Review: Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania

September 24, 2018 By Emily Yankowitz in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: book review, migration, Pennsylvania, Scots Irish, teaching history 1 Comment

**Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).**

Judith Ridner opens The Scots Irish of Pennsylvania: A Varied People by asking, “Who are the Scots Irish?” Ridner suggests that popular and scholarly answers to this deceptively simple question tend to fall into one of two categories. One response conjures a mythic image of the Scots Irish as a “desperately poor” community that rose from “rags to riches” in America through hard work, individualism, and pragmatism. The other offers a more pejorative image of the Scots Irish as “hillbillies” living in abject poverty.^[1] In classic historian form, Ridner suggests that the answer is far more complex than either conventional answer. Continue reading →

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Presentism

April 18, 2018 By Carla Cevasco in Commentary, Pedagogy Tags: academia, cultural memory, current events, historical memory, Presentism, teaching, teaching history 7 Comments

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I’m trained as an early American historian, so I never anticipated that one day I’d teach a current-events course. And yet, in Fall 2017, I debuted a course called “Learning from the Past: Early America in the 21^st Century.” New to my department, I had to market an early American studies course that would draw enrollments, and the best method I could think of was to convince students that the early American past had relevance to their lives. In graduate school, some of my professors argued that historians should not engage in presentism—that it would make our work seem dated to future generations of scholars. But our own political moment—I started teaching two weeks after far-right protests converged around Confederate monuments in Charlottesville—felt too urgent not to let our own moment into our discussions of the past. Instead of keeping the present in the subtext of my class, I brought it into the text. Continue reading →

Roundtable: A Proud Taste for Alex & Eliza

June 8, 2017 By Nora Slonimsky in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Alexander Hamilton, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Angelica Schuyler, Children's literature, Eliza Hamilton, Eliza Schuyler, Hamilton, Hamilton: An American Musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literature, medieval, Peggy Schuyler, Philip Schuyler, teaching history, women, women's history Leave a comment

Hilary Mantel recently gave the annual BBC Reith Lecture in which she described why she became a historical novelist. Printed in The Guardian, Mantel argued that culture and genes, history and science, put “our small lives in context.” Mantel’s work is of course separated from the theme of this roundtable by two degrees, as she is neither a writer of YA nor of Early America, but the broader question I think she was trying to answer—why we write about what we do—resonate in a conversation on #FoundingFiction. Continue reading →

Teaching Hipster History: Ending the Semester on an Ironic Note

December 9, 2014 By Michael Blaakman in Pedagogy Tags: Edmund Morgan, hipster, hipsters, historical writing, irony, Jill Lepore, students, teaching history 16 Comments

Conclusions are hard, I find, and no less so in teaching than in writing. Both at the end of a book and at the end of a course, really great endings add a bit of spice—something just new or unexpected enough to cast what’s come before in a different light, something that makes it exciting to reflect back across the material you’ve just learned.

I aim for student-driven discussions, and at semester’s end in previous seminars and discussion sections, I’ve struggled to coax students into producing the final chord that resonates in all registers of a course’s architecture. I’ve had students free-write (and then discuss) to summarize, as succinctly as possible, the change over time they’ve learned about in the course, and I’ve asked students to identify what one idea from the class they hope they’ll remember forty years from now. Both exercises have produced good-enough results. But since they didn’t ask students to see the courses’ material anew in any way, I’ve found myself wanting more.

But my students’ final discussion this semester was so invigorating that I just had to write a blog post about it. Continue reading →