I have taught a wide variety of courses on early America, media history, and historical methods. Here I am sharing syllabi, assignments, and ideas for teachers. Everything below is free to borrow, adapt, and assign.
If you’re adapting something here for your own students and want to talk it through, write to me. I’m glad to help if I can.
Taughtcourses & syllabi
The Long Nineteenth Century, 1800–1917
Indiana University–Southeast. Online graduate course primarily for dual-enrollment high school teachers, from the history of capitalism to emancipation to Native American experience. Taught ten sections over six years.
American History I
Indiana University–Bloomington. Early America through the intersection of Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism, and emerging notions of freedom. Syllabus
The American Revolution
Smith College. A familiar event read from the perspective of women, enslaved people, and non-elites, set in an Atlantic and imperial context. Syllabus
The Historian’s Craft
Smith College. Historiography, history as a discipline, and historical method. Co-taught with Jeff Ahlman.
Fake News in American History
Smith College. Information literacy, media history, and the historical roots of present-day media dysfunction. Syllabus · earlier version
Vast Early America
Smith College. North America to 1800, on the intertwined histories of slavery and settler colonialism in continental, Atlantic, and global frame. Syllabus
American Scandal, 1700–present
Smith College. Media, ethics, race, gender, and sexuality across American history. Students produced a semester-long podcast, Forgotten Scandals. Syllabus
Doing Digital History
Smith College. The public, collaborative, computational, and interpretive dimensions of digital history, built around a local project on antislavery in Northampton, Massachusetts. Syllabus
Scandal in the Early United States
Indiana State University. Scandal in the early republic as a window onto gender, sexuality, and media. Syllabus
The Civil War
Indiana State University. Cultural, political, and social history of the war, with attention to causation, memory, trauma, and sensory experience. Syllabus
Facts, Hoaxes, and Fake News
Indiana University, Collins Honors College. Interdisciplinary seminar on information literacy, media history, and the genres of bullshit. Syllabus
Revolutionary America
Indiana University. Social, cultural, and political worlds of the Revolution, with attention to geography, memory, and ordinary people. Ratification debate exercise
United States History Since 1877
Purdue University–Northwest. Online summer survey.
Assignedteachable primary sources
Sources I’ve taught with, each with an introduction, the text, and notes on what students tend to find in it.
A Mi’kmaq Man Questions French Superiority
From Chrestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia (Paris, 1691). Rich, and surprisingly funny.
Oliver Parker’s Recipe for Revolution
Built for students constructing a multi-causal interpretation of the Revolution rather than settling on one cause.
Handsome Lake, “How America Was Discovered”
The Seneca prophet’s account. One of the most interesting and most difficult sources I’ve taught.
Alexander Hamilton, A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress
Pairs with Seabury below as a debate exercise.
Samuel Seabury, Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress
The loyalist case, in the pamphlet Hamilton was answering.
Farmington, Connecticut Resolves on the Intolerable Acts
A short town resolve, good for a single class meeting.
Builtclassroom activities
Step-by-step digital history exercises for undergraduates with no prior technical experience. Both use data from my own research, so students work with real material rather than a toy set.
Making simple network graphs with Palladio
Students map late eighteenth-century North American newspapers’ citations to papers outside North America, aggregated by city and weighted by frequency. Data included.
Topic modeling the State of the Union with MALLET
A short guide adapted from The Programming Historian, with a prepared corpus. Developed for Doing Digital History.
On Teaching
Clearing the Graveyard: Public Writing in and Out of the History Classroom
Journal of American History, textbooks and teaching section