As the Fall semester approaches I am eager to hear what books you are assigning to your students. Feel free to share in the comments section, especially if you are teaching courses related to what we do here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
Anyone teaching courses in US History to 1865/77, Colonial America, American Revolution, Early Republic, American Religious History, or something close? Or perhaps you are doing a specialized seminar on something related to these themes. We want to hear what you are assigning!
I am teaching two courses this semester. In my U.S. survey I have the students read a textbook, a host of small primary documents, and three classics: Franklin's Autobiography; Paine's Common Sense; and Douglass's Narrative.
I am also teaching a new course called "Teaching History." It is designed for future history teachers, public historians, and anyone else who wants to think about how to communicate the past to public audiences. The class is near full! We will be reading:
Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
Gary Nash, et.al, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past.
James Loewen, Teaching What Really Happened.
Bruce VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education.
James Percoco, A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History.
3 comments:
Hey John, great question: I'm using for one class, Fea, _Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?_, Kramnic and Moore, _the Godless Constitution_, Sutton, _Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America_, and Schultz, _Tri-Faith America_. In another, I'm using Sutton, Schultz, Lofton, _The Gospel of Oprah_, and my own _Reforging the White Republic_. For the survey class, it's the textbook _Hist_ and _Major Problems in American History_ which get bundled together to be really inexpensive.
Where do I sign up? And thanks for assigning Was America Founded!
I'm teaching the first half of the U.S. survey for the first time. In addition to a textbook (Foner's Give Me Liberty!) and several short primary source readings, I've assigned the following:
*Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
*Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey
*Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America
*Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: The Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War
I tried to select texts that were relatively short, well written, and/or connected to the local community/region (hence Townsend's Pocahontas bio and Dew's book).
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