I had a brief moment of panic yesterday when I realized how few weeks of the summer were left. I’m teaching a new course this fall – Race, Sex, and Empire: North America before 1750 – and I’ve spent almost all summer immersed in wonderful new literature on that subject. But yesterday I couldn’t read another page, I was so mentally occupied by the question of how to turn the things I was reading into active learning opportunities for my…
Americans have a long-standing habit of ignoring the needs of the poor, writes Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The Untold 400-Year History of Class in America. Instead, cultural commentators and politicians alike have noticed the poor only when they could score some political or cultural point by doing so, blaming the poor for their poverty, for lacking education, and for facing health crises that passed most other Americans by. Isenberg is meticulous in demonstrating how pervasive and ingrained the habit…
Welcome to my blog, a place for my musings about life as a professor at a small liberal arts college. Expect lots of posts about teaching, about the books I’m reading, and about my research.