Category: Old
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Maps Teaching History
I love maps. I love writing about them. I love rescuing them. I love reading about them on the internet. I love to look at them hanging on walls. I love to touch them, to trace imagined journeys by fingertip — sliding a digit over the Alps to Innsbruck, along the high passes of the Pamirs…
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Revisionist Hunnic History
In the same vein as my previous post on New World Demographics, I would also like to share another controversial historical thesis. This is also the product of my teaching, but more recently from teaching two sections of Military History to 1789 and Introduction to European History, both of which cover (however briefly) the Hunnic…
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Golden Age Piracy Reconsidered
The crux of this post will be to introduce a new topic for this blog; the History of Pirates, Bandits, and Brigands. As a professor of world history, I have found success in teaching a survey course of such outsiders and supposedly unethical persons throughout history, from the Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age to…
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Beyond Black & White, Part II: Language as Means to Effective Solidarity
(By Teresa) I hope that this addendum will clarify and expand the ideas I presented in my previous blogpost. My essential thesis in the former post was we are not born knowing racial categories–these have been dictated to us by historical circumstance and cultural convention–and so we can challenge these categorizations, especially with regards to…
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Beyond Black & White
A few musings that I probably do not have the authority to make… and yet, perhaps I can offer a minuscule contribution to a collaborative, inclusive worldview. (By Teresa) My five-year-old daughter does not know what “black” or “white” means. At least, not with respect to race. When describing a new friend at school, Jansamal sometimes…
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Reflections on Mercy
By Teresa On November 20, 2016, Catholics celebrated the close of the recent Jubilee Year of Mercy. Based on the Jewish tradition of jubilee years in which debts were forgiven, prisoners freed, and fields left fallow (see Leviticus 25), this past year has sought to make manifest God’s love and mercy in our suffering world. As Pope Francis…
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Social Change, not Dehumanization
By Teresa This post is a reflection on how we often inadvertently dehumanize others as we seek to portray our world through language, especially when discussing divisive issues. Instead of contributing to this dehumanization, however, we can conscientiously use language and emotion as a recourse against violence. Except in perhaps the most extreme situations (if…
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A reflection on the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows of Mary
By Teresa The following thoughts are personal, devotional reflections that arose during prayer and meditation. Perhaps they may be useful to others; I share my reflections for this purpose, and to promote the chaplet as a powerful tool to strengthen us in our spiritual journey. When Mary appeared in Kibeho, Rwanda, she urged her devotees…
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Teaching with (not against) Wikipedia
Introduction I want to talk about teaching history using Wikipedia, but not in the way I believe the average person would expect (and worry about). First I should explain the context in which I developed this new project, this new pedagogical exercise. My professional career teaching outside of my graduate institution only began in the…
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The Genetics of Ethnicity
Following an introduction to the idea that we actually have no genetic relationship with many of our direct ancestors, we will consider what this means for the promise from genetic-testing companies of finding your “ethnic heritage.” Imagine that you are on a theater stage, like the one pictured. You are standing in a theater modeled…