Educators in history must find new and creative ways to attract students to programs, and horror cinema can provide a unique opportunity to bring social and racial justice issues into the classroom and engage with critical social theory. This article describes how the author created a course at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock--called…

This article describes the account of a "European Queens" course as an example of the intellectual growth available to both the professor and the student when an instructor uses engaged, responsive teaching to address apparently incommensurable understandings of a given topic. The author outlines how the study of premodern queens relates…

Empire and its related themes of conquest, colonization, decolonization, and cultural imperialism loom large in the teaching of any history course on European, African, Asian, or Latin American history. "How to Hide an Empire" by Daniel Immerwahr argues that the image (North) Americans have of their nation is that of what scholar…

Historians sometimes view teaching and community engagement as peripheral to research. Self-reflection on the design of assignments, pedagogy techniques, and students' work aids teachers as they refine their teaching, and it can also inform research questions and methods. Teaching, research, and community engagement do not have to be separate…

Contextualization involves weaving together an interpretation of a document that situates it within its historical context. This study explores how undergraduate students approached the complex cognitive task of contextualizing historical documents. As part of their professional preparation to teach secondary social studies, undergraduate teacher…

This article aims to assess how historical thinking, as defined in the research literature and practiced in schools, can be accessed by analyzing physical spaces. Since the 1990s, "historical thinking" has typically been associated with doing the work that historians do, meaning analyzing documents, weighing evidence, and making…

This article details an experiment with flipped/hybrid courses that was guided by questioning how history units across the nation's colleges and universities can curb enrollment decline, improve student experiences, and impart to students the value of studying history and why it should remain an essential part of college curricula. A team of…

This study explores what affordances and challenges teacher candidates experience and consider pedagogically in an individual virtual reality (VR) history experience versus a collective VR history experience and what potential they see in using VR technology in their future history teaching. Study participants were teacher candidates enrolled in a…

Since the release of ChatGPT, concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities and impact on education at all levels have been voiced by instructors in disciplines ranging from computer science to composition to history. This article explores two specific examples from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) that provide…

A standard learning outcome for students in humanities courses, from middle school into higher education, is to craft clear, specific arguments based on evidence. A common assignment to develop and assess this learning outcome is the take-home essay. Generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grammarly, are quickly able to generate such…

Experimental archaeology is a vibrant and fascinating field that offers great opportunities for hands-on student learning in history. Although it is typically taught by archaeologists and anthropologists, it is certainly accessible and easily adapted to history courses. In addition to teaching "Introduction to Experimental Archaeology"…

College expansion throughout the twentieth century was accompanied by the growth of a profession centered on supporting student learning and development. Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs multiplied across the United States to train these professionals with a focus on administration, leadership, and student affairs. As…

This paper is based on the first two iterations of the Twitter reenactment in "History 450: The Growth of Metropolitan Milwaukee," taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) in Fall 2020 and 2021. According to the authors, they did not come up with the Twitter reenactment as a pedagogical tool on their own. This paper…

In February 2020, the author was offered a position as a postdoctoral teaching fellow at a large land-grant college in the American West. A couple weeks later, COVID-19 hit in full force. As the newly hired postdoctoral teaching fellow, the author's department chair tasked the author with a challenging assignment -- to develop an asynchronous…

In the early modern era, Spanish missionaries, cosmographers, chroniclers, and physicians wrote major studies on botany, ethnography, navigation, Indigenous languages, war, and history, aided by capable, though often reluctant, Indigenous informants. They penned this rich body of scholarship using iron gall ink -- a mixture of tannins, sulfates,…