Teaching
After coming to southwest Georgia as a park ranger in 2015, I stayed to teach. In addition to survey courses, I taught the Civil War and Reconstruction, research seminars on southern and environmental history, and various courses on public history.
History "Lab"
From big cities to the rural countryside, history is everywhere. The challenge of a public historian in the classroom is to help make these connections. For many students, “history” is something that happens far away. The first lesson can be that the ground under the building–adjacent to a large spring-fed pond–has been the site of human habitation for thousands of years. The periods of historical significance lead right up to the present.
Practicing public history doesn’t require a special archive or a passport; rather, it means paying attention to the landscape and asking the right questions. The towns of Americus, Andersonville, and Plains—and the cotton fields and pine trees in between—are a public historian’s dream laboratory. When Study of History and Introduction to Public History students visited the segregated cemeteries, we compared the monuments and the state of preservation. Then we went to the computer lab to learn how to connect a stone and a name to broader patterns in history. From the “history lab,” students learned the process of doing original research at a granular level.
Digital Story Telling
I never called it digital humanities, but my public history classes often experimented with digital storytelling.
In spring 2018, for example, my students built digital tours of Georgia Southwestern State University using ESRI StoryMaps and Knight Lab Story Maps. I built the applications on the left. The first, “Andersonville National Cemetery: Profiles in Stone,” uses ESRI Maps and open-access NPS interpretive products. “Irving Hall: A Black Conscript at Andersonville” narrates the life and death of the first black prisoner to die at Andersonville. I wrote about him in “The Conscript and the Freedom Fighter” for the Americus Times-Recorder.
Before designing their own maps, we discussed what students found useful in my example. Then, I asked them to build a better map tour!
Public History Field School
Teaching public history requires developing high-impact learning opportunities for students. I developed a series of student internship opportunities, including ones at Andersonville National Historic Site, the Friends of Jimmy Carter National Historic Site, Koinonia Farm, and the City of Americus.