In the December 2013 issue of Perspectives, AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman wrote a very interesting essay on the future of history education in America: “Disrupting the Disruptors.” I couldn’t agree more with Grossman’s premise that higher education is a public good and deserves to be treated that way. Alas, as a recent report by…
Tag: Curriculum
Getting History in Tune
Over the past year or so the American Historical Association has been working on what they call the “Tuning Project“. For those who are not members of the Association, the April 2013 edition of Perspectives included an entire forum on the project. Now the AHA has issued a new (pdf) document detailing the current state of the…
Teaching Digital History: Beyond Tech Support
I taught my first “digital humanities” course in the spring of 1998 when I was a visiting assistant professor at Grinnell College. My students created a “virtual archive” of primary sources, building a website that made it easy (in 1998 terms) to access the sources they placed in the archive. They wrestled with such things…
The History Curriculum in 2023 (Mining)
When I was a freshman in college one of the first history classes I took included a tour of the university’s main library and an introduction to its vast card catalog, the like of which none of us had ever seen. Our professor patiently explained the arcana of the Library of Congress subject heading system,…