HIST 111 History of the U.S. since 1877: The U.S. history survey course is one that I regularly teach and thoroughly enjoy. My teaching focuses on developing students’ historical habits of mind, writing, and ability to analyze primary sources. I use The American Yawp, collectively written open textbook for U.S. History. And I extensively use freely available digital primary sources and materials, including History Matters, leading digital history projects, and Library of Congress American Memory.
HIST 341: American Constitutional History: This advanced course for undergraduates is my favorite because every single class has deep relevance to our world today. In 1776 Americans proclaimed a set of self-evident truths: that all people are created equal and that they have unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This advanced course explores the formation and development of a government designed “to secure these rights” — the United States Constitution — and how Americans have interpreted the Constitution from 1787 to today.
HIST364: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery: This course grows out of my current research on slavery, the law, and early Washington, D.C. petitions for freedom. It is a general survey and lecture course at the upper level, covering the development of slavery in the United States.
HIST 450: Slavery, Freedom, and American Law: This seminar investigates a central paradox in American history–how the rise of liberty and equality in American law was accompanied by the rise of slavery in American law. This course is a capstone seminar in the Department of History and students write 20-25 page (or longer) research papers.
HIST 365 History of the U.S. South: This course (also taught in summer session format) is one of my favorites. I extensively use Southern Spaces (Emory University), and digital history projects developed at the Virginia Center for Digital History at UVA.
HIST 946 Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar in Digital Humanities: This course is part of our new Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities program. The course is a foundational readings seminar in Digital Humanities for advanced graduate students. It was developed in consultation with my colleagues: Stephen Ramsay, Amanda Gailey, Ken Price, Douglas Seefeldt, Andy Jewell, and Brett Barney. One of the key pedagogical innovations in this course is to engage students early in the semester in an intensive digital design and building project as a frame of reference for the readings and discussion to follow.
HIST 970 Graduate Seminar in Digital History This course is a research seminar in digital history aimed at providing advanced graduate students with the necessary skills to build a digital history project based on their dissertation research.
HIST 445/845 Civil War and Reconstruction: This is an upper-division seminar for history majors and advanced history students. We read new scholarship on the Civil War and we extensively use digital history projects to analyze and understand the conflict, including The Valley of the Shadow, Visualizing Emancipation, the digitized Civil War newspapers collections.