US History Archives - Page 13 of 25

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.

You may also like:

Lomax Family Collections at the American Folklife Center
The Library of Congress, American Memory Collection
The University of Houston’s Digital history music database
University of Pittsburgh’s Voices Across Time database, divided into periodic and thematic categories

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.

The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

By Christopher Babits

In this history of popular religion and spirituality, Matthew Hedstrom argues that books and book culture were integral for the rise of liberal religion in the twentieth century. After World War I, a modernizing book business and an emerging religious liberalism expanded the spiritual horizons of many middle-class Americans. The new spiritual forms of twentieth-century liberalism incorporated psychology, mysticism, and (to a lesser extent) positive thinking in their works. Hedstrom, like sociologist Christian Smith, believes that liberal religion achieved a stunning cultural victory after World War II.

Two key developments led to the rise of liberal religion: the embrace of the marketplace and the creation of middlebrow reading culture. In the 1920s, liberal Protestants turned to the marketplace, but on their own terms. They wanted people to read right. Middlebrow reading required that one read earnestly, intensely, and with purpose. Many liberal Protestants thought that this manner of reading would improve people. Middlebrow reading norms also required individual autonomy and expertise. Religious and cultural leaders carefully shepherded readers by offering comfortable — but limited — freedom to act as guided consumers. In other words, religious leaders still hoped to shape the purchases that laymen and laywomen made and the book industry complied.

The First World War destroyed the faith Americans had in simple notions of progress. In response to this crisis, liberal Protestant leaders, executives of the American publishing industry, and other cultural figures collaborated on a series of new initiatives to promote the buying and reading of religious books. These initiatives included the Religious Book Week, the Religious Book Club, and the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association. Major publishing houses, like Harper’s and Macmillan, established religious departments for the first time.

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925. Via Library of Congress.

In the interwar years, religious reading became a national concern as the United States faced the threat of fascism. Religious groups like the Council on Books in Wartime and the Religious Book Week campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) promoted reading. Hedstrom shows the widespread appeal of the Council’s slogan, “Books as Weapons in the War of Ideas.” The Second World War, for these groups, was not only an ideological battle, it was also a spiritual struggle for the soul.

US Government Poster from 1942. Via Library of Congress.

Harry Emerson Fosdick. Via Wikipedia.

After the war, Americans continued to turn to books for spiritual guidance. And the increasing belief that the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation formed the foundation of what Hedstrom calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.” Letters to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two of the most popular post-World War II authors of liberal religion, display Americans’ newfound eagerness to read religious and spiritual works from authors of other faiths. These letters also provide keen insight into who was reading spiritual books and why and how they were reading them. Many Americans were religious, even if they were not attending church on Sundays. Readers of middlebrow religious culture were trying to grapple with religious questions about the Second World War, morality, and spirituality. Fosdick and Liebman helped them find answers.

The Rise of Liberal Religion is revisionist history in the best possible sense. By emphasizing “lived religion,” or the spaces where religion is practiced and faith is formed, Hedstrom shows that the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches and churchgoers matters less than previous historians insisted. In addition, Hedstrom challenges the master narrative that conservative Christianity dominated the post-World War II religious landscape. Despite this, readers might find a few shortcomings. First, Hedstrom makes too many sweeping declarations about liberal religion after the 1950s. For example, he points to Americans’ incorporation of yoga as a form of spiritual cosmopolitanism, but it is not clear that liberal religion in the U.S. made a conscious effort to incorporate yoga into its practice. More important, Hedstrom provides little evidence about the lived religious experiences of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. He asserts that middlebrow reading provided women agency, but the evidence from women themselves is somewhat thin. By emphasizing the vitality of liberal religious experience, Hedstrom has set a new agenda for the cultural history of U.S. religion, but that cultural history will have to incorporate more of the population of the faithful for it to have a real impact.

Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013)

You may also like these reviews by Christopher Babits:

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

And Robert Abzug’s discussion of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Call Pest Control: The Bug Problem at the US Embassy in Moscow

By Brian Selman

Every popular American spy novel and film of the past half-century has had to contain a Russian character, usually in the form of a femme fatale or a burly, deep-voiced brute. Is there a strong historical basis for this? Did the US and Soviet Union conduct espionage as extensively as the movies would make us believe? The short answer is “yes.” While it is true that there were far fewer explosions and self-destructing messages than portrayed in this particular sub-genre, both superpowers employed vast intelligence and espionage networks in order to gather information about each other. The 1964 bugging of the US embassy in Moscow is a good example of this, as it served as one of the most pervasive and prolonged acts of espionage discovered during the Cold War.

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow. Courtesy of the LBJ Library

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow in 1964. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

On the morning of April 29, 1964, the American embassy in Moscow sent a telegram to the Department of State in Washington detailing the discovery and the beginning of the removal of microphones, eventually found to total more than forty, hidden within their walls. According to a situation brief from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the American embassy, the U.S. had long suspected that their facilities in Moscow were bugged. Regular sweeps and frequent probing of the embassy’s walls, however, had never shown any evidence of the presence of microphones. According to Rusk, they had done everything “short of physically destroying a room.” Rusk states in this telegram that the hidden microphones were only discovered as a result of a ”decision to do some extensive physical damage to an area in Embassy.” According to this telegram and as reported in “Red ‘Bugs’ Found in U.S. Embassy,” an article in Long Island’s Star-Journal, after demolishing an inner wall, embassy staff discovered the first covert listening device located inside a wooden tube 8-10 inches behind the wall’s surface. It was only after finding this first microphone and following its wires that they realized the pervasiveness of the bugging. The foundations of every single room, including the bathrooms, were bugged, with the exception of a specially designed “room-within-a-room.” As the Star Journal report states, due to the age and obvious rusting on some of the microphones, it was clear that the embassy had been bugged since the Soviet government had leased the facility to Americans over a decade prior to their discovery.

L-R: US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1967 during the Glassboro Summit Conference. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

In a press conference on May 19,1964, James L. Greenfield of the Public Affairs Bureau and Marvin Gentile, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security at the time, announced that more than 130 microphones had been found in American embassies in Eastern Europe between 1949 and April 1964 when the Moscow bugs were detected. However, none of these other microphones were part of such an extensive system. After the removal of these microphones, embassy staff there evaluated the size of the security breach resulting from the unprecedented 12-year Soviet bug infestation. Many reports were sent to the White House by different members of staff at the embassy detailing the precautions they took in their correspondences and conversations. In fact, as a circular telegram sent out by Rusk to numerous embassies in Europe states, all members of staff at the Moscow embassy were instructed as a matter of procedure to always assume they were being watched and listened to by the KGB (Soviet secret police). At the press conference Gentile stated that, “We will never operate in any post behind the [Iron] Curtain except under the assumption that a place is bugged.” He then claimed, “That is the only way we can operate in Eastern European countries.” In a report to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Rusk claims that he often made statements “in the hope, if not expectation” that they would be overheard by the Soviets. All these reports stated that, to all embassy staff members’ knowledge, no ultra-sensitive information was leaked. However, according to the article in the Star Journal, a meeting of U.S. consular officials had been proposed to take place at the American embassy in Moscow. The “room-within-a-room” where most important meetings were held was not large enough to accommodate all of the meeting’s members. Therefore, if this proposal had gone through, they would have convened in a larger, and therefore bugged, room. Because the hidden microphones were discovered first, Rusk rejected the meeting’s proposal and it never took place. If it had, unbeknownst to the US, the Soviet Union would have gained profound insight in American consulate operations during the peak of Cold War tensions.

Replica of the Great Seal which contained a Soviet bugging device concealed inside a gift given by the Soviets to the US Ambassador to Moscow on August 4, 1945. The device is displayed at the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum. Via Wikipedia

Another problem at the time was how to officially declare the discovery of these bugs to the Soviet government. A memo for Bundy from Benjamin H. Read, Rusk’s Executive Secretary, states that it was likely that the Soviets already knew that the bugs at the American embassy had been discovered; it was assumed that they heard the moment of detection through the bugs themselves. However, the U.S. needed to inform the Soviet government that such blatant acts of espionage would not be taken lightly. Embassy staff drafted a formal protest intended for U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy D. Kohler, to present to Soviet Foreign Minister, Vasily Kuznetsov. The first draft is written in flowery complimentary language, giving Kohler the “honor” of informing Kuznetsov and the Soviet government about the discovery of the bugs. After edits, the official protest was written in much sterner and stronger language, detailing the U.S.’s serious displeasure of the USSR’s “flagrant contravention” of Article 22 of the Vienna Convention, which invested the host state with the responsibility of assuring diplomatic missions safety against intrusion. As Kohler reported to Rusk, Kuznetsov openly wondered why such a “strong” protest was issued. He recalled several prior occasions, when Soviets found similar bugs in their facilities in Washington, but Soviet government had issued no such protest. According to the memorandum to Bundy, Kohler replied to Kuznetsov that due to the extent of this particular bugging, a “strong” protest was indeed warranted. However, later, after the Soviet Union’s subsequent official rejection of the U.S. protest, Kohler privately confirmed Kuznetsov’s claim, listing multiple cases of American espionage that the Soviet Union cited in its rejection of the U.S. protest including the discovery of listening devices in a table leg in the USSR mission to UN and microphones discovered in vehicles belonging to both a military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington and of the Third Secretary of Soviet UN mission.

While the Moscow embassy bugging and the American bugs mentioned by Kuznetsov were by no means the only large-scale acts of espionage between the two superpowers during the Cold War, they demonstrate the lengths that both sides were willing to go to in order to gain an edge in their worldwide struggle for supremacy.

The image of the bug and all cited documents were taken from box #9 of the NSF Intelligence File at the LBJ library, file name: “USSR-Hidden Microphones in Moscow Embassy.”

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

By Nancy Bui

Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture before US’s involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology. The War cost over 58,000 American lives and claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers, over a million of North Vietnamese troops and an estimated 7 million civilians from both North and South Vietnam.

The war was over, but the misunderstandings continued. What can we learn from this war? Perhaps, we may want to look at the war from the Vietnamese perspective. After all, we carry the largest cost of the war and suffered unspeakable atrocities long before and long after America’s involvement. The outcome of the War has affected us tremendously and the ongoing process of healing will take us generations.

On May 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S Marines landed in Da Nang, a beach town North of South Vietnam. It marked the year America officially got involved in The Vietnam War by sending ground troops. However, for the Vietnamese, the war had started many years before. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, an expat who was away from Vietnam for over 30 years, introduced communism into Vietnam. The Vietnamese have had a history of fighting for our sovereignty long before communism arrived. Our people fought the French for our independence from 1885, and we quickly had to fight another war against communists at the same time. In 1954, the Geneva Accords was signed to divide Vietnam into two parts at the 17th parallel. The North belonged to the communist party, and the South belonged to the free Vietnamese.

On May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s 69th birthday, with help from Russia and China, North Vietnam officially kicked off the invasion of South Vietnam. The South fought back in a Guerrilla War which lasted from 1959-1963. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and sent troops to Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Diem on the other hand, only wanted economic aid, weapons, and training, because he believed that any foreign troops on Vietnamese soil would sooner or later offend the Vietnamese people, as fighting for their sovereignty from foreign invaders was their way of life. The conflict ended in his assassination on Nov. 2, 1963.

After sending troops to Vietnam, the conflict extended into a Total War. The battlefields became bloodier and bloodier. Over half a million U.S troops were in South Vietnam by 1968. Vietnam lost the media war, as public opinion and support for the War rapidly declined, triggering a decade of antiwar demonstrations. America started pulling troops out of Vietnam. By the end of 1972, all combat troops were completely withdrawn. In early 1973, Congress passed the resolution to prohibit any funding of The Indochina War. The US was quick to get involved in the war, but was even quicker to retreat from it.

The South Vietnamese Army fought for over two years without any outside assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China more than doubled their aids to North Vietnam. The South fought to their last bullet and finally surrendered on April 30, 1975. The following two slides offer further information what happened after the war.

You may also like:

Mark Lawrence’s article The War in Vietnam Revisted and his recommended must-read books on the war in Vietnam.

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

By Christopher Babits

In the series finale of Mad Men, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) finds himself at a California retreat center overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of several days, Draper attends seminars where participants talk about what’s bothering them. At first, he’s skeptical of the place, reluctantly engaging with other people to support the niece who wanted to attend the retreat. When she leaves him, with no car and no escape, Draper is forced to find peace with himself. In the final scene, he participates in a morning meditation session. He sits with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. Upon uttering an “om,” a bell rings, as Draper has yet another advertising epiphany, and the show ends with the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. Draper finally accepted that he was an ad man, albeit one who was responding to — and incorporating elements of — changing social and cultural norms .

Don Draper in the final scene of Mad Men. Via Hollywood Reporter

In Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, Jessica Grogan examines the rise, demise, and lasting impact of humanistic psychology, a mental health movement that sometimes incorporated meditation, always emphasized self-acceptance, and that Grogan implies changed the corporate world for the better. Grogan offers detailed and illuminating portraits of the individuals most responsible for shaping humanistic psychology — Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May — while putting their movement in historical context. As Grogan demonstrates, humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s and grew in the 1960s because Maslow, Rogers, May, and others thought psychology had lost its way. In the early Cold War, professional psychologists focused on individuals’ pathologies and academic psychologists emphasized empirical studies at the expense of theory and philosophy. Humanistic psychology, with its emphasis on personal growth and the practice of nondirective therapy, challenged the status quo. By the 1970s, Grogan believes, humanistic psychology infiltrated various segments of American intellectual, cultural, and social life, laying the foundations for today’s therapy culture.

Grogan’s well-constructed and easy-to-follow narrative highlights the discontent that existed in the 1950s and 1960s and the ways that humanistic psychologists offered Americans a new kind of therapy. The threat of nuclear war, not to mention excessive conformity, were key factors for a despondent national mood. Grogan shows that humanistic psychologists had the same critiques of American culture put forth in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956). And she traces the solution humanistic psychologists pursued: create, develop, refine, and advertise a subfield of psychology that emphasized personal growth and individualism.

Abraham Maslow. Via Wikipedia

Humanistic psychologists had a formidable challenge ahead of them. For nearly fifty years, Freudian psychoanalysts and empirical behaviorists dominated the practice of psychotherapy. Grogan describes how Maslow, Rogers, May, and others aimed to transform psychology and American culture in spite of this longstanding dominance. Maslow, a professor of psychology at Brandeis, then a fledgling and financially struggling university, wrote theoretical and philosophical texts, mixed with some small-scale empirical studies, that emphasized the healthy parts of human development and personal growth. Rogers and May pushed humanistic psychology in other directions. Rogers, who taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and left to join the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California, in 1963, established person-centered therapy. According to Grogan, person-centered therapy allowed for a relationship to develop between psychologist and patient, thus questioning old models where a stifled psychoanalyst listened to her patient and then asked probing questions. May, on the other hand, pushed for group therapy, challenging the predominant belief that therapy had to be a one-on-one relationship between psychoanalyst and patient.

Carl Rogers. Via Wikipedia

By the end of the 1960s, humanistic psychology had gained repute in disparate areas of American intellectual, cultural, and social life. Grogan demonstrates that Maslow, Rogers, and May were able to carve out a space within the psychological discipline for humanistic psychology, organizing their own journals and conferences. Rogers’ ideas about person-centered therapy also dramatically changed the fields of social work and education, putting increasing emphasis on the lived (and subjective) experiences of clients and students. And at least initially, humanistic psychologists supported Timothy Leary’s ideas about the therapeutic uses of LSD. In addition, Grogan examines California’s Esalen Institute, the place that many commentators believe Don Draper found himself in the last episode of Mad Men. Esalen practiced encounter-group therapy and meditation and spiritual practices as paths to self-actualization. By covering such an array of people and places, Grogan underscores that humanistic psychology found a diverse group of followers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Esalen Institute, California. Via Wikipedia.

Encountering America is a fascinating work of cultural and intellectual history. It would have been easy for any historian to get bogged down in the details about the many people, ideas, and events related to humanistic psychology, but Grogan’s narrative style keeps the reader interested. Grogan’s least developed point, however, deals with humanistic psychology’s connections to corporate America. It is clear that humanistic psychology had some impact on the business world (for example, companies now offer employee retreats and sensitivity training), but at what cost? Was this a dramatic victory for humanistic psychology? Or was it selling out? Grogan implies that the changes were for the best, but she also hints that humanistic psychology could only do so much to change businesses’ adherence to the profit-motive. Importantly, Grogan has written a work that could help future historians probe these questions. Anyone interested in Sixties culture and/or the history of psychology should find themselves immersed in this work.

Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (Harper Perennial, 2012)

You may also like:

Christopher Babits on Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Jing Zhai explains Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Adrian Masters recommends Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis by Rubén Gallo (2010)

Could a Supreme Court justice be president?

By Lewis L. Gould

Bill Kristol, whose major political contribution to American public life is the national career of Sarah Palin, has another bright idea to free the Republican Party from the looming prospect of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy. The GOP, he writes, should turn to a dark horse from an unlikely source. After naming several long-shot contenders such as Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, Kristol essays the presidential equivalent of a two-handed shot from half court. Why not, he inquires, Justice Samuel Alito from the Supreme Court? Never mind that Justice Alito has never expressed interest in the White House and would have to give up his seat to make the race. A man of Alito’s intellect would save the party from the oafish Trump whose slogan on his hat embodies his program to make America great again. Has this potential departure from the Court ever happened before or is the gadfly Kristol innovating again?

The Republicans faced such a dilemma once before in American history. Against President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for a second term in 1916, the GOP lacked a strong presidential nominee to counter the resurgence of former president Theodore Roosevelt who hated Wilson, advocated for intervention on the Allied side in World War I, and seemed an unpromising candidate against the sitting president. Several Republican hopefuls pressed to be nominated, but a motley assortment of senators, governors, and also-rans caused no excitement comparable to what the charismatic Roosevelt stirred.

Salvation seemed at hand on the Supreme Court. Justice Charles Evans Hughes, appointed to the Court by William Howard Taft in 1910, seemed the ideal solution. Formerly a reformist governor of New York (1907-1910), Hughes had no baggage from 1912, when Taft and Roosevelt fractured the party. He was a man with no personal blemishes who could lead the Republicans back to the White House against the unpopular Wilson. Republicans of the era hated Wilson with a venom reminiscent of how modern GOP members hate President Barack Obama.

How to convince Hughes to leave the Court? He disclaimed all interest in the presidency and ordered his name removed from primary ballots in the spring of 1916. However, unauthorized advocates kept his name before the party. Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s candidacy struck few sparks; his bellicose positions toward World War I attracted some but alienated many, especially in the Middle West, on which the Republicans counted for victory. When the Republican National Convention met in June 1916, the Hughes candidacy was poised for success. It came on the third ballot. Hughes was nominated and he promptly resigned from the bench. Republicans had their savior and they anticipated the ouster of Wilson and a prompt return to power. A reporter with the New York Times visited Hughes’ headquarters a week after his selection and observed, “The casual visitor would think it was all over except the inauguration.”

“Charles Evans Hughes campaigns in Winona, Minnesota on the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian”. Via Wikipedia Commons.

Hughes was a brilliant jurist, which he later proved as Chief Justice. Alas for the Republicans, he proved an inept candidate. Certain he would win the presidency, he gave dry discourses that stressed familiar GOP themes about the protective tariff and prosperity. On issues of war and peace, he indicted Wilson’s performance but said little about what he would do instead. Democrats called him Charles “E-vasion” Hughes. Audiences arrived at events enthusiastic, but left deflated and disappointed. A reporter concluded that “Hughes is dropping icicles all over the west and will return to New York clean shaven.”

Though the election was close, Democrats boasted that Wilson had “kept us out of war” and those sentiments won the president a second term. Wilson carried the crucial state of California and won 277 electoral votes to Hughes’ 254. Republican Party members disavowed “smart” candidates like Roosevelt, Taft, and Hughes, which won Warren G. Harding favor in 1920. Hughes returned to private life, but years as Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States lay ahead of him. No viable candidate has emerged from the Supreme Court since Hughes (unless we consider the feckless antics of William O. Douglas). Given the cavalry-charge nature of the current Republican presidential race—and the prospect of a campaign against Trump—it would not be surprising if Justice Alito, a smart man, considers Hughes as precedent and ignores the aggressive punditry of Bill Kristol for the lifetime security of a seat on the Supreme Court.

This post originally appeared on the OUPblog

You may also like:

Lewis. L. Gould, The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party (Oxford university Press, 2014)

J. Taylor Vurpillat recommends A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, by Michael McGerr (2003)

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