It Was as If We Were Never There

still read the Sydney Morning Herald online almost every day."I just can't seem to leave Sydney," she said, perhaps not realizing that she had never actually left Plattsburgh.Teaching this course also had a profound impact on me.The relationship I established with these students was the strongest in my teaching experience.It broadened my ideas on how students can best capitalize on the multitude of primary and secondary sources available to them, forcing me to innovate on the more traditional pedagogical methods of lectures, note taking, and discussions.It also demonstrated that Plattsburgh's Honors Program allows for unusual flexibility and creativity, engendering a student community strong enough to survive for several weeks without a professor.The next step, then, is to stretch such opportunities to students in the general curriculum, perhaps through the learning communities that have been successful on so many campuses.While doing so would necessitate administrative support and the shattering of rigid registrar schedules, I hope in the future to introduce other courses "outside the box" to a variety of students on a variety of levels, as the rewards are many. "It Was As If We Were Never There": Recovering Detroit's Past for History and Theater Charles BrightThis project began in a conversation about Sophocles' tragedy Philoctetes and the ancient Greek practice of combining the telling of history with the rituals of theater.It was designed to address two problems I had encountered in teaching a course on the history of Detroit.First, although the city celebrated its three hundredth anniversary this year with the Detroit 300 festival, it is in most respects a twentieth-century boomtown.Much of its early history has been erased by the power and speed of its dynamic expansion in the first half of the century-and its equally dramatic contraction in the second half.The dominant historical discourse is one of rise and fall, spiked by an immense nostalgia for the city that once (briefly) was. 1 The recent past is often deployed as a cautionary tale about what goes wrong with urban spaces when racism, white flight, and industrial evacuation undercut a city's viability. 2Such a historical construction

Art history · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• Local to where, across the river?”

  Brian Jansen•Canadian Review of American Studies•2025

  Add to list