ACTA's Must-Reads

The first thing you need to give your students is your point of view. If you haven't articulated one, stop now and formulate one before you do anything else.

The idea that history is just "one damn thing after another" leads to students being bewildered by all of the "facts" that can be read and digested. They need a standard of value to use when reading so that they can filter out what is important and what is not.

Telling students to read material that you assign and "think for themselves" is nonsense. In our present educational system, no coherent viewpoint has been taught to them to make them able to do this.

If you give them your standard for evaluating history, and tell them to use it to start, they at least know where you stand, and can work off of your viewpoint to assess the material you assign, and use your viewpoint until they formulate one of their own. They will have to be prepared to defend their viewpoint.

If you can't come up with a standard for evaluating history, you have no business trying to teach it.

I will post more later.

TELL IT TO DE JUDGE

Imagine you are part of a defense team in a court in NYC, London, or Tokyo. Your work is out of time sequence (viz., the NPR interns who don't know whether Korea or Vietnam came first).

The judges first laugh at you, then subtly mock you. They consider ordering you of their courtroom for incompetence.

Should accurate knowledge of key historical dates (e.g., 1776, 1812, 1865) be a "standard of value?"

Most of the lawyers I know, they seem to think so. But then, what do they know. Let a thousand flowers bloom, said Mao (before relocating the "blooming" geniuses to communal mud farms).

Since I would probably never be in a situation of teaching an intro American history course, I hesitate to answer, but here are a couple of things I would emphasize.

First, original texts would get more emphasis than is probably usual. I find as time goes on that they are more and more important in getting any kind of real sense of what was going on in people's heads.

Second, if the size of the class allowed, I'd assign a serious term paper and then do a lot of (probably unbearably painful) work on editing and revising the papers to make them into decent essays.

I think the most important thing for teaching U.S. History, or Chinese History, or any type of history, is to first present history as a narrative, a story of how things turned out the way they are. Break things into large component parts -- The Revolution, The Articles of Confederation, The Constitution, The Secession Crisis, The Civil War, Reconstruction, The Industrial Revolution, etc. etc. etc. Then learn the details within each component, and the details within each component of that. Make History a giant outline.

These conceptual "packages" are useful precisely because they allow students to put things in order, to place events in relation to one another.

It's also important, however, to make sure to stress that history is not necessarily inevitable, and to try to remember what things seemed like at the time. It's very fashionable to teach World War II as the struggle of the Americans and their friends against the Genocidal Nazis... but the truth about the Holocaust didn't really come to public light until the end of the war. The great crusade to liberate Europe was not made against the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but against an imperialistic, aggressive nation state bent on domination -- that's how it was packaged anyway.

Don't let the way things turned out influence your perception of how they actually were. At least not too much.

So now that methodology is out of the way... what about substance? I'm a traditionalist: great leaders, great innovators, great innovations, calamitous events, celebrations, wars... I don't mind taking side jaunts into "the lives of ordinary people," but that shouldn't be the point of studying history -- at least not until you've got all the big flashy stuff down pat.

Class time would thus be a limited discussion (lecture, with students asking and answering occassional questions) going through the "outline of history," spending three or four class periods on each major era of the United States' development. In chronological order.

At the end of the semester, I'd want my students to be able to take a list of fifty famous Americans, write a sentence or two about each person, and PUT THEM IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.

Ordering things is more important than dates themselves -- the dates are only useful because they allow us to put things in order. History is the study of cause and effect, with a sprinkling of happenstance.

I am not a professor so this probably won't make the cut, but the best history course I had in college 50 years ago was not taught by a history prof. This was a course called American Civilization and was taught by an English professor (and probably the best professor I had in college).

The course consisted of reading the various writings about America from different periods of time. We started with the Mayflower Compact, proceeded to Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, De Crevecoeur (Letters of an American Gentleman Farmer - fascinating book), some of the Federalist Papers, some Thomas Paine, De Tocqueville, Mrs Trollope writing about her trip giving lectures in America, Charles Dickens writing about his trip giving lectures in America, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, John dos Passos, John Gunther. There were some others but I specifically remembered these. The concept was to develop an understanding of the flow of American life and ideas as seen by the people writing about them at the time.

I found it particularly amazing that De Tocqueville was so right in his readings of America at the time and how he saw the America changing in the future. The other part that I found particularly interesting was that the discussions of the materials was fascinating. The university I attended had a range of people from midwestern farmer's kids to the sons and daughters of some of the major industry CEO's and the sons and daughters of diplomats, both US and foreign (we had students from over 40 countries there). When you brought that broad a range of backgrounds to the subject of American history the discussions really got lively. Wonderful experience. Not the only course in history to take but by far the most satisfying. The directions you can go from almost any point in the course were almost limitless. Even writing the papers and then defending your point of view was fascinating. You really had to be on your toes for that one!!

I'm not an historian, but I'd love to teach a course on the political and social birth of the Republic. I imagine it as a freshman seminar, not a 200 student lecture course. I'd focus on a narrow stretch of time -- begin with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and end with the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In terms of readings, I'd want students to first read a fairly standard historical-textbook version of the events. That would get the chronicle down, get the major players named, etc. But the meat of the course, I imagine, would consist of primary readings (letters and writings of the Founding Fathers, newspaper reports, contemporary reports from Europe, the Federalist and anti-Federalist Papers, Madison's notes on the debates, reports on Shay's Rebellion, etc.). Of course, I'd want to look at excerpts from scholarly works, like Merrill Jensen's *Articles of Confederation* and Gordon Wood's *The Creation of the American Republic*.

Finally, I'd like to give my students a sense of the cultural sitution of Americans at this time, a sense of what daily life was *like* for various social groups and regions. This would require some readings in demography, history of ideas, perhaps even literature.

Pedagogically, I'd use some class days for lecture and others for group exercises in which students could work together in small groups on historical interpretation with primary documents.

I'd ask each student to give a annotated-bibliographical presentation on 50 to 100 pages of scholarly readings *not* assigned to the class as a whole. Students would choose a very specific topic -- the role of newspapers in the Constitutional debate, or life of urban free blacks in the North in the early Republic -- and present their research findings to the class.

Finally, I always have a midterm and final, which would be largely short answer and essay questions. And then a final research paper of 15 to 20 pages. The paper is 40% of their grade; the exams 20% each; the presentation 20%. I expect participation in discussion; I don't reward it.

I would start an introductory course with a statement to the effect that "I am going to show you why the United States of America is the greatest country in the history of the world."

No, A.D., I don't think a recitation of dates is a "standard of value." Mike Lopez says:

what about substance? I'm a traditionalist: great leaders, great innovators, great innovations, calamitous events, celebrations, wars

It's a shame that this is even in question. But my limited reading of recent history books written by Academics proves it is. They can't seem to write a chapter without including references to how the material they cover affects "women and minorities." I guess the History Departments as a PC as the rest of the Liberal Arts are.

My "standard of value" for teaching a intro level American History course is "Importance." How much did any event affect American History? I believe that ideas are the most important. "Common Sense" and "The Declaration of Independence" are more important to American History than All the Presidents, Generals and politicians that we ever had. That is because what they did stands on the shoulders of those two documents.

I feel the same way about the Innovators and Entrepreneurs that built this country. What they did enabled by our founding ideas. It was because of this that we have become the greatest country in the history of the world.

I, too, am not a historian, but I enjoy reading history and had several excellent professors at the state college I attended in the 70s. One of the more interesting courses I took covered the Industrial Revolution, and featured a text with articles by many authors from different periods. Thus, a chapter might start with an early "great man" bio of Andrew Carnegie, for example, go on to a "robber baron" treatment of industrialists, and end with a more balanced look at the "actors" and era. We were presented a wide-angle view of events, and the instructor had no agenda.

Karen Elliot's plan for a course seems sensible to me, except for the group exercises part. From my experience, as both a student and parent, such exercises are usually bad pedagogical ju-ju -- they often indicate a lack of coherent planning on the teacher's part, and give slackers a way to take credit while doing nothing.

What I'd like to do in this thread is ask a more pointed question. Suppose you are yourself tasked with teaching a semester-long, college-level U.S. history requirement. How would you teach it?

With an emphasis on the characteristics and behavior of aggregates, demonstrated with such salient descriptive statistics as I could locate but illuminated with select readings from primary texts (e.g. contemporary correspondence, inventories, sermons, &c.)

What issues, events, authors, and works would you be certain to include on the syllabus?

Works: none; authors: none; events: discrete occurances of seminal significance (e.g. the founding of the first colony, the composition of the federal constitution, 1965 immigration law) or affecting broad sectors of the population in their mundane lives (the series of liquidity crises in 1929-33); issues: [see below].

What issues, events, authors and works would you leave out due to time constraints?

Most everything else.

How would you shape the syllabus?

I would compile a bibliography through searches of a half-dozen databases; order material from various libraries; do inspectional readings of the material and select the most promising; and arrange for these to be put on reserve.

How would you use class time?

I would lecture, making liberal use of maps and timelines, both posted and in the form of hand-outs.

How would you use out-of-class time?

I would show up for my office hours (should anyone be interested in speaking with me), correct papers, and correct examinations.

What would your goals be, and how would you set about meeting them?

My goal would be that they master the information I attempt to impart to them, including the significance of each of its componenets. I would go about doing this by lecturing to them, answering their questions, assigning them readings, administering examinations to ascertain that they are doing the readings, and assigning them papers to insist that they reflect on these readings, and criticizing their performance on examinations and papers so they come to understand how they are failing to meet the goals I set.

What would you want your students to know by the end of the term? How would you assess whether they know it?

They should know the following: for each of five regions (New England & Hudson Valley, the bloc of territory between the Ohio river and the St. Lawrence seaway, the South, the Great Plains & Mountains, and the Pacific coast) and four periods (1607-1789, 1789-1865, 1865-1929, 1929- )

1. How did people worship?
2. How did they alter the landscape?
3. What were the competing cultures? (and I mean any sort of culture, not merely and ethnic one)
4. How did they earn their living, and to what extent did they trade in markets for goods and factors of production?
5. How long did they live, with what were they afflicted, and how soon did they die?
6. How was their domestic life ordered (nuclear families v. extended families v. stem families v. fatherless families)?
7. From whence had they originated and when and to where had they had settled?
8. What was their distribution between orders, castes, and classes?
9. Under what terms did they possess their land (usufruct v. ownership) and their labor (free v. indentured)?
10. How were they governed?
11. What technologies were salient in the realms of public health, agriculture, and industry?
12. What experience did the population have of war?