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Cultural History in the AP U.S. History Program
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by Marc Singer
College Board
New York, New York
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| | Surveying College U.S. History Courses
In 2003, the AP United States History program conducted a curriculum survey of college faculty who teach the U.S. history course. The survey is done every five years and is intended to ensure that the AP course reflects current practices among college faculty.
In any given survey year, the results often indicate that small changes are needed. This is natural, as the discipline evolves, and scholarship moves into previously unexplored territory or uses new methods. For instance, there has been a trend toward more social history in history survey courses in recent decades, usually at the expense of political, economic, and diplomatic history.
This time, however, the change was somewhat of a surprise and was more abrupt: the curriculum survey of more than 500 U.S. history college history instructors showed a decrease in social history, moving from 35 percent to 28 percent of the average course's content (see Table 1). This was matched by a jump in cultural history from 5 percent to 15 percent.
Table 1: Chronological and Topical Coverage in U.S. History Introductory or Survey Courses, Compared with 1998
| U.S. History |
1998 Survey** |
2003 Survey |
| Chronological Coverage |
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 Pre-Columbian to 1789 |
17% |
23% |
| 1790-1914 |
50% |
50% |
| 1915 to present |
33% |
35%*** |
| Topical Coverage* |
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| Politics and institutions |
35% |
30% |
| Social |
35% |
28% |
| Economic |
10% |
15% |
| Cultural |
5% |
15% |
| Diplomatic |
15% |
15% |
* Covers more than one chronological period or topic.
** The 1998 survey consists of data only from institutions receiving high numbers of AP Exam grades.
*** Includes approximately 10% for the post-1975 time period. |
Over half of instructors said that they spend 20 percent or more of the time in their survey courses on cultural history (Table 2).
Table 2: Distribution of Respondents' Coverage of Cultural History in Their U.S. History Survey College Classrooms
Cultural History
(%) |
Percentage of Respondents |
| Under 10 |
8 |
| 10 to 15 |
39 |
| 20 to 25 |
39 |
| Over 30 |
8 |
The Shift from Social to Cultural History
There are a couple of reasons why this new emphasis on cultural history showed up on this survey, not all of them easy to decipher. Further examination of survey responses showed that the definition of "cultural" and the way it was used as an organizing principle in the college survey was not the same for all respondents.
Culture is variously defined as including or pertaining to:
- "High" culture, such as the fine arts and classical music produced in America: for example, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, and John Singer Sargent
- Mass culture, including working-class culture, nickelodeons, Coney Island, boxing, and fashions
- Mores, norms, and values. In this view of culture, taken from anthropology, it serves as a type of organism within which all practices of a group are contained.
- Subcultures or the practices and boundaries of particular groups, that is, multiple and interacting cultures -- gay culture, Hispanic culture (or cultures), and regional cultures
- The cultural forms of U.S. society. This interpretation applies the techniques of literary analysis methods to culture as a whole (see, for instance, Clifford Geertz's work [1973] on deep reading of cultural texts).
A couple of these versions of culture could reasonably be seen as reflecting aspects of "social history" (which is, as you'll see in a moment, part of the point).
To get a sense of how instructors use and think about the various topics in their own survey courses, and by extension the AP U.S. History course, we asked them about the themes they used as organizing principles in their courses. We gave them an open blank for their responses in this online survey and got hundreds of different responses. Many overlapped, so we grouped them into unitary topics for convenience (Table 3). For instance, we combined such topics as "Black History" and "African American History." Then, we placed these combined topics into thematic categories, often placing one topic into several categories if it seemed to be necessary, using instructors' comments about these topics as guides.
In the category of "Cultural History," we ended up with some traditional cultural topics (for example, "music and U.S. society" and "popular culture") as well as others that were unexpected or defied clear categorization ("frontiers and middle grounds," "cold war culture," "social experience of war mobilization"). Some cultural categories were ones the AP United States History Development Committee would have thought of as social categories and others as more interdisciplinary ("race and ethnicity").
Table 3: Answers to Question 10 on the Curriculum Survey
AP U.S. History
Curriculum Survey Question 10: Please list up to five major themes covered in the course.
Themes listed by survey respondents (grouped topically for ease of review): |
Culture
Cultural encounters in the New World
Frontiers and middle grounds
Popular culture
Nationalization of culture
Rise of consumer and mass culture
Cold war culture
Cultural ideas and values
Music and U.S. society
Changing American cultural landscape
Social experience of war mobilization
Race, Class, and Gender
Race, class, and gender relations
Economic inequality
Gender roles and family life
Ethnic and racial conflict and unity
Social class
U.S. and the World
Empire/Imperialism
Atlantic system and world capitalism
Rise to world power
Domestic and foreign imperialism
Cold war culture
Globalization
Democracy and its dissemination
American power and its discontents
Economic and Technological Themes
Technological change
Economic inequality
Growth of capitalism
Labor and management
Development of a national economy
Rise of the market economy and society
Economic and demographic change
Rise of consumer and mass culture
Capitalism vs. agrarian democracy
Technological innovation as a shaper of social mores
American Political Traditions
Growth of democracy
Individual rights
American identity
Civil rights
Expansion of federal government
Rise and fall of the welfare state
Development of the modern state
Republicanism
Contradictions in U.S. political tradition
Sectional division
Struggle for rights
Changing relationship between individual and government
Forces threatening the unity of the nation
Paradox of American liberty and American freedom
Struggle for social and political equality
Changing character of American political parties
Democracy and dissemination
Inequalities in American history
Reform movements/Social reform
Rise of the party system
Visions of a nation
Major turning points in history
American history and myth
Perspectives and Other
Immigration and migration
Social reform
Ethnic and racial conflict and unity
Historical ambiguity
Importance of perspective
Relationship between consensus and conflict
Paradox of American liberty and American freedom
Major turning points in history
Agency vs. determinism
American history and myth
Movements of social reform and protest
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The Committee's Decision
It seemed clear to the AP U.S. History Development Committee that the traditional categories (political, diplomatic, social, economic, cultural) were more fluid than we had expected. Topics that may have once been classified as social history are now seen as the purview of cultural historians. (One exchange between committee members went: "There's some interesting work going on in cultural history in the last few years," said one. Responded another: "Young man, I was working on these same topics in the 1970s before anyone had ever heard of cultural history!" It's not clear whether that exchange represents a cultural issue/divide or social one.)
In light of this fluidity, exemplifying the trend toward interdisciplinarity in many fields, it seemed arbitrary to reduce social history content and increase cultural content, as there is so much overlap. (For example, would a question on exchange interactions between Puritans and Indians be social history? Economic? Or are they, as some are saying, cultural? To break things down further, perhaps more arbitrarily: are they cultural if they concern food exchange and foodways but social if they concern intermarriage and economic if they concern bartering?)
Ultimately, the Development Committee combined social and cultural history into one category, now worth 40 percent of the AP United States History Exam, with the new guidelines for the exam as presented below.
The U.S. History Development Committee's Note on Social and Cultural History
From the AP U.S. History Course Description:
Much recent scholarship in United States history merges social and cultural history. Based on college curriculum survey data, the Development Committee decided to combine these two categories into one called social change, cultural and intellectual developments.
A substantial number of social, cultural and economic history questions deal with traditional topics as the impact of legislation on social groups and the economy, or the pressure brought to bear on the political processes by social, economic and cultural developments. Because historical inquiry is not neatly divided into categories, many questions pertain to more than one area.
At the same time, the committee added a list of themes to the topic outline in the AP U.S. History Course Description. One of those themes is culture: "Diverse individual and collective expressions through literature, art, philosophy, music, theater, and film throughout U.S. history. Popular culture and the dimensions of cultural conflict within American society." In addition, cultural history figures prominently in the theme of globalization.
Changes in the Classroom
With so much overlap and cross-referencing, it seems important to ask: What exactly is the difference between cultural and social history? What are the implications of this shift for the classroom? My understanding is that it involves not so much a change of subject but a change of tools.
Social historians' approach may be more quantitative, and, though their work may take up cultural subjects (mapping and counting the number of bars in nineteenth-century Chicago, for instance, as a way of thinking about the culture of drinking in the United States), their work tends to generalize about the group from a larger survey of the topic. Cultural historians' approach, on the other hand, is more particularized. Their work on the same topic may look at songs about drinking or novels or plays about the subject (such as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room [Arthur 1854]) -- sources that may be better at capturing the individual experience, or creative expressions about such experiences, but less able to make conclusions about the group as a whole (see Table 4).
Cultural historians, then, might be less likely to conclude something like, "Women bought into the notion of the cult of domesticity, and X percent of them did not work outside the home," but more likely to say, "This particular woman rejected the cult of domesticity and expressed her opposition through her painting or by wearing men's clothes."
| Social History |
Cultural History |
| Is quantitative, longitudinal |
Can be quantitative, but more often qualitative, impressionistic, text based |
| Makes generalizations about groups |
Usually resists generalizations about group members -- often looks at how people act against or outside group identity |
| Sees action and change as being in the aggregate of the members of the group, rather than in an individual -- may suggest idea of "being caught up" in forces beyond individual control |
Emphasizes agency, role of individuals as actors and shapers of their own destiny, their efforts to respond to situations not initiated by them |
| Looks at marginalized groups of people |
Looks at marginalized groups of people but also more powerful groups -- and interactions between them |
| May include topics such as group identity, social change, work, recreation, family, religion -- larger forces at work on people |
Includes same topics as social history, but also arts, film, entertainment, vernacular culture |
The tools of cultural history can provide insights, certainly, or can be combined with other methods to allow historians to make conclusions about their subjects: Eric Lott's work on minstrelsy, Love and Theft (1995), reveals much about white attitudes toward African Americans through performance of their (whites') idea of blackness but less about blacks themselves. Generally speaking, though, minstrel songs or novels or paintings can reveal a lot about the attitudes of a particular society, even if only anecdotally.
Disciplines grow and evolve by borrowing from one another. In the case of cultural history's growing presence, historians are borrowing from anthropology and English. Change within the discipline is also informed by external societal changes (in this case, perhaps, the importance of postmodernism in the academy, the resulting rejection of absolutes, and cautions against essentializing have led to one group of historians being unwilling to generalize about an entire group or society). I often tell my own survey students that what they are learning in a history course is the use of a historian's tools -- and that those tools evolve and change.
Often, using different tools in the classroom and in research can inform our discipline in new and exciting ways, as with the recent practice of coteaching and cross-listing two or more AP courses (AP World History with AP Human Geography, AP U.S. History with AP U.S. Government and Politics). We can generalize from quantitative analysis, but we can also gain particularized insights, which perhaps students can identify with more readily, by using the cultural history model, looking at the individual and the text and drawing larger, though less reliable, conclusions from those.
Bibliography
Works referred to in this article, and suggestions for further reading:
Arthur, Timothy S. 1954. Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There. Chicago: David Cook Publishing.
Duis, Perry R. 1999. The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920. Urbana, Illinois, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Fass, Paula. 2003. "Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue." Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (fall): 39-46.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Lott, Eric. 1995. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marc Singer, an associate director with the College Board's CLEP program, was a former program administrator and editor at ETS. He received his master's in American studies from New York University. This paper was first delivered as part of a panel on cultural history and the AP United States History course at the 2005 National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.
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