What kind of history does the Nomadic Professor do?
Nomadic Professor teaches history as method, not ideology: build knowledge, then master bias, evidence, and context to judge competing narratives with confidence.
Tag: history
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”?
Student Question: “Did World War II End the Great Depression?”
According to conventional wisdom, World War II ended the Depression, but there are some serious problems with this line of thinking. War is destructive, not productive. War involves much more centralization—demanded in order to centrally plan a war economy.
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.
