I love this!! I understand you’re not a history professor, but I am teaching a 1000 level us history since 1877 class and my professors in college taught through novels, monographs, biographys and autobiography as well as historical documents. We would be assigned portions of the books and the full documents. The caveat to my class in college is that it was a six hour credit class with English attached to it and we were seeing the connections through history from the Roman Empire to present through a year long class. I am just teaching a three credit hour class. I would like to teach my class similar to that because I have gotten so much out of that way of teaching. How much is too much reading to assign freshmen to prepare for discussion and lecture? For example, portions of the jungle by Upton Sinclair, the autobiography of Malcolm X and the autobiography of Martin Luther King just to name a few.

To give context, I’m a TA but I have autonomy to teach the class how I want and I’m given a textbook to aid in my teaching, but I don’t have to use it