With the recent roll-out of the complete American History series by The Nomadic Professor (see video introduction below), we’ve pulled the NP himself aside to pry into his thoughts and provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the course creation process. Stay tuned for more Q&A-style posts that peek into our other courses, coming soon. The NP, though currently hard at work on the upcoming World History series, was kind enough to regale us with tales from the road while explaining what makes this American History course so special—read on!
And if you happen to have further questions, comments or suggestions for the NP, please do get in touch!
First of all, congratulations on the completion of the full four-part course on American History! After years of work and travel, taking to you to 48 states, how does it feel to have reached this milestone? Time to take a rest?
It’s been a long journey (rather, a set of long journeys), and I’m a little worn out! But there’s no rest: I’ll be doing three coast-to-coast, cross-America road trips over the next ten months to film for sessions still lacking an on-location lecture (I think currently about one out of four sessions need one). After that, it’s off to the Philippines, Pakistan, Turkey, and several European locations to film for our two-course World History series, which we’re already well into.
You almost disappeared into quicksand while filming in the Dakotas (a lecture on the Arikara War), but kept filming. Can you tell us what happened?
I was filming on the banks of the “Big Muddy” on a Lakota reservation (what had once been the site of an Arikara village, before the Lakota and U.S. forces more or less destroyed them), when suddenly I found myself quickly sinking and my legs stuck. There was a moment of panic, but for some reason I kept the camera rolling, grunts and all, and thankfully managed to wrest a foot out of the mud–my leg was caked in it–and use the leg flush with the ground as leverage to roll over and free myself. Since I was literally in the middle of telling the students that “history is muddy,” it actually worked perfectly!
True, well you handled it like a pro. Here’s the link to the lecture on the Arikara War (quicksand around the 18.30 mark). Any other close calls or nerve-racking episodes while filming?
The most nervous I’ve ever been filming was in China and in China’s western colonial holdings (Tibet and East Turkestan). I always had to be careful where I was filming, and cognizant of who could see and who could hear. Both Tibet and East Turkestan (“Xinjiang”) are so police- and military-heavy that gun-toting soldiers or guards might run into you at any moment. And since I was talking about actual history (as opposed to the CCP-approved version), out loud, it was always a risk. To a degree, I felt the same way in Cuba, especially around sites the government had sanctified (like Che’s mausoleum in Santa Clara). I had a couple of run-ins in Saudi Arabia that were pretty nerve-racking, actually–one in Medina, where a local Saudi did not approve of my presence (note: all of the non-Saudis–i.e. the majority of people–were very kind to me), and the other elsewhere in the Hijaz, where for about ten minutes I had to pretend to be a Pashtun from northern Pakistan (it worked!).
Of course, you’ve also traveled and filmed abroad for these courses, even basing in Cairo for some time. And with your global body of content, why did you choose to begin with a four-part course on American History?
The first official “Nomadic” journey was a three-month road trip across America, so it just sort of happened that way organically. We never intended to produce four U.S. history courses–just one–but there’s just so much great history we couldn’t help ourselves. (Or, at least, I couldn’t help myself–sorry, Nate.) It was a blast to create them, but I’m very happy to be focused now on the World History series, which in some ways is the best suited for a globetrotting “Nomadic Professor.” That said, the last eighty years or so of U.S. history is pretty global.
Student workbook covers for The Nomadic Professor’s American History series
Your on-location videos are certainly something to set The Nomadic Professor’s courses apart. Where/how did this unique approach first emerge?
When I started teaching at the college level, it quickly became apparent that many students struggled with the readings. Growing up with ubiquitous screens and social media and swipes seems to have conditioned a whole generation against anything but short-term concentration. This is a tragedy. How, then, to engage the YouTube generation? I figured one way was to create short lectures (7-20 minutes each), filmed on-location, then edit them for YouTube. That’s how it all started. In 2016, my dad planned an epic summer trip with me, my brothers, and brothers-in-law to Iceland and Nepal, so I brought along a little GoPro and filmed the first Nomadic Professor videos. These early ones aren’t my best (some are completely unusable due to wind or background noise!), but I like to think they’ve gotten better. The idea to build full-fledged courses came out of this initial effort. By that fall, I was on the road with my family filming all across America.
No small amount of curation is involved in wrapping up a survey course so broad, covering the full sweep of American History. Judging by some of the course titles (‘Monsters to Destroy,’ ‘A Great Consolidation’), a couple of themes you’ve highlighted as perhaps particularly important to understanding the American story are military exploits abroad and federal expansion at home. Can you tell us a bit about how you tried to balance particular focus with comprehensive coverage?
Any survey course (which is what these are) is going to have to pick and choose. I like to think we explore a very broad range of topics. But running through it all, we’ve chosen to especially concentrate on the growth of the U.S. state from its decentralized, federalist, Atlantic-coast-hugging, we-go-not-abroad-in-search-of-monsters-to-destroy beginnings to the centralized, nationalist, pan-continental, interventionist America of today. I’m fascinated by this transition. I also see it connecting to so many other phenomena in American history, from the Civil War and party politics to the frontier, the plight of the American Indian, central banking, and both world wars (to name a few). It’s a thread that seems to run through most, if not all, of American history, with great explanatory power.
Your courses effectively challenge students to consider a range of perspectives. Have you yourself experienced any shifts in your own perspective while creating this course?
Any time a historian is challenged to write two thousand original pages of survey history, he’s bound to be challenged. My understanding of Gilded-Age America shifted a bit while writing this course–in the direction of increased empathy for the people of the time (we tend to be quite judgemental about these guys today). The stark differences between the various American colonies struck me more powerfully this go-around, too; they really were a collection of nascent nations as opposed to a single nascent nation.
A Nomadic Professor mini-lecture at the Capitol, discussing the Webster-Hayne debate
The video content is far from the only thing that makes these courses unique. They also feature guided notes in each session and source-rich, document-based lessons by your colleague Nate Noorlander. Can you comment on how these complement the core course material?
The scaffolding that Nate has provided really makes the college-level course material I create accessible to a high-school-aged audience. There’s a lot of college-prep built into the scaffolding, too. His work makes what we produce transcend the “history course” category to something approaching a full humanities curriculum that uses history as the vehicle. Between the in-depth learning provided by the guided notes, the reinforcement provided by quiz feedback, the memorization and knowledge-organization help offered by the Structure exercise, the historical-methods and media literacy training offered by the document lessons, and the research-and-writing element also embedded in the document lessons–not to mention training in logic, rhetoric, and introductory instruction in American literature, among other things–the scaffolding combines with the historical content to create a uniquely rich opportunity for learning.
From your time on the road, what locations have particularly charmed or surprised you? Where would you most like to return?
I loved Georgia (as in, Caucasus Georgia, also known as Sakartvelo, though I also love the Peach State!). I’ll always love Tibet, though I’m not allowed to go back (I’ve now been kicked out twice). Highland Ecuador was incredible. There’s a special place in my heart for Japan. Actually, this is a really hard question. There aren’t many places I haven’t liked. One place I’ve been that I’d really love to go back to: Burma. Or Namibia. One place I haven’t been that I’d love to film in: Afghanistan. Or Iraq. Or Russia.
Over the last several years of building this course, you might say that you’ve had your hands full: juggling commitments to students and family with the sizable workload of long-term travel: planning routes, securing visas, researching locations – what’s been the most challenging part?
It’s definitely been a bit of a struggle trying to maintain an already-packed routine while also being on the road, with family, never quite knowing what the new day and new place will bring. There have been times when I’ve had to tell students I won’t be available for a short period of time–while on a three-day train ride across Kazakhstan, for example–which can be challenging. Making sure the kids have a good experience while realizing we aren’t traveling in the tourist sense–we have (home)school, work, etc., and might not see/do everything a tourist would expect to see/do–was often difficult. Coordinating with the colleges I teach for–including attending Zoom meetings when the Internet was less than reliable, as in the Guatemalan jungle or on a Black Sea freighter–could be an exercise in frustration, both for me and for my colleagues… And being on the move takes time–planning a route, booking a place that is affordable and also convenient, booking transportation, mapping out lecture sites, making concrete plans to visit them–but it had to be done, despite what already seemed like a maxed-out daily routine. Doing it all on a shoestring budget wasn’t easy, either!
How might your family answer the above question? How might they review the Nomadic experience thus far?
I think on the whole it’s been a positive experience, though they’ve all suffered from travel fatigue! It can be difficult being away from friends and family, though they are quick to make friends wherever we go. But rather than speak for them, I’ll defer to my wife: “Overall, it has given our family a love of people and places all over. Seeing how people are basically the same everywhere. I am grateful that my kids have the opportunity to know how to feel at home anywhere we go and to make friends with anyone. Sometimes it’s hard to be limited when it comes to feeding people things that they’ll enjoy, or to feel like we’re doing a good job celebrating holidays and birthdays. And now that two of the kids have moved out [for college/work], it’s harder to spend long periods away from them.” And from my son, Thomas: “The best part is probably getting to see the way people live all over the world, and getting this appreciation for my life. Either that, or getting to see some of the most beautiful places on earth. The most challenging part might be that it can sometimes be hard to feel like you don’t have roots down anywhere, but usually that feeling goes away not long after I realize that I now have friends and family all over the world.”
The Nomadic Professor in Sinai, filming a lecture on the Six Day War
In a world of AI and virtual reality, how would you characterize or explain the value of bringing on-location videos to the classroom anyway?
I guess I could film everything in a studio, using AI to generate fake backgrounds that look real. But it’s not the same. There’s something about knowing your professor has been there, done that, and is at the very least speaking based not only on credentials but also on some type of real experience in the real world at the actual place. As great as AI or VR gets, I’m not sure they will ever be a substitute for the real thing. The people that made history are mostly gone, but the settings of history are mostly still there, so we’re going to bring those settings–the real settings–to the students if we can.
Next up for The Nomadic Professor is to take on the world: World History goes live this September. What can you tell us about the progress of that course creation thus far?
It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve sort of divided the world into 16 regions, and then, between the two courses, I’ve divided the chronology into 20 time windows. We then work our way through each time window, one or two regions at a time. So this truly is a world history, as opposed (as is often the case in other world history programs) to a survey mostly of three or four areas with light treatment (if at all) of other areas. A lot of my on-location videos from around the world, filmed over the last eight years, have made it into the courses, too, which is gratifying to see. We’re taking a different sort of approach when it comes to the scaffolding, too–more of a you-are-the-curator-of-a-museum framework, with the student discovering artifacts and texts all over the world as one moves through history, then diving into them, explaining them, connecting them, and organizing them in one’s “museum.”
Sound great, looking forward to the release in September. Perhaps to close, in just one or two sentences would you summarize the contribution your courses make to what’s already out there?
We certainly offer one of the most comprehensive treatments of American history out there–and, as far as I know, we are the only high school history curriculum that incorporates on-location videos filmed by the professor. Our courses neither talk down to students nor are they dumbed-down for students, but rather equip them with the tools necessary not only to learn history but also to do history–a skill tied to media literacy, with broad application across fields and disciplines and even in everyday life, as anyone who takes the course will see.
Featured image: The Nomadic Professor filming a mini-lecture in Uparkot Fort, Gujarat
