Teaching + Learning on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Debs Invites Arrest

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Clyde Miller hated what he was hearing. It was June 1918, and the U.S. had been at war for a little over a year, and the man on the platform in the park in Canton, Ohio was speaking — passionately, mockingly — about the many ways that the war had undermined the rights of American citizens. Socialists had been sent to jail for criticizing the war, complained Eugene Debs, the most famous Socialist in America: “It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.” There was knowing laughter from the crowd of picnicking socialists.

American Religious Ecologies Team Completes Digitization

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:30:00 +0000

American Religious Ecologies seeks to understand how congregations from different religious traditions related to one another by creating new datasets, maps, and visualizations for the history of American religion. After years of photographing, editing, cataloging, and uploading schedules to the American Religious Ecologies website, we are excited to announce that we have uploaded the last of the 1926 religious census schedules. Although our website indicates that we are only 98% complete, we have digitized every schedule from the 1926 Religious Bodies Census housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, over time, many of these schedules have been lost or destroyed. Paper is not a permanent object. It is easily lost, destroyed, and deteriorates over time. The work being done, not just by the Religious Ecologies team, but at RRCHNM as a whole, is essential to ensuring that future generations have access to archival materials. The American Religious Ecologies project is an excellent example of this work and the benefits it can bring to historians’ understanding of various facets of United States history. The completion of the digitization aspect of this project will enable us to focus more on analyzing the data we have gathered, creating maps, and examining various statistics to better understand the distribution of churches and religion in the United States around 1926.

Graduate Student Reflections: Sustainability Summer

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:40:25 +0000

This past summer I had the opportunity to work on RRCHNM’s sustainability team. Our work focused on flattening websites built with content management systems (CMS), such as Drupal, Omeka, and WordPress. Flattening refers to the process of simplifying dynamic, database-backed websites to static versions built with only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This minimizes server space and reduces security risks. However, flattening comes with trade-offs, such as losing dynamic features like a search function. One of my main roles this summer was creating a static site search for these flattened websites.

RRCHNM Receives Funding to Create Teaching Guides on the American Revolution

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Funded through the American Historical Association as part of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program, the teaching guides will support history educators in teaching a more comprehensive and complete history of American independence.

RRCHNM is proud to announce new grant funding to create two teaching guides for teachers on the history of the American Revolution. The guides are funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Mid-Atlantic & US Territories Region, managed by the American Historical Association. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library primary sources to better understand the complex relationships to independence experienced by various groups during the revolutionary era particularly the Black Americans and Indigenous Americans fighting for their own independence on both sides of the conflict. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians’ approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.

Report from the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:15:00 +0000

From March 19th to March 21st, 2025, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC hosted the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History. The conference theme, real-time history, drew on Roy Rosenzweig’s call to action that historians need to directly address the methodological potential and risks of the digital age.

Designed as a forum, the conference prompted attendees to share what opportunities, problems, and concerns arise while “documenting the now.” To allow space for unstructured creativity after long days of conferencing, the GHI team and I also arranged a zine-making workshop in which attendees crafted and exhibited their own mini magazines (just for fun!). As a first-time attendee to the DH conference, I was especially struck by how each presenter chose and justified different methodologies to achieve their project goals. The self-management evident in the still-emerging field reminded me of a Do-It-Yourself ethos usually applied to art and music. Scholars, practitioners, and activists discussed the following topics while sharing their experiences tackling real-time archiving.

Celebrating Women's History Month

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:27:33 +0000

Since RRCHNM’s founding in the 1990s, we have been committed to highlighting the contributions women made in the past. One of our first projects was a CD-ROM version of the textbook Who Built America? which grew out of efforts to reinterpret American history from “the bottom up”—drawing on studies of workers, women, consumers, farmers, African Americans, and immigrants—that has helped transform our understanding of the past. This textbook highlighted perspectives often neglected in traditional teachings of American history, including women’s history.

Teaching, Writing, and Research with AI

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:29:49 +0000

When Chat GPT first appeared in November 2022, the almost universal reaction in the humanities community could be summed up in one word – Yikes! Almost without warning this new tool seemed ready to make it incredibly easy for students to “write” essays using prompts that took no more than a minute to produce and then, if they were crafty, another 30 minutes to modify a bit so that it wasn’t quite so obvious that the essay had been written by a large language model (LLM).

Celebrating Black History Month

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:50:48 +0000

Just a couple miles from RRCHNM is the campus of Woodson High School, part of the Fairfax County Public School system. Until this past year the school was named for W. T. Woodson, the long time superintendent of FCPS and an opponent of school desegregation. Now the school is named after Carter G. Woodson. Born in 1875, Woodson was the second Black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. Excluded from the American Historical Association and other professional historical circles, Woodson was a creator of institutions to understand and study Black history. Among the many institutions he founded was Negro History Week, founded nearly a century ago in 1926. Woodson’s observance was the precursor to Black History Month, first observed in 1970 and then federally recognized in 1976 for the bicentennial.

NEH Institute Participants Present at AHA on Higher Education History

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Five participants in the NEH-funded institute, Unpacking the History of Higher Education, presented the projects they developed at the institute at the AHA Annual Meeting in January along with project co-directors, Kelly Schrum and Nate Sleeter. The summer 2024 institute brought together faculty members from higher education programs who teach or support history of higher ed courses.

At the AHA 2025 annual meeting in January, RRCHNM’s Nate Sleeter and Kelly Schrum chaired the panel, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States.” The panel grew out of an NEH institute of the same name directed by Schrum and Sleeter in the summer of 2024 in which 25 faculty from universities nationwide came together to explore the teaching and research of the history of higher ed through archival sources. Institute participants included faculty, advanced doctoral students, librarians, and archivists who teach or support courses on the history of higher education in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs.

RRCHNM Launches New Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Funded by the Library of Congress, these four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching post-1970s U.S. history and civics and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on post-1970s history in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from theLibrary of Congress. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers new to the profession.

Graduate Student Reflections: Teaching DH

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:15:44 +0000

This 2024 spring semester at George Mason University, I was an instructor of record of HIST 390 “The Digital Past” course. This course satisfies the university’s Information Technology and Computing (IT) requirement and aims for undergraduate students to learn how to use digital tools to study the past. As a PhD history candidate at GMU and former digital history fellow at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), I have strong experience in the field of digital history, and was excited for the opportunity to expand my research and technical skills through practical application and instruction in the classroom. Following university parameters around learning outcomes for this course, I designed my own syllabus and taught specific digital history topics regarding primary source research, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, project management research workflows, and how to write historical analysis. Overall, teaching HIST 390 provided me an opportunity to reflect on what I have learned as a PhD student of digital history and develop a curriculum to instruct these skills to undergraduate students new to the field.

Graduate Student Reflections: Brandan P. Buck

Wed, 08 May 2024 14:30:13 +0000

My name is Brandan P. Buck, and I am currently in my fifth year as a Ph.D. candidate in history at George Mason University and graduate research assistant at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), where I have spent four of the last five years of my Ph.D. program with Mason. In this, my final semester with the RRCHM, I thought I would share how my work here and the skills learned in the history department’s “Cilo wired” series of digital history courses have afforded me invaluable skills for public-facing scholarship. Through this combination of experiences, I have learned how to work with and clean “messy” data, analyze it using computational and spatial methods, and present it to audiences through crisp and efficient visualizations. The skills gleaned here at RRCHMN, whether banal or advanced, have aided my dissertation project and helped me turn some of its findings into a portfolio of public-facing work for popular and scholarly audiences through my blog, opinion pieces, and several podcast appearances.

World History Commons Adds Several New Primary Sources

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:44:58 +0000

World History Commons recently prioritized adding primary sources from lesser-covered regions and time periods to give a more thorough overview of world history for educators to pull from. As the Project Associate heading this endeavor, I focused my efforts on ancient and post-classical Oceania, North/Central America, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

My largest effort went to include sources for Oceania, which had the lowest overall coverage of any region. Oceania, as a small region of dispersed island nations with less written history than other areas of the world, often receives less attention in curricula seeking to cover large amounts of space and time. However, Oceania’s vibrant history and culture can easily be incorporated into larger classroom topics regarding human migration and peopling, archaeology and material culture, early architectural advancements, imperialism, and colonization history. I included visual materials about pottery and figurines, canoes, maps, and stone structures.

Exploring True Crime in Early Modern Europe in the Classroom

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 10:34:04 +0000

This semester I’m using my expertise on crime and violence in a new way: I’m teaching an upper-level undergraduate course “True Crime in Early Modern Europe.” When we think of the true crime genre, we tend to think of documentaries, Netflix shows, Pulp Fiction, and podcasts, to name just a few popular formats. What most people don’t know, however, is that “true crime” as a genre originated in the early modern world–mostly Europe but also premodern China and the Americas. Bestsellers in the genre included pamphlets, murder ballads, and executioner’s songs which sensationalized crimes, spoke of motives, and reflected on justice.

RRCHNM Launches New Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Funded by the Library of Congress, the four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching the history of religion and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on the history of religion in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the Library of Congress. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers who are new to the profession.