The Popular Professor Peoples
Peoples was a popular professor who required students taking his Louisiana history course, many of whom were education majors, to write an "original" term paper using primary sources. It was his desire that the students research and write about important events that were not widely known in the body of historical literature. He would not accept regurgitation of already "settled" history but would permit students to offer serious new interpretations of established historical findings. Over the years, his students researched a plethora of previously unknown or relatively little known historical events covering a wide range of Louisiana history.
Peoples avoided injecting his personal attitudes, beliefs, or partisanship in his teaching. He offered the standard historical narrative but frequently detoured with other points of view and interesting stories and anecdotes that he had encountered in years of research and study. He was biased, however, in his love of Louisiana, but he did not let his patriotic spirit withhold truth that exposed the warts and flaws of the state and its leadership over the years. His "Peoples' Policies" instructed his students on exactly what would be expected of them.
He received many honors and awards for his teaching, including the first ever Louisiana State University at Alexandria award as "Outstanding Louisiana Historian" in 1973. He received the Louisiana Tech Faculty Senate "Good Teacher Award" for 1980.
In the 1970s, Peoples and a colleague, geography professor Ralph Douglas Pierce (1931–2009), conducted college-credit bus tours of the United States. In 1971, for instance, the pair led some three dozen students in a tour of the East Coast, with stops in Virginia, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Maine, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Montreal, Detroit, Ohio, and Kentucky. In 1972, they conducted a trip to the American West, with stops at many historical sites and natural wonders, including Yellowstone. The tours were in demand, and students often found that the available seats were quickly taken.
Read more about this topic: Morgan D. Peoples
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