(no subject)
Aug. 21st, 2006 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupURI asked me to switch my fall course from American Culture, which I've done so often -- six or seven times -- that it really needs hardly any prep on my end, to the "capstone" course, a yearlong seminar and thesis writing program for history majors. As the name implies, the latter should be the height of the department's coursework, and as such, it's nice to be asked to do it. And I'm ready for just a little bit of a change; I enjoy the cultural history, but as shtick it's becominga a little repetitive.
This really isn't the year to be taking on new challenges, but myself and others talked me into it. In the same vein, I decided to make the focus of the course 1910 to 1940, a period that I have taught a great deal but didn't really study in the same depth as the Gilded Age-Progressive Era stuff that my diss. was on. This course needs a bunch of up-to-date scholarly articles laying out, ferinstance, debates over whether the New Deal was ultimately conservative or progressive.
It is much easier to teach these chestnuts with primary sources than with scholarly articles, but this group needs something deeper, so I have spent the last week scrambling through my files, looking through JAH and AHR issues (one advantage of my job is that they pay for my subscriptions) and generally coming to grips with how Out Of It I am when it comes to the period and my supposed field.
As part of the same project I decided to disinter my grad school papers and sort them into neat little manila folders so that I can find Rodgers, D., "In Search of Progressivism" without shoveling through the back of a filing cabinet. I am amazed at the amount of stuff I once read and, allegedly, understood well (or so said my comp examiners). There are literally hundreds of articles in there, many only dimly recognizable. That's what ten years will do for you.
This really isn't the year to be taking on new challenges, but myself and others talked me into it. In the same vein, I decided to make the focus of the course 1910 to 1940, a period that I have taught a great deal but didn't really study in the same depth as the Gilded Age-Progressive Era stuff that my diss. was on. This course needs a bunch of up-to-date scholarly articles laying out, ferinstance, debates over whether the New Deal was ultimately conservative or progressive.
It is much easier to teach these chestnuts with primary sources than with scholarly articles, but this group needs something deeper, so I have spent the last week scrambling through my files, looking through JAH and AHR issues (one advantage of my job is that they pay for my subscriptions) and generally coming to grips with how Out Of It I am when it comes to the period and my supposed field.
As part of the same project I decided to disinter my grad school papers and sort them into neat little manila folders so that I can find Rodgers, D., "In Search of Progressivism" without shoveling through the back of a filing cabinet. I am amazed at the amount of stuff I once read and, allegedly, understood well (or so said my comp examiners). There are literally hundreds of articles in there, many only dimly recognizable. That's what ten years will do for you.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:37 pm (UTC)