and university museums (mostly art museums) to hire recent Ph.D.s to serve as liaisons between faculty members and campus museums. Many of these have gone to SLACs, so the movement is there–though not necessarily in History.

The study of material culture encompasses more than museum/public history work, though–think about what placing artifacts front and center in business or economic history does, for example. Or the movements of classes of objects between persons and peoples throughout the world.

By: Feminist Avatar

Feminist Avatar — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 06:35:50 +0000

@CPP – yes, there is such a thing as economic history. In fact, my u/grad degree is in economic history, so there are still a few lonely institutions who offer this as a distinct degree subject. Increasingly, a lot of hardcore economic historians (those interested in things like econometrics and philosophy of economy) live in economics departments, but it has also evolved into business history, which is very popular (especially amongst students interested in business and economics, so can be offered as an option in multiple courses, which, depending on how your institutions does its finances, can boost students numbers in your area and so your income) and can be quite lucrative, as some companies will pay historians to write their histories, or to give them advice on what to do with their archives etc, but also because it’s easier to claim for ‘national signficance’ when writing grant apps.

On the topic of subfields, the history of material culture is just booming at the moment, and to a lesser extent visual culture. I think this is also a useful speciality(ies) to have covered as it allows students to think about writing history with non-traditional sources and also might be useful training for students who want to work in museums/galleries etc, as well as offering opportunities for formal linkage partnerships between academics and those in that area.