Hello, colleagues, and get ready to make history! Inspired by S-USIH tradition and looking toward the future of the profession, we’re delighted to host our first-ever pre-conference workshop on “Teaching Intellectual History,” to be held Thursday, 5 Nov. 2020, 9am-4pm, Back Bay Sheraton, to kick off #USIH2020. We have a terrific lineup of workshop leaders on our Local Arrangements Committee. We’ll start with a reading group session in the morning, followed by lunch, and then dive into breakout sessions exploring material culture, approaches to the survey, and the pedagogy of using immersive role-playing games in the classroom.
Online registration opens in summer 2020, and the workshop will be FREE to graduate students. Browse below for a sneak preview of what our workshop leaders have planned, and send your queries to [email protected]. For further details on our conference CFP, please go here. See you all in Boston for “REVOLUTION & REFORM”!
Andrew Hartman: Every year, several of us S-USIH regulars hold an informal book group on the day the conference begins. Those of us who are regular attendees of this book group attest that it is one of the highlights of our annual conference experience. I inaugurated the group at the 2014 conference in Indianapolis, modeled after the Intellectual History Group (IHG) in the United Kingdom that holds a two-day gathering every January in Cambridge to discuss a book. I was lucky enough to attend the IHG meeting in 2014, during which we discussed Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I wrote up my thoughts on the IHG meeting and the text at the USIH Blog, here and here. The list of books we have read thus far (we missed the 2016 Stanford conference) is below:
2014 (Indy): Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History
2015 (DC): Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
2017 (Dallas): Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
2018 (Chicago): Raymond Williams, Culture and Society
2019 (NYC): WEB DU Bois, Black Reconstruction
As we currently decide what book to read this year, we are very excited that Sara Georgini, the Conference Chair for the 2020 conference to be held in Boston, has invited us to join the “preconference,” which will offer an exciting program on Thursday, November 5, focused on the teaching of intellectual history. This means that anyone can sign up to join our book group this year. We tend to discuss the book for two hours in the morning, break for a leisurely lunch, and then discuss the book for two more hours in the afternoon. We do not set rules or guidelines, and our discussions are relaxed and wide ranging. Please join us. We are a welcoming bunch! If you have any questions, or would like to be added to the book group email list, send me a message at [email protected]. See you in Boston!
Benjamin Alpers: Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is an innovative pedagogy that teaches history through roleplaying games. This workshop will introduce participants to RTTP with an emphasis on its potential for teaching intellectual history. One of the tacit premises of RTTP is that ideas are essential to understanding the past. Whether playing delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, members of the Cherokee National Council in 1837, participants in the Yalta Conference of 1945, or any of the other available roles that Reacting games ask students to embody, the primary task of playing a Reacting game tends to be understanding the ideas that one’s character held and employing them in speeches and papers. All Reacting games thus foreground the role of ideas in the past. And some are particularly focused on intellectual history.
Whitney Nell Stewart: At its most basic, material culture is the study of culture through the material world. Material culturists look to the objects that people make, consume, and discard to better understand the concepts, convictions, and customs of individuals, communities, and societies. Key to this endeavor is the history of ideas; within the artifacts that individuals leave behind, we can interpret much about what a person thought and what their society prescribed and idealized. At once the subject of study (the objects) and the way for studying (the methodology for analyzing and interpreting artifacts), material culture provides us with an opportunity to go beyond the written word as we study the history of ideas. For a generation that everyday curates their world through Instagram and other social media outlets, objects may be more inviting primary sources than the barely legible scrawl of an 18th-century diary or the didactic babble of a 19th-century minister (no shade thrown on textual sources, of course). Within the Material Culture Workshop Session, we will discuss how to bring objects and material culture methodology into the classroom. In particular, we will practice “doing” material culture by together analyzing and interpreting artifacts from New England.
Benjamin Wright: The vast majority of our students only encounter the discipline of history through our broad survey courses. How do we integrate our subdiscipline of intellectual history in U.S. history survey courses? This roundtable ranges across the full chronology of United States history with an eye toward practical pedagogy designed for first-year undergraduate students. Our goal is to equip instructors with the topics, sources, and methods needed to teach intellectual history in U.S. history surveys. Join us as we seek practical ways to explore key topics in intellectual history, balance teaching both content and method, and foster the pursuit of lifelong learning for all of our students, regardless of their academic and professional ambitions.
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