Cate Denial

In a powerful column on the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog last week, Brandon R. Byrd drew attention to the racial baggage carried by the idea of objectivity within the historical profession.  Historically, objectivity has, Byrd argues, been the province of whiteness.  Black claims to truth-telling have always been judged suspect by whites, a past (and present) that renders professional claims to objectivity deeply problematic.  In the present moment in which we teach, we need anything but objectivity, Byrd…

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In my lower-level classes, many of my students have little idea what it means to be a practicing historian.  Their experience of history has been to read a dry textbook, believing that the god of history has decanted facts onto the page, and to take a lot of quizzes about specific people and events.  This is contrary to everything I want them to get out of a history course – I want them to be historians for the duration of…

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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…

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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…

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