Apple Seeds: R.J. Morris’s Pedagogy in History and Computing

Once the disorderly output from the mainframe was pushed to one side, R.J. Morris was quick to realise the potential of the early Apple Mac personal computer to enhance how he taught the historical method. In this article, I reflect on Morris’s pedagogy in the fields of urban history and middle-class formation, and in his approach to nominal record linkage. These insights come from my experience as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student under his guidance and then later as collaborator in the classroom and in research. When teaching the power of the computer to advance the historian’s craft, Bob Morris never lost sight of the ‘concept’ as his favoured means of exploring and understanding historical transformation.