At my school, “interdisciplinary” was that hardy educational perennial, a “buzz word” that came back again and again during my nearly four decades on the faculty. We actually had a couple of so-called “interdisciplinary courses,” though I did not teach them. Instead, I usually got my interdisciplinary “jollies” by answering the requests of others looking for some historical insight into a topic that might not be strictly “historical” in content. Here are some examples:
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- The Uses of History in Stoppard’s “Arcadia”–August 1, 2012.
- Echoes of the Scopes Trial, 1925-2000–October 1, 2012.
- Getting Right with Spielberg’s “Lincoln”–December 1, 2012.
- Denying the Holocaust–February 1, 2013.
- The Book that Changed My Life–February 26, 2013.
- Peace of Bread, Bread of Peace–March 14, 2013.
- He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, the Writer–March 15, 2014.
- Growing Up in Colonial New England–June 15, 2014.
- American Witch-Hunters: Salem & McCarthy–August 15, 2014.
- Is Wolf Hatred Really “Wolfism”?–October 24, 2014.
- Reckoning with “The Dispossessed Majority,” 1989–February 1, 2018.
- American Republicanism, Part I–April 1, 2015.
- American Republicanism, Part II–May 1, 2015.
- American Republicanism, Part III–June 1, 2015.
- American Republicanism, Part IV–July 15, 2015.
- Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Hillbillies–August 1, 2017.
- Georgia Visions, Part I–April 16, 2018.
- Georgia Visions, Part 2–May 1, 2018.
- My Brother, the Writer: Act 2–May 15, 2018.
- My Brother, the Writer: Act 3–May 1, 2019.
- The Lost Cause and Frederick Douglass’s Response–September 1, 2019.
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For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to several books on the subject:
Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)
In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)