blog posts

The death of the 100-year old former president Jimmy Carter on December 29, 2024, has occasioned much reflection on his remarkable life, career, and decades of public service. In that spirit, I’d like to share a happy memory of a…

(originally posted at Juvenile Instructor 5/18/2013) This post is part of my occasional postings that try to make academia’s processes more transparent, especially to benefit prospective & junior faculty. So this public service announcement brought to you by the merrie…

Usually pre-semester dreams are full of dread and stress, but this morning I woke up feeling like I might actually have gotten something good from my brain’s nocturnal wanderings. At the risk of subjecting myself to armchair psychotherapy by revealing…

I have just begun a semester-long sabbatical (huzzah!) and so I suddenly have a great deal more discretionary time, including, let’s hope, for blogging now and then. As a breather from my hitting the books, I had the very cheerful…

[Cross-posted to Teaching United States History] In the spirit of continuing my week of post-conference active learning to stave off end-of-term slacking (theirs AND mine)… here’s another one that worked especially well this past week. I should explain – many of my…

[Cross-posted to Teaching United States History] Last weekend I attended a conference, which had two consequences: returning to campus invigorated with a renewed willingness to experiment BUT having had very little prep time before Monday morning’s classes. So I turned to something I…

This weekend I was part of a panel for the OAH in Atlanta with the zippy title “The Future of Teaching History: Using Technology to Make Teaching More Fun and Effective.” Fellow panelists David Trowbridge (Marshall University), Russell Jones (Eastern…

I had the chance to be part of a lively panel at the American Historical Association in Washington DC on January 4th, 2014, on the subject of doing digital history with undergraduates. Since it was a roundtable, the presentations from…

At the AHA 2014 meeting this week, I was part of a panel on doing digital history with undergraduates (more on that later) and read the statement I stick into the methods and capstone syllabi to help explain why I…

A broken iPhone took my graduating HS son and me to Harvard Square today, one of my favorite places on earth. And darn, we had a whole hour and a half to wait, what will we do? After lunch at…