History Survey Course Research Articles

Timeline Game

What events get included in historical narratives? Which ones get left out? Why? How might we encourage students to consider and debate these decisions while simultaneously making arguments about causation, the politics of knowledge production, power, and perspective? This article explores the use of a “timeline game” to help students articulate and develop historical argumentation skills. Students’ main objective in the game is to convince their classmates to vote for their groups’ chosen events, nominating them onto a “Final Timeline,” which includes the most “significant” events of the course’s history. Students argue for the significance of their chosen events in various ways including (but not limited to): articulating how it caused other events, how it represented important course themes, how it challenged dominant Eurocentric narratives, or how it shed light on a perspective otherwise obscured or hidden by the timeline’s main events thus far. Though designed for college-level African and Global history survey courses, the game could be adapted for a number of different classroom contexts and grade levels.

Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America by Thomas Aiello (review)

Reviewed by: Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America by Thomas Aiello Wade Davies Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America. By Thomas Aiello. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2022. ix + 271 pp. Bibliographic essay, index. $34.00 cloth. Sports historians have long hoped for a grand basketball narrative that appeals equally well to scholarly and popular audiences and centers the game at the heart of the American experience, alongside baseball and football—two sports that have elicited far more scholarly attention. Thomas Aiello has finally written that book. It comes in the form of a concise yet sweeping narrative that traces basketball's evolution, both at the college and professional levels, from its origin and early development in the 1890s, through its mid-twentieth-century maturation, and to its ascent as a premier professional sport, embodied by the post-1970s National Basketball Association (NBA). Aiello strikes an effective balance between in-depth scholarly analysis of basketball's evolving social significance, particularly relative to struggles for gender equality and racial justice, and inspirational stories about all-time great players and teams. Casual readers will particularly appreciate later chapters featuring Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, LeBron James, and, of course, Michael Jordan. The book serves almost as well as a survey of twentieth-century American history as it does a basketball history, in that extended sections are devoted to detail ing broader societal developments—including the Civil Rights Movement, AIDS epidemic, passage of Title IX, COVID-19 pandemic, and Black Lives Matter—before relating these topics back to the sport and its players. Basketball is presented as equally reflecting and influencing the society around it. Aiello so deftly weaves these varied and weighty discussions into his narrative that his book would be as equally well placed as a text for a United States history survey course as for a more focused sports history course. Aiello's otherwise comprehensive narrative does, however, fall a little short in fully capturing basketball's widespread significance to a diverse population. He devotes primary attention to basketball's significance to African Americans and to race relations affecting Black athletes and communities, and deservedly so, but rarely mentions how important this game has been for other athletes of color or of diverse ethnicities, apart from brief mentions of Native American boarding-school teams and longer sections featuring early twentieth-century Jewish teams. More could be said about the intense hoops passion many Indigenous, Asian American, and Latino/a athletes have demonstrated through the years; and there is more to say as well about the game's early importance to American Catholics and other religious communities. These criticisms aside, this is still the most comprehensive and all-around best historical overview yet written about American basketball and is a volume that no sports historian or basketball enthusiast should do without. Scholars will also appreciate the extensive bibliographic essays Aiello includes for each chapter subject. [End Page 110] Wade Davies Native American Studies University of Montana Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Glazed Eyes of History: Reading the 1964 AIA-ACSA Teacher Conference

This position paper looks at the 1964 AIA -ACSA Teacher conference, one that offers us a window into the current anxieties of architectural history survey courses. The conference was organized at a time when PhD programs in Architectural History and Theory were emerging, with accompanying mid-century notions of disciplines with clear boundaries, objects of study and hierarchy of experts. The questions that were being asked were fundamental: What is Architectural History? What are its contents? How should it be taught? Who is an Architectural Historian? However, a closer look beneath the masculine bravado of the conference reveals many of the same symptoms that persist today: questions of ‘diversity’ of content, anxiety to be ‘relevant’ to students in professional programs and a tendency to leave unquestioned the tradition of ‘designo’. This paper journeys through these anxieties with the hope of bringing some of those in play today into sharper focus. Perhaps, it concludes, the work of architectural history might be what Spivak termed as a project of “Planetarity”, involving not merely a change in epistemological methods but an undoing of the social order of architectural history.

Developing Historical Thinking in Large Lecture Classrooms Through PBL Inquiry Supported with Synergistic Scaffolding

As PBL has gained popularity across disciplines, its move from small medical-school inquiry groups into large-class undergraduate inquiry has led to an increasing need to understand the elements of successful PBL implementations in large classrooms. In this study, we investigated how PBL was appropriated among students to develop historical thinking skills in a 96-person introductory undergraduate history survey course. The video analysis demonstrated that it was initially challenging for students to appropriate the routines and norms of PBL, but instructor interaction with both the students and representational tools in a large classroom provided multiple co-occurring and dynamic supports. This synergistic scaffolding structured around representational tools was instrumental in a semester-long intervention in which we supported student learning of historical thinking skills by encouraging appropriation of the activities that govern PBL. Keywords: PBL in large classrooms, history PBL, developing historical thinking skills, synergistic scaffolding, representation tools

The Transnational Turn and the Dilemma of the "phenomenal mix"

This essay explores the special challenges of “transnationalizing” a half-semester history survey course designed for nonhistorians in a graduate journalism school. The course has just seven weeks to address a huge array of material. Many of the students have not taken a single history course since high school. And while many of them, both US citizens and international students, have been pleasantly surprised to find that the course includes material they find relevant to their own experience, in the time we have it is not possible to validate everyone’s lives through inclusion. Navigating the dilemmas of identity in a diverse and fragmented public sphere is, of course, not a new challenge for people who do history for a living, but it may be instructive for journalists as well, whose everyday work also involves constituting meaningful narratives that satisfactorily explain why things happen.

Spinning Truth(s), Myths, Gossip, and Facts in the Theatre History Classroom

Spinning Truth(s), Myths, Gossip, and Facts in the Theatre History Classroom Shawna Mefferd Kelty (bio) I know this may come as a surprise, but most theatre students do not become majors to learn about theatre history. Nor is this reality new. In 1994, Jerry Dickey and Judy Lee Oliva published a reassessment of theatre history survey courses, pointing out some obvious but nevertheless unchanging circumstances of our students: 1) they have had little-to-no exposure to theatre history prior to our courses, and 2) quite often we expect our students to write theatre history research papers, but do not actually teach our students how to conduct historical research (46–47). For decades, the challenge in theatre programs has been, and continues to be, engaging the student who "just wants to act" or the history major just wanting an easy arts elective. Dickey and Oliva offer some guiding principles, which include instructors creating "opportunities for students to conduct historical inquiry," giving "greater attention to historiography," and by creating "activities in which the students learn from each other" (52–54). They call for engaged pedagogical approaches that reframe theatre history away from content and toward historiography: What do we want our students to learn? Why do my students (who just want to act) need to know how to do this? Dickey and Oliva's questions remain pertinent. As a theatre historian, I find myself regularly teaching things my students never knew they wanted to know more about. It is my charge to help them draw connections between past and present practices, to highlight relationships between and across cultures, and to raise questions on how theatre responds to its sociopolitical climate and to interrogate how and why institutions favor some narratives over others. Through theatre histories both mainstream and marginalized, I try to cultivate their understanding of representation: whose story is told, how it is told, and who is telling it, both then and now. I teach in a small theatre department (about twenty-five majors) at a rural state college. We offer two theatre history courses, which are supplemented by dramatic literature courses. My classes typically have about ten students. Most are theatre majors, but there are also English, communications, and history students in both sections. Like many theatre history educators, I engage with students who represent a broad range of backgrounds and interests. My courses serve as both an introduction and an advanced requirement for our artist-scholars-in-training. How do I make theatre history matter to this diverse group? In my case, I reconstructed my course as an introduction to historiography and research skills. To emphasize these skills and to highlight how research into theatre history might apply beyond the classroom, I revamped my course assignments toward student leadership, research, and spin (how history gets told), with student-led discussions, "old school" archival research, and student-created podcasts. My pedagogical approach is disruptive—I think it is always good to risk, fail, trust, and risk again; learning to think critically in the classroom helps students think critically in the world. In this note from the field, I share a selection of assignments from my "Theatre History I" course that exemplify how I "spin" the course material to my small though diverse group. Through these assignments, I strive to engage students in the classroom and to make them "the experts in the room" when it comes to the theatre history, research, and the history of theatre on our campus. [End Page 195] In 1991, Thomas Postlewait argued that history is not fixed; rather, "[h]istory happens and re-happens, as we continue to reconstitute the past every time we comprehend it. We are always rewriting and rereading history" (178). The idea that history is continual, contextual, and interpretive is the basis of my approach to the course from the first day I express this approach to students as a formula: history equals evidence plus perspective divided by perspectives across time (H = E + P/PT). This equation, I explain, is not meant as literal math but as a conceptual model. I want my students to learn to ask questions, combining history with perspective, rather than simply accept scholars' interpretations...

Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre History: A Work in Progress

Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre HistoryA Work in Progress Patricia Ybarra (bio) For this issue on hemispheric theatre history I ask the following question: How does one teach a theatre and performance history survey course from a hemispheric perspective? For me, this investigation has a long history. It is an ongoing practice responsive to methodological and theoretical changes in the field and to the political conditions within which I teach. The recent incorporation of Latin American theatre forms into canonical theatre history texts attests to the fact that these performances are now a part of a global theatre history.1 This is not merely an additive operation but an epistemological one that questions the definition of performance. That is, survey classes can frame performance in the way advocated by Diana Taylor and others: as a mode of knowledge production including indigenous forms of cosmology that are not contained by Western European definitions of theatre.2 I have been an advocate of this shift in focus—a commitment I share with many scholars whose work in this area preceded my own: Taylor, Adam Versényi, Jean Graham-Jones, Jill Lane, and Tamara Underiner, among others.3 The recent revisions to my syllabus, however, signal a move from teaching theatre history as a Latin Americanist to teaching theatre history from an Americas or hemispheric perspective. This move overtly links global theatre history to Aníbal Quijano’s conception of the coloniality of power and to Gerald Vizenor’s theorization of indigenous survivance. Quijano’s theory maintains that the creation of race and the emergence of modern capitalism are coincident with an idea of America created during the Spanish Conquest, during [End Page 123] which European invaders labeled non-European people as inferior so as to dominate them.4 Gerald Vizenor’s term “indigenous survivance” frames creative practice by indigenous people as an active presence outside of the tragedies of colonialism and disappearance that occurred subsequent to the events Quijano describes. Vizenor’s theorization, it should be said, emerges from forms of settler colonialism that utilize reservation and boarding school systems, which were largely with the US and Canada, rather than forms that attempted to destroy indigenous culture through other means.5 Ironically, then, making my syllabus truly hemispheric meant paying more attention to the US and Canada. This shift in thinking was made possible by two people: my student Lilian Mengesha, whose dissertation brings together Canadian, US, and Mexican/Central American thinking about land, gender, and vulnerability, and Monique Mojica, with whom I taught a course on indigenous performance in fall 2016.6 In this essay, I will narrate my development of a theatre history course that meets the demands of the move to decolonize one’s syllabus while teaching the fundamental methods of performance historiography. A History of My Theatre History When I arrived at Brown in 2004, I began teaching a theatre history course, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS) 1240, which covers theatre and performance history from 1500 to 1850. I have taught it most years from then until now. TAPS 1240 is a required course for most tracks in our theatre arts and performance studies concentration (our term for a major). The course is one of a three-course sequence on theatre and performance history. The course is part lecture and part discussion and usually enrolls between twenty and thirty students, most, but not all, of them concentrators. Presently, I combine a textbook (Theatre Histories, Tobin Nellhaus, General Editor) with plays, performance scripts, and theoretical essays as readings for the course. The course has a midterm, a presentation, a final exam, and a final paper that requires archival research. When I began teaching, the faculty wanted to change the curriculum so that TAPS 1240 would be global rather than simply Western in focus.7 The political and social movements during these 350 years necessitated that this course not simply be one about theatre and performance during a particular period but an historiographical investigation into how theatre and performance participate in, embody, and defy the emergence and development of colonialism (the policy of acquiring full or partial control over another country or area, exploiting [End Page 124] it...

Bringing History to Life: A Study on the Implementation of an Oral History Research Project as a High-Impact Practice in Undergraduate History Courses

Oral history research projects are assignments that can foster student engagement and learning in undergraduate survey history courses. However, existing scholarship indicates that these assignments are seldom used in undergraduate survey courses. Since the aims of undergraduate survey history courses are to satisfy graduation requirements, foster critical thinking skills, and provide options for potential major areas of study, there is a need to examine whether engaged learning strategies, such as oral history projects, can serve as a high-impact practice (HIP) in undergraduate history courses. With these premises in mind, the purpose of this action research study is to evaluate whether my five-step oral history research project could serve as a HIP in the undergraduate history survey courses I taught at a two-year college located in metropolitan region of the Southeast. Major findings indicate that oral history research projects can be considered a HIP when grounded in pedagogies that emphasize community-based field work that encourage students to consider diverse perspectives on topics and make real-world connections to content and experiential knowledge.

A restructured freshman history course: The evolution of a librarian’s role

In 2012 the history department at the University of Oklahoma (OU) received a mandate from the university’s president to overhaul its U.S. history survey courses. Part of the mandate was that only tenured or tenure-track faculty would teach the survey, and though the classes would be large (around 200 students), there would also be required discussion sessions led by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Writing and critical thinking were also to be incorporated. The department decided to fulfill this mandate by reconstructing the survey classes around primary source-based research and looked to other departments on campus, such as the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Expository Writing Program, and the University Libraries, for support. This article describes how the librarian for history has worked with numerous stakeholders to support this ambitious and constantly evolving project, which attempts to bring historical inquiry to the freshman level.

Integrating Peace History in the U.S. History Survey Course: Challenging Identity from the Outside In

Integrating Peace History in the U.S. History Survey Course: Challenging Identity from the Outside In

Gifts from Our Elders: African Artsand Visionary Art History

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

Jessica Riskin. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. xiii + 548 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. $40 (cloth).

Jessica Riskin. <i>The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick</i>. xiii + 548 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. $40 (cloth).

Teaching the Digital Natives

The goals of the Middle East history survey course are to introduce students to the major events in the history of the Middle East and to show the diversity of Middle Eastern civilization. In this paper, I discuss how instructors can use the Internet to enrich their teaching of the Middle East history survey course for students known as “digital natives.”

Enriching the History Survey Course with “Mini-Documentaries”

Enriching the History Survey Course with “Mini-Documentaries”

Promoting Postformal Thinking In A U.S. History Survey Course: A Problem-Based Approach

This article presents a problem-based learning (PBL) model for teaching a college U.S. history survey course (U.S. history since 1890) designed to promote postformal thinking skills and identify and explain thinking systems inherent in adult complex problem-solving. We also present the results of a study in which the outcomes of the PBL model were compared to the outcomes of the same course taught with traditional lecture and discussion. The PBL model was more effective in scaffolding learning so that students recognize and practice postformal thinking dynamics and in facilitating self-reported student perceptions of increased course engagement and content relevance. We offer recommendations for implementing PBL in social science survey courses.

Aging in World History by David G. Troyansky

Reviewed by: Aging in World History by David G. Troyansky David Lipton Aging in World History. By david g. troyansky. New York: Routledge, 2016. 152 pp. $155.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $34.95 (ebook). The elderly were apparently never the subject of a topically focused world history, until Aging in World History was published. As David Troyansky states, Western civilization has been the focus of earlier histories about old persons. This 152-page book provides an introduction to the history of aging, as well as a more general consideration of the causes and zeitgeists of historical eras in several regions of the world. Thus, Aging in World History may be useful for introductory survey courses in World History. Unlike some authors of popular books about aging in American history,3 Troyansky does not seek a single thematic explanation for all relevant human behavior. Instead, he offers objective presentations of the most important paradigms in each era and in each culture. Troyansky frequently explains how gender and class influenced the attitudes of younger generations toward the elderly. He offers many nuanced analyses that include gradients of both positive and negative attitudes for each culture in each era. Nevertheless, discussion of some generalized beliefs in African society fail to state the name of any specific ethnicity that articulated these ideas. Of the book’s thirteen chapters, only six are focused on the eras that predated the Enlightenment. Chapter 2 is an anecdotal globalized presentation of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras in Kenya, Botswana, Brazil, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, and the Arctic Region. Chapter 3 discusses the experiences of the aged in ancient outer Eurasian civilizations in Europe, the Middle East, India, and China. Chapter 4 offers similar geographical breadth in its treatment of the medieval and Renaissance eras. This chapter includes Korea and Japan, but it omits the Indian subcontinent. Chapter 5 describes varying western European attitudes toward the elderly during the Reformation and the scientific revolution, as well as pensions and segregation for the elderly. In subsequent chapters, global coverage is gradually resumed, organized by the chronology of European civilization’s colonial expansion and cultural diffusion from the 1500s through the present time. More pages are used for shorter intervals as the author approaches the present time. The concluding chapter considers theories about the future. [End Page 699] In the second half of the book, Troyansky includes anecdotal discussions about encounters between Western European and non-Western civilizations. One important theme is the diffusion of the concept of social welfare from Western Europe to the United States and to other nations throughout the world. However, this focus on diffusion might deemphasize creativity and independent agency by non-European civilizations during their colonial subjugation by European states. One particular strength of Aging in World History is its consideration of the elderly in underrepresented groups in the United States, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and women. Another strength is a crossdisciplinary global consideration of relevant issues in anthropology, sociology, economics, gerontology, political science, and religious studies. This integration may provide a model for research and composition in other subdisciplines of world history. The quality of presentation is also enhanced by the inclusion of frequent excerpts from original sources, including those written by elderly persons who described their own sociocultural experiences. Successor works might offer greater equality of coverage by including a broad range of materials produced by dominant and subaltern cultures throughout the world at each era in their respective history. Within outer Eurasia, coverage might be expanded for Southeast Asia. There also might be consideration of Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism, as well as the ancient Phoenician civilization. Likewise for pre-twen-tieth-century inner Eurasia, as well as sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere including pre-Aztec Mesoamerican civilizations. The impressive extent of the author’s research is apparent from the relatively long annotated bibliographies for this relatively short book. These bibliographies might be more useful for introductory level students, if only one citation were included in each paragraph, and if the bibliographical citations were always alphabetically sorted by using the authors’ surnames. Despite its shortcomings, Aging in World History is an important volume in that...

Teaching Historical Analysis through Creative Writing Assignments

Incorporating creative writing exercises in history courses can heighten students' critical reading and analytical skills in an active learning model. We identify and define two types of possible assignments that use model texts as their locus: centripetal, which focuses on specific context and disciplinary terms, and centrifugal, which address paradigms in human experience. Imitative assignments that include emphasis on form or structure provide a clear framework for assessment. We provide models for both types of assignments in history survey courses, including our reflections on final analysis of the projects, means of assessing them, and qualitative evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach.

Flipping the History Classroom with an Embedded Writing Consultant: Synthesizing Inverted and WAC Paradigms in a University History Survey Course

“Flipping” the Classroom techniques and the use of Embedded Writing Consultants (EWC) in institutions of higher education have been the subject of scholarly research in recent years. However, it appears that no studies have examined the simultaneous use of both “tools” in an introductory History course at the university level. This essay examines the instructor's efforts to concurrently implement Flipping strategies and EWC assistance in a single course and student perceptions of these tools. The data used to analyze this process may assist other instructors who are considering or already using Flipping techniques or EWCs in their courses.

Where Visual and Information Literacies Meet: Redesigning Research Skills Teaching and Assessment for Large Art History Survey Courses

AbstractArt librarians who are responsible for information-literacy instruction programs face many of the same challenges librarians from other disciplines face, such as limited staffing to deal with increased requests for course-related library instruction, teaching large groups of students, and the assessment of instruction sessions. As subject specialists, art librarians are well positioned to collaborate with faculty in the design of research-based assignments that connect visual literacy to information literacy. This article explores how the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Sloane Art Library took on these challenges and in the process improved its instructional program, increased assessment of student learning, and collaborated with faculty to transition from optional “library worksheets” to graded library-based research assignments.

Teaching Central Eurasia in Undergraduate Survey Courses: Problems and Strategies

Recent scholarship has challenged narratives of Central Eurasia’s relationships with its neighbors in East Asia, South Asia, and Southwest Asia. This scholarship explains the trade networks that are commonly called the “Silk Routes” as the foreign trade component of a complex and dynamic Central Eurasian economy. Scholarship of Central Eurasia also challenges long-standing narratives of “needy” or “predatory” nomads that militarily overwhelm sedentary empires. This article discusses the importance of incorporating such ideas into world history and Asian history survey courses, which are often taught by non-specialists who have only encountered Central Eurasia in their respective fields as a periphery. Correcting misconceptions about Central Eurasia’s relationship with its neighbors also provides opportunities for students to think critically about historical sources and move past stereotypes of “barbarian” and “civilization.”