UCLA’s advice on thesis statements for history papers.
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Look for the unstated agenda
I have tweaked my Examples of Critical Reading, listing “the source is advancing an unstated agenda” in place of “the source is advancing an agenda.” I encourage students to look for messages not explicitly stated, but I fear that “hidden agenda” is too loaded a term.
My Kind of Audiobook
I recently finished listening to the unabridged audiobook version of The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left by Landon R. Y. Storrs. Not only was the book informative and persuasive, but it may herald a new kind of audiobook offering.
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Outlining in Reverse – NYTimes.com
Outlining in Reverse – NYTimes.com. Works for nonfiction too!
Cronon the Storyteller, part 1: All Greek to Me
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One of the surprises in William Cronon’s magisterial AHA presidential address, “Storytelling,” was to learn of his early devotion to northern European epics: Anglo-Saxon and Norse sagas. You see, I had understood Nature’s Metropolis as a sort of Greek tragic cycle. In 2011, I even staged a production of chapter 4, “The Wealth of Nature.” I’ve posted the script for the record.
Minor Edits on Critical Reading
I have made some minor edits to Examples of Critical Reading. The old version separated “surprising choices about what facts to present, and how to present them” from “surprising choices about what to emphasize.” These are more or less the same thing, so I have combined them, listing the Cronon, Dower, and Brinkley examples together.
New Theme: Twenty Twelve
I’m trying out the WordPress.com theme, Twenty Twelve. I think I like the font better than Twenty Ten, but I’m frustrated that the theme italicizes block quotations. No reason for that.
SPLC Makes Doubtful Curriculum Claims
The Southern Poverty Law Center has released a new report, Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011, that claims that ” Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history.”
The report reaches this claim by comparing ” state standards and curriculum frameworks” to “the generally accepted core knowledge about the movement.” But I think the comparison could have been more thorough.
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Reboot
Welcome to the latest version of my teaching website. These pages originally appeared on my personal domain: schrag.info. In the summer of 2010, I moved them to their own domain, using a WordPress installation on a shared hosting service. In March 2011, that site was hacked, and in trying to fix the damage, I broke WordPress. So I have now moved the site to WordPress.com, in the hopes that it will be more resistant to both hacking and to my own bumbling. As of this writing, I have not yet migrated all the pages, but I hope to complete that task soon. Wish me luck!
In addition to seeking greater reliability, I hope to do more blogging on this new site, covering ideas about the study and teaching of history.
