Here is an excerpt from a speech Lilah Lindsey made around 1906 warning her fellow members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union to be on the look out for something quite evil in their communities. See if you can fill in the blanks and figure out what she was warning her white-ribbon sisters to avoid.

There is a danger that is lurking in our ( Read more... )

I was amused to run across this item in the files of Lilah D. Lindsey, a woman who will likely play a huge part in my dissertation. (Is suspect my fellow historians will also be amused, as well as any teachers out there.) It is from the Tulsa Historical Society about a textbook it was assembling on Tulsa history:

A good deal of emphasis is now ( Read more... )

So, in these uncertain times and at a point where I seemed to have worked (literally) through departmental support, I'm hoping to pick up a few academic crumbs (and health insurance) next year by teaching a couple of undergraduate reading or writing seminars. The department asked for a list of proposed courses and I offer them up for your amusement ( Read more... )

From the 11 September 1884 Union Signal:

Mrs. Hobart, president of the Minnesota W. C. T. U. keeps the crusade fires stil burning. She leads a holy war for the children's sake, against drunken public school teachers and officials. All honor to these mothers of the republic who watch and gurad [sic] its highest interests

I'm using a chapter of Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were: America's Families and the Nostalgia Trap in the course I'm teaching this summer. It's a chapter that talks about the ways in which American society has distorted and mis-remembered what family life and the status of women was really like in the 1950s.

In it, she notes:

"Family and ( Read more... )

It's been a rather frenzied week ( Read more... )

In tallying up the grades from the final exams I discovered I was one exam shy ( Read more... )

I'm in a grading blizzard of blue book exams for a course in the Civil War and Reconstruction. SO far, one of my favorite answers includes this sentence ( Read more... )

History can be fun, really.

For example, on of the books I'm using in the class I'm teaching this summer is Ragged Dick-a title that is sure to provoke a few giggles among undergraduates or my less mature friends.

The full title is Ragged Dick, Or, Street Life In New York With Boot Blacks and it is the first rags-to-riches (well, really rags-to- ( Read more... )

So, hey, how would like to see the first footage taken from a heavier-than-air craft? Say over a French field in a Wright Flyer being flown by Wilbur Wright ( Read more... )