[...]Using Maps in History: An Interview with Dr. Helmut Walser Smith «[...]…

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts here: very interesting!

I assign Sister Carrie all the time, and cannot get enough of it. I also love The Pit, although I have never used it in class. I find that Nature’s Metropolis, while wonderful, is situated a bit outside the city for most of my courses of this nature. And I have used Devil and in the White City frequently, the students tend to like the “devil” portions far more than the coverage of the White City, and I think the full force of the book is somewhat lost on them. (I think I am pandering to them by assigning it, but then they say they don’t really like the book, so it does not serve its purpose!)

I really love Carl Smith’s book, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief. I have used this many times and get wonderful reactions from it. Smith came to American Studies and Urban History from English, and his prose is lovely. Twenty Years at Hull House is always appropriate. I also adore Hilda Satt Polacheck’s book about growing up at Hull House. I can absolutely go on and on here!

I direct our Honors Program at Worcester State University. In honors we urge students to visit cities, and a whole course ideology was developed by the National Collegiate Honors Council called City As Text (TM) that you might want to check out.

Feel free to contact me for more discussion on teaching Chicago.

The greatest advantage to studying in location is the opportunity to experience, in some way, the places, sights, and sounds of the sources and people you research. Our course was broken up so that half of each M-TH morning class was spent in lecture time, while the other half was an excursion based on the lecture. When studying the working class we explored East London, and when studying popular leisure we went to Brighton, for example.

Books and readings become a bit tricky. You don’t want to overload students with so many readings that they will lose the opportunity to explore the city. On the other hand, first and foremost this is a university course for which they earn credit. Assign readings well in advance so that some students can finish them before leaving home. Perhaps focus on a reader of articles rather than too many books, which will further break up the readings. And one thing that our professor did was assign a period novel that took place not far from where we were staying. It was more powerful reading about the lives of working-class Victorian Londoners when I was walking down their streets every single day.

Good luck with this project. It sounds exciting, as much for you as your potential students. But, you never know, you might change someone’s entire life.

But building it takes some work. Make sure to keep active in your department, and that your professors know what you’re working on in more than just a general sense. Make contacts with professors and grad students at other institutions. (I’ve been using academia.edu for this kind of networking).

It’s also important to be seen, so make sure you go to conferences. Ideally present a paper, but even just attending, chatting, and meeting people makes a world of difference.

All I can say about this post is that I shared many of your experiences when I was a postdoc at UBC last year. Having two years is certainly better than one and hopefully things turn out just as well in your second year as they did in your first.

The idea of actually trying to use it as you suggest had not occurred to me, but I will keep it in mind for the future. On the other hand, it could complicate things for the next round of students in the following year who would find Wikipedia now more useful and relevant than ever to their course, but still officially off limits.

Good luck with preparing your own work for the press.

And you’re absolutely right about the workshop. These practical elements should be a part of every graduate education, but unfortunately still seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I have to give credit here to a graduate student for helping spearhead a series this term on questions of publishing, and credit to the department for supporting him in it.

I’m learning a lot at USask about how a department should operate to train students and open up opportunities.