History instructors typically keep up on the scholarly literature in their own areas of specialization, but rarely have the time to read widely across the entire sweep of U.S. history. Nonetheless, history educators attempt to cover it all (or at least a lot of it) in undergraduate courses. How do we get from the monographic, specialized research to the undergraduate-level “big picture”?
The “Teaching the JAH” project attempts to bridge this gap by providing online “teaching packages” for selected JAH articles to demonstrate how the featured article might be used in teaching the U.S. survey course.
Each package includes a targeted article, brief comments from the article’s author, and a set of annotated primary-source materials intended for classroom use. Depending on the article, these source materials may include illustrations, photographs, video clips, audio clips, and excerpts from other primary historical texts. The packages also include links to other history-related Web sites that hold additional relevant materials.
The Indiana University Ameritech Fellowship Program provided the initial funding for the first four installments of Teaching the JAH (March 2001–September 2002).
Current Installment
“When Women Do Military Duty”: The Civil War’s Impact on Woman Suffrage
Past Installments
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture during the Removal Era
The Power of the Ecotone: Bison, Slavery, and the Rise and Fall of the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia
The six segments in this installment are meant to introduce students to the complex story of the Illinois and their grand village, to reveal the topographical and environmental details of the place the Illinois inhabited, and to help students understand the group’s relationship to the land and evaluate cultural encounters. The lessons can also be…
Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in Fin-de-Siècle Chicago
In the nineteenth century, women were largely excluded from public drinking establishments, but this changed in the late 1800s with the rise of urban consumerism. As more women ventured into city centers for leisure and shopping, entrepreneurs capitalized on this trend by establishing dining spaces tailored to female customers, allowing respectable women to indulge in…
