Resistance

I am in the middle of Nechama Tec's Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford, 2013), which I obtained at the 22nd Annual Conference of the WHA.

The book is eminently readable, has an at once simple and incredibly complex thesis (that those who resisted did so through cooperation with others), and presents accessible examples and explanations of those examples.  An undergraduate audience, I believe, was intended and I will add it to the list of books from which students may choose to do a book review for my History of the Holocaust course.  It seamlessly complements the structure of the course, which is divided into three main sections: one on survivors, one on perpetrators, and one on bystanders and everyone else.

Here's an amusing slideshow as movie that gets my World History started. Yes, I update it every year. It's "13.67 Billion Years in approximately 13.67 Minutes." (Disclaimer: the timing works better in PowerPoint; as a movie it seems to go much too long.) . . . Drat, it didn't upload the entire "movie." Sorry.

Collaboration in the classroom experiment, Fall 2011

This fall semester in my History 103 class I am going to try out group work again, but this time I would like to initiate better collaboration. History 103 is ambitiously titled "World History, from the Beginning to 1500" and trying to cover millennia of history in one semester is daunting. The first step in this experiment I'm going to take is to show the following 10-minute clip in class on the first day.

What should step #2 be?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

Thinking abstractly

Historians like facts. Students like grand connections across time and space. The meeting point: abstract thought and analysis.