The year 2017 will mark the 75th anniversary when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 or EO 9066 on February 19, 1942. EO 9066 led to the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into ten racially segregated concentration camps throughout the U.S. This article discusses the educational and literary…

This article urges educators to responsibly teach, discuss, and read against "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee for fear that it may otherwise perpetuate subtle racist ideologies in generations of students who continue to read it in schools. One way to do this is through a comparative lens of old and new racism.

Over the course of history, various groups have challenged, banned, and burned texts out of fear and the desire to control the thoughts and beliefs of a populace. Dictatorial regimes such as Hitler's Nazi-controlled Germany used "bonfires [to] 'cleanse' the German spirit of the 'un-German' influence of communist, pacifist, and, above all,…

The idea of writing to the next generation about one's struggles to overcome poverty, discrimination, and repression dates back more than 200 years in American history and offers many perspectives on the American experience. Focusing on the literal and psychological journey to freedom in Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,"…

According to the author, as our abilities to combine image and text become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, digital storytelling is a powerful means for sharing those stories. Digital storytelling is a perfect way to remix stories. To present American literature as relevant to students' lives, the author rewrote their curriculum using backwards…

Launched in June 2016, the Smithsonian Learning Lab (SLL) provides access to the digital resources from across the Smithsonian's 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the National Zoo, to be used as real-world learning experiences. It is designed to aid students in building lasting knowledge and critical skills that take learners from simply…

Developing disciplinary literacy in history requires that classrooms become an environment where students can engage in discursive practices typical of the profession. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized ways of reading and writing used in history to construct historical arguments and ways of reasoning. Learning history includes using…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of adding historical fiction novels as a supplement to the textbook in an eighth grade social studies course. This qualitative study focused on student interest and feedback as their social studies class was altered through the addition of historical fiction novels. The research questions were…

The author describes alternatives to traditional ways of conceptualizing the early American literature survey course, focusing on film ("1492" and "Black Robe").

It is difficult to overestimate the differences between Native American studies in Europe and the United States. In Europe there are no dedicated university programs in Native American studies; instead, disciplinary units such as American studies or departments such as English, history, development studies, and anthropology house teaching and…

Nineteenth-century literature offers insights into the history and sociology of play in American life. Louisa May Alcott's novel "Little Women" contains especially rich period depictions of childhood games and amusements and provides some of the earliest scenes of American girls at play. The author discusses the various depictions of…

Curious about the connections between the author's students' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, the author read Nina Baym's excellent text "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America" to gain a sense of how readers in the 1800s might have thought about the texts that they read. Nineteenth-century…

In 1983, when the author began graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as the only black student in the Graduate English School, it offered no graduate-level African-American Literature course. Today an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia can major in African-American and African Studies and take courses…

Focused on comparative ethnic studies and intersectionality, the author commences with a discussion about Barack Obama's historic inauguration and the Asian American literature classroom. This essay argues that courses, programs, and departments focused on ethnicity, race, gender, class, and sexuality remain important precisely because they…

While traveling along the Platte River on May 18, 1834, William Marshall Anderson stopped to pick up a human skull bleaching in the prairie sunlight. Anderson was from Louisville, Kentucky, and had been sent west by his physician to accompany a fur-trade caravan to the Rocky Mountains in hopes of regaining lost physical strength. He came west not…