My interest in history began at an early age growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia. School trips to the homes of Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, James Madison, and George Washington and to the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., helped to instill an appreciation for American history, especially of the Revolutionary era. Additional trips as a youth and teenager to Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites throughout Virginia, to Gettysburg, and to American Indian sites and museums in New Mexico made lasting impressions and led me to majoring in history as an undergraduate. Historical sites and high-quality historical interpretation are absolutely vital to getting students and citizens interested in the nation’s past. Another continuous source of historical interest for me is family history. Americans typically love the pursuit of genealogy, and my family is no exception. My interest in family history is one that encompasses the larger historical trends that I teach about and making the connections between those macro-level events and my own family’s past. There are no royalty or presidents in my family’s history, that I am aware of, but my ancestors and all American ancestors participated in occurrences here and across the world that we teachers lecture about on a daily basis. As teachers, we frequently have difficulty bringing those events to a level that our students can care about; family history is one way of doing that.

I am an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I specialize in American Indian, American environmental, and early American history. I earned my doctorate in American History at the University of Kentucky in 1998 and taught for ten years at the University of Southern Mississippi. In addition to numerous articles and review essays on southeastern Indian history, I am the author of Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830 published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2002 and winner of the 2003 McLemore Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society for the best book on a Mississippi history topic. I also co-edited George Washington’s South published by the University of Florida Press in 2004 and edited Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008. One of my articles, “The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries on the Post-Revolutionary Southern Frontier,” won the 2002 Fletcher M. Green and Charles W. Ramsdell Award for the best article published in the Journal of Southern History during the two preceding years.  

Currently, I am writing a book on the New Orleans Flood of 1849, the worst flood in the city’s history before Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I was lucky to present part of this research to a packed room of teachers in Lafayette, Louisiana, while working for the American Institute for History Education (AIHE). They were amazed, as I am, at the stunning parallels between the two floods separated by 156 years. In both disasters, elected officials failed to prepare adequately for the possibility of a flood and neglected the advice of engineers, while also doing little to alleviate the suffering of the thousands of people displaced from their homes. A longer-term project that I am working on is a study of the Seven Years War in the South (1750s-1760s) focusing on Native diplomatic initiatives and Indian-European relations. 

Being able to teach for AIHE and to meet teachers and other professionals across the country has enhanced my teaching in unexpected ways. As Dr. Bill Ross has told me, we all learn from each other and we are all united by our love of history. I have incorporated, in altered form, Dr. Dennis Denenberg’s use of “heroes” in history in my survey-level courses as a way to bring those macro-level events that I normally lecture about down to the level of individuals so that students can see how real people grappled with history-changing events. I also take to heart Dennis’ caution that “heroes” are not perfect, though admirable, and have faults like all other people. Bill Ross’ idea to open a class by quizzing students about historical events from that date has also proven invigorating in my survey-level courses. One day last fall when I forgot to bring my list of “today’s date in history,” the nearly 200 students were genuinely disappointed. They had grown to be excited by starting the class with a fun verbal quiz that encompassed politics, economics, and cultural events and people. It was almost beside the point that they were also learning history. For AIHE I usually teach about early American History, such as the Washington and Adams administrations, or colonial Virginia, or African Americans and American Indians during the American Revolution, however I have also lectured about 20^th century U.S. history too, something that I teach in survey courses at the university level. Most times, I learn new facts and interpretations from the teachers we are working with while they learn or reinforce their content knowledge from me. AIHE has brought together an amazingly diverse collection of professionals who approach history in a variety of ways. The resulting dynamic is beneficial to teachers and participants alike, and I count myself privileged to participate.