Professional Development & Training

Pardon me?  Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Sorting out Presidential Immunity, Professor Kurk Dorsey

Fifty years ago, President Gerald Ford took the bold step of pardoning former president Richard Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed while in office.  Given the scope of the activities included in the Watergate scandal, it is likely that Nixon would have faced multiple criminal charges.  Just this summer, the Supreme Court ruled on the question of presidential immunity, so this is more than just a question of historical interest. In this lecture, UNH History Professor Kurk Dorsey will explore the nature of Nixon's actions, Ford's decision to pardon him, and the larger question of presidential immunity.

Silk and Spice: Ancient Asian and the Roman Trade Connections, Professor Tejas Arelere

Land and Sea trade of goods between the ancient Roman Empire, the Mauryan Empire in India, and Han Dynasty China was a major economic driver in the ancient world but also shaped the way these groups viewed one another. In this workshop, we will discuss some of the fundamentals of these early trade networks, and discuss literary and material evidence that informs us of global interconnectivity during this period of history. These early trade interactions lay the groundwork for the “Silk Road” which was actually a group of overland routes that allowed goods to move across Eurasia from the 2^nd century BCE until the 15^th century CE. While Euro-American discussions of trade often view the ancient world from an Italo-centric perspective on a map and visualize the flow of goods out from or into the center of the Mediterranean, our source materials highlight how for the Chinese and Indians, Rome was on the periphery of their world maps. Our discussion will consider how using a map that centers Italy, China, or India shifts our modern assumptions about the flow of goods and ideas like Buddhism and Christianity in antiquity.

Teaching History with Role Playing Games (Reacting to the Past), Professor Ann Zimo

This session begins with a short presentation addressing the use of historical role playing games in Professor Zimo’s classes at UNH and benefits that arise from this pedagogical model. Participants will then participate in a “Reacting to the Past” microgame called “Making History: The Breakup” in which players sort through different evidence for the cause of the breakup of a college romance and in the process confront the kinds of issues that historians have in trying to understand the past.

Fear of War and the Fight to Control It:  The 100-Year Anniversary of the Geneva Gas Protocol and How a Short Document Can Be a Window on So Much History, Professor Molly Dorsey

One short document.  Multiple historical lessons.  Inspiration for several classroom activities.

The goal of this workshop is to use the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925, the international treaty that governed poison gas use through the end of the Cold War. 

As we will see through a short lecture, the Protocol can be the basis of historical content that can be integrated into multiple social science courses.   It can be an entry into lessons about global and American history, military and diplomatic history, as well as legal, social, and cultural history.  Debates about arms control and legacies of wars took place at grass rooms levels as well as at the upper echelons of political life and, of course, still exist today.  

Teaching the History of Witch Trials, Dr. Tricia Peone

The Salem witch trials of 1692, and the history of witchcraft generally, remains one of the most misunderstood topics today despite its continued popularity in books, television, and podcasts. Exploring cases of witchcraft through primary source documents can shed light on these and other questions: Why did people accuse each other of witchcraft? Why did trials for witchcraft stop? Did people really believe what they said they believed? We will discuss the many explanations historians and other scholars have offered for witch trials and look at examples of cases from New Hampshire and around the world. Lastly, we will consider how the portrayal of witchcraft in popular culture has shaped the way the public understands historical witchcraft today.

Learn Hieroglyphs!, Professor Scott Smith

What was the meaning of those ancient Egyptian symbols? Were they part of a secret symbolic code? A mystical pathway to enlightenment? Or something else? By the end of the session, participants will understand the basics behind the hieroglyphs, learn the history of rediscovering their meaning, and be able to write their names in the ancient Egyptian language!

The History of Economic Equality, Professor Andrew Seal

The history of economic equality provides insights into how societies have evolved and how wealth distribution impacts social stability, opportunities, and overall quality of life. Understanding this history helps students to compare different systems of wealth distribution across time as well as to grasp the root causes of current economic disparities and the efforts made to address them, fostering a deeper appreciation for social justice and the importance of equitable policies. It also encourages critical thinking about how economic systems influence people's lives and the role they can play in creating a more equitable future.

Teaching the Black Death in a Post-Pandemic Era, Professor Elizabeth Mellyn

Few pandemics are more (in)famous than the fearsome Black Death that ravaged Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century. In many respects it has become synonymous with the Middle Ages as a benighted period without science, medicine, or modern hygiene and in thrall to religion and superstition. Yet, Europe’s experience of bubonic plague was not a fourteenth-century one-off, but rather an enduring series of confrontations that recurred cyclically from the 1340s to the 1720s. And Europeans were not without knowledge or agency in their fight against it. They had a well-articulated understanding of nature and the cosmos that they marshalled to make sense of plague and develop strategies for combatting it. In fact, it is in response to plague that Europeans developed public health measures and institutions that are still in use today. This session builds on our common experience of a recent pandemic coupled with an examination of key primary sources and recent scholarship on the plague to ask 1) what kind of parallels we might draw between the experience of plague in medieval and early modern Europe and the recent global pandemic and 2) what we might learn from the medieval and early modern experience of plague that might also cause us to re-evaluate our understanding of sickness and health and the nature and role of our modern healthcare system?

The Viking Age, Professor David Bachrach

The Vikings spread terror and destruction for hundreds of years throughout modern Britain, northern France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Russia. They also developed remarkable art forms and cutting edge naval technology, constructed important new cities (such as Dublin) and new kingdoms, including Novgorod and Kiev, and explored the New World half a millennium before Columbus. So who were these fierce warriors, intrepid explorers, and famed poets? Participants in this session will discuss ways to teach the Viking Age that goes beyond the aggressor-victim paradigm, and consider some of the reasons why the Viking phenomenon developed, responses to these developments in both Scandinavia and in the rest of Europe, and also consider how to use texts from the Viking age to get students thinking about the art and science of creating history.