gender
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The Year of Writing Dangerously
Well, folks, it’s the one year anniversary of this website, so it seems like time for me to think about what I’ve done. I say that I’ve been “writing dangerously” not because anything I’ve written here has been particularly provocative, but rather because doing anything other than keeping your head down and publishing your ass […]
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Women’s history commonplace blog drafts
As I mentioned last week, my women’s history students are creating blogs inspired by commonplace books. This project not only requires them to produce public writing, but to make the draft stage public. To that end, they have had to put up draft versions of all the contextualized quotes they want to examine, and they are […]
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The cowardice of “no strong convictions”
Many of us in Connecticut were horrified – but not surprised – at video of a post-election gathering at which someone in Klan robes rode around a bonfire waving a Trump/Pence sign while onlookers laughed and cheered. Some, however, including the first selectman, downplayed the seriousness of this. A town leader downplayed the vile bash. […]
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Commonplacing women’s history
I wrote earlier this summer about my use of commonplace books in my women’s history class, and about how I hoped to turn that practice into a project for the class. Well… My students have each chosen a theme to explore, and are busy selecting and contextualizing passages from primary and secondary sources. By the end […]
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The weight of history
This election has led to a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the state of the electorate, and I’ve seen a lot of people arguing that the voting population in the United States needs more civics education. In many ways, I agree; I don’t think most voters could explain the mechanisms of our government […]
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Always changing, therefore never really changing
I’m teaching a chapter from Sharon Block’s Rape and Sexual Power in Early America tomorrow in US women’s history, and I know that when we talk about it, much of the conversation will center around how shocking early American ideas about power and consent and sex are. And then, across the semester, we will come back […]
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“Rules for Wives”
This list of Good Housekeeping’s 1955 “Good House Wife’s Guide” has been getting a lot of attention on ye ol’intertubes. What are those guidelines? 1.) Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you […]
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Thinking about teaching 5b: new project for Women’s History
In addition to coming up with a new term project for my survey classes, I wanted to find something new to do in U.S. Women’s history as well. In that class last fall, I had students write two short papers, neither of which required outside research. Broadly speaking, they asked students to take the material we’d worked […]
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Thinking about teaching 4: History of Women/History of Sexuality
In addition to my U.S. survey classes, which I examined in earlier posts, I also taught 200-level courses on the history of women in the U.S. in the fall and history of sexuality in the U.S in the spring of this past academic year. I’ll be teaching history of women again this fall, which is […]
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Thoughts on Continuity
I wonder if progressive historians tend to be more favorable to “change over time” than “continuity” when studying the past. Source: Do Historians Privilege “Change Over Time” Over “Continuity?” | the way of improvement leads home John Fea’s great piece and the comments on it have crystallized something for me that I think is important […]
