Teaching the Civil War and Reconstruction
Thoughts on new adventures in teaching
Next semester I’m teaching the Civil War and Reconstruction course for the first time. I’ll be team-teaching with Chris Mackowski of the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University, but for our purposes his role with the Emerging Civil War might be more important. The Emerging Civil War has a variety of interesting public history projects about the Civil War, including a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel and a series of publicans. This is the foundation for an interesting course.
Being a historian of the United States I can hardly say that I’ve never taught the period before. Depending on how the United States surveys are organized, the Civil War and Reconstruction appears at the end of or the beginning of the class. The surveys are a staple of the history curriculum so you will find a number of textbooks organized this way, dividing the nation’s history at its point of greatest conflict. This organization can be a mixed blessing from a pedagogical perspective. For the first half of the survey the period can be rushed because of the inevitability of falling behind the syllabus. Too many questions about the War of 1812 and the Civil War is shortchanged (okay, students don’t usually ask about the War of 1812 but you get the point). If it is the second half of the survey, the period can come across as foreshadowing before we really settle into the term. The Civil War and Reconstruction can be something of a prequel to the meat of the class and making a satisfying prequel is difficult.
This is not the first time I’ve team-taught about the Civil War.
For the past (almost) decade the Introduction to Public History class has focused on the Civil War to take advantage of a great Civil War collection in the University Archives at St. Bonaventure University. I’ve been working closely with archivist Dennis Frank in designing and teaching the class. This semester Rachael Schultz has joined the team teaching the class. The Dunkelman and Winey Collection features the papers of soldiers from Western New York, specifically the 154th NYVI regiment. The New York 154th is also featured in Chris Mackowski, Kristopher White, and Daniel Davis’s book Fight Like the Devil: The First Day of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863, which is one of the books students are reading in the class.
I know it has been almost a decade because Google Photos recently served up “memories” from 9 years ago in the form of pictures I took of that first class working in the collection. We overhauled the Introduction to Public History class in an attempt to bring it more in line with what public historians do. To that end, we had the students build a board game based on research in the collection. In the process, we hoped they would learn something about archival research, design, and project management - and have some fun in the process.
So while I’m not new to either team-teaching or the content of the Civil War and Reconstruction, it always interesting to embark on the planning process from a fresh perspective. The Civil War and Reconstruction class promises to be as enjoyable a teaching experience as the public history class has been.