An Interview with David Hollinger

David Hollinger, the S-USIH 2012 Conference keynote speaker, is the Preston Hotchkis Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  He will be retiring from teaching following the 2012-2013 academic year.  Professor Hollinger kindly consented to be interviewed by me via email for our conference newsletter.  I have reprinted his interview below.

Alas, as our readers know, this year's conference was canceled due to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Sandy. However, a .pdf of the conference newsletter will be available for download at the S-USIH website.  In the meantime, you can view and download the entire newsletter through my public Dropbox folder using this link. The 8-page newsletter features a piece by David Sehat highlighting and exploring the themes of the conference he planned so thoughtfully and well, an article by S-USIH President Paul Murphy discussing the possibilities of starting a print journal, a note from Allison Perlman about our plans for next year's conference, news and notes from our members, and other key information. It would have been my great pleasure and a real privilege to help distribute this newsletter in person at our conference. Next time.

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An Interview with David Hollinger

by L.D. Burnett

Q: The theme of this year's S-USIH conference, "Communities of Discourse," acknowledges and celebrates the enormous influence and usefulness of your conception of the field of intellectual history, a conception that is arguably "paradigmatic" in the Kuhnian sense of the word.  As you argued in the paper you delivered at the Wingspread conference, the notion of a "community of discourse" is a capacious one, able to accommodate a far broader range of subjects and subject matter than might be suggested by narrow definitions of what the term "intellectual" in "intellectual history" stands for.  In thinking about how this paradigm has functioned to frame the field of inquiry over the past four decades, do you find it still capacious enough as a way of conceptualizing intellectual history?  Are there ways of understanding intellectual history that this paradigm is strained to accommodate? 

A: I would not want to claim too much for the notion of “communities of discourse,” and prefer to see it mostly as a heuristic, not as a charter for the field. It is a heuristic in that it can help some good projects find themselves, but good projects are certainly not limited to those that operate within its scope. I am very glad that the notion continues to help colleagues design and defend their projects, but I pushed the notion more for reasons of the politics of the profession than for strictly methodological reasons. Of course the two are connected, but my big concern was to get the profession to acknowledge that the features of human life studied by intellectual historians left material tracings every bit as real as the material tracings left by elections, wars, social movements, demographic transformations, economic booms and busts, and other features of human life that historians took for granted.

This simple point was worth making because of the incessant chatter, even by people who should have known better, about the “relation of ideas to reality,” or “the relation of the interior of the mind to external life,” as if intellectual history was a series of speculations rather than an interpretation of documentary evidence comparable to that scrutinized by historians of other subfields. The vivid positivity, the concrete substantiality of our major subject matter—discourse as carried out by socially embedded human beings who left evidence of their doings in the form of letters, essays, diaries, books, etc.-- needed to be affirmed. Second, I wanted to remind colleagues of the value of the kind of history that focused on the questions thinkers are trying to answer and on how various individual thinkers answered one another’s questions and thereby participated in a community of sorts. This, too, seemed obvious to anyone like me who was raised professionally on Collingwood, but some social historians at the time seemed not to know that this was what most intellectual historians did. Indeed, I wrote the essay in a kind of fury in the fall of 1977 when I read the Wingspread draft of Larry Veysey’s paper, which I thought misrepresented the methodological issues in the study of intellectual history, repeated the worst of contemporary social history’s libels against intellectual history, and threatened to undermine the credibility of a professional practice that I believed to be sound. I had told John Higham, who organized the Wingspread conference, that I would write about Kuhn’s influence on intellectual history, but when I saw what Larry had written in his pre-conference draft (I had yet to send mine in) I scraped my own draft, and while still drawing some inspiration from Kuhn, wrote in a hurry a very different paper.

But the notion of communities of discourse proved of value to many scholars long after Veysey’s formulations were forgotten, and I suppose it was just as well that I dealt with Larry indirectly, never mentioning his name, because that better enabled the essay I wrote to have a life even after the proximate cause  for its composition had largely disappeared. I spent most of the essay citing examples of existing scholarship, to guard against the idea that I was inventing anything new: I was trying to provide a set of terms that I thought might have efficacy in the politics of the profession to describe and defend a well-established practice. Delighted as I am to see this set of terms still functional, I am pleased with this chance to underscore that I was not trying to “define” intellectual history, but only to vindicate a primary form of its practice.

Q: Your recent "state of the field" essay in the MIH forum touched on the connection between pedagogy and scholarly inquiry.  In what ways has pedagogy at both the graduate and undergraduate level shaped your own scholarly inquiry?  Do you see the possibility for "new directions in intellectual history" arising out of the discourse community of the classroom?

A: In my own case, there has often been a connection between my undergraduate lecture course and my scholarly writings. Several of my articles, most fully “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia” (1975) and “How Wide the Circle of the We” (1993) began as undergraduate lectures. I’d have a sense that this or that topic was important to the field that the course was supposed to cover, but the monographic literature seemed not right on point. Lacking a literature to harvest for my lectures, I would work up what seemed to me a sensible and sound take on the topic based on my own reading of what I took to be the most relevant sources. Then if it seemed that what I’d worked up for the students might even contribute to the scholarly conversation, I’d sharpen the lecture to the point that I could deliver it as a paper at the OAH (as I did for “Ethnic Diversity”) or the AHA (as I did for “Circle of the We”), and then, depending on the reception it got from colleagues, publish it. Undergraduate teaching has the splendid effect of forcing one to address large questions, and if the scholarly literature does not go after those large questions you have to do it yourself, and doing so can, in turn, blow back into the professional literature. Graduate teaching is something that I have enjoyed equally, but in my own case it has not had remotely as direct an effect on what I write as a scholar. Graduate students I see as fully part of the community of professional scholars, but undergraduates function more as a surrogate for the educated public at large and therefore they provide a different type of stimuli. 

Q: The Society for U.S. Intellectual History and the annual conference have their beginnings in the discourse community -- or one of the discourse communities -- of the blogosphere.  Because this medium of communication/interaction is technologically new, it is tempting to see the community constituted through it as also somehow new or fundamentally different from previous communities of intellectual inquirers.  But in what ways might the S-USIH exemplify continuity with a broader and older tradition of intellectual/academic communities?  What aspects of that longer tradition do you hope the S-USIH will carry forward?

A: I am not sure that blogs create “new or fundamentally different” kinds of learned communities (perhaps they do, in ways that I do not discern?), but they surely help bring into the conversation of a specialized field a number of individuals who might otherwise not be as fully part of it as they should be. I am probably not a good person to explore this question, however, because I am lucky enough to be based on a campus where I cannot walk down the hallway from my office without running into someone with whom I can have an informed and animated conversation about the latest book or article. If I were not at one of these big campuses, with large faculties and a steady stream of bright, energetic graduate students passing through, I suppose blogs would mean more to me. Blogs enable a lot of folks who would otherwise not be in regular and direct communication to be in touch with each other whenever they feel like it, and surely that is a good thing. I’m also in the habit of treating print journals and books as somehow prior to blogs, as if blogs were something to go to once you’d finished (which I seem never to manage) reading all the other stuff. I don’t defend this attitude, but I do confess to it. I’m for blogs, just not very active in them.

Q: You published your first scholarly paper in 1968 and have announced your retirement from teaching in 2013; what changes in the field over that span of four-and-a-half decades are most striking to you?

A: In 1968 American intellectual history was very close to American Studies, and the ASA’s journal, American Quarterly, was a favorite place for intellectual historians to publish. That remained true through Bruce Kuklick’s editorship in the 1970s, but by the end of the 1980s that journal had narrowed its focus methodologically and chronologically. By the 1990s it was almost entirely a “cultural studies” journal focused on the period since World War II, and largely since the 1960s. I had published in AQ three times, had read it eagerly, and had even won one of the ASA’s prizes, but I have long since quit the ASA (as have most historians I know who used to be in it). The decline (at least from my point of view) of ASA and AQ has helped make space for the creation in 2004 of Modern Intellectual History and the simultaneous rejuvenation of  The Journal of the History of Ideas, both of which turn out to be much better for us than AQ for several reasons, one of which is that they comfortably integrate American intellectual history into the intellectual history of the North Atlantic West instead of tying it, as ASA and AQ did, to more narrowly Americo-centric concerns. So, while I long lamented the transformation of the ASA and AQ, I finally came around to realizing that the liberation of American intellectual history from American Studies was a blessing in disguise. The youngest cohort of US intellectual historians is much more likely than my generation to be fluent in German and/or French, and more and more of these younger scholars are engaged in trans-Atlantic projects. This cohort, moreover, is reclaiming the study of philosophy, theology, social theory, and social science that the American Studies movement at its best had engaged, too, but then largely dropped.

The closer ties between US intellectual history and European intellectual history encourage attention to aspects of American intellectual history to which the projects that have flown under the flag of “cultural history” have been less attentive. Cultural history has done a lot of great things for us, and deserves to be celebrated, but the anti-elitist strain within cultural history limited its scope. At the risk of appearing to ignore some other really good recent stuff, I want to mention the three 2012 imprints devoted to my main field of the 20th century to have hit my desk the most recently: Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression, Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn, and Andrew Jewett’s Science, Democracy and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. These three ambitious, rigorously argued, sophisticated monographs illustrate how, looking now only at the last couple of months of twentieth century studies, the cohort to which I refer is making the field of American intellectual history more vibrant than ever. 

Novel and Old School

Since the popular literature of the Early Republic, and especially the early American novel, is a crucial source for my work on the idea of home, I can't avoid the scholarship of Cathy N. Davidson.  Nor do I want to. 

Davidson's work on the novel as a democratic genre, her explorations of how novels were read, and by whom, and to what purpose and effect -- all of her painstaking research, rendered into brilliant prose, has cut a path through the wilderness, along which I will gladly and gratefully walk for as far as it will take me in pursuit of my quarry.

At the same time, Davidson's work on learning and pedagogy -- especially writing pedagogy and the  new literacy -- is likewise unavoidable for me.  I teach rhetoric (a.k.a. "freshman comp") at my university, and our standardized syllabus requires a blog project as part of our students' portfolio of work.  This requirement is due in no small part to the influence of Davidson and other scholars who are championing the blog as a tool for teaching writing -- perhaps even as a substitute for the research paper or term paper.

A recent article in the New York Times describes Davidson's take on "Blogs vs. Term Papers," and situates her as holding "a more extreme position" among professors and writing teachers who are all alike concerned with finding the best way to teach the best practices that make for the best writing both within and beyond the academy.  The concern to teach writing practices that have some practical application beyond the ivied walls of the Ivory Tower is made explicit in Davidson's pedagogy, but, as I will argue below, I believe a concern for practicality is implicit in the commitments of those of us who continue to see pedagogical value in the research essay.

Now, as the reader may have gathered, I am fond of blogging.  It is a fantastic medium for exploring ideas and establishing connections with fellow explorers working at other institutions.  (Oh mercy -- what is it with all these metaphors of hunting, exploring, wandering in the wilderness? Clearly, I have been spending too much time with Catharine Sedgwick and James Fennimore Cooper.)  Indeed, I think blogging can at least help create the conditions for establishing a vibrant intellectual community, a virtual post-modern Republic of Letters.

There's no doubt that blogging emphasizes the sense of writing for an audience and highlights the potential for interaction with one's readers in a way that writing a traditional term paper may not.  The (in)formal conventions of blogging may help students better recognize that scholarship is not about building little (or big) monumental plinths that just stand there and gather dust -- it's not about writing essays, term papers, theses, dissertations as finished objects and final words.  Rather, scholarship is about participating in and contributing to a larger conversation.  So to the extent that blogging foregrounds this crucial aspect of scholarly work, I think it can be a valuable use of students' time and energy.

But I worry that a near-exclusive emphasis on blogging is not a very good use of students' money -- especially working-class students, first-generation students, students who are going into debt to attain that which an education confers.  As Davidson has made clear in her own research on the early American novel and its readership, education confers empowerment -- often in ways that the educators never intended and that the educated never expected.  And maybe that democratic and democratizing empowerment will be (already is?) the lasting legacy of blogging, the internet, the new literacy.  In the meantime, though, I believe that championing the blog as the primary form of scholarly writing puts students at a profound disadvantage, not merely in the job market but, more crucially, in the public square. 

In an era when most of the paths to erudition were closed to women, when a university education was not merely impermissible but also impossible because most women were not trained to read Latin or Greek, the novel democratized education and became a means by which disempowered women and men could not only gain knowledge but also produce knowledge and shape public discourse.  As a result, the doors of educational opportunity that had been closed to women, to the working-class, to minorities, have been and are being opened.  And I can see the similarities between the novel and the blog as genres that open up access to knowledge.

In some ways, though, championing the blog over the research paper as a cornerstone of a university education seems to be turning back the clock, taking back part of what has been gained.  Knowledge is power, and the knowledge of how knowledge is constructed and deployed as a tool of empowerment and disempowerment --  not just how to recognize the process, but how to do it -- is the most powerful knowledge of all.

Judging from the Times' description of how Davidson uses blogging in her pedagogy, it is clear to me that she doesn't teach blogging as a substitute for careful research, but as a means of exploring new avenues for students to articulate what they have learned in ways that excite and ignite the interest of others.  I'm sure that her students leave her class well-equipped to pursue and present a savvy, sophisticated argument across a full range of knowledge platforms.  More power to them.

Nevertheless, despite the broad democratic potential of the blogosphere, there is still enormous privilege, power and prestige in traditional academic prose.  Nobody -- not even the English department at Stanford -- is going to throw that baby out with the bathwater.  So no matter the potential of blogging as a means of (re)producing knowledge, the best educated, the most privileged and empowered among us, will continue to learn the long-form, old-school research essay.   

In this age of the soundbite, this era of intentional and celebratory ephemerality, this epoch of the quick and the slick and the flickering flash of momentary thoughts twittering  across the collective mindscape, whose knowledge will carry the day?  Whose perspective will endure to shape the present and open or close the future?  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  In the country of those who don't learn to value, much less know how to construct, a sustained, logical argument based upon careful research and a judicious treatment of evidence, David Barton and Newt Gingrich will be our greatest historians, our most influential public intellectuals.

pages from my life as an intellectual historian

Couple of interesting things happened last week that I thought I'd share with ya'll.



1. First day of a USIH class, I asked what an "intellectual" was. First answer--dead white guys--second and third answers agreed. I asked if they all agreed with that. Silence. Till one brave student suggested that he thought Du Bois might be considered an intellectual. Then a kid in the back started to talk about how different people groups might have esteemed different individuals (he might have said shamans...can't remember...but that was what he was referring to) as in the role of intellectuals. Same student told me later after class, after telling me that he was really going to enjoy this class, that he had wanted to say to the question, "Are all intellectuals dead white guys?" "no, but all the good ones were"....pause...."I'm joking of course!"

Oh, and the last comment of the class was that liberty was more important than equality, because some of us are more equal than others. Literally, said in the last second so I had no time to ask questions of that statement.

I'm glad I kept as much of an emphasis on race as I did in my class, though I did change the syllabus based on some of ya'lls comments last semester. I wonder what students will think after reading Pauli Murray's autobiography. I come back to the question, though, about my role in the classroom. I am not there to change someone's political point of view, but I am there to ask whoever steps through the classroom door to think more deeply about the subjects I pose. And yet, I cannot help wanting someone who comes in thinking that intellectuals are only dead white men to change their thinking to believe that intellectuals have come and are still coming in all shapes as sizes...and that intellectual history can refer to the kinds of things LD mentioned in her inaugural post as much as it can refer to William James. What subjects are within our purview as professors to attempt to change people's minds about?

2. I presented a portion of my research to the department on Friday. Among other great feedback someone challenged me that I was not doing an "intellectual history" as the subtitle of my talk declared, because....(wait for it)....I was doing a "history of intellectuals, not a history of their ideas." "Do you understand the distinction?" she asked me. I told her about this blog and suggested that we were redefining the idea of intellectual history to include, among other things, the lived experience of intellectuals. She had objected to me talking about what intellectuals did rather than what they thought.

3. Second day of USIH class, we discussed debates over the causes of the Civil War. I originally pondered this topic here.  I also introduced them to Frederick Douglass and Ta-Nehisi Coates, neither white and one of whom is not dead. There was an undercurrent of agreement that the Civil War was not justified, not quite because of Lost Cause mentality, but because it didn't immediately lead to equality for black people. This is a smart group of undergrads who have remembered a lot from prior classes. It's going to be fun to challenge them with dense readings. The discussions are already rich with nuance.

They're Back!

Entering First-Year Students Perform the OU Chant at Convocation

The new school year at the University of Oklahoma started today.*  As Andrew's post below suggests, the thoughts of most USIHers are no doubt returning to the classroom.

For the third straight fall semester, I'm teaching my Honors colloquium on America in the Sixties. After another round of syllabus fiddling--some of it inspired by suggestions from the readership of this blog--I once again start the semester feeling that this course is better than it was in its last iteration.

One of the many ways in which I know this is no longer a new course is that I'm beginning to pare down the material on the syllabus.  I took out some things--including Doug Rossinow's The Politics of Authenticity, which I love, but undergrads seem to hate--and added others. But when the dust settled, the reading load is lighter than it was last time through. Among the new items I'm most looking forward to teaching is Frederick Wiseman's documentary High School (1968).  A clip (one of the few from the film available on YouTube):

My other class is new...at least to me:  the first half of a very traditional Great Books (of the Western Tradition)** course that we're starting to offer in the Honors College.  I borrowed the syllabus, with only minor changes, from my colleague Bob Lifset, who did his PhD at Columbia. Though he's an energy historian, Bob taught in CC, in many ways the mother of all American Great Books courses, and now among the last of that dying breed.

Even preparing to teach this course has made me think a lot about the canon wars that framed the ongoing crisis of the academy when I was in college and graduate school in the 1980s and early 1990s.  But I'll save those thoughts for another day.

Back to prepping....

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* Of course, for folks around here other than students and faculty, the year doesn't start until a week from Saturday:

** Scare quotes can be added to both capitalized terms if it makes you feel better.

Pedagogy: A Theme for the US Intellectual History Survey

I am teaching the US Intellectual History survey for the first time in Spring 2012. I've been thinking about what unifying theme I want to present to students. It's become my conviction that we need a few ideas that we keep returning to over the course of the semester, rather than an attempt to cover as much material as possible. When I first started teaching, I wanted to give my students all the information which I had discovered since coming to grad school--the kind of stuff that I read and went, "how did I not know that before?" But I realized that themes developed based around my interests, anyway, and it was usually those themes that were remembered, through the sheer force of repetition.

What themes have you used in the survey? I had been thinking about things like pragmatism, pluralism, changing ideas of conservative/liberal, but I had a bright thought this morning and would like your opinion.

What if I arranged the lectures around idea transmissions and national conversations? I would want students to ask the questions--how did people have national conversations before the internet? What did they talk about? How did the method of transmission influence the content of the discussion? We could spend the last few weeks looking at blogs, newspapers and magazines online, and social media. I could then ask the question on the final--has the internet fundamentally transformed what Americans talk about? Why or why not?

I had this thought reading Louis Menand's discussion of the "Value of College in America" in the most recent New Yorker. I am thinking of assigning the article for students to begin to think about college as a form of idea transmission and center for dialogue. (On a side, more relevant note, what did you all think of the article?)

I've also been thinking a lot about American literature. When I took my European Intellectual History comp, I read a lot of literature/philosophy. Less so for my US Intellectual History comp. Do you ever assign novels?

Finally, do you assign monographs in an undergrad class? I feel like I should assign more than a week for undergrads to read a whole book, but if I assign a monograph, we may only be discussing that topic for a single week. Perhaps it is better to assign article length primary and secondary sources and tie them to the specific discussion of each class meeting?

P.S. The image is from Menand's article in the New Yorker.

Pedagogy: A Theme for the US Intellectual History Survey

I am teaching the US Intellectual History survey for the first time in Spring 2012. I've been thinking about what unifying theme I want to present to students. It's become my conviction that we need a few ideas that we keep returning to over the course of the semester, rather than an attempt to cover as much material as possible. When I first started teaching, I wanted to give my students all the information which I had discovered since coming to grad school--the kind of stuff that I read and went, "how did I not know that before?" But I realized that themes developed based around my interests, anyway, and it was usually those themes that were remembered, through the sheer force of repetition.

What themes have you used in the survey? I had been thinking about things like pragmatism, pluralism, changing ideas of conservative/liberal, but I had a bright thought this morning and would like your opinion.

What if I arranged the lectures around idea transmissions and national conversations? I would want students to ask the questions--how did people have national conversations before the internet? What did they talk about? How did the method of transmission influence the content of the discussion? We could spend the last few weeks looking at blogs, newspapers and magazines online, and social media. I could then ask the question on the final--has the internet fundamentally transformed what Americans talk about? Why or why not?

I had this thought reading Louis Menand's discussion of the "Value of College in America" in the most recent New Yorker. I am thinking of assigning the article for students to begin to think about college as a form of idea transmission and center for dialogue. (On a side, more relevant note, what did you all think of the article?)

I've also been thinking a lot about American literature. When I took my European Intellectual History comp, I read a lot of literature/philosophy. Less so for my US Intellectual History comp. Do you ever assign novels?

Finally, do you assign monographs in an undergrad class? I feel like I should assign more than a week for undergrads to read a whole book, but if I assign a monograph, we may only be discussing that topic for a single week. Perhaps it is better to assign article length primary and secondary sources and tie them to the specific discussion of each class meeting?

P.S. The image is from Menand's article in the New Yorker.

Exciting New Pedagogy Based in the History of Ideas

A decade ago, several professors at Barnard College created a pedagogy based in the History of Ideas called "Reacting to the Past." I attended a session at the AHA discussing this pedagogy (the History News Network discusses the session here).

Their website explains:

Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

Some of the games I heard discussed were based on Plato's Republic, Confucius's Proverbs, the division of India, Anne Hutchinson, and King Henry VIII. The games immerse the students in the ideas expressed. Students are divided into different factions and given certain goals they are trying to achieve. Some students are indeterminants that need to be persuaded to join one or another faction and often have the swing vote in classes. The games take up different amounts of time.

All the professors at the AHA session familiar with this pedagogy said that it transformed students. They arrived early and stayed late for class. The factions would chase down indeterminants in the hallways and unions trying to persuade them. Shy students felt nervous at first, but blossomed by the end. Freshman made lasting friendships.

The series started out as something more for a Freshman Year Experience course or a general education course, but historians are starting to adopt them. We have to be willing to give up a lot of content coverage in a lecture class, or they can be used in a seminar type class. There are several games already published, and more being worked on at the moment.

I was especially excited because I had plans for constructing something very much like this around the 1964 Democratic Convention. Delegates at that convention split into many different factions that expressed competing opinions among blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, politicians and activists. An EMU history prof at the AHA session, Mark Higbee, said he's developing a game for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One black student told him that she had never understood the Civil Rights Movement until she had to take on the role of a white segregationist and argue for further discrimination and segregation. She then realized what Civil Rights Activists had been challenging.

The pedagogy has been used at small liberal arts colleges and major research one institutions. Barnard College holds a training session every summer and there are other regional conferences around the country.

What do you think? Do you have any controversies or texts in American Intellectual History that you think would work for this?

Exciting New Pedagogy Based in the History of Ideas

A decade ago, several professors at Barnard College created a pedagogy based in the History of Ideas called "Reacting to the Past." I attended a session at the AHA discussing this pedagogy (the History News Network discusses the session here).

Their website explains:

Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

Some of the games I heard discussed were based on Plato's Republic, Confucius's Proverbs, the division of India, Anne Hutchinson, and King Henry VIII. The games immerse the students in the ideas expressed. Students are divided into different factions and given certain goals they are trying to achieve. Some students are indeterminants that need to be persuaded to join one or another faction and often have the swing vote in classes. The games take up different amounts of time.

All the professors at the AHA session familiar with this pedagogy said that it transformed students. They arrived early and stayed late for class. The factions would chase down indeterminants in the hallways and unions trying to persuade them. Shy students felt nervous at first, but blossomed by the end. Freshman made lasting friendships.

The series started out as something more for a Freshman Year Experience course or a general education course, but historians are starting to adopt them. We have to be willing to give up a lot of content coverage in a lecture class, or they can be used in a seminar type class. There are several games already published, and more being worked on at the moment.

I was especially excited because I had plans for constructing something very much like this around the 1964 Democratic Convention. Delegates at that convention split into many different factions that expressed competing opinions among blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, politicians and activists. An EMU history prof at the AHA session, Mark Higbee, said he's developing a game for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One black student told him that she had never understood the Civil Rights Movement until she had to take on the role of a white segregationist and argue for further discrimination and segregation. She then realized what Civil Rights Activists had been challenging.

The pedagogy has been used at small liberal arts colleges and major research one institutions. Barnard College holds a training session every summer and there are other regional conferences around the country.

What do you think? Do you have any controversies or texts in American Intellectual History that you think would work for this?