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In 2014, at Rollins College, a liberal arts college in central Florida, the history department completely revised its curriculum. Like their peers across the history discipline, Rollins history faculty saw a disconnect between its traditional curriculum--with a stress on lecture and memorization--and the actual process of doing history. Colleges developed this curricular structure when knowledge memorization was a vital historical skill. Thus, students first acquired a historical overview before immersing themselves in the details of specific historical times. Today, the proliferation of online information repositories that are immediately accessible has vastly reduced the importance of memorization as part of the historian's toolkit. Instead, other skills have become more important, including critical thinking, researching--both online and offline--and effective written and oral communication. The focus of the Rollins history curriculum revision in 2014 was to highlight and emphasize skill acquisition--often through iterative pedagogy--rather than just chronological or geographical knowledge acquisition. The aim of this case study is to evaluate whether the new curriculum developed by Rollins history faculty effectively helps students learn specific and important history skills. In particular, the department's American historian, Claire Strom, investigates if the iterative pedagogy of the 200-level classes facilitates students' acquisition of primary source literacy skills over the course of a single semester.

The traditional American model for an ethnic community is based on immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and embodies certain key characteristics. The life of James J. Hill, the builder of railroad who was born in Canada and migrated to America is highlighted.

Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections. Edited by John B. Boles. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 334. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8203-2475-2; cloth, $54.95, [...]

It must be remembered always that until recently most of our people lived in the country. Colonial America was a land of farmers; many of the merchants, fishermen, and manufacturers spent some time working on the land, and even those who did not were closely dependent on farmers for their supplies and for their markets. Even when the Civil War was beginning, eighty-five in every hundred persons lived in the country; and one hundred and forty-one cities taken together could show a combined population of only five million persons, less by a good deal than modern New York. Only since the World War have cities outstripped the country. More than half of our population is now urban; but this development is recent, so recent that most of us still have individual rural backgrounds. As for America, apart from any citizen, it is not to be understood at all by one who forgets its homestead origin, backwoods training, and extremely short acquaintanceship with the furnishings of a sleek suburban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]