Teaching Tools
Time to reset your syllabi, Vast Early America
By Catherine E. Kelly, OI Editor of Books
I came to the project that would become Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence the hard way – through the college classroom.
Before joining the Omohundro Institute, I taught American history first at Case Western Reserve University and then at the University of Oklahoma. I knew from experience that finding cutting-edge scholarship that could fit into an undergraduate syllabus was no small challenge. This dilemma isn’t special to early Americanists, of course; it’s built into teaching. Still, it was especially acute for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the period that stands at the heart of #VastEarlyAmerica. I was always struck by how the number of assignable choices increased once I cleared the 1820s. READ MORE
