Teaching the history and culture of early America to undergraduates is challenging on many fronts. Students' familiarity with the best-known documents of the Revolutionary period can breed either contempt or a reverential awe indistinguishable from ignorance and boredom. The lesser-known material from earlier years presents formidable conceptual obstacles and seldom...

History is a field of study filled with bias, ambiguity and complexity. Analyzing historical documents and other artifacts is the historian's primary occupation. For students of history and related fields, working with primary materials is recognized as an important way to develop critical thinking skills, in general, and historical thinking...

Text-searchable historical resources provide students in African American studies classes with new techniques and opportunities to explore black-authored writings. Most early black Anglophone authors (1760 to 1860) wrote in a complex, allusive style, referring commonly to the King James Bible and contemporary Protestant sermons and less commonly, but still in...

I love putting history on trial in my undergraduate courses. These students still typically think of history as finding, identifying or uncovering a set of hard facts, but, as Hayden White reminds us, history has a subjective dimension—historians construct claims, create narratives, interpret facts, build cases, possess agendas, have pre-dispositions...

You don't have to be a retired CIA operative, like the one Robert DeNiro portrayed in the blockbuster hit "Meet the Parents," to realize that students need a lot of help when it comes to selecting resources for their research papers and projects. Despite the success of my library's instructional...