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American Diversity as a Theme in the AP U.S. History Course
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by Cora Greer
University of Maine at Machias
Machias, Maine
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| | Structuring the American Past
In an effort to encourage students to think conceptually about the American past and to focus on change over time, the AP U.S. History Development Committee has listed 11 themes that teachers can incorporate into the AP United States History course. These themes, listed in the 2006, 2007 AP® United States History Course Description, are:
- American diversity
- American identity
- Culture
- Demographic changes
- Economic transformations
- Environment
- Globalization
- Politics and citizenship
- Reform
- Religion
- Slavery and its legacies in North America
- War and diplomacy
All are important threads woven into the overall fabric of the American past, and all have contemporary relevance, but many specific themes will have different meanings to specific actors at different times. For example, John Winthrop's "City upon a Hill" (1630) represents perhaps the first example of "American exceptionalism," but his particular Puritan vision is not one that many Americans would articulate today. Similarly, "freedom" has always been a major theme in American history, but as Eric Foner notes in his excellent The Story of American Freedom (W.W. Norton, 1999), its meaning to those living in the twenty-first century is much broader and more encompassing than it was in the period of the American Revolution. Moreover, the meaning of the term may vary within a particular time period. Contemporary conservatives, for instance, might define freedom in a different way than their liberal counterparts would.
American identity is another theme that can have an unstable meaning. What does it mean to be an American, at different periods in our history? Teachers can address this theme on the first day of class, explore it at various points during the year, and give a final evaluation at year's end. American exceptionalism plays a part in this theme, as do different conceptions of racial, ethnic, and gender identity. Minorities and women are essentially invisible as political and social actors for much of the nation's history. It is only with recent scholarship that these groups have come to be seen as active participants in the American past and part of a college-level course in American history.
It is also obvious that the 11 themes overlap, and that some are more important than others. The reform impulse is a major thread in American history that relates to several of the other themes listed. A class cannot study the reform movement of the antebellum period apart from the religious fervor that characterized the times. Nor can they study the Progressives without exploring the demographic changes and economic transformations that took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In fact, this theme is so central to a college-level U.S. history survey that tying the various strands together is probably best done as part of an end-of-the-year review.
Teaching Strategies
Although the AP U.S. History Course Description encourages teachers "to look at the American past through a variety of lenses and examine U.S. history from multiple perspectives," it does not present specific guidelines for how to use these themes. The wise teacher will, however, note the themes' emphasis on change over time and how easily many of these themes could be used in formulating free-response questions or Document-Based Questions. At the same time, teachers should view the themes as integral aspects of the American past, not as concepts that stand apart from the overall picture. Indeed, given the time constraints placed on AP teachers, integration into the regular syllabus is the only choice.
Some AP U.S. History teachers already teach thematically and thus should have little difficulty incorporating the themes into their syllabi. Those who teach chronologically will have to plan more carefully. Some themes are more dominant during specific periods of the American past than others; as such, teachers might examine the relevant themes during these key focal points. For example, teachers might best incorporate demographic changes when covering periods of high immigration or social change.
Diversity as a Model Theme
The Course Description describes the theme of American diversity like so:
American Diversity
The diversity of the American people and the relationships among different groups. The role of race, class, ethnicity, and gender in the history of the United States.
What follows is an account of how teachers can integrate and explicitly discuss one theme, American diversity, within the context of an AP U.S. History syllabus. When developing a syllabus, teachers should consider how the American attitude toward diversity evolved as well as how issues of race, class, ethnicity, and gender influenced these attitudes. At the same time, teachers should be aware that the theme of diversity does not exist in a vacuum. We cannot study American diversity apart from the themes of demographic changes, American identity, and politics/citizenship.
American diversity is a major theme in textbooks currently used in AP U.S. History classrooms. This attention to diversity and inclusiveness, however, is recent. True, colonial America and the United States, from Jamestown to the present, possessed ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, but few historians either recognized or viewed that diversity in a positive light.
Historical Overview
The diverse nature of the American population is obvious in the colonial period when one examines religious, racial, and ethnic groups within the population. Its presence is even more pronounced when one includes not only English-speaking North America but also the Spanish and French colonial territories. At the same time, those in the English colonies did not think of diversity as one might in the twenty-first century. White populations considered Native Americans as an impediment to expansion and a threat; they saw African Americans as a source of cheap labor, rather than part of the colonial community. Inhabitants of the English colonies considered both the French and the Spanish as threats. Teachers should include these realities in the initial approaches to an examination of American diversity.
Once the American colonies achieved independence and ratified the Constitution of the United States, the new nation's attitude toward diversity showed in the laws governing citizenship and suffrage. Edmund Jennings Randolph, the first attorney general, wrote that slaves were not "constituent members of our society," and thus the laws of liberty and citizenship did not apply to them. Society still viewed Native American tribes as "nations" and apart from the laws of the United States. In his essay "What Is an American?" the author Hector St. John de Crevecoeur defined "the American, this new man" as a "mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. . . . He is either an European or a descendant of an European . . ." (Please see the link to the full text of this essay in the list below titled "Documents.") Crevecoeur's categorization is reflected in the Act of March 26, 1790, which limited naturalized citizenship to "free white persons." (This restriction was on the books until the Nationality Act of 1870 allowed African immigrants to become citizens; many Asian groups, such as the Chinese, continued to be barred from naturalization until 1943.)
Ambivalence toward inclusion of African Americans in an "American identity" was also apparent in the antislavery movement -- particularly in the activities of the American Colonization Society. The society, founded in 1816 by Robert Finley, was an attempt to satisfy two groups in America. One group consisted of philanthropists, clergy, and abolitionists who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to return to Africa. The other group consisted of slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America. Although most African Americans rejected colonization, it was a solution favored by such prominent Americans as James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, all of whom believed that African Americans could not be assimilated into a majority white population.
The struggle for recognition of diversity, in the sense of recognizing political rights for the disenfranchised, could often pit different groups again each other. Although African American women were part of the struggle for black emancipation, there was little diversity within the movement for greater rights for women undertaken at the same time. In the decades following the Civil War, the women's movement was characterized by a narrow focus on women's suffrage. Racism persisted along with indifference and hostility to working-class and immigrant women. Leaders of the women's movement often expressed their disappointment in racist terms when the Fifteenth Amendment did not give women the right to vote, as seen in an excerpt from an article by Susan B. Anthony:
While the dominant party have with one hand lifted up TWO MILLION BLACK MEN and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship, with the other they have dethroned FIFTEEN MILLION WHITE WOMEN -- their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters -- and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood.
The animosity played out again in the early twentieth century, when Alice Paul and other women's rights leaders, believing that the success of the Nineteenth Amendment rested on the support of southern white women, would not allow any participation of black women in the movement. Thus a movement for greater political rights for one group, African Americans, was perceived as opposed to a movement for greater rights for another group, women.
Immigration, Industrialization, and Urbanization
Diversity within the American population increased during the nineteenth century, when over 50 million immigrants arrived. Businesses, from the railroads to the mines and factories, welcomed the newcomers, who provided a cheap and abundant labor force. The general population, however, had concerns as to whether these people could become good "Americans." The influx of Irish Catholics in the 1840s was not well received in the Northeast, and the presence of such groups was the major factor behind the formation of the nativist American Party ("Know- Nothing Party"). The wave of immigration from eastern and southern Europe in the decades following the Civil War, coupled with a belief in the racial and ethnic superiority of those from Northern Europe, brought about serious attempts to restrict and limit immigration. Chinese exclusion, the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907, and the immigration restriction laws of the 1920s were all based on the widespread belief that some people were not suited to American democracy.
At the same time, however, the idea that ethnic pluralism could be a strength of American democracy was also growing during the early twentieth century. Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) portrayed the United States as a land where old immigrants became valuable, patriotic, productive new Americans. Going further, commentators such as Jane Addams and Horace Kallen justified not only the presence of immigrants in America but also the survival of immigrant cultures and folkways. The early twentieth century also witnessed the rise of new attempts to provide African Americans equal legal and political rights, as with the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Yet the national rivalries and political radicalism that erupted during and after World War I led many commentators to debate how, and whether, the "melting pot" of America was still producing a single, non-ethnic national culture. The 1920s were a watershed decade in which traditional prejudices battled with the forces of inclusion. The quota system in immigration, the post-World War I race riots, the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the violent suppression of labor unrest seemed to indicate the defeat of the voices of tolerance and inclusion. These were years when the conviction that new immigrants could never "melt" in the "melting pot" was at its height. Yet the 1920s also produced the Harlem Renaissance, the acceptance of jazz as a native American art form, an increasing number of ethnic players in sports and film, and the selection of an urban Catholic to run for president. The Great Depression and World War II saw an increased mobilization and validation of ethnic diversity in the United States, although constrained by race and with many assimilationist assumptions continuing undisturbed.
One of the best ways to observe this pride in diversity is through an examination of popular culture, particularly film. War movies of the 1940s, such as Guadalcanal Diary, show off a number of "ethnic" characters, demonstrating the difference between American values and those of the country's fascist and totalitarian enemies. The years after the war saw a concerted effort to combat prejudice, as in the novel (and subsequent film) Gentleman's Agreement, about anti-Semitism, and early steps to integrate the armed forces and professional baseball.
In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and greater assertions of cultural equality by African Americans, a positive assessment of diversity was one of the most important movements to come out of the social and cultural battles of the 1960s. Women, homosexuals, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and the handicapped began to assert their rights. Since the 1970s American society has witnessed continuing debates over the meaning and extent of diversity. Government efforts to establish official rights for particular groups, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, have been matched by new explorations of diversity in the media. Now, as throughout American history, diversity is a concept that is heavily contested, both in political and cultural terms.
Lesson Plan 1: Diversity in Antebellum America
Introduction
This lesson plan takes one 50-minute class period. Although designed for a lesson on American diversity, it would also work well in studying American identity. Teachers can insert such a lesson into the curriculum in a number of places, but it is especially useful when examining the anti-Catholic movements of the 1840s. In this lesson, students explore American attitudes toward diverse elements within the population during the antebellum period through an examination of the documents listed below.
Structuring the Lesson
Divide the class into four groups, and assign each group one of the primary source readings. Each group completes a written APPARTS analysis of the document:
 APPARTS Worksheet (.pdf/37KB)
Groups also present a five-minute report summarizing the content of their document.
The remaining 25 minutes of the class should be a structured discussion of what diversity meant to Americans in the antebellum period and why many considered some groups incapable of assimilation.
Lesson Objectives
- To help students understand that, although diversity was celebrated in the antebellum period, the definition of diversity was very limited
- To help students understand why African Americans and Native Americans were considered unsuited to citizenship
- To make students aware that, beginning in the eighteenth century, Americans believed the words race and ethnicity were interchangeable
- To show students that the anti-Catholic bias of groups such as the "Know-Nothing Party" fit nicely with the limited view of diversity
Documents
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, "What Is an American?" (1870)
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur was a French immigrant to New York who received his naturalization papers in 1765 and settled on a frontier farm, where it is believed he wrote Letters from an American Farmer (of which "What Is an American?" is a chapter).
Letters from an American Farmer: J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur -- Letter III. What Is an American
Act of March 26, 1790
This legislation, which passed without debate, established the law for the naturalization of immigrants. To access this text, select the following link and scroll down to "Chap. III -- An act to establish an uniform rule of Naturalization":
The Library of Congress: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation -- Statutes at Large, 1st Congress, 2nd Session: Page 103 of 755
American Colonization Society: A Memorial to the United States Congress
The American Colonization Society was organized in 1816 in Washington, D.C., to facilitate the transport of free blacks from the United States and settle them in Africa. To expand that effort, a committee that included Francis Scott Key and John Mason presented a petition titled "A Memorial to the United States Congress" to that body in 1820. Although supported by many prominent Americans (such as James Madison, Henry Clay, and James Monroe), the society's mission was not popular with African Americans. Between 1816 and 1860, more than 11,000 free blacks were returned to what would become the nation of Liberia (capital, Monrovia).
American Colonization Society: A Memorial to the United States
Jackson's Second Annual Speech Before Congress, 1830
This speech includes President Andrew Jackson's rationale for Indian removal.
Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears: Jackson's Second Annual Speech Before Congress, 1830
If teachers find any of these documents too long to use, they can excerpt them as desired.
Lesson Plan 2: Analyzing Guadalcanal Diary
Film: Guadalcanal Diary, directed by Lewis Seiler, 20th Century Fox, 1943. Black and white, 93 minutes, available in video or DVD.
Book: Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, Modern Library, 2000. ISBN: 0679640231.
Introduction
This lesson plan takes one 50-minute period. Designed as a lesson on American diversity, it would also work well in conjunction with lessons on racial stereotyping or the American home front during World War II. The following description involves group work, but teachers can structure this lesson in any number of ways. As AP U.S. History teachers are always pressed for time, students should view the film on their own.
Structuring the Lesson
Make arrangements to have the film available for student viewing. Because students will view the film outside of class, be sure to give the assignment at least a week before class analysis.
Divide the class into six groups. All groups are responsible for a written APPARTS analysis of the film; use the following worksheet or something similar:
APPARTS Worksheet (.pdf/37KB)
In addition, each group gives a short oral presentation that addresses one of the questions listed below under the heading "Questions for Discussion."
Lesson Objectives
1. To show students how a World War II film can celebrate the ethnic diversity of America while at the same time use racial stereotyping against the Japanese and the natives of the Solomon Islands
2. To help students understand how a film of this sort was perceived as a civic lesson teaching Americans that winning the war required the country to live up to its democratic values
3. To show students how to analyze films, an invaluable type of primary source material
Background Information
Ninety million Americans went to the movies every week during World War II. Shows began with short newsreels, which were the only film renderings of actual events that Americans saw. Combat films thus played a more important role than they would today in explaining to the public the nature of the war. More importantly, these films helped educate viewers in the reasons behind why we fought by depicting "democracy in action."
The battle for Guadalcanal was the first major American military operation in the Pacific involving an amphibious assault, and it was still fresh in the minds of Americans when this film opened in 1943. There were many casualties: while about 1,600 soldiers were killed and 5,000 wounded, about five times as many succumbed to malaria and dengue fever. The Japanese lost 15,000 men in the fighting and another 9,000 to disease.
Guadalcanal Diary is based on the book of the same name by Richard Tregaskis, a war correspondent who landed with the initial troops on Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942. The film begins on a troop ship ferrying marines to Guadalcanal. The landing on the island goes well, and it seems as though the Japanese have withdrawn. But in fact they have retreated to fortified positions, and the long campaign begins to root them out and take the island. The Japanese put up greater-than-expected resistance, and death and disease take their toll. Like all films of this genre, the focus in Guadalcanal Diary is on one small group of men -- a platoon of marines. Their survival and success depend on the men's ability to operate as a team, balancing individual acts of heroism with professionalism and mutual cooperation. The group's diverse composition sought to underscore the fact that this was a democratic war -- a peoples' war drawing upon every segment of American society.
Questions for Discussion
- What techniques does the director of the film use to show the diversity of the platoon?
- Indicate specific incidents in the film that celebrate democracy and diversity.
- To what extent (if any) does the director use stereotyping in the way in which he presents the various characters?
- How does the film portray the Japanese and the Solomon Islands' native population?
- What is the overall message of the film?
- In what ways does Guadalcanal Diary differ from a contemporary war film, such as Jarhead?
Cora Greer has taught in California, Massachusetts, and Maine -- most recently at the University of Maine at Machias. She has served as Reader and Table Leader at the AP U.S. History Reading, been a consultant in AP U.S. History, Building Success, and Vertical Teams, and won the College Board New England Region's Advanced Placement Recognition Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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