A group of my students stood up and walked out of the classroom on strike. It was not a bad thing, however. They were in the midst of a role-playing activity in which they had been assigned the role of the working classes during the years of quickening industrialization in the late nineteenth-century United States. Debating the question “who built America?” after reading primary sources, taking in a lecture about the “hog squeal of the universe” in the Chicago stockyards, and reading about growing class conflict during the Gilded Age, the students took drastic action. The two other groups of students played the roles of upper-class capitalists and the middle-class managers, and contended that they, not the working-class group, were the key shapers of a modernizing United States. They even tried to split the working-class students apart by nature of their different ethnic and racial backgrounds and levels of skill! The working-class students gathered together and then they marched out of the room. They explained that they would only come back to class if the other student groups granted that they needed the workers to keep “building America.” As they left the classroom chanting, we all laughed at their clever move. Yet, I also felt something serious had occurred: they had begun to study history with more precision, clarity, and intensity. Imagining themselves into the past through primary sources, a lecture, and a role-playing activity, they were beginning to access the past more critically and creatively.
It was a good moment for me as a teacher, and it fit with my philosophy: to galvanize student inquiry into the past, its evidence, different ways of interpreting its empirical record, and the significance of historical understanding for how we wish to understand the full range of what happened and why it matters right up to the present. Sometimes when I teach, I want the past to come alive for students with an immediacy. They are allowed to go on strike when pretending to be the working classes. At the same time, I also help students adopt more balanced, objective approaches to the study of the past. I want to help them pursue historical analysis from a remove, with the benefit of hindsight, as scholars. Dialectically moving between the past as something immediately immersive and available for careful scrutiny and study, students ideally emerge from my courses with a wider repertoire of skills in critical thinking, democratic citizenship, more meaningful investigation of the self, and better capacities to understand and communicate with others.
In all my courses, students work extensively with primary sources: not only written texts, but also images, statistics, maps, speeches, architecture, material culture, and more. With guidance, they practice gleaning historical information from these different types of evidence. How do we quote material? How do we cite? How do we paraphrase? How might we, in more recent times, engage critically with information on the Internet and the easily abused possibilities of artificial intelligence tools? Through multimedia lectures, classroom activities, field trips, guest speakers, conversations, guided role-playing assignments, and digital projects, students and I rigorously contextualize source materials and explore how historians have interpreted them. What kinds of narratives do the sources support or disrupt? What do we do with contradictions and ironies and the messy complexity of the past? We also probe different methodological approaches: economic as compared to cultural analysis; top-down political power compared to bottom-up social movement activism; local and national frameworks compared to global and transnational and diasporic ones.
For instance, in my survey of US history since the Civil War, we compare the parallel stories that numerical data of the Great Depression tell compared to photographic images; we try to understand the unfinished project of post-Civil War Reconstruction by way of a letter from the freedpeople of Edisto Island, South Carolina to President Andrew Johnson; we listen not only to the roars of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, but also the loudly competing protests of anti-modernity; students learn about mass culture by writing their own imitations of formulaic Tin Pan Alley lyrics; we consider Cold War containment as both an explicit foreign policy and a domestic cultural mood to consider the ways that what happens outside the United States affects what happens within the nation; we listen to different versions of the 1960s song “Respect,” written by Otis Redding and most famously performed by Aretha Franklin, to explore social movements and the push for rights during the 1960s; we look to the vexed legal decisions that undermined Native American sovereignty; we track the shift from beliefs in classic liberalism to the modern liberalism of state activism by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II presidential administrations; then we trace how, by the end of the twentieth century, a neoliberal ideology appeared that harkened back to classic liberalis; we probe the rhetorical differences between Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech and the various “morning in America” speeches of Ronald Reagan; we examine shifting ideas of warfare after 9/11; we explore the coalitional politics of an ever-shifting two-party system; and we notice the technological and financial similarities across many decades between the rise of the railroads and the emergence of the computer and the Internet.
I strive to make my classes full of sources, voices, perspectives, and different angles on the past by way of multimedia lectures. I also attempt to move beyond the standard lecture format itself. In courses that focus on public and digital history, recent US history, the history of the computer in the United States, intellectual history, popular culture, the history of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, labor history, and other topics, students pursue project-based research. They conduct oral history interviews; develop websites and audio podcasts; prepare digital slideshows; create timeline poster collaborations with graphic design students; design and publish “table tent” exhibitions; conduct intensive archival research; write essays based on original findings; hear from guest speakers; focus on cultural sensitivity through collaborations with social work students; attend intellectual events of interest off campus; take field trips to museums and historical houses; and pursue role-playing activities that ask them to act out the past so that they can better scrutinize its dynamics and intricacies. The goal is a varied approach to historical inquiry in which students become active learners.
As a digital historian, I pay particular attention to how students might harness new technologies in service of re-enlivening core historical questions and stories, in the process gaining information and digital literacy as they also learn about the past. For example, perhaps counterintuitively, I use digital tools to force students to slow down the process of analysis and inquiry rather than speed it up. An approach such as digital annotation of primary sources forces students to write directly on primary sources, then converse not only with the past, but also with other students through the sharing of annotations themselves. They cannot speed forward to vague assertions about a source, but must use digital annotation to read more closely and more slowly, then build up to evidence-based arguments and claims. So too, modular digital timeline construction helps students play with periodicity, chronology, and selection as they move around events and time periods to see different narratives of the past emerge. Storymapping asks students to think about place, time, movement, and mobility as they interacted to shape the past. Podcasting and video editing shifts the form of communication, asking students to relay their ideas more clearly and effectively by moving out of the familiar formula of the classic analytic written essay. Database design asks students to break down materials into component parts for analysis. Data visualization and even “glitching” evidence by remixing it digitally allows students to become more aware of patterns within sources. Experiments with AI tools allows students to compare what these predictive approaches of algorithmic inference produce compared to individual human analysis of primary sources and historical context. The goal is not to emphasize some kind of AI magic, but rather to get students able to use AI appropriately for how it works and what it can do rather than misusing it to plagiarize and, in fact, not think about the past. The overall goal with my digital history pedagogy is not to have students automate analysis, but rather for them to engage in fresh ways with historical inquiry itself through digital technologies.
Digital history in the classroom not only delivers professional skills to students, it also serves a civic purpose. It helps students develop more effective skills of information literacy, digital fluency, and more empathetic understandings of a diverse, complicated, and increasingly integrated contemporary society. I even teach a course on the history of the computer which “flips the switch” on the relationship between new digital technologies and supposedly old historical approaches. Instead of applying digital technologies to history, it applies historical understanding to digital technologies. From where did the computer emerge? What social, economic, political, and cultural contexts gave rise to digital technologies? Computers are not ahistorical, they, like everything, have a history. Equipped with this knowledge, students can better navigate the contemporary technological world.
I am deeply involved in professional development with fellow faculty and experts as well. For example, I collaborated with a documentary filmmaker in SUNY Brockport’s Journalism Department on a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Connections Grant to develop faculty skills and a new curriculum in Digital Historytelling. Through videos, audio podcasts, website development, and digital “zines,” students will be able to put together historical inquiry with digital “content creation” and project management skills development. I also founded the SUNY HistoryLab at SUNY Brockport as a vehicle for better linking students and faculty across SUNY campuses who are interested in historical inquiry. The SUNY HistoryLab also seeks to establish more robust connections to institutions of historical study and citizens across New York State.
In addition to my use of digital tools, I remain committed to teaching traditional historical writing skills. In my introductory US history course, for instance, a series of “scaffolded” assignments allow students to work on the component parts of a classic historical analytic essay. They move through assignments that allow them to practice forming a historical question; developing a hypothesis; articulating a thesis statement; creating a successful paragraph with a strong topic sentence, evidence, explanation, and a transition sentence; outlining an essay, drafting, and reverse-outlining the writing for additional revision; creating a catchy introduction; and formulating a strong conclusion. Students receive ample feedback on these sequenced assignments as they work toward bringing them together to assemble a final analytic essay.
As a teacher, I have received a number of commendations and awards from students. Undergraduate students who have worked with me have won prizes for digital humanities projects and independent studies. I have also worked extensively with graduate students in traditional MA and PhD programs as well as in adult education settings and with secondary teacher education. I encourage graduate students to delve into both primary sources and historiographical debates through intensive reading, discussion, and multiple modes of writing. I have overseen thesis projects on a range of topics: the history of SUNY Brockport during the Vietnam War era; American nurses in the Vietnam War; the development of Old Town as a countercultural neighborhood in 1960s Chicago; the emergence of the contemporary craft movement; portrayals of the Civil War in high school textbooks; “scramble” marching bands at US universities in the 1960s; HIV-AIDS memorials; and muckraking novels during the Progressive Era. Interacting with and mentoring graduate students has been one of my most rewarding intellectual experiences as a teacher and scholar. I have also created a graduate methods course, Introduction to Cultural Analysis, in which students across fields beyond history alone draw upon a wide range of intellectual sources to help access different theoretical approaches that can enhance particular research interests.
As a public historian, I partner with local libraries and institutions as well as with campus lifelong learning and alumni programs. I have received a teaching fellowship from the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a Diversity Fellowship from the SUNY Brockport Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Re-Placing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era fellowship to develop public history courses on the Brockport-born African American social reformer Fannie Barrier Williams. I worked with high school teachers studying the Vietnam War through a Teaching American History grant. And I received a SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant to create a SUNY HistoryLab that encourages faculty research and teaching and project collaborations across SUNY’s many campuses.
My teaching also includes a focus on how history and the humanities relate to civic engagement, public life, and applied learning. When COVID-19 arrived, students in my Digital History course pivoted from an on-campus oral history project to a digital exhibition about objects and material culture that communicated stories about life during the pandemic. As an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, I designed and taught a graduate seminar, The Challenge of the Citizen-Scholar, as the core course in the Center for Civic Engagement’s Graduate Engagement Opportunities Certificate Program. I teach a course in digital cultural and arts criticism and museum curation at SUNY Brockport and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, that draws upon my past work as a journalist and helps students develop their voices as critics and curators.
Internships and public projects are also a key part of my teaching. At SUNY Brockport, I have coordinated the History Department’s internship program and its Interdisciplinary Museum Studies and Public History minor. Students work at museums, historical societies, libraries, archives, municipal offices, and private companies in the Rochester area. I also oversee student research internships in my own public history work at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project and students complete internships in digital scholarly editing through work with scholars on book roundtables that I edit for the Society of US Intellectual History Blog and a new online journal of US cultural and intellectual history that I edit, The Carryall.
Overall, my approach to teaching encourages students to grapple with the meaning of history as both a specialized area of scholarly inquiry and a foundation from which to address pressing issues in contemporary life. Whether in methodological, historiographical, or topical courses, I help students bring together primary materials, absorb existing scholarly debates, raise relevant questions, map out explanatory problems and quandaries, work with digital tools, connect the classroom to public life, and improve their skills of analysis and communication. I work to foster an inclusive atmosphere in which students can discover and relish history as a deeply relevant field of intellectual inquiry. Students blend their theoretical learning with hands-on, project-based skills acquisition. At its best, my teaching enables students to improve their capacities for research, writing, and communication; they can pursue career development and civic engagement through intellectual work that both pushes out into the wider world and brings an awareness of public life more robustly into the classroom; they practice the difficult skill of expressing evidence-based arguments cogently and precisely; they acquire the ability to debate and deliberate, to argue fiercely themselves and to listen generously to others; they sharpen their sense of critical awareness, historical consciousness, and how to try to handle the complexity of the world with dexterity, grace, and sophistication.
Articles About Teaching
- Stevie Rudak, “Uncovering the Life of Fannie Barrier Williams:Students from five different academic departments collaborate to research Brockport’s first African American graduate,” SUNY Brockport University News, 30 April 2024
- Gaen Murphree, “Students Examine Folk Music History Through a Digital Lens,” Middlebury College News, 6 June 2019