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Accessibility and the Post-Pandemic Conference
It’s July, which means that academic conferences are in full swing—and for the first time in three years, largely happening as in-person events. My home organization, SHEAR, meets this weekend in New Orleans. I won’t be there. In my case, it’s a combination of the expense of getting and staying there combined with anxiety about…
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My Fresh Take on the Declaration
Last year, the Declaration Resources Project at Harvard published a feature with twenty-four historians re-reading the Dunlap broadside edition of the Declaration of Independence and then offering brief remarks in their experience. It makes for compelling reading, as scholars who have read and taught the Declaration sometimes for decades come at the document with new…
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Protected: BFWorld: Defining the American Revolution
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Novelty and Historical Arguments
Every writer has something that trips them up. Here I discuss my Achilles heel: trying to narrate historical events that are necessary to my story but don’t offer much new in the way of argument.
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This is just like that time when…
A response to the recent New York Times op-ed decrying the use of historical analogies.
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Fall 2017 Book Orders
Below are the required texts for my courses for the upcoming semester. For students, please note that these texts will be on reserve at Whittemore Library, and that I do not permit the use of electronic editions. HIST 120 American Lives Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little…
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HSTA 306: Historiography of a Field
As part of our discussions this semester, we have spent significant time discussing the evolution of the field of the history of the early American republic. Over time in every field, interests shift as historians begin to ask new questions, revisit old ones, open up new archival sources for study, and so on. For historians…
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HSTA 306: Response to Baptist
For historians, a book review is an opportunity both to assess the quality of a historical work and to place the author’s argument in conversation with other scholarship. At its best, therefore, a quality review synthesizes the arguments of the historian, assesses the quality of the research, and comprehends the historiographic significance of the work. It is…