Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part II

    

The time has come: It's part II. In my last post, I introduced an activity made in Twine which can be adapted for various sources, allowing students to undertake a source analysis. In this post, I'll show how how it came together. 

How Did You Make This?

Good question! I'll break it down. 

First, I popped open my Twine application, which looks like this: 

Screenshot of my Twine archive. 

To start a new story, I clicked the green button on the right. Then, a blank canvas awaited! I added the first passage. 

The first passage of Source Analysis I, in Twine. 
(Note: the story format I used for this project is called Chapbook.
More on this, and why it's important, below.) 

Each passage represents a different page of text. As you may have noticed, there are a few parts to this passage. The title at the top, which is not seen by the player. The tag section, which I'll ignore for now because I rarely use it. And the text section, which is where you put the words you want students/players to see. 

You may have also noticed a couple of codey-looking things here in the text section. First, the double asterisks (**) surrounding some phrases, which makes them bold. Secondly, the double brackets; these are the most important things you need to make a Twine. Every double bracket makes a link somewhere else, usually to another passage. If you put a double bracket around some text, it creates a link to another passage and titles it with that text. Twine then puts an arrow connecting the first passage to the new passage. (You may also notice the external link above-- more on that later.) After completing Source Analysis I, I had a structure that looked like this: 

The entire structure of Source Analysis I, in Twine. 

You also may have noticed that the two different paths available in Source Analysis I have the same questions, but one allows text inputs and one doesn't. Here's the passage for the first set of questions without text input: 

"there were many that corrupted the service of the Lord" passage, in Twine.

The only code here is {back link}, which provides a link back to the previous passage labelled "Back."

For comparison, here is the corresponding passage from the other track of the activity with the text inputs: 

"service2" passage with text input code, in Twine. 

All that was needed for me to put in the text input boxes was to pop in a bracket ([), tell Twine I wanted a text box (text input for:), specify a variable ('serviceA'), and close with a bracket. I also opted to make them optional (required: false), so that students could move back and forth between pages as much as they wanted. Each of the text input boxes throughout the activity has a different variable attached to the information that the student puts in that box.

I also chose to relabel the "Back" links on these pages, to reassure players that this responses would be saved if they went back (label: 'Save and go back to excerpt').

The last critical piece of this activity is the final page, which returns all of the variables I set on the other pages and lets students know how to turn in their answers:

"Submission Instructions" passage with variables, in Twine. 

When I completed this activity (putting in some truly solid answers if I do say so myself), skipping some questions and answering others, this was what my final page looked like, with the answers I gave replacing the variables on the page above and the unanswered questions simply printing the name of that variable. 

Screenshot of final passage with example answers, in itch.io.

Finally, I published the game to an HTML file by going to the name of the game at the bottom left, clicking on it to bring up a menu, then clicking the last option:

Source Analysis I structure with menu open, in Twine. 

Limitations...

In the last post, I focused on goals and benefits of using this activity or something like it. Now I want to highlight a few limitations and things to consider if you want to use something like this for yourself. 

...of this activity

• You may notice that if you choose Passage I, the option in which you type nothing, or if you don't put text in a box, the final page shows the variable for the empty boxes instead of just being blank. There are ways in which to make this display differently, but I wanted to keep this example relatively simple. If you're curious, feel free to reach out. 
• I noticed that Print To PDF for the end page did not work well on itch.io, but it did all right when I tried a version of the game posted within an LMS. So, your mileage may vary on being able to capture the last page in a PDF versus other methods like screenshots or copying and pasting the text. 

...of Twine

• Twine remembers things in the browser. As the beginning screen of this activity notes, that means that someone who wants to do this activity needs to use the same browser all the time. They should not use incognito mode if they want to save their progress (and depending on the game, it may not work in incognito at all). This also means that anyone opening the same browser on that computer will open the activity to the same point and with the same information still saved in the input boxes, so remember this if you have anyone sharing devices. 
• Depending on how you host your Twine, it may not show up on mobile, or display awkwardly. (You used to be able to use philome.la and it was so easy--- but alas, it is no more. Here's hoping someone picks up this torch). To ameliorate this issue, there are a couple of things you can do; I'll offer what I think are the two easiest.
• You can upload Twine files to an LMS and play right within the LMS page-- different systems all handle this slightly differently. I tried with this game on an old Compass page and it seemed to work well in both the Blackboard Instructor app and in a mobile browser. 
• You can also upload your game/activity/interactive whatnot to itch.io. After you create an account, you can upload games and activities' HTML files (which is what Twine gives you when you publish your activity). This is where, as you may have noticed, this activity is hosted. Itch.io offers a lot of options-- you can fiddle with the size of the display (Source Analysis I is 650x900), check a box to enable mobile-friendliness, etc. Lots of Twine games are hosted there.
• Lastly, Twine can incorporate photos and audio, but the image and audio files themselves can't live within the game file, which can get a bit tricky. I would rate incorporating those things as a bit more advanced than you may want to experiment with on your first go-round, but it is doable. 

I want to experiment with Twine! 

Hooray! Just visit https://twinery.org/ to get started. You can use the tool in your browser, which will save your work to the browser, or you can use the downloaded version (I prefer this). 

Please note: Like player progress, Twine also saves your projects in progress themselves in your browser (whether you use the desktop version or not), meaning that deleting your history, cookies, etc can wipe away your games too. To avoid disaster, archive often: From the story list, click the "Archive" button on the right, then save the resulting file to a location you can find later. This will bring your entire library back if you lose it!

I want to make something like this or edit this to make my own thing!

Hooray! Feel free to use this framework in your classes,  and change it however works for you. (If you publicly post any versions, a linkback here would be nice, and I'd love to hear about your project!) All the text in the project can be found here (so if the screenshots above are difficult to read, you can find all the text they display here as well).

Please note: There are multiple story formats (that is, highly specific programming languages) for Twine, meaning that depending on which one your Twine is set to,  some commands or features are done differently. This activity uses the Chapbook story format, which is relatively new and easier to learn than older formats. If you'd like to use Chapbook, set that as your format by clicking the title of your game while you're editing it, then clicking "Change Story Format" and selecting Chapbook. If you want to learn more about what you can do in Chapbook, see the Chapbook Story Format Guide.

However, all story formats will let you use double brackets to let you link between passages; for example, [[Passage I]]. If that's all you want to do, you don't need to worry about story formats.

Questions? Ideas for using Twine in other ways? Let me know! 

Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part I

 

Scrolling text gif courtesy of Screedbot.

I've recently been rediscovering my love of interactive fiction, a formative medium for me when I was growing up. 

A Brief Intro to Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction (IF) includes several different classifications of thing, but usually the term refers to text-based (though not necessarily exclusively text) software games or stories which allow players to have some amount of control over how and/or when the story unfolds. There are two main styles of IF: choose your own adventure (CYOA) style, which offers a limited number of options that you can click on (similar to the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, which had you make decisions by flipping to a particular page), and parser IF, which allows you to type in the actions you want to take within the narrative. Some interactive fictions are more focused on telling a story,  while others are more focused on creating a game experience (solving puzzles, winning). 

Screenshot from CYOA style game Birdland, by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. Surprisingly, unrelated to my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course. 

Screenshot from parser IF game Counterfeit Monkey, by Emily Short.
Image: Media Archaeology Lab. 

Before recently, I had never really tried to make my own games, content to play others (almost entirely parser IF); however, more recently I've been working on a few personal projects in the CYOA style. In this post, I want to talk about a couple of ways to use a tool often used for creating CYOA-style interactive fiction in the classroom: Twine.  

Make Your Own Adventure

When I sat down to write this post, I thought that I'd talked before here about using Twine for history courses, but it turns out that I've only briefly mentioned the beginning of the Western unit. So, I'll preface this by saying that I've used Twine before in the classroom, assigning students to make their own takes on the Western genre which incorporated gamified or choice elements. Twine is a great tool for this sort of thing because it is very easy to learn enough to get started making a narrative. My Fiction and the Historical Imagination students used Twine for a "hackathon," spending the whole of a 50-minute class period putting together their games in small groups, and did a fantastic job embracing, challenging, and pushing the limits of the Western genre. 

So, Twine can pretty easily be used as a student assignment tool. However, there are also ways in which instructors can make something in Twine to assign to students. Here's one example that works well for history: source analysis, especially close readings of shorter texts. So, being curious about how this might look, I knocked out a potential example, which you can experiment with either in the embedded version below or directly on itch.io.

"Source Analysis I" (a creative title right up there with my childhood stuffed animals "Lamby" and "Mr. Bear") took me about an hour and a half, not counting all of the other distractions I got up to along the way like changing the wording around, taking screenshots for this post, and testing it on a variety of devices and browsers. The goal is for students to click on the parts of the text that are linked to questions related to that phrase or idea, and answer the corresponding questions. As you may notice, this version of the activity offers students the option to collect their answers in their own document and turn that in, or type their answers directly into text boxes under each question; the answers are then returned to them all together at the end in a single page that can be emailed, printed, or submitted to an LMS. One could also assign only one or the other format; I wanted to include both in this activity to illustrate that there are multiple options for doing this sort of activity (and you can offer all, some, or only one to your students directly), and that one takes almost no "coding" and the other only minimal coding.

How much coding, you ask? In part II, I'll walk through the process of creating the activity, and talk more about the limitations of this particular version and of Twine overall. For now, though, I'll leave you with some of the...

Benefits of this activity

One of the things that can often be difficult about reading for college courses is figuring out how, exactly, you are supposed to read something. In history courses, we often want students to skim the textbook and pay close attention to the details of a primary source, but it can be difficult to explain and emphasize this distinction in a way that feels natural.  I like that rendering a passage in Twine this way, with particular segments linked to related questions, makes the act of close reading feel more intentional, and the source as a whole a bit less daunting. Selecting a particular phrase and digging deeply into it becomes a more finite undertaking; it is no longer a long sheet of questions but rather a series of small tasks directly embedded into the text itself. 

This version is a bit handholdy, suitable for an introduction to this sort of close reading. One could climb a bit higher on Bloom's Taxonomy by asking one or more follow-up questions; I like the idea of asking a student what segment of the text they would highlight and questions they would add if they were going to edit the game themselves. 

I'll be back with part II soon, with a detailed walkthrough of how to make a similar activity. If there are any particular questions or features you'd like me to address, feel free to drop them in comments! 

Related links:

 

If you want to try playing interactive fiction yourself, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) is a great place to start. (You might find this friendly beginner list or this other friendly beginner list useful.

 

The Interactive Fiction Archive might be of interest to digital humanists/technology historians.

Flashback Roundup: Early American Witches

In honor of the season's plethora of pop culture references to witches, here's a roundup of all of my posts on teaching about witchcraft in Early America, with some updates and additional resources. I'd love to hear more about other witchcraft history resources--anywhere, anytime-- in comments!

Syllabizing Salem (originally published April 9, 2018)

I'll be teaching a course next fall under the shell "Fiction and Historical Imagination," which I am using to explore American historical mythologies from Puritan witch trials to the passing of the 19th Amendment. Since I've last written about this project, the title has evolved to "Fictionalizing US History, 1630-1920" and I've begun to try and tackle turning my Course Rationale into a functional syllabus. Today, I want to talk about my process of figuring out where to start and what to start with.

Hopefully this will provide a few items of interest-- to students who might be thinking about taking the course and would like a sneak peek; to anyone looking for readings to assign for courses on Salem or just for their own reading pleasure; or to any instructors wondering, "How do other people find things to assign?" These are not the definitive selections-- I may in the end need to add or subtract based on time, availability, or content-- but this is where I am for now.

Beginnings: A Reaction to Reacting

To set the stage: When I first conceptualized teaching my Reacting to the Past course, Conflict and Unity in American History, the early American setting of the first game we were to play was daunting. I had not previously had much interest in

• Colonial America
• The history of religion
• New England in general
• Anything involving reading documents with "f"s instead of "s"s*

So, Trial of Anne Hutchinson was an odd match. But I wanted to assign Greenwich Village, 1913, which I had played as part of my Reacting to the Past training, and I wanted to emphasize an aspect of the game that I thought could be easily overlooked in a course that attempted to focus on a narrow time period: the struggle for group definition that occasioned the conflict of the game. The players in Greenwich Village are ultimately struggling not only to decide whether they will support suffragists or labor activists with their time and art; they are also trying to determine what they as a community value. Trial of Anne Hutchinson, set in a vastly different time (the 1620s) and with far different consequences for winners and losers (various implied possibilities including: banishment, divine punishment, social censure), represents at its heart a similar attempt to figure out what parameters defined their group.

To truly appreciate this element of the trial, it was necessary for both the players and I to understand what, precisely, the debate was all about (who is really "saved" by God, and how do we know?), and what motivated the drive to ensure the Massachusetts Bay Colony was spiritually unified. The game materials were handy for providing context about religious debates that preceded the trial, the insecurities about the colony's survival, and the Calvinist convictions which made the unity of the colony a critical matter. In the end, these served their purpose well, and I left both semesters confident that students had, in addition to improving their argumentation skills, gained a greater understanding of some very unfamiliar points of view.

However, Anne Hutchinson and Puritan New England has stuck in my head, partially because I noticed an interesting trend when I discussed the course with people. Whether students on the first day of class or other graduate students, most only dimly recalled Hutchinson (I was unfamiliar with her when I first heard of the game) and thought that perhaps she had been tried for witchcraft. I was intrigued by how the complexity of Puritan religious thought, well expressed by my students in their roles as Governors, Pastors, and Teachers in the colony, has been widely translated to "those witch-burners."

Starting from Fiction

The family from The Witch (2015), kneeling.

When I began conceptualizing this course, I knew I wanted to build upon the complications we had explored in Trial of Anne Hutchinson. I also knew that I wanted to assign The Witch (2015) as one of our fictional treatments of history. I had wanted to screen clips of the film as part of my Reacting course the previous year, but couldn't quite justify its incorporation. Yet I found the film very reflective of the spritual anxieties articulated by the major players in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: not just a censure of powerful womanhood (although, sure, that) but also a genuine belief that one's community must reflect compliance with divine will and a certainty that the devil did, in fact, exist. I now needed two things:

• A secondary source which could provide the context to appreciate this aspect of the film
• A reading which could provide a more traditional view of the witchcraft myth

I cast about for options, using the UIUC library catalog to seek out titles related to the history of witches, witch trials, and colonial America. I found Elizabeth Reis's book Damned Women, contemplated assigning it, and realized that her collection Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America not only contained an abbreviated chapter of her book but also additional readings that might come in handy.

My second task was more obvious: I quickly opted for the quintessential treatment of the witchcraft myth, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Not only is it frequently cited in any discussion of real or figurative "witchhunts," it also represented a different form of fiction, and I wanted to be able to potentially incorporate a discussion of form and performance into the course. I decided to start the course, after introductory materials on source analysis, by delving into this text together.

From here, I wanted to provide some complicating counterpoints to the Salem presented by Miller. First, I knew that I wanted to include discussion of Tituba and the role of race in the Salem mythology. I plan to assign selections of Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem, which attempts to use the sparse historical record to trace Tituba's life story and argue for rethinking both her racial identity and her role in the story of Salem.

Upon doing a little digging, it becomes fairly obvious that Salem's witchcraft trials were far afield of what most witchcraft trials looked like. Paradoxically, because the Salem incident was so unusual, they have been remembered; yet in being the only ones remembered, they have passed as the only available example and thus defined popular understanding of American witch trials. I chose Richard Godbeer's Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 to call attention to this discrepancy. Godbeer focuses on a Connecticut incident which occurred in the same yea, but which unfolded very dissimilarly: if Salem was a "panic," officials' treatment of witch claims in Stamford could best be described as "cautious" (7).

Conclusions

So, below is the current list in order-- next step, assigning each reading to a date!

• The Crucible (1953)
• Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem (selections)
• Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692
• The Witch (2015)
• Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (selections)

As you can see, the final order is very different than the order in which I conceived of the sources to use. Obviously, there are tons of other things that one could assign to talk about the American mythology of Salem-- these are just a few of my frontrunners, and not the final word (and I suspect I may need to cut this down a bit!). Likewise, there are other great approaches to figuring out what to assign-- I'd love to hear about yours.


* Yes, I know it's not really an f. No, I won't stop pronouncing it "Congrefs."

Related Links:

An interesting guide to the proper use of the long and short s.
Quite an extensive online archive of Salem sources exists at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.
A Smithsonian Magazine article on Tituba.
I'm also considering using Veta Smith Tucker's article Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village, from the Journal of Black Studies.

Update: 

Interested in how scheduling and organization for this section of the course turned out? Check out my Fiction and the Historical Imagination syllabus. 

Time Travel and Crucible Critique (originally published September 5, 2018)

A shot of the original production of The Crucible, from playbill.com.

It's Week 2 of the semester, and History 365 is now in full swing. In this course, in addition to seminar style discussions, weekly response papers, and a final project, I'm using various creative projects to encourage students to make connections between the historical fictions we're reading and other primary and secondary sources of the eras under study. Today I debuted an activity which asks students to step into one of three perspectives and work together to argue about The Crucible's relevance to the experiences of their group.

How do you solve a problem like Arthur Miller?

I have to admit that I was stuck on what to do with The Crucible for a while. I knew that I wanted to include it as a starting point for our discussion of witchcraft and religion in colonial New England, as so many people's ideas about the topic and the period are already informed by the work. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to read and discuss it in class, so that we would all have a basis for understanding this influential portrayal of the Salem trials. I knew also that it was long enough that it would be difficult to pair with the longer companion texts in the section for a comparative discussion-- I didn't want to have it due the same day as Escaping Salem or The Witch so that we could compare the two immediately. It would not only be more reading than was reasonable for one day but also rush the discussion of both, leaving us little time to get to some of the smaller details. It would have to be the subject of a few days of discussion before getting to these newer texts.

Knowing this was the case, I still couldn't figure out what to do with The Crucible. As performance of a theatrical work can be an important part of its interpretation, I toyed with the idea of having students produce scenes from the work, with one as a dramaturg, one as a director, some as actors, etcetera. Perhaps pairing it with a performance of a HUAC trial transcript. But although I could see the potential value of doing this, I couldn't see my way into or out of it-- I couldn't make it make sense for this class and the kind of intellectual engagement with the text I wanted to encourage.


I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in under half an hour for once when the solution finally came to me, as these things so often do. I had assigned the Christopher Bigsby introduction to the Penguin edition for the week before the actual play was due, and when I went back to consider it again I found a great deal which seemed delightfully questionable. No statement was so ripe for critique as that which came near the end of the piece, in which Bigsby claims that "the play's success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written." Such a claim echoes the widespread interest in declaring this particular work as well as most other well-regarded literature as somehow good because they capture a universal humanity, a transcendence of context. How could I encourage students to avoid this mentality, which sounds very nice but is useless for an appreciation of history?

The Project: Time-Travelers and The Crucible

The conceit of the project I ended up designing is this:

In a mysterious and poetic quirk of fate, two groups of 1690s Puritans from Salem, Massachusetts AND two groups of Hollywood writers targeted by HUAC in the 1940s and 50s have been transported forward in time to the modern day. As coincidence would have it, they have landed in the midst of a conference of historians of race and gender who are analyzing The Crucible. In this project, you and your group will analyze Miller’s play in light of your particular viewpoint and come up with a plan to present your experiences to one another and to the curious world in a press conference.

In this project, students are in one of six groups. (For a smaller class, three could easily be used-- my class is too big to have only three groups).

• Groups 1 and 2: 1690s Puritans who lived through the trials. They are tasked with answering the question: Does this play reflect our experience and values?
• Groups 3 and 4: Targets of HUAC in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. They investigate whether this play speaks to their experiences as suspected Hollywood Communists.
• Groups 5 and 6: Modern day historians of race and gender. They have a more removed task, contemplating whether Miller’s play is more reflective of 1690’s ideas on race and gender, 1950s ideas of race and gender, or some combination of the two.

Each group confers with one another to consider Miller's work in relation to "their" experiences and interests. They create a 5-7 minute presentation, using evidence from the play and other sources provided, such as lecture, primary documents such as selections from Puritan sermons and HUAC trial transcripts, and secondary literature. They took the class period to work on this, and are free (but not required) to work on this outside of class as well. On Friday, they will present their conclusions to the group.

Project sheets and rubric are here.

Reflections

I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the class has taken to the activity so far. I was a bit worried it would be confusing and I would get a lot of questions about the details of the project. In reality, many of the questions I got were complex historical ones about relationships between ideologies and actions in the Puritan context. From observations I made walking around the room, most of the class seemed to come to the questions and ideas I wanted to encourage, considering issues of race, religion, gender, enslavement, historical interpretation, and the nature of experience in relation to the texts. The questions and arguments raised in this section will serve as a nice platform to build upon for the final week of inquiry into the mythological role that Salem and the concept of colonial witchcraft trials have played in US historical memory.

Related Links:

Some of the sources I provided include the HUAC transcripts of Paul Robeson and John Howard Lawson; Gretchen Adams, "The Specter of Salem in American Culture," from the OAH Magazine of History, July 2003; and selections of John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; "Regulating Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies," from Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality; Elaine Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem; Steven J. Ross, Movies and American Society.

Update: 

Interested in how to make this activity work on a more individual level, or help students who miss a day to catch up? I also created a project sheet for making up this activity.

Making a Course You Love (originally published June 18, 2018)

I've talked before about being a proponent of giving students an excuse to spend time on something that interests them, having relished those opportunities during my own education. There are so many obligations which face students that they must prioritize, and wrapping some freedom of choice into assignments allows them to reflect on what sorts of things they might be intellectually passionate about. Today I want to talk about the flip side of this concept-- instructors and the freedom they have to steer the content of a course toward things that pique their interest.

An empty page for only me to fill! Should I hold the light bulb over my head, or...

I've been prepping on and off for the last few months for my fall course, Fiction and the Historical Imagination. It's a fun one to organize not only because I'm always interested in how history is portrayed in fiction-- for this iteration of the course, I'm examining popular mythologies and narratives about American history in a variety of fictional sources from theatre to video games-- but because it's enabled me to expand on some topics and questions I've already taught in a much more limited sphere. Only semi-intentionally, this course positions itself roughly within the same time periods as my Reacting to the Past course. It begins with Massachusetts Puritans-- albeit to talk about the Salem witch trials in 1692-1693 rather than the Anne Hutchinson trial in the 1630s. And it ends in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, arguably the paramount goal of the Suffrage faction in Greenwich Village, 1913. So in many ways, it's as if I'm coming at much of this material backwards in planning this course. First, I helped two groups of students live the history; now I and a new group will together delve into the background, the historiography, and the popular memory which surrounds and bridges these two events.

It’s a great opportunity to incorporate the knowledge I have gained from the games into a (slightly) more conventional seminar-style course. Not only do the names and dates associated with these periods come more naturally to me than ever before, but also an appreciation of the humanity, subjectivity, and tendentiousness of historical moments that Reacting emphasizes. I feel I have a grasp on some critical theological ideas of Puritan life that I might not have appreciated without having led students to those realization in the Anne Hutchinson game. One of my former students commented that she had come into the course thinking the Puritans were nonsensical people, but that the game had given her an understanding of their priorities. It's also helping to me envision a future course that marries both approaches; for example, a deep dive into the Puritans which incorporates both the Salem material and the Anne Hutchinson trial.

The difficult part, as always, is transmitting knowledge and appreciation in an effective way to a new group. I know I will want to refer to the events of the games (much as I always make popular culture references in class that only two people understand), and being that there are only a couple of repeat customers I will have to restrain myself!

Tailoring a course to something you'd like to talk about in this way offers a lot of fun options, but it also threatens some pitfalls. Many of us, I'm sure, have taken or heard of courses that were clearly serving only the instructors' interests and not those of the proposed themes. How do we lean into the freedom to shape a course we're excited about without ignoring the needs of the course as a whole?

I don't claim to have all the answers-- hey, this is my first time doing something quite like this!-- but here's the general rules I've tried to make for myself in this process:

• Lean into joy rather than expertise-- that is, try for a course that emphasizes the things you think are really interesting rather than the very specific thing you are personally studying. These can of course overlap, but enthusiasm draws in people who might not care about the topic, whereas no amount of encyclopedic knowledge on children's hospitals during the Depression era can convince folks to stay in your course past the drop date.
• Related: Try not to be completely self-serving-- if something helps you with your reading to-do list, your prep for a conference, or just saves you time because you already have a lecture for that, consider whether it also serves the course well. There are many things I've considered incorporating that I've just had to cut because they weren't quite pulling their weight for my overall goals (but, okay, I'm still working on it).
• Don’t hesitate to embrace the new/fun-sounding-- if you have the time, try to break out of what you've done before and use new resources-- you might find things you never knew existed. For this course, I decided to use Valiant Hearts: The Great War as a fictional source to discuss US involvement in World War I. This decision led me to learn of the Gaming Initiative and try out the Gaming Center at the Undergraduate Library, as well as learning the game had iPhone and Android versions. Now that I know that those things exist, how they work, and who to talk to about them, I can not only use them with greater ease in the future but also refer students to those resources and describe how to use them.
• Related: Don’t embrace the new/fun just because it's new/fun-sounding-- this is particularly true for online materials, which bill themselves as being the newest most fun millennial/Gen Z appealing way to learn but in reality are often poorly structured and frustrating to both the computer unsavvy and the technology buff. If you don't have time to test the new thing and see if it's actually helpful, the old books/primary sources/paper copies/presentation styles are just fine.

You'll notice a pattern here-- there's a middle ground that I'm aiming for, a happy marriage of all the considerations of structure, effort, enthusiasm, knowledge. A balance between knowing and discovering which brings vibrancy to a group discussion of ideas-- which is, after all, what a seminar is at its base.

Do you have any tips for using intellectual interests to power a course?

The First Church in Northampton, MA (originally published October 23, 2017)

Sign outside of church, Northampton, MA. A link to the sign's text can be found here.

Being in Northampton is wonderful because one is surrounded by women of all ages who seem both smarter and more fashionable than you, and yet somehow it is motivating and not discouraging. Hence it was a little jarring to come upon this sign reminding me of the Trial of Anne Hutchinson, a Reacting to the Past Game I taught in my classes last year which, despite the title, features no women as playable characters --as a General Court of the period would not have contained any women. (See this post from the OAH blog for a description of both Reacting and The Trial of Anne Hutchinson by Mark Carnes, co-author of the Hutchinson game and Reacting Consortium Executive Director.)

In this game, it's 1637, and a variety of men of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have gathered to determine whether or not Anne Hutchinson, local religious thinker and midwife, should be banished from the colony. Her crime? Well, that's sort of complicated. Were I to tell you much more, I would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that those who have played the game come to a variety of conclusions about the charges and her guilt or innocence of them (but no, she's not a witch-- though some of these same Puritans' relatives will also be involved in the Salem Witch trials toward the end of the century. Puritan life was rife with religio-legal drama).

John Cotton plays a critical role in this game-- a noncommittal teacher whom all look up to, both pro and anti-Anne members of the General Court want to win his favor. Cotton is also in a precarious position within the conflict, not wishing to abandon any of his admirers or to upset the power players on the General Court. Historically, Anne is banished; Cotton escapes unscathed, becoming more conservative over the rest of his life. I give these historical details and more in the postmortem to the game (facts about the fate of their character which any student could look up were they inclined, so I'm not giving away any trade secrets here). During this postmortem, a clear theme emerges-- these people, and their descendants, have their mitts all over American history, especially on the East Coast. John Winthrop, Governor and main authority in the General Court, is perhaps the most famous example-- still quoted by a wide variety of politicians, he originated the "cittie on a hill" phraseology which has inspired many American-exceptionalist ideas. His son founded Connecticut and John Kerry is one of his notable descendents.

John Cotton has similarly notable descendents, particularly Cotton Mather, John Cotton's grandson who is known for his New England ministry and his historical writing (and, those darn Salem Witch Trials again!) This sign brings in another connection-- Eleazar Mather, cousin of Cotton Mather, was Northampton's first minister.



This tidbit suggests the reach of some of these families, a stark contrast to the way you meet them in the game. Despite some of their achievements and connections, or their apparent control over the colony, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay in 1637 are a small group in a tenuous position-- they're afraid of England; of attack by local Pequots, with whom they've recently warred; of sin, which lives within themselves; of one another, whose indiscretions threaten to bring down the wrath of God or England upon all of them.

Another connection to the problems and aftermath of the Hutchinson trial is the "Halfway Covenant" promoted by this church's second minister, Solomon Stoddard.



Previously, to join Puritan churches, parishioners had to stand before the assembly and tell them how they came to know that they were part of the elect few who were saved. During the Anne Hutchinson game, a third of the students play the roles of newcomers to the colony, who have to be admitted to the church before they can vote on the Anne matter in the General Court or pursue their own individual goals effectively. They do so through their comportment, the hope that no one can discredit them, and, most importantly, writing and presenting a conversion narrative. As illustrated by Hutchinson's case, the churches' main concern was restricting membership to "visible saints" who were definitely elect.

For example, here's John Winthrop's conversion narrative. Note the detailed chronological retelling of one's life experiences; the confession of one's sins; changing behavior as evidence of becoming sanctified ("the great change which God had wrought in me", pp 6) and yet the lasting struggle with sin ("continual conflicts between the flesh and the spirit", pp 12); yet, ultimately, assurance that he is elect ("when I have been put to it by any sudden danger or fearful temptation, the good spirit of the Lord hath not failed to bear witness to me, giving me comfort, and courage in the very pinch", pp12).

Fast forwarding thirty years or so, the exclusivity of the church resulted in reduced membership and thus a reduced power over public life. The Halfway Covenant allowed children of church members to be baptized into it (though as only "half," not full, members) without having had a conversion experience. This would increase church membership and address the issues that arose with second and third generations of Puritans, who wanted their children baptized within the church but often lacked a dramatic conversion to share. John Wilson, Pastor of the Boston Church at the time of the Hutchinson trial, supported the Halfway Covenant when it was proposed-- meaning that the arduous process that immigrants to the colony were forced to go through was downgraded in importance for the children of baptized members.

Why is this interesting? The church and sign showcases the reach of ideas and families across space and time (and suggests the familial ties between different New England cities), and illustrates the way a single place can echo to a variety of disparate, nationally relevant ideas.

Questions? Comments? Send them my way!

Related links:

Description of the Anne Hutchinson game on the Reacting site.
Winthrop's narrative at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Winthrop's journal at archive.org.

Current Project: Time Travel and Crucible Critique

A shot of the original production of The Crucible, from playbill.com.

It's Week 2 of the semester, and History 365 is now in full swing. In this course, in addition to seminar style discussions, weekly response papers, and a final project, I'm using various creative projects to encourage students to make connections between the historical fictions we're reading and other primary and secondary sources of the eras under study. Today I debuted an activity which asks students to step into one of three perspectives and work together to argue about The Crucible's relevance to the experiences of their group. 

How do you solve a problem like Arthur Miller? 

I have to admit that I was stuck on what to do with The Crucible for a while. I knew that I wanted to include it as a starting point for our discussion of witchcraft and religion in colonial New England, as so many people's ideas about the topic and the period are already informed by the work. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to read and discuss it in class, so that we would all have a basis for understanding this influential portrayal of the Salem trials. I knew also that it was long enough that it would be difficult to pair with the longer companion texts in the section for a comparative discussion-- I didn't want to have it due the same day as Escaping Salem or The Witch so that we could compare the two immediately. It would not only be more reading than was reasonable for one day but also rush the discussion of both, leaving us little time to get to some of the smaller details. It would have to be the subject of a few days of discussion before getting to these newer texts.

Knowing this was the case, I still couldn't figure out what to do with The Crucible. As performance of a theatrical work can be an important part of its interpretation, I toyed with the idea of having students produce scenes from the work, with one as a dramaturg, one as a director, some as actors, etcetera. Perhaps pairing it with a performance of a HUAC trial transcript. But although I could see the potential value of doing this, I couldn't see my way into or out of it-- I couldn't make it make sense for this class and the kind of intellectual engagement with the text I wanted to encourage. 

I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in under half an hour for once when the solution finally came to me, as these things so often do. I had assigned the Christopher Bigsby introduction to the Penguin edition for the week before the actual play was due, and when I went back to consider it again I found a great deal which seemed delightfully questionable. No statement was so ripe for critique as that which came near the end of the piece, in which Bigsby claims that "the play's success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written." Such a claim echoes the widespread interest in declaring this particular work as well as most other well-regarded literature as somehow good because they capture a universal humanity, a transcendence of context. How could I encourage students to avoid this mentality, which sounds very nice but is useless for an appreciation of history? 

The Project: Time-Travelers and The Crucible

The conceit of the project I ended up designing is this:

In a mysterious and poetic quirk of fate, two groups of 1690s Puritans from Salem, Massachusetts AND two groups of Hollywood writers targeted by HUAC in the 1940s and 50s have been transported forward in time to the modern day. As coincidence would have it, they have landed in the midst of a conference of historians of race and gender who are analyzing The Crucible. In this project, you and your group will analyze Miller’s play in light of your particular viewpoint and come up with a plan to present your experiences to one another and to the curious world in a press conference. 

In this project, students are in one of six groups. (For a smaller class, three could easily be used-- my class is too big to have only three groups).

• Groups 1 and 2: 1690s Puritans who lived through the trials. They are tasked with answering the question: Does this play reflect our experience and values?
• Groups 3 and 4: Targets of HUAC in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. They investigate whether this play speaks to their experiences as suspected Hollywood Communists.
• Groups 5 and 6: Modern day historians of race and gender. They have a more removed task, contemplating whether Miller’s play is more reflective of 1690’s ideas on race and gender, 1950s ideas of race and gender, or some combination of the two. 

Each group confers with one another to consider Miller's work in relation to "their" experiences and interests. They create a 5-7 minute presentation, using evidence from the play and other sources provided, such as lecture, primary documents such as selections from Puritan sermons and HUAC trial transcripts, and secondary literature. They took the class period to work on this, and are free (but not required) to work on this outside of class as well. On Friday, they will present their conclusions to the group. 

Project sheets and rubric are here. 

Reflections

I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the class has taken to the activity so far. I was a bit worried it would be confusing and I would get a lot of questions about the details of the project. In reality, many of the questions I got were complex historical ones about relationships between ideologies and actions in the Puritan context. From observations I made walking around the room, most of the class seemed to come to the questions and ideas I wanted to encourage, considering issues of race, religion, gender, enslavement, historical interpretation, and the nature of experience in relation to the texts. The questions and arguments raised in this section will serve as a nice platform to build upon for the final week of inquiry into the mythological role that Salem and the concept of colonial witchcraft trials have played in US historical memory. 

Related Links:

Some of the sources I provided include the HUAC transcripts of Paul Robeson and John Howard Lawson; Gretchen Adams, "The Specter of Salem in American Culture," from the OAH Magazine of History, July 2003; and selections of John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; "Regulating Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies," from Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality; Elaine Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem; Steven J. Ross, Movies and American Society.