Teaching the JAH

Joanne Meyerowitz

Those of us who teach college-level history often lament a common problem: We keep up on the scholarly literature in our own areas of specialization, but we rarely have the time to read widely across the entire sweep of U.S. history. Nonetheless, we attempt to cover it all (or at least a lot of it) in our undergraduate survey courses. How do we get from the monographic, specialized research to the undergraduate-level 'big picture'? In March 2001, the Journal of American History will launch a new project, 'Teaching the JAH,' that uses online tools to bridge the gap between the latest scholarly research in U.S. history and the practice of classroom teaching.

With a grant from the Indiana University Ameritech Fellows Program, the project will create online 'teaching packages' that demonstrate how new JAH articles might be used in teaching the U.S. history survey course. Each package will include a targeted article, brief comments from the article's author, and a set of annotated documents intended for classroom use. Depending on the targeted articles, the document sets might include illustrations, photographs, video clips, audio clips, and excerpts from other primary historical texts. The packages will also include links to other history-related web sites that hold additional relevant materials. The grant provides the funds for four such packages, produced biannually over the next two years.

The packages, we hope, will provide the commentary and primary source materials needed to introduce new research and new themes into U.S. history survey courses. The online documents can be used directly in classes equipped with computers and projectors or downloaded and converted into handouts and overhead projection transparencies for less well-equipped classrooms. Or professors can send their students directly to our web site as part of out-of-class assignments.

Next month, our first online teaching package will feature Constance Areson Clark's forthcoming article, 'Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, the Public and the Scopes Trial Debate.' In the U.S. history survey course, the Scopes trial is routinely taught to illustrate the cultural battleground of the 1920s, the emerging conflicts between religion and science and between an urban, cosmopolitan, secular vision and a rural, traditional, religious mindset. Clark's article introduces the visual images of evolution used by scientists in the early twentieth century. It complicates the usual history of evolution by investigating the assumptions scientists incorporated into their diagrams, illustrations, and exhibits. The teaching package will invite professors to take a detour into the history of science during their lectures on the Scopes trial.

'Teaching the JAH' will appear, free to the public, on the Journal's website at http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/.