US History Archives - Page 12 of 24

Digital Teaching: Behind the Scenes in the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio

The Liberal Arts Development Studio has served as the production force behind the development of live-streaming and other online courses at The University of Texas at Austin since 2012. The Development Studio is an integrated team of professional and student staff assembled to work with faculty to create rich and effective online courses. Software development professionals create tools to support student/professor interaction online. Audio, video and graphic design experts recruit top-notch UT student staff to create high-quality multi-media experiences for students. Project management professionals work with faculty and technical staff to coordinate the production and delivery of multiple courses each semester, including the summer terms.

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Credits:

Interviews conducted by Teaching Assistant Shery Chanis.

Musical intro prepared and performed by Natalie Suri and Zachary Suri.

American Zionism and Soviet Jews

By Michael Dorman

During the early 1960s American Jews began realizing the severity of the anti-Semitic policies under which the 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union were living. This sparked an organized effort across American Jewish communities to raise awareness about the human rights violations being faced by Soviet Jews. Throughout the decade the White House frequently received letters from Jewish organizations and leaders requesting that the President use his influence to persuade the Soviets to rethink their anti-Semitic policies. Jewish organizations also wrote directly to the Soviet government pleading for it to ease its discriminatory policies targeted at Jewish culture and religious practices. Letters sent to the Kremlin were often asking the Soviet government to merely follow its own laws, citing cultural freedom as a right that was granted to all Soviet citizens in the 1917 Declaration of Rights. Another common request sent to the Soviet government was that Soviet Jews, who had been separated from family members as a result of the Holocaust, be allowed to reunite. Many organizations, especially those with an underlying Zionist agenda, used such arguments with the Soviets (and the White House) in hopes that it would provide a convincing pretense for a mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In response to Zionist efforts to use the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to increase the population of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists leaders began writing to the White House expressing their concerns. During his time in office, President Johnson, a strong and vocal supporter of Jewish causes, received numerous letters from anti-Zionist rabbis and Jewish organizations asking him to take their views and solutions into consideration. These letters were primarily aimed at explaining to the Johnson administration that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, thus supporting a Zionist approach in the Soviet Union should not be thought of as supporting a Jewish approach. These letters often point out that the vast majority of the American Jewish community at that time was either not supportive of the Zionist movement or outright anti-Zionist.

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Via Wikipedia.

One letter in particular, sent to President Johnson by The American Council For Judaism, an organization of Anti-Zionist, reform rabbis, was quite explicit in expressing opposition to Zionism. In this letter the Council attempts to draw the White House’s attention to the fact that Zionism is not the humanitarian rescuing of the Jews, nor should it be viewed as a movement that is particularly inline with the tenets of Judaism as a religion. The letter explains to the president that, from the Council’s perspective, the aim of Zionism is not to create a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, emphasizing ethnicity over religion.

The letter goes on to point out that Zionists have worked hard to make it so that criticism of Israel (especially by non-Jews) has become synonymous with criticism of Jews as a whole, and sometimes unjustly labeled anti-Semitism. According to the Council this is an intentional way to not only deflect criticisms of Zionist ideologies, but also to make criticism of the State of Israel and its legitimacy completely off limits. As a result of this, many American Jews and non-Jews shied away from speaking out against the Johnson administrations’ whole hearted support of Zionism and the solutions it offered in efforts to ease the plight of Soviet Jews.

As the decade progressed, Jewish special interest groups would continue to work with the White House in the battle to end the state imposed hardships on Soviet Jewry. Ultimately the Israeli voice would prevail, and during the 1970’s a noticeable trickle of Soviets emigrants to Israel would begin. This is perhaps to be expected, as every Prime Minister Israel has ever had was either born in the Russian Empire or born to parents born in the Russian Empire, thus the connection to the region’s Jewish population runs deep among Israel’s elites. Over the next several decades more than a million Jews would leave the USSR (and the post-Soviet territories) to settle in Israel.

The documents cited in the essay are held in the LBJ Library and Museum, “White House Central File; RM (Religious Matters) Box #7. They include a letter from the American Council For Judaism to Jack Valentini on December 18,1963, a letter from the American Council For Judaism to President Johnson on January 25, 1967, a letter from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to Bill Moyers on December 8, 1966, a letter from Richard Korn (president of the American Council For Judaism) to President Johnson on June 16,1966, and a letter from the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and Rabbi S. A. Berkowits to President Johnson on September 23,1966.

On the Performance Front: Internationalism and US Theatre

By Charlotte Canning

Grinnell College professor Hallie Flanagan wanted to challenge and transform herself as a theatre artist. “I can’t tell you how much I feel that I need this European training if I am to do anything distinctive . . . . I want first hand knowledge of the theaters of the world . . . . In short, the year of foreign study is indispensable if I am to do work which is of power and value,” she wrote in her December 1925 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation application. Flanagan was one of many artists, not just in theater, who were heading to Europe in the 1920s to learn about innovative and sophisticated artistic practices.

Her preparation to study abroad was impeccable. She was part of the first generation of theatre artists in the US to receive specific university education in theatre practice. At Harvard University she studied with George Pierce Baker, who established theater as a serious course of study in higher education. A positive recommendation from him was the ultimate seal of approval. She was fortunate in her timing as well. Less than a generation earlier she would have had nowhere to turn to find an organization interested in funding her work.

The rise of the philanthropic foundation in the US is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon and one that has great bearing on the history of US theatre. The number of foundations in the US had risen from only three in 1902 to 40,000 by the end of the twentieth century. Until President Lyndon Baines Johnson approved two national endowments in 1965—for the humanities and for the arts—the American government had few resources officially dedicated to the arts or humanities. Long before President Dwight Eisenhower implemented a formal program of cultural diplomacy, private foundations had been funding US artists and scholars to study and work abroad.

There is another element of Hallie Flanagan’s story that is just as crucial as the narratives about the development of public policy and the arts, the growth of US theatre, the relationship between theatre and higher education, or twentieth century geopolitics. That element is Flanagan’s racial identity as a white woman. US theatre struggled with questions of race just as painfully as did education, government, and private enterprise. The histories of all these institutions for many years erased the contributions that people of color made to their development. White theatre leaders, who occupied most of the positions of power in US theatre, commercial and otherwise, were constantly forced to confront race as it was configured as a public issue in the moment, as well as their own prejudices, in their daily work. How they did so, as well as how their colleagues of color deployed theatre for their own means, shaped US theatre in the twentieth century. Evidence of the struggle around race, and the results of the struggle, can be seen in the ways US theatre leadership both artistic and administrative, was predominately white, except in the very few theaters run by and for people of color. Those people of color in mainstream theaters were most likely to have experiences like Rose McClendon‘s. She was a highly respected actress in the interwar years who headed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in New York. McClendon had to have a white co-director because the FTP worried that an African American woman could not be an effective leader within the deeply segregated and discriminatory federal government.

Hallie Flanagan’s story is just one of many in the history of the remaking US theatre in the twentieth century. She was part of a large community of people, some of whom were not theatre practitioners but critics, administrators, editors, professors, or writers who assumed leadership roles in US theatre. They were neither isolationists nor exceptionalists, they believed that the US theatre should be part of the larger world, as an equal player that learns as much as it teaches. Through the interwar years and during the Cold War, this community did not lose sight of its internationalist goals or investments. Instead they worked with their counterparts around the world to ensure that theatre people of all kinds could share their work globally and that audiences could see work from other parts of the world. Their internationalism was utopian in the best sense: they saw theatre as a productive way to make the world a better place for all.

Those in the arts who pioneered internationalism did so out of frustration over the limitations of nationalism, specifically the ways it prevented people with mutual interests from working together across borders to realize common goals. Internationalists in the arts imagined a community where the bonds were as profound, defining, and affective as those of citizenship. It relied, however, on forces that sometimes resisted, sometimes affirmed, but always negotiated geopolitical identities and histories, even those that undermined their cause. Theatre people fervently believed that theatre, more than any other art form, connected people to one another and should be central to the development and expression of internationalism and the better world it envisioned.

Three crucial institutions were integral to theatre’s reinvention in the US and elsewhere during the twentieth century. They are largely without precedent; in the nineteenth century such institutions would have been unthinkable as theatre was not considered a serious endeavor deserving of serious study or geopolitical attention. The journal Theatre Arts, the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), and the International Theatre Institute (ITI), a NGO of UNESCO, constituted an effort to transform US theatre into a legitimate, national cultural form. They appealed to those in theatre because they supported theatre’s development and connections among theatre artists. They demonstrated to those outside theatre that the art form was a legitimate art—not mere entertainment—one with national and global reach and impact.

The Marriage Proposal, 1927 (Realistic) Hallie Flanagan Production © Vassar College / Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries

The Marriage Proposal, (1927),Hallie Flanagan Production
© Vassar College / Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries

The argument for theatre’s importance was not achieved solely through offstage efforts. Productions in performance too made the argument that theatre was central to education, cultural diplomacy, and the United States’ global reputation. Three particular productions exemplify how theatre was used to these ends. In 1927 Hallie Flanagan directed Anton Chekhov’s “A Marriage Proposal” performed by Vassar College undergraduates. Flanagan employed what she had learned during her Guggenheim year, particularly in Soviet Russia, to create theatre that helped her students understand themselves as part of a global artistic reinvention. The students were immersed in the ideas and methods of Russian Soviet directors Vsevelod Meyerhold, Nikolai Evreinov, and Konstantin Stanislavsky and in the process were able to envision a different way of looking at the world.

A 1949 US production of Hamlet was a fledgling effort at cultural diplomacy. It was the first show to tour abroad with official support from the US government. In addition, the production itself was the work of the first state-supported theatre in the US, the Barter Theatre. Hamlet performed at the Elsinore festival in Denmark and then traveled to military bases in occupied Germany. Its true audience, however, was not the European spectators who mostly flocked to the show out of curiosity, but US citizens at home who need to be convinced about the powerful potential of international artistic exchange.

The team behind Hamlet went on to produce the 1952-56 world tour of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The revival performed in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and even Russia, the first US production to do so. Everywhere the company went it was hailed as a triumph. The artists involved were invested in demonstrating that the arts’ were worthy of ongoing public support, and that they had something essential and unique to add to public discourse. The US government leveraged the production for their own purposes. The government investment in cultural diplomacy was two-fold. First it was an attempt to communicate (as with Hamlet) that the US had vibrant and sophisticated culture that could be positively compared with any in the world. If the Soviets were going to use ballet and symphonic orchestras to prove their complexity and worldliness, the US would counter with jazz, dance, and theatre.

The second was race. During the Cold War the US argued that the nation stood for freedom, and that democracy guaranteed equal rights and opportunities for all. But that presented the US with an extraordinary challenge. White supremacy and democracy had historically been coeval, and US national identity had been produced by this relationship. Now the US wanted to argue for democracy as a resistance to intolerance, particularly racism and colonialism. To do so would require evidence that racism was not an integral part of the nation, and that the experiences of people of color were far better than they were usually depicted. Cultural diplomacy provided a way to make that argument without seeming to—every musician, performer, and speaker was positioned as a refutation of the charge that the US was a racist apartheid state. None of these three productions documents the new and influential plays being written in the US, or, with a few exceptions, the theatre artists whose names would become ubiquitous in US theatre history. Instead these productions moved theatre’s cause along, and supported the argument that theatre was necessary and essential.

Theatre internationalists around the world believed that live performance could inspire and ensure a better, a more peaceful, world. They took each other’s work seriously and created new work for their own audiences based on what they had learned from each other even when they were not in agreement about what constituted an improved world. They built a series of interdependent institutions to further theatre’s influence, to give it greater visibility and prominence, and, most importantly, to ensure its survival. Theatre could be imported and exported and exchanged so it could provide a point of contact among nations. Internationalism, as it was embraced by utopian theatre practitioners in the twentieth century, ceaselessly negotiated the demands of the state with those of the people whose stories needed to be told to each other.

For more great books on modern theater, look here.

My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem (2015)

By Megan Seaholm

Gloria Steinem’s eighth book is part feminist memoir, part autobiography of personal growth and change, part invocation to the adventure of living in the present, and part story book. Her style is relaxed and conversational but never random or sloppy. She presents four purposes of the book in the Introduction, but I found two recurring themes: the joy of serendipitous discovery while traveling to new places and the value of listening, the power of groups talking and listening, that she learned from the talking circles while in India.

The life on-the-road theme begins as she recalls that until she was ten years old her family spent most of each year travelling around the country as her father bought and sold antiques. Though she longed for a “real home” when she was a child, she is grateful for her father’s “faith in a friendly universe” and credits him with her tolerance for a life of relative insecurity. She writes with sadness about her lonely mother who worked as a journalist before she married. This migrant life ended when her parents divorced and she lived in Toledo with her clinically depressed mother. She went to Smith College on a scholarship—Government major, Phi Beta Kappa—and, then, spent two years in India on a fellowship. She studied at the University of Delhi and spent several months with a Gandhi-inspired group who walked from village to village after terrifying caste riots in east India. The walking group invited villagers to meet with them, and with each other, to share their grievances and to provide reassurance after the riots. She credits this experience with teaching her the value of listening and the amazing things that happen when people share with each other in groups.

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1970. Photograph by Dan Wynn. — Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1972. Photograph by Dan Wynn.

She returned to the U.S. to work as a free-lance journalist and an avid participant in political campaigns, the first being the 1952 Adlai Stevenson campaign for president. She became aware of the women’s rights-women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. In 1971, after New York Magazine published her article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” she began to receive invitations to speak about feminism. Terrified of public speaking, she enlisted the help of her friend Dorothy Pitman. As a bi-racial team, they spoke at community centers, in union halls, and school gyms. As Steinem gained skill and confidence, this duo was soon traveling to college campuses, to meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization, to speak with United Farm Workers chapters, lesbian groups, and antiwar activists. Steinem saw her job as helping the audiences become “one big talking circle” — there was always discussion after she and Pitman made their presentations. Later, she would work and travel with the inimitable Florynce (Flo) Kennedy.

Most of the stories that Steinem shares are stories from the road as she became “a public speaker and a gatherer of groups” and one of the best-known feminists in the U.S. She refers to these campus speaking engagements as the “largest slice of my traveling pie.” One of her best stories is about the often-tense 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. This account features Bella Abzug, co-founder of Women Strike for Peace in 1961, three-term Congresswoman from New York, and tireless activist. Abzug, Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink asked Steinem to help them organize the National Women’s Political Caucus, which they did in 1971 with a diverse group of notable women. There are other stories from the feminist trenches, but this book is only part feminist memoir. There is a curious and very fun chapter titled “Surrealism in Everyday Life,” and there is a chapter about her time in “Indian Country” by which she means her relationships with Native Americans, including Wilma Mankiller, deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Speaking of “Indian Country,” I was troubled when she confidently asserted the popular, but erroneous, notion that that the U.S. Constitution was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy.

Steinem shares these stories in the most-unassuming way as if you were a long-time friends visiting over a cup of coffee after having not seen each other for a while. She talks (writes) about covering Eugene McCarthy after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 and about the Clinton-Obama contest in 2008. My favorite chapter, “Why I Don’t Drive,” is an account of conversations she has had with taxi drivers. Oh, the stories!

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 2014.

But, of the lessons that she has learned and that she shares, my favorite is this: “One of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”

Digital Teaching: From the Other Side of the Screen: A Student’s View

By Abigail Griffin

When most college students think of online courses, they often imagine basic, boring classes that are convenient and easy A’s. Online classes often require little effort and minimal time commitment, while still satisfying a graduation requirement. So, students drudge aimlessly through the mandatory course, get their completion grades, and move on with their lives, without actually gaining anything from the experience. Dr. Suri’s online course, however, is so much more than a mark off of an undergraduate’s to-do list. Professor Suri revolutionizes this old, bland style of online coursework and provides a unique and active learning experience to students anywhere—from the comfort of their own beds to a quaint coffee shop down the street to the studio classroom in Mezes.

Going into the course, I was skeptical. Not because I didn’t have full faith in Professor Suri’s ability to make the course the best it could be, but because I was worried that even the best online class could not beat traditional, classroom-style learning. I had been unimpressed by the reputation of online classes in the past, and I never previously had the desire to take one. I always preferred a classroom setting because it just seemed more “right.” But boy, was I wrong.

Not only is Professor Suri an incredibly energetic and knowledgeable professor, but he makes his lectures engaging, informative, and entertaining. The online setting does not take away from the education at all, in fact, I think it enhances the learning environment. Students are more willing to participate in class through applications like “Class Chat” and “Ask the Professor,” and the TA’s and Prof. Suri actively respond to their comments, which would be nearly impossible in a huge lecture hall. When students take an active role in their learning like this, they benefit significantly more from the lecture. I know from experience that there is practically no class participation in a 300-500 person lecture hall, but having the same class size online encourages significantly more student involvement.

For example, Dr. Suri uses images in his lecture every class period, and the pictures pop up on our video screens so we can easily see them. When he asks us to comment on the images, students begin contributing to the discussion in a matter of seconds. In a normal classroom setting with the same number of students, almost no one responds to the professor’s questions, and never that quickly and eagerly. So the online forum actually makes the lecture easier for the students, the professor, and his assistants. It is also wonderful because the slides and images that come up on our screen are clear and easy to understand and interpret, whereas, it would be more difficult for some of the students to evaluate the images in a lecture hall.

Overall, I am incredibly impressed by what Dr. Suri has done with his online course. Obviously, it isn’t perfect. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work correctly or people get off track in the class chat. But as a whole, the class is a lot of fun. I think that the online and in-person office hour options are great, the class pings ensure that students are paying attention (and are super easy participation points), and the lectures are always interesting.

Plus, I have never been a morning person, so it’s great to be able to wake up 5 minutes before class and still make it on time.

Abigail Griffin is a second-year Plan II Honors and Government double-major with a minor in Arabic. She graduated high school in St. Louis and her family currently resides in Elizabethtown, KY. She is an Arabic Flagship and Forty Acres scholar at UT , an Agency Co-Director within Student Government, and a Camp Texas counselor to incoming freshman. Abigail also volunteers as a KIPP tutor and as an AISD tutor to Arabic-speaking students. Additionally, she is passionate about sports and has played on the Women’s Club Soccer team In the future, she intends to pursue a career in foreign service and counterterrorism.

Digital Teaching: Blending the Old with the New: In-Person Studio Attendance

Every year thousands of students take introductory courses in U.S. History at UT Austin. This spring Prof Jeremi Suri is experimenting with an online version of the U.S. History since 1865 survey course. He and his teaching assistants, Cali Slair, Carl Forsberg, Shery Chanis, and Emily Whalen will blog about the experience of digital teaching for readers of Not Even Past.

By Cali Slair

Students typically watch our online course from home, a local café, or at various locations on campus. In order to make the course more interpersonal, each student is also assigned two dates when he or she is required to attend class in the video production studio in Mezes Hall, where we film the live lectures.

Students attending a lecture. Courtesy of the Author.

Studio attendance is similar to taking a course in a classroom or lecture hall, but it is also quite different. Similar to a traditional lecture course, the students listen to a live lecture and take notes surrounded by their classmates. They also arrive to the studio approximately thirty minutes before the course begins which gives them time to ask questions and interact with their classmates, teaching assistants, and Professor Suri before class starts. A great feature of the in-studio attendance dates is that the twenty to twenty-three students who are assigned to each date are all in the same TA group. This allows the students to meet and interact with peers whose weekly response essays they have access to read online. The TA in charge of going over the studio rules and taking attendance for that day is also the TA for the students who are assigned to attend in person. This allows the studio TA to put faces with the names of his or her students, and vice-versa. While some students feel more comfortable taking the course through the online setting, there are also many students who feel more comfortable in the studio and prefer meeting and interacting with their TA and classmates in person. We have even had a few students request to attend more than the two required in-person studio attendance dates.

A main difference between our online course and courses held in a classroom or lecture hall is that having access to a computer is integral to being successful in this course. Despite being in the studio, the students cannot raise their hands and ask questions like in a typical lecture hall. The students still use their laptops to communicate through the Chat and Ask the Professor functions. The Ask the Professor button still functions as the equivalent to raising a hand during lecture. The Pings are another reason the students still need laptops for their in-person studio attendance dates. Students watch the lecture live, and at the same time keep the lecture video open on their laptops to watch for and respond to Pings. This allows the students to earn their attendance grades by demonstrating that not only did they show up to the studio, but they have also been actively listening to the lecture.

Cali Slair in the studio. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

We have found the students’ ability to multitask during lecture especially impressive. This is a generational phenomenon that our online course taps into and utilizes for rigorous learning purposes. While the in-person studio attendance dates are based on some traditional classroom learning styles, the studio still requires students to use technology in their learning. The technology encourages active participation during attendance, encouraging students to listen closely to the lecture and integrate what they hear with their reading.

Early in the course some students found the in-studio attendance dates to be a little challenging. Some students had difficulty finding the studio and others found the studio itself to be somewhat distracting. At this point in the course, the number of students who have difficulty finding the studio has declined significantly. For the students who find the studio itself distracting, one of the great things about this course is they can watch the recorded lecture online. As a TA, I value the opportunity to meet all of the students in my group in person. I hope these meetings help students feel more comfortable asking their TAs and Professor Suri questions and attending office hours online or in person. The in-studio experience is an innovative component of our course that helps us achieve our goal of making the course as participatory, engaging, and stimulating for students as possible. Come visit sometime!

History TAs on Learning to Teach

Even the most gifted teachers had to learn how to teach history and most of us needed a lot of help getting started. This month Not Even Past asked graduate students to reflect on their first teaching experiences as Teaching Assistants in History classes. They responded with insight, humor, and even a little hard won wisdom. Reflections here by Chloe Ireton, Cacee Hoyer, Jack Loveridge, Cameron McCoy, and Elizabeth O’Brien.

Chloe Ireton

As a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, I have had valuable opportunities to learn how to teach history. Over the last three semesters I have worked as a Teaching Assistant in a lecture course on United States History since 1865. The 300+ students in the course listen to two hours of lecture a week and then participate in discussion sections of thirty-five students for one hour a week, taught by one of four TAs or Dr. Megan Seaholm who directs the course. The sections aim to create small learning environments for students to engage in sustained discussion and focus on important academic skills such as critical thinking, reading, writing, and discussion skills. Each seminar leader also creates a closed online social media group where students complete tasks, engage in graded online discussions about specific topics, and communicate with other students and the Teaching Assistant about the course.

This US History course is the first large lecture courses in the History Department to carry an “Ethics and Leadership Flag.” All UT undergraduates are required to take at least one Ethics Flag course, which is intended to “expose students to ethical issues and to the process of applying ethical reasoning in real-life situations.” The Ethics Flag component of the course taught students to explore the ethical reasoning of historical actors and to interrogate contrasting moral values in different historical time periods. We focused on four key ethical themes: poverty in the late nineteenth century, eugenics and state-sanctioned forced sterilizations in the early twentieth century, the Targeting of Civilians during the Second World War and specifically the use of atomic bombing, and lastly Civil Disobedience in the second half of the twentieth century. In the seminars, students reflected on the ethical reasoning of historical actors through primary source analysis. What did each person see as the key ethical issue at stake? Who did they see as the key moral actor(s) responsible for solving this issue? Did they see any alternatives? Did they see a certain action as ethically required or permissible and why?

At the end of the course, feedback from many students referred to these discussions as hugely important in the development of their critical thinking skills and their understanding of others and of history in general. The majority of the students found it enlightening to engage in discussions with peers who approached the topics differently from themselves. As the discussion leader, I found that the ethical framework of these seminars encouraged a high level of student engagement and provided a space for students to learn important skills in primary source reading, critical thinking, argumentation, and discussion, but most importantly in developing a sense of historical differences. I was fortunate to collaborate in the process of planning and integrating of the Ethics and Leadership Flag into the course. The TAs, Dr. Megan Seaholm (History), Dr. Eric Busch (Sanger Learning Center), and Dr. Jess Miner (Center for the Core Curriculum) met every fortnight during three academic semesters to plan seminars and debate the most appropriate forms of assessment. In our fortnightly meetings, we took turns presenting seminar lesson plans, each of which we critiqued until deciding on the most appropriate format. This experience provided a crucial venue for professional development in discussing best teaching practices with experienced teachers.

In organizing discussion seminars for this course, I adhered to a pedagogical philosophy called “task-based learning.” It is broadly defined as student centered and often student led learning through students’ active engagement in relevant tasks, commonly in collaboration with their peers. Adherents of this pedagogy believe that when learners are actively engaged in a task they become invested in the outcome of their own learning and the skills that they acquire along the way. In task-based learning approaches, the educator acts as a guiding toolbox to aide students’ learning rather than as a vessel that carries knowledge and imparts it in a teacher centered learning environment. For one weekly seminar, I planned a task-based lesson on National Security and free speech in the United States during World War I, which aimed to elaborate on the theme of the lecture that week, develop students’ primary source reading and critical thinking skills, and abilities to analyze historical sources and themes. Students read The Espionage Act of 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 speech about the need to enter WWI in order to make a world “safe for democracy.” I provided guiding questions and divided students into small discussion groups, which identified a wide array of perspectives on what these sources signified and whether they could and should be read together. In these discussions, students engaged actively in the type of historical thinking skills that we wanted them to acquire. For example, since the class represented a variety of opinions about the significance of the readings when read together, students became aware of the importance of historiographical debate and the role of historians’ perceptions in their own interpretations. In the second half of the class, students read two court cases where individuals who publically spoke out against the draft during WWI were found guilty of charges under the Espionage Act. For example, students read excerpts from Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), a United States Supreme Court decision, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that those distributing leaflets that urged resistance to the draft could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft (a criminal offense) because they posed a “clear and present danger.” This activity helped to contextualize the meaning and effect of the Espionage Act and prompted students to revisit the original question of whether we should read President Woodrow Wilson’s speech on the need to spread democracy across the world alongside the Espionage Act. For the post-seminar online discussion task, students reflected on the questions and documents that they found most interesting. They also read a news article about the Obama Administration’s use of the Espionage Act in order to engage in a discussion on the differences between the use and purpose of the Espionage Act in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This semester I am embarking on a new challenge as I am working as a Supplemental Instructor for a large US History Survey course. This means that I am offering two hourly discussion sections every week for students in this course. These seminars are designed to help students with course material and also to develop the skills that they need to become successful and autonomous learners. We will be covering diverse topics such as reading and note-taking skills, writing skills, preparation for specific assignments, discussion seminars, debating skills, historical thinking skills, and reading and analyzing primary sources, to name just a few. All of these sessions aim to support students’ progress in the class. The challenging aspect of these seminars is that they are voluntary. As the discussion leader, I have to be prepared for attendance to vary between a handful of students and hundreds. The Supplemental Instruction program (directed by the Sanger Learning Center) also provides continuing professional and pedagogical support through biweekly meetings with a supervisor and Supplemental Instructors from other departments within the College of Liberal Arts. These meetings aim to provide a forum to discuss teaching methods and our classroom experiences over the course of the semester.

Completing my PhD at the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin has provided an unrivalled venue for developing as a historian. Excellent support of my intellectual trajectory and research project (which I have not discussed in this post), combined with the opportunity to teach on exciting and innovative History courses make this a wonderful department in which to train as a historian.

***

Cameron D. McCoy

I would like to start this reflection with a quote from a friend. When asked to describe his undergraduate experience at the United States Naval Academy, he replied, “It was everything I thought it would be and a thousands things I never imagined.” As a UT History Teaching Assistant for the course in the Black Power Movement, my friend’s words found a suitable place to rest.

I am sure TAs do not even cross the mental radar of students until after the first exam. We morph into something a little more than a disembodied e-mail solicitor by the midterm, and then two weeks before the final the TA becomes the end-all-be-all. Prior to this—according to most students—the teaching assistant is the class scribe, sends pestering e-mails, listens and deals with complaints, and is supposed to know the syllabus verbatim at a moment’s notice. Of course this all falls under “… and a thousand things I never imagined.” Anything unfavorable is the Teaching Assistant’s fault and anything favorable is the professor’s doing. I can always count on the behavior of the students to hit the same currents throughout each semester, which brings the comfort of knowing it is “everything I thought it would be” and the familiar chaos of “a thousand things I never imagined.”

Surprisingly, I discovered that I never had to sell history to the students. Neither was I under fire in attempting to defend the discipline and virtues of history. The professor designed the course in such a way that the material was palatable and fairly easy to consume.

I did find when grading exams that the students’ interpretation of the material varied. Each student personalized the material, from ultra-conservative to highly polemic, from rigid to liberal, and from nonchalant to finely precise. I found this fascinating and the variety assisted me in better understanding how students communicated. I also enjoyed reading essays that expressed the student’s growth from learning the course material. Several students’ views drastically changed throughout the semester, specifically concerning how the black power movement connected directly to how universities function and how many social issues of 2014 are direct descendants of the 1960s.

***

Jack Loveridge

Teaching History at a major public university in the United States means stretching outside of your intellectual comfort zone on a regular basis. Teaching Assistants (TAs) are often assigned to courses somewhat beyond their principal fields of study. Many unwitting Latin Americanists, for instance, might find themselves cast before a crowd of inquisitive undergraduates, struggling to cough up the basics of the Missouri Compromise. A historian of Russia might be cornered in a hallway and asked where everyone was running during the Runaway Scrape or what was so abominable about the Tariff of Abominations. These are our occupational hazards.

As a student of British imperial rule in South Asia in the twentieth century, I felt a nervous pang when I found myself TA-ing for Dr. James Vaughn’s course, entitled History of Britain: The Restoration to 1783. Though a bit closer to home for me than the assignments drawn by many of my colleagues, the long, gouty march of Stuarts and Hanoverians, punctuated by a decade of Cromwellian fun, is hardly my strong suit. Not only did the scope of the course predate my period of expertise, part of it also predated Britain itself. (England and Scotland did not tie the knot until the Act of Union in 1707. Incidentally, whether their marriage will endure the test of time shall be seen with a Scottish independence referendum this September.) Beyond that bit of Jeopardy trivia, what on earth did I know about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

My initial hesitation notwithstanding, I plunged forth into my first teaching assignment. I read the requisite materials and then some, devoured half a dozen BBC documentaries, and memorized the English monarchs since William the Conqueror for an added parlor trick. As it turned out, this period of English history helped to explain a great deal about the evolving British Empire and, more surprisingly, the contemporary global economy. Most of all, engaging with an unfamiliar period of history proved humbling, but it also gave me an opportunity to approach the readings and lectures as a student and not a teacher. This, in turn, ultimately helped me to address students’ questions with a bit more empathy.

On occasion, one of my many bright students would ask a question for which I simply had no good answer. At first, these instances embarrassed me. How could I, the respected TA, wearer of fishbone-patterned blazers, and sipper of tiny coffees, ever fail to answer a student’s question? Gradually, though, I realized that even when I didn’t have the knowledge my students sought, I typically knew how to find it. Moreover, I could teach students how to find and interpret that knowledge themselves.

The point for teachers of History of all stripes, I think, is to find comfort in the discomfort of branching out into the unknown. All of us are learning right along with our students and that’s how it should be. After all, the objective of any school or university is to build an open society that asks questions, fosters lifelong learning, and enables the sharing of knowledge. That’s what we do here and doing it well is as much about not knowing everything as it is about knowing anything at all. To be effective teachers, we must feel free to honestly say, “I don’t know,” and follow it up with a spirited, “But let’s find out.”

***

Elizabeth O’Brien

This semester I am TAing for a course designed to introduce students to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America. About half of the students are freshmen and most have very little knowledge of Latin American history. During discussion, some students requested information regarding the colonial “caste” system, which was mentioned in the readings but not explained. After class I decided to look online for some further reading for them.

It was very difficult to identify an accurate and academically rigorous article that was accessible for lower-division undergraduates. First, I looked at several websites, but I could not use them due to blatant historical inaccuracies. Then I skimmed a few full-length scholarly articles, but they were far too dense and lengthy for the students.

I realized that Not Even Past was a perfect source for the concise and accessible explanation that I needed. I found an article by Dr. Susan Deans-Smith, “Casta Paintings,” which clearly explained how seventeenth and eighteenth-century authorities sought to define, label, and categorize the offspring of Spaniards, Indigenous natives, and Africans. They developed an intricate “caste system,” which was represented in paintings that depicted mixed racial groups. Deans-Smith’s article was complete with images. For example, one painting showed a Spanish man, his Mestiza (Spanish and Indigenous) wife, and their “Castiza” daughter. Several students reported that they read the piece and emerged with a much better understanding of racial and social categories in the history of Latin America.

***

Cacee Hoyer

Top Five Experiences as a TA

#5: A student wanted to meet to discuss her exam. During the almost half-hour long discussion, the student contradicted every comment I had made on her paper. I coolly tried to explain why she had lost points for this or that and she consistently insisted I was wrong. Eventually, she gave up her debate tactics and just blurted out “well are you going to give me any points back or not!” I just stared at her and explained how I generally didn’t do that unless there was a blatant mistake. At which she responded, “then why are we even supposed to meet with you!” As she stomped away, I was saddened as I realized she was an honor student because she could play the game and work the system, however, she failed to learn how to love learning.

#4 A student emailed me to explain he was not able to turn in his assignment on time because he had spent the night in jail. After I explained this wasn’t a University sanctioned excuse, he eventually turned in the assignment. A few weeks later he approached me in class, introducing himself as the guy who had emailed about spending the night in jail. I thought I should point out to him that perhaps using that tagline earns him points with his friends, but that it doesn’t quite work that way with his TA.

#3 I was leading a discussion in class, which quickly ran out of control when one student who persistently claimed he liked to be “provocative,” made racially inappropriate references that set off another girl quite vocally. At one point I was afraid we were going to have an all out brawl! My head was spinning, and so was the class…right out of control. That was definitely a learning experience for me!

#2 On final exams, several students still refer to Africa as a country.

#1 A student practically tackles me when she gets her exam back. She had struggled on the first exam and had been working very hard, coming to office hours and emailing me constantly. She was so excited she almost knocked me down! But in a good way.

More to read on innovations in teaching history

Banner Credits:

Les Grande Chroniques de France (via Wikimedia Commons)

Gene Youngblood lecturing at Rochester Institute of Technology, 1982 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Digital Teaching: Talking in Class? Yes, Please!

By Emily Whalen

Some scholars wince a little when they hear the words “online class.” But what if online education wasn’t meant to supersede traditional teaching methods? What if online tools enhance the student experience? Instead of increasing the quantity of enrolled students, what if we increased the quality of the course through the use of online learning?

Emily Whalen. Courtesy of the Joan Neuberger.

Emily Whalen talking during the filming of the first online lecture on January 21, 2016. Courtesy of the Joan Neuberger.

The first week in our new, online US History survey course was a whirlwind, but the teaching team and the studio team have both entered with open minds. We all feel a little bit like we’re a part of a thrilling new experiment and that air of excitement and flexibility has carried over into our interactions with the students. The first few classes were not without slight hiccups—technical difficulties for one or two students as they learn the new engagement tools—but for the most part, we’ve had positive results.

The biggest feature for many students to adjust to, and for the teaching team to navigate, is the Class Chat. During lecture, students have a chat room open in another window, where they can talk to their classmates, ask TAs questions, and respond to prompts that Prof. Suri asks them throughout the lecture. Few students in lecture halls tapping away at laptop keyboards are only taking diligent lecture notes – many are answering emails, checking social networks, and messaging each other, much to the lecturer’s chagrin. With Class Chat, we are trying to ensure that multitasking students engage in multiple tasks without diverting their attention away from the course. In the last class, Prof. Suri asked students to share ways in which war had affected their lives, at the start of a section about how the Civil War shaped the social and cultural landscape of the American South. Students chimed in with their responses and the TA moderating the chat was able to share some of their answers on screen – something the students really enjoy! It was also eye-opening for us to see the amazing diversity of our UT student body unfold in real time. For the students to get a sense of the rich variety of their peers’ backgrounds was an additional benefit –and one that’s not easily achievable in a lecture hall.

Students share some of the ways that war has affected their lives. Courtesy of the author.

Even better, Class Chat seems to be cultivating a congenial, supportive atmosphere among the students. We see students answering each others’ questions, reinforcing their own learning, and creating a unique collaborative environment during lectures. Students can immediately ask their peers if they’ve missed an important point in lecture or where to find next weeks’ readings. This way, students can improve their note-taking and immediately reinforce the salient points in Prof. Suri’s lecture. Last class we had a student create a Facebook group for the course to facilitate group study throughout the semester.

Students ask each other questions during the lecture. Courtesy of the author.

Of course, some questions are worth stopping the lecture for – and we’ve had students pose some really insightful questions already in our first two lectures. This is where the “Ask the Professor” feature comes in handy. In our first class, Prof. Suri discussed the effect slavery had on the Southern economy in the early years of the American Republic. Using the “Ask the Professor” button, one student asked Prof. Suri to clarify what he meant by the difference between working for a wage and working for survival. As Prof. Suri responded to the question, he realized that the distinction between the two wasn’t as clear-cut as his lecture had suggested. The student was able to see Prof. Suri reassess and refine his phrasing to better reflect that ambiguity. It was a wonderful illustration of the ways these interactive tools create dialogue and benefit scholars as well as students.

One goal of this course was to harness the multitasking abilities of our students and demonstrate a participatory approach to knowledge to make the class both more interesting and more educational for them. Just a week in, we’re realizing that it’s a tremendous educational experience for the teaching team, too!

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

By Eyal Weinberg and Blake Scott

It’s midway through the semester and you’ve slogged through one of the infamous central Texas morning monsoons to make it to class. You’re soaked and so are the students starting to arrive. And you’re all a bit stressed from the commute and all the other work still floating in your head. You organize your lecture notes. More students start to come in. Some sit quietly. Some stare at you. Some are glued to their mobile devices. There are still about 10 minutes before class begins. We call it the awkward pre-lesson moment. You could warm up the wet early birds with some tough words of inspiration, or you could do what we tried this semester: lure the students into history with the power of music.

Today’s subject is the Great Depression and the New Deal. In the time that ticks off before class, as your clothes dry and you review your notes, Bing Crosby sings “Brother can you spare me a dime?” The song is a sad anthem of the early 1930s. It’s as if Crosby were singing not only to an earlier generation, but also to your rain-drenched grumpy students. In between lyrics, you remind the class to also review their notes.

Next is a more upbeat song by Louis Armstrong, “WPA,” released in 1940. Armstrong sings, “The WPA, WPA…. Three letters that make life OKAY, the WPA.” When the song ends, you start class, asking “so what exactly was the WPA and how did it fit into the New Deal’s efforts to relieve the stresses of the Great Depression?” Discussion has begun and, with melody replacing drudgery, you’re ready to tackle some difficult historical topics – the melancholy of depression and the changing role of the federal government. Music has set the mood.

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed
musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression. Via Library of Congress.

We are not specialists in music history, but we value what music can do in the classroom. Every Friday last Fall semester, we facilitated discussion sections with approximately 30 students each. As teaching assistants, we offered supplemental instruction for Dr. Megan Seaholm’s 300-person lecture on the history of the United States from 1865 to the present. On Fridays, in smaller groups, we discussed course material and, in particular, encouraged students to think about questions of ethics in relationship to historical events. The seminar meetings fulfilled UT’s “Ethics and Leadership Flag,” which is designed to equip students with “the tools necessary for making ethical decisions in your adult and professional life.” When discussing the period of Reconstruction, for example, we examined differing visions of “freedom.” We analyzed primary source documents written by newly freed slaves, white southerners, and northern Republicans. How did different social groups conceive of freedom, and how did their values clash and in turn, shape post-war U.S. society?

Music, we soon realized, could be an effective prompt for encouraging students to think creatively and critically about material that at times felt historically distant. Playing and then thinking about music had a broad classroom appeal. It allowed us to consider experiences from an earlier era in a very direct and affective way. Getting students to listen closely, and reflect on historical attitudes, was smoother and even enjoyable. This was certainly useful when teaching history to students from different majors who admittedly took the course only because it was a requirement. At the beginning of the semester, we heard more than enough talk about how “I’ve never been very good at history.” That only motivated us more…

To remind students that the issue of race was central to the era of Reconstruction (1865 to 1876), we paused discussion and played Pete Seeger’s version of “John Brown’s Body.” It was a chance to consider the causes and effects of the Civil War and its continuing affect on U.S. society. The song led to an anecdote: After Union Troops burned Atlanta in November 1864, they marched out of the city singing, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave… but his soul goes marching on.” It became a favorite song among General Sherman’s troops as they marched to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The song also encouraged us to explore the controversial legacy of the abolitionist John Brown. Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that “[John Brown] will make the gallows glorious like the Cross.” Thoreau also wrote a eulogy for Brown, explaining that in death: “He is more alive than ever he was.” The point of this brief genealogical thread about a man and a song was to acknowledge that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. After the war, the legacy of racism would continue to shape the debate about the meaning of freedom.

Later in the semester, to guide a discussion about the Civil Rights Movement, we played Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Hearing Simone sing, with anger and passion, “Alabama’s gotten me so upset, Tennessee’s made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam,” reminded students to seriously contemplate the violence that occurred in the U.S. South in the 1960s. The song opened a discussion about the KKK’s terrorist bombing in Birmingham, which Simone refers to, and in contrast, the early Civil Rights Movement’s commitment to nonviolent protest.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights activists singing Freedom
songs on the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. Via Jacobin magazine.

Music served as primary source material to think about the time and to feel something of the era. We asked students to imagine the power of John Brown’s song being sung by Union soldiers marching through Georgia, and later, to reflect on the violence and injustice swirling around civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery. These are powerful images to consider with an equally powerful soundtrack to hear and feel. With story and song together, students were forced to reckon with the material and its importance to U.S. history.

As we soon learned, however, not all classroom experiences have to be so tightly scripted. Music as pedagogical tool can take on a more implicit role as well. It can literally “set the mood” for the class and help foster a space for dialogue. As our experience this semester taught us, music can be a way to hear and feel history, to jump start conversation or frame a question, and most importantly, to bring people together. Even if students are not asked to analyze a song’s lyrics or the story of its production, music can still affect a student’s reception of history. Songs can also work in mysterious ways.

Woody Guthrie’s famous guitar slogan, “This machine kills
fascists.”. Via Wikipedia

If you appreciate music and recognize that songs can also serve as an important resource for teaching history, we encourage you to share your own musical selection down below in the comments. What songs would you play in a post-civil war US survey? Here is our own highly subjective “History Mixtape” to start the exchange. We hope to hear and learn from your recommendations. Keep the music playing…

Our History Mixtape:

John Brown’s Body by Peter Seeger
The Battle is Over (But the War Goes On) by Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry
This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie
Fire in the Hole by Hazel Dickens
Brother can you spare me a dime? by Bing Crosby
WPA by Louis Armstrong
Everyday by Buddy Holly
Mississippi Goddamn by Nina Simone
Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival
I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag by Country Joe McDonald

We are always keen to build our playlist so please send us your recommendations via the comments section on our facebook page.

Digital Teaching: Taking U.S. History Online

By Jeremi Suri

This semester we are experimenting with a new online version of the bread-and-butter undergraduate survey course, “US History since 1865.” This is not a MOOC. It is an effort to use digital tools and online delivery to offer a course that will increase the rigor, fun, and participation among enrolled students. The course seeks to motivate students by bringing the material to them in accessible, thought-provoking, and creative ways. It asks them to actively engage with the material offered in lectures and to participate outside the lectures through online platforms, including a live chat, an “ask the professor” forum, and online office hours. Future posts will describe how each of these innovative online functions works and how the students use them.

Behind the scenes shot of Jeremi Suri delivering a lecture for the course. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

The course incorporates more primary documents, photos, recordings, videos, cartoons, and maps than I usually use in my traditional survey course — all delivered and accessed online. I deliver the lectures in a film studio in Mezes Hall on campus, and they are live streamed to students. Students will attend some live, in-class lectures on designated days, but they will all primarily participate by watching the lectures online each Tuesday and Thursday morning, encountering history as a serious learning experience from the laptop screens in their dorm rooms. It is time to consider that learning can indeed work best today in that personal setting, rather than a musty old lecture hall.

The course is built around about 150 pages of assigned reading each week and twice weekly lectures. Each lecture includes a mix of fire-and-brimstone preaching, Socratic questioning, and light entertainment. We want the students to enjoy watching their screens. They should feel included in real-time discussions about the presented material, and they should feel free to ask questions and pursue their interests.

Assessments of student work include a test of their listening within each lecture, weekly response papers on the assigned reading, and exams. Students will get frequent feedback on their comprehension of key concepts, their interpretation of major events, and their written expression through the online platform. They will also have increased opportunities to communicate with teaching assistants and the professor — both online and in-person.

A view of the studio used to film the lectures.

The goal of this teaching experiment is to raise the quality of the history survey and re-energize it for a new generation of students. If this experiment works, the course will be better and more popular than ever. If it works, the online platform will bring history alive for our undergraduates. That is the fundamental mission for a top history department and a top research university in the twenty-first century. US History Online is a more rigorous and fun history for a new generation.

The lecture delivered online.

Take a look at the course syllabus here.

All images were taken on January 21, 2016, by Joan Neuberger.

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