Fun last few days

From Wednesday, October 13 to Saturday, October 16, we hosted the Northern Great Plains History Conference in Grand Forks, ND. There were a number of great papers and panels on a wide variety of topics. Yours truly presented papers on the social transition in Illinois Civil War camps of instruction, A. C. Townley’s leadership of the Nonpartisan League, and chaired a panel. I was also able to meet several fine graduate students all doing great things at several far-flung programs from CUNY to TCU, to even New Brunswick. It was a great amount of fun to host the conference and meet so many great scholars. I look forward to keeping in touch with those who I met.

A new semester

It is that time of year again, the beginning of the new semester. This semester will be a great one, as I will be taking courses dealing with the American West, a research seminar that will allow me to complete a chapter of the dissertation, and a Public History project dealing with oral history, where I will interview local World War II veterans who participated in the Honor Flights to visit the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, to understand their experiences in the conflict and how visiting the memorial affected them.

I will also be returning to North Dakota History, with a new group of students and an additional teaching assistant, which will lighten the workload for me. I will also devote some time to preparing for my class in the fall, which will be exciting and challenging. When that time arrives, I will devote many posts to examining the interesting angles of teaching my own class for the first time, with some of them appearing on Teaching Thursday, so stay tuned to this site. It’s good to be back in the swing of things and I look forward to sharing the fun with you.