Area teachers to learn history from Yale professor at seminar

~ Twenty-five history teachers are scheduled to attend the event at Jackson High School.

For area history teachers, a weekend seminar will offer the chance to learn about American history from an Ivy League professor.

But more importantly to organizer and retired history teacher Linda Nash of Jackson, it's an opportunity to help the region's high school and junior high teachers make history come alive in the classroom.

Twenty-five of the region's history teachers are scheduled to attend the seminar at Jackson High School, featuring American history professor Dr. John Mack Faragher, who directs the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Studies of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University.

Faragher also will present the Veryl L. Riddle Distinguished History Lecture at Southeast Missouri State University at the Show Me Center at 7 p.m. Thursday. Faragher's lecture will focus on violence in the Old West.

The annual lecture is funded by an endowment from Riddle, a Southeast Missouri native and prominent lawyer.

Faragher is recognized as the leading scholar of the American West, university officials said. In 2000, he published "The American West: A New Interpretive History." His textbook, "Out of Many: A History of the American People," has gone through several editions and is now one of the most widely used textbooks on American college campuses. It served as the American history textbook at Southeast for several years, officials said.

'Presidents and Precedents'

The seminar -- scheduled for Friday night and all day Saturday -- is part of a three-year, grant-funded project to improve the teaching of American history in area schools.

That's particularly important, Nash said, when many political leaders and educators are focused largely on improving math and science skills.

"There is little focus on history," she said. "We have to fight to keep that interest up and encourage the students and administrations to realize that history is important."

The "Presidents and Precedents: Teaching American History" project, funded with a $971,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, began in fall 2005.

The grant pays the salaries of the program staff. It also pays the teachers enrolled in the program as well as the historians and others who lecture the group.

The weekend seminar is the third and final seminar scheduled for this school year, said Nash, who heads up the three-year project.

In addition to seminars during the school year, the high school and junior high teachers in the program also attend summer sessions.

The upcoming seminar will focus on President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian period of American history from the late 1820s to the 1830s.

In addition to Faragher's presentation, the seminar will include instruction from English professor Dr. Robert Hamblin on literature of the Jacksonian era.

The high school and junior high school teachers in the program are from 13 Southeast Missouri schools from Bell City to Fredericktown. History teachers from the Jackson, Cape Girardeau, Scott City and Delta school districts are among those enrolled in the program.

Nash said the program has allowed area history teachers to learn from excellent historians.

"The idea is to give them a deeper understanding of particular areas of history so they can then pass that along and encourage their students to gain a deeper appreciation of history," Nash said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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