Category: Teaching

Digital History and Early Modern Europe

The major assignment in my survey of Early Modern Europe this past semester required that students work in groups to construct guides to digital history on any topic within the period. Each guide was to comprise of an introduction to the topic using “traditional” research and a list and description of relevant online resources, databases, and/or projects. Those guides have been placed online via the course website and are available here. Topics ranged from the Reformation to French Colonialism to interactions between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. I chose to ask students to complete this assignment in this particular course after attending the Digital Humanities Summer School at the University of Bern, Switzerland this past summer where, among other things, I was introduced to the sheer volume of digital work being done on early modern material. My students’ guides, I think, give a fairly diverse entry point to the field; materials range from basic primary source databases to complex digital mapping projects.

Most of my work in the digital humanities has involved these kinds of assignments and they pose particular difficulties, especially in a survey course. First, students often have very little preexisting experience using web publishing platforms such as WordPress, programming or markup languages, or digital humanities more broadly. This means that class time must be devoted to introducing students to at least some of these areas in order for them to be able to complete the project. Second, topics that may be very prominent in the historiography — the Reformation, say — may not be as represented online. This creates a unique tension when helping students choose their topics; while we’d prefer to see digital work on topics of digital interest, students also need to be able to locate relevant analog sources as well. The guides themselves demonstrate this difficulty. While some feature a great deal of secondary source research in the introductions and much less by way of digital history work, others show the complete opposite. Third, grading projects that can — and should be — continually in progress poses problems not simply because of the time it takes in a survey course, but also because the projects are never really finished. Students continue to have access to their projects and can edit them freely; others can comment on them and offer advice and new resources can be added. I attempted to solve this problem by having two due dates: first, the initial draft had to be put online, then two weeks later I would download whatever was available online and grade that version (I used Evernote and Skitch to mark up the pages).

Digital history in the classroom, put simply, must be much more than just another assignment. Rather, it adds an entirely new layer of inquiry to any given course. In the future, I will probably devote even more in-class time to the assignment, a task made easier by the fact that almost everyday there is a new, relevant digital source available for us to work with. How would our reading of Candide have changed had I had the time to prepare to work with the Bibliothèque nationale’s Candide app? Perhaps it would be worth considering ways that the survey itself could turn more fully around the theme of the digital without losing the narrative such a course is designed to provide.

New Courses

The semester is about to begin and I’ve uploaded websites and syllabi for the courses I’ll be teaching this semester, an advanced seminar on the French Revolution and a survey of Early Modern Europe.

The Past in the Present

At the risk of turning my blog into all Germany all the time, I wanted to put this up primarily as a teaching reference.  Last semester, when my Modern Europe class had begun to study the Holocaust, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put up a post on how he and his wife had to reassess what they knew of her family’s experience of the Holocaust.  She had thought that her great-grandfather had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen, when in fact he had died in Auschwitz.  This moment occurred just as I was re-reading Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, in which she describes precisely the same realization that her “mental furniture has to be rearranged” because while she had thought her father had died in Auschwitz, he had in fact had been transported to Lithuania and Estonia and “who knows how they were murdered” (40).  That “these stories have no end,” as Klüger says is aptly demonstrated by Marshall’s update to the story, in which he shows his readers his wife’s great-grandfather’s death certificate:

The reason I’m sharing this with you is that the death certificate itself captures for me one of the paradoxes of the Holocaust. Why even keep death certificates? Auschwitz was after all a network of concentration and extermination camps. I’m not even talking about the fear of possible punishment after the war, though that’s another significant question. Just simply, why? These are people, a whole people, being sent into oblivion, to be erased from the earth and from memory. These were to be much less than ordinary deaths.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

New GradeBook Pro Features

I use the iOS app GradeBook Pro to take attendance and keep track of grades through the course of the semester. I was pleased, therefore, to see two new features appear after I upgraded to the latest version: letter grade assignments and behavior tracking.  The first simply allows you to assign letter grades to percentage scores by recording the lowest valid numerical score per letter grade (so, 93% as A, 90% as A-, 88% as B+, etc).  It’s also extremely easy to copy grade scales from courses, which means you really only have to input the scale once.

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The second new feature allows you to quickly note student “behavior” (read: participation) in class.  In small seminars, I tend to take notes and am able to assess student participation fairly consistently.  In larger classes, where I still ask students questions and hold discussions, but which also tend to go a bit faster and involve more students participating (and more students not participating), this will be a useful tool for quickly noting who has and has not participated.

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The screenshot shows the default labels for behavior.  They can be customized in the GradeBook Pro tab of the iOS settings app.

GradeBookPro can be downloaded from the iTunes store for $9.99.

Spanish Civil War PowerPoint

I recently gave my final guest lecture of the semester on the Spanish Civil War.  The PowerPoint I used can be accessed here.

Marriage Equality and Queer Politics

In the context of recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court, students taking “Sex and the City” discussed the marriage equality in the context of a course that addresses some of the more radical implications of queer politics and practice.  Claire Potter at the New School provides some thoughts on that subject that students may find intriguing.  Here’s her conclusion:

The radical queer critique of marriage emerges from this history: under current conditions, gay and lesbian people who marry signal a commitment to things as they are, not as they could be. But this does not have to be the case: just as marriage should not require the marginalization of the unmarried, movements for economic justice do not have to occur in a world where no one at all marries. Marriage is not a radical act, and ought not to be spoken of as one — but radical people sometimes marry. Regardless of what the court decides, the agenda must be to continue the critique of marriage as an institution, scrutinize the improper power relations that marriage nurtures. But asking millions of people, rich and poor, to accept a set of discriminatory and humiliating legal exclusions until the revolution comes, laws that hurt them economically and repeatedly articulate them as second class citizens, does not necessarily move a social justice agenda forward either.

PowerPoints for Guest Lectures

I’ve recently given a number of guest lectures, several on Weimar Germany and one on the French Revolution.  Students in those courses can find the PowerPoint slides for the lectures by clicking on the links.

Mary Louise Roberts on Entering the Digital Age

One of my favorite historians discusses her newfound enthusiasm for utilizing forms of social media in the classroom:

Somewhere along the way, I realized this is how they learn—this juxtaposition and making of connections, this linking of yesterday and today. What the technologies of the digital age have done for my classroom is to let in the outside world in new and valuable ways, so that more than ever the past is viewed through the lens of the present. This strikes me as a brilliant way to do our work and to make history matter in students’ lives.

New Courses

I’m rapidly gearing up for another semester and have prepped new versions of my syllabi for survey courses on Modern Europe and Modern France, as well as a new course on “Sex and the City.” The new sites for these courses have just been put up and can be accessed under “Teaching” above. These websites will remain mostly static. Although I am trying out some new kinds of assignments this semester, I am not having students in these courses use digital tools as I have in the past, primarily because doing so requires a level of individual attention and constant grading not amenable to a semester where I’m teaching three survey courses. Once I’m back to seminars, I plan on trying out new things with blogs and wikipedia especially. In any case, I hope the materials I make available through these websites will be useful to other students and instructors.

History of Sexuality Lecture

I just delivered a guest lecture/seminar to a class called “Body Politics.”  It was essentially an introduction to the history of sexuality, Foucault, and early sexology with an eye towards the week’s reading by Joanne Meyerowitz from her fantastic book, How Sex Changed.  The powerpoint for the lecture can now be accessed for students and other interested parties.