The purpose of this project, completed with Dr. Joanne Jahnke-Wegner, was to “flip” the UWEC survey course History 114 to facilitate more discussion and critical thinking during class time. In my presentation, I will explore our main goals in flipping History 114, the advantages this model has over a traditional classroom, how the project worked in practice, and how I can apply this when I become a K-12 teacher. The main idea of flipping a classroom involves having students interact with material for the first time outside of class by completing readings, watching lectures, or interacting with other media. This frees up time during class to focus on group discussions. We aimed to bring the class more in line with our goals of developing students' critical thinking and historical skills, students developing their own opinions and conclusions, and increasing student engagement. After reading several books on the flipped pedagogy, we assessed the class, constructed lesson plans and instruction specifically suited for flipped learning, and implemented the plan in the fall semester of 2024. The results indicated that while time-consuming and challenging to implement, flipping a classroom facilitated a deeper understanding of historical concepts for students, who better achieved course goals.
The decades preceding the Civil War were marked by stalwart political division and congressional violence. While the ensuing debate surrounding the expansion or containment of slavery raged in the halls of Congress, one key factor in many Southerners’ strategy to subdue their Northern counterparts, was the strategic usage of the “affair of honor,” or the duel. In contrast to the period of the Early Republic, sentiment around the affair of honor diverged starkly between North and South, with Southerners championing the practice, and Northerners rejecting it. The flashpoint for this divergence can be traced to the morning of July 11th, 1804, when Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met in Weehawken, NJ to settle an honor dispute with a duel. After only one exchange of fire, Burr emerged physically unscathed, while Hamilton died the next day from the fatal wound Burr had inflicted. What followed, at least in the northern states, was the outright rejection of both Burr, and the ritual of honor that facilitated his part in killing Hamilton. The south gradually integrated the affair of honor as both a facet of their identity, and a political tool to be used against Northerners. By using what congressman Henry Wise dubbed “the rule of force,” Southerners would use their knowledge and public approval of the affair to silence any congressional debate pertaining to slavery.
This project, focusing on the Wisconsin rural-urban political divide in historical perspective, aims to answer the following research question: Is there evidence of urban-rural electoral polarization in Wisconsin from the mid-20th to the early 21st century and, if so, what were the causal factors? Researchers who have studied political polarization in recent presidential elections have sought primarily to correlate single election results to ideological differences between urban and rural communities. In contrast, this project adopts a longitudinal approach by comparing presidential election results from the Wisconsin Historical Society for the periods 1948-1968 and 1992-2020. Our research demonstrates that electoral polarization among urban cities in our sample grew between 1948-1968 and 1992-2020. However, this urban polarization was greater than polarization between the sampled urban and rural communities. Similarly, electoral polarization increased among rural towns between 1948-1968 and 1992-2020. It too, however, was greater than polarization between the sampled urban and rural communities. These conclusions suggest that standard assumptions regarding the rural-urban “political divide” in Wisconsin presidential elections are overly simplistic. Specifically, they fail to account for causal factors such as regional geography among and between urban and rural communities from the mid-20th century to the present.
Seafaring and coastal women around the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries lived on the periphery of a male dominated world, where cultural gender prescriptions ran into the reality of women’s work roles expanding and economic needs. This trend is reflected in the work of women within various Atlantic world industries such as piracy, whaling, and coastal and port activity. While women’s roles and agency changed because of new expectations caused by the formation of Atlantic world society, they were still unable to completely transgress the world’s standard expectations for women during the 18th and 19th centuries. While women were participating in this new society and found new agency, Atlantic seafaring still upheld gendered separation and expected roles across the various industries within that limited full transgression of gender roles. Using the practices introduced by gender historians Jeanne Boydston and Joan Scott, this poster presentation will study both women and gender in the Atlantic world and also examine the power structures within. Expanding the study of women in the seafaring world beyond focus on transgressive women like pirates Anny Bonny and Mary Read helps us to see how women involved as shopkeepers, tavern and boarding house owners, laundresses, and dependent widows sought personal and economic opportunities but still faced constraints from the societal gendered power structure.
Isolated cases of plague and widespread paranoia infected San Francisco. Fledgling practices of bacteriology debuted the ability to identify Petis bacteria. No longer was it the faceless enemy of the Black Death. Yet a contentious set of unknowns remained — competing medical groups clashed politically, socially, and professionally over the plague's transmission, treatment, and existence. Often to the detriment of Chinese Immigrants. Previous scholarship documented the outcomes of the plague and subsequent political battles as a vector to the construction of race, intertwining it with public health. This paper then looks at the commonality between these competing groups; the absence of critical epidemiological knowledge. It utilizes a study of ignorance, intentional or incidental, through the analysis of archival court cases, medical journals, correspondence, and newly translated Chinese newspapers. Rather than focusing on the outcomes of these battles, it shifts its focus to the underlying foundations. In this poster presentation, I then argue that the insertion of each group's respective ideology into the unknown variables formed the results of the plague; ignorantly shaping knowledge, and racist systems of policy while conversely allowing the Chinese to counteract them. Thus revealing how knowledge itself is the battleground for power.
