I find myself, day to day, thinking harder about the purpose of teaching during an age of social tumult. Having been fortunate enough to teach two different courses on the American South at the University of South Carolina in the last year—Contemporary South for Southern Studies and now the New South for History—I’ve had to confront these pedagogical issues time and again. In particular, these questions of how to teach history during the era of Black Lives Matter relate to broader questions of the purpose and “utility” of teaching and learning history. At the same time, public discourse about American Read more