On the first day of my course on women and politics in the United States, I introduce a single question: what does US political history look like when women’s experiences and actions are placed at the center? Students then explore how focusing on women’s lives and privileging women’s voices better account for, challenge, or change the way we think about politics. As my students discover, our understanding of American history and politics looks much different when we consider whose experiences matter.

The questions I pose about women are also questions that I pose about other groups of people, in other time periods: whose history and whose experiences matter? For example, my course on Hamilton’s America used the hit musical as a jumping off point to examine a central question in the history of the American Revolution: “a revolution for whom?” In addition to examining the Revolution from diverse perspectives, students examined the stories that we continue to tell of the Revolution both in academic histories and in popular culture, questioning who takes center stage in those stories—and why that matters, both in terms of a collective national memory and in terms of the consequences for contemporary debates about originalism and the founders’ intent. In my classroom, I thus unite traditional work in economic and political history with new work on women, African Americans, Native Americans, working people, sexuality, and ethnicity.

My ultimate goal is to encourage students to think creatively, critically, and historically about the past. This goal is the common thread in the disparate array of courses that I have taught—survey courses in US history and US women’s history, southern women’s history, business history, the American Revolution, gender and race in early America, women and politics, and historical methods.

When class size permits, students visit library special collections to engage directly with archival sources. I draw inspiration from my experiences at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, where I interned in the 2017-2018 academic year, to introduce students to the foundations of archival research and introduce them to unique archival materials and artifacts.