A Word about the Course and Materials:

I am passionate about history of all kinds – and eager to spread that enthusiasm to my students.  My goal in teaching history is to help students see the connections between what happened in the past and what is happening today.  A case in point:  the United States’ current goal of rebuilding Iraq and the experience we had in reunifying our own nation after the Civil War.  While there are important differences, the parallels are striking and valuable in helping us plot our future course.

How’s this for another parallel?  Last term I mentioned that former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark had joined Saddam Hussein’s defense team.  That sparked some lively discussion, until a few students noted that one of our own patriot forefathers, John Adams, chose to defend British soldiers on trial for their role in the Boston Massacre.  This led to an equally interesting discussion on everything from the nature of our judicial system to the patterns we can spot in history.

I don’t know that I agree completely with the dictum that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it, but I do firmly believe that knowledge is power.  If we know how people succeeded or screwed up in the past, we can apply those lessons to our own lives, which is a historian’s raison d’etre in a nutshell.

One of the most valuable skills we learn in our study of history is how to use source material.  Students learn how to evaluate a variety of materials, from primary sources, which were created by people living in a particular time, to tertiary sources (analyses of historian’s interpretations of primary sources and events).  In my class we look at artifacts (things used in daily life), political cartoons, poetry, prose essays, sermons, photographs, newspaper accounts, editorials, films, and anything else I find that sheds light on a particular event, person, or time period.  My students learn how to evaluate the author’s biases (revealed or assumed), tone, and purpose, as well as the context in which the source was created.

Some of the materials we examine may be considered controversial or offensive to modern sensibilities.  For example, the Rudyard Kipling poem, “White Man’s Burden”, with its assumption of Caucasian racial superiority, is about as non-politically correct as any piece of literature in the canon.  Please rest assured that in our class discussions of these materials students’ (and my own) sensitivities are taken into account, and openly discussed.  My family’s extensive history in the American Civil Rights Movement (my father was arrested with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the SCLC’s efforts to draw attention to the then extremely racist administration of St. Augustine, FL in 1964) was a formative factor in my life, and I bring a commitment to social justice into my classroom.

However distasteful our 21^st century sensibilities may find some of the attitudes expressed in many of the primary sources we examine (Cabeza de Vaca’s comments on the aboriginal inhabitants of North America are fairly offensive), we cannot rewrite history to pretty it up – nor should we. 

America is the phenomenally great country that it is because we as Americans can look unflinchingly at our past, mistakes and all, and work as a people to redress them.  The reparations paid to Japanese Americans for their internment during WWII, and even the early days of affirmative action stand as proof that America can face its past head-on.

I am enormously grateful to be a citizen of this country – which in my opinion is the greatest on earth.  My pride in America is directly tied to this nation’s honest examination of its past, and its hopeful journey into the future.