Recorded Winter 2022

U.S. history is often covered through the description of events using documents from the period being studied and typically enhanced through biographical sketches of national leaders.  This course will use art work to better tell our nation’s story while elaborating on the paintings and photographs themselves to fully appreciate what we’ve often taken for granted as true to life representations of historical events.  We will start with the French and Indian War and continue through to the Revolutionary War, the early days of the republic and beyond.

Douglas Sheer graduated from SUNY New Paltz and then joined the Peace Corps where he served in the Marshall Islands for two years. He has been teaching social studies for over 30 years and became a department chair in 1987.  He has taught A.P. U.S. History, A.P. Human Geography, and A.P. World History. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study celestial navigation in Greenwich, England in 1994.  In 1996 he was asked by the American Federation of Teachers to instruct teachers in Slovakia about different methods of teaching democratic principles.