Author: Nate Noorlander

Parent Question: “Will this course make my child proud of her country?”

We regularly get questions about the slant of our history courses; these questions often boil down to a similar fundamental concern: How far have our courses been captured by one side or the other in the American culture wars? Do we have a partisan approach that unjustly celebrates, or, conversely, unjustly denigrates the “American story”?

Is History a Waste of Time?

If you’ve been to one of our in-person or online sessions on teaching history, you may have heard us talk about the value of knowing the past for understanding and making informed judgments about the present. While this prerequisite is not new, and our articulation of it is not original, it is a prerequisite that is worth emphasizing—and doing so often.

Should history teach information or skills?

In college I had a history teacher who didn’t teach us history. Instead he gave us two texts—A Patriot’s History by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, and A People’s History by Howard Zinn—and assigned us to read excerpts on overlapping time periods from both. That was our education in the “content” side of American history, or the “who, what, where, when, and how” of the story.

On Being Skeptical

History is a good place to learn how to be skeptical in a good way. The distinction between “good” skepticism and other kinds of skepticism comes out in the following lines from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Ancient Skepticism”: Suspension is a core element of skepticism: the skeptic suspends judgment. However, if this […]

Whose side is The Nomadic Professor on?

*NB: Access the student guide using the link after the article. In George Orwell’s 1984, the hero, Winston Smith, gets tortured and indoctrinated by a member of the Inner Party. Here’s an excerpt from that scene (name of Inner Party member replaced with “IPM” to avoid spoilers!): “There is a party slogan dealing with the […]