Just returned from a weekend in Lake Placed, New York where I took part in a conference sponsored by a small grassroots organization called John Brown Lives! The conference brought together historians, teachers, students, and activists working to end modern day slave trafficking. It was an incredibly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating weekend. Many of you [...]
Teaching
I’ve met some incredible history teachers over the years through this blog. A few of them have taught me as much as I hope this blog has helped their own classroom practices – none more so than Chris Lese, who teaches history at Marquette University High School. Chris is a passionate and talented teacher. [...]
Earlier this week I introduced you to Byron Thomas, who is considering joining the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It looks like the research that will be necessary to establish his connection with a Confederate soldier will have to wait as Byron needs to write an essay on Robert E. Lee. Now being enrolled at a [...]
A new exhibition on Civil War era paintings opens today at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. “The Civil War and American Art” examines how America’s artists represented the impact of the Civil War and its aftermath. The exhibition follows the conflict from palpable unease on the eve of war, to heady optimism [...]
What follows is a guest post by Allison (Herrmann) Jordan, who is currently an administrative assistant at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Allison shares her experience as a participant in the college’s “Gettysburg Semester,” which is a semester-long immersion in Civil War studies. I remember sitting in my freshman dorm room in Worcester, [...]
Like many of you who teach history, I am always looking for new ways to convey the subject to my students. The move toward e-textbooks offers an exciting opportunity to expand the traditional textbook in a way that takes advantage of new digital technologies, including the community-building potential of social media. The possibilities are limitless, [...]
This event has been a long time in the making and I signed on to take part when I was still living in Virginia. John Brown Lives! is a small organization led by Martha Swan, which focuses on public and educational outreach around issues related to freedom and oppression in history and in our world [...]
Today in class we finish up reading a selection from historian Edmund Morgan on the evolution of slavery in Virginia. Friday’s discussion on why early in the seventeenth century many blacks enjoyed the same freedoms as other Virginians went well as did our discussion of the challenges of managing a growing and increasingly discontented population [...]
