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Home > Filling the Holes: Rethinking the U.S. History Survey
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Filling the Holes: Rethinking the U.S. History Survey
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by Pauline Maier
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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A Revival of Political History?
Teachers of the college-level U.S. history survey and secondary-school American history teachers share at least one interesting distinction: we continue to teach political history at a time when historical research has, for the most part, moved on to other subjects. That's not to say there's no life in political history; indeed, there is some evidence of a revival. Still, it's fair to say political history has not been at the center of historical scholarship for some time now.
But whether political history is in fashion or not, teachers have to cover it: political history is part of the basic knowledge that students in the United States need, if only as part of their civic education. A set of interviews by Gary Kornblith and Carol Laser of Oberlin College -- which were published in the 2001 Journal of American History -- revealed that teachers of the U.S. history feel the same obligation. None of us, however, want to go stale, which happens when we teach the same material over and over, or to become old-fashioned.
Some kinds of new research of a non-political sort can easily be absorbed into the basic traditional history of the United States. One example is the demographic studies of colonial populations done in the 1960s and 1970s. In retrospect, it seems hard to see how anyone could ever have taught the history of colonial America without considering how and why populations multiplied in some places while they lagged in others. Similarly, it's hard to believe that the typical U.S. history survey was ever taught without consideration of the widespread deaths of Indians in the wake of contact with Europeans. Work on African American history also fills in a major hole in the story that needed to be filled, if other events -- the first appearances of slave laws in colonial statute books, the beginnings of emancipation a century later during the Revolution, abolitionism, the Civil War, the rocky history of black rights thereafter -- are to be fully understood.
In general, historians have tended to move from the public history of "dead white men" to other topics and agendas that focus more on everyday life than grand political developments. But how do we fit those other topics into our everyday teaching? How can we integrate the history of Indians as full actors in the story, not just as occasional victors in battle and longtime victims of Anglo-American expansion? How are we to include early Hispanic and French influences on American history? What about "whiteness" studies, or the history of sexuality?
The "Shalt Nots" and New Historical Ideas
Sometimes we simply cannot respond to new historical ideas. Recent years have, for example, witnessed a certain opposition to the whole idea of a "master narrative," which is no doubt to some extent reasonable: stories look different from different perspectives. The modern hostility to national histories is all well and good, unless you're scheduled to teach the first half of the U.S. history survey in the fall term.
And sometimes I think certain "shalt nots" override concrete new information and insights. For example, "Thou shalt not make the story Anglo-centric": our history, like our population, needs to be multicultural. "Thou shalt not tell American history as the history of men, since women were half the population." "Thou shalt not make the story move from east to west, as if, say, Minnesota had no history until settlers of the Atlantic coast arrived." (I always did wonder, as a child in Minnesota, about the number of places with French names, which nobody every explained. Come to think of it, my teachers never said much about Indian names, either; we knew that Indians lived in Minnesota, but learned nothing about them and their culture, much less their fate, although clearly there weren't many around anymore. Those were holes in the story that needed to be filled for me to make historical sense of my world.) And "thou shalt not make the United States a story unto itself": avoid the taint of exceptionalism, and tell the story in a global context.
Meanwhile, of course, you and I "shalt not" forget the independence movement, the Constitution, the origins of parties, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the election of 1800, the War of 1812, the Marshall Court, Jackson, nullification, the age of reform, the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Dred Scott, John Brown, the secession crisis, or the Civil War, much less the postwar constitutional amendments.
Holding the Story Together: Using a Textbook
How can we do it all? This involves, I think, two distinct questions: how we can possibly teach this expanding field, and how we can make the pieces hold together?
How do I teach this expanding field? I use a textbook. That takes a lot of pressure off. I teach two hour-and-a-half classes a week. I dedicate the first to discussing a chapter from the textbook -- its major themes, what events seem worth highlighting, anything the students come up with. The second class focuses on a document or set of documents, a book, or an article, so some theme -- for which, having read the text, the students have a context -- gets examined in depth. That's possible because my classes at MIT are small--seldom larger than in secondary school -- so I can teach through discussions. What lectures I give are generally short, to provide additional background or context for some topic the class will discuss.
When I was an undergraduate at Radcliffe/Harvard, professors did not assign textbooks. They wrote them, but for students somewhere else. That, I think in retrospect, was a problem, not least for their students. In my experience students need a text that lays out a basic story with names and dates. My professors lectured instead, and I took notes and memorized what they said. Personally, I think discussions are a better way of teaching. Students remember what they say more than what they are told, so the trick is to get them to say smart things. Textbooks help give them the basic knowledge necessary to say smart things.
I helped write a textbook, Inventing America, which was published a few years ago. There has been substantial criticism of textbooks lately, and I have to say that as a teacher I'm in sympathy with much of it. The books all seem astoundingly expensive to me. Even adjusting for inflation, I believe they were much cheaper when I was an assistant professor. But the book I used then, John Morton Blum's The National Experience was shorter than most modern books, focused on political history, and had no color photographs and few other "amenities." Books are also heavy -- too heavy, I think. I'm told that's because they need double-coated pages to make the color pictures "pop." I could live without color pictures, but I'm not sure about my students. My colleague Merritt Roe Smith and I gave them free typescripts of Inventing America before it was published so we could test it in the classroom. I well remember the students saying with surprise "No pictures? No maps? No features?" Now, of course, we also have CDs with music and film segments on them, Internet sites, and other add-ons that John Morton Blum didn't have to think about. All that adds to the cost.
The bigger problem, I think, is that textbooks often don't give a reliable basic story. They tend to be clones of each other, and so to perpetuate problems. A few years ago I remember assigning a new textbook that was highly recommended, but without reading it beforehand. It was full of mistakes. It got the Virginia Plan wrong! That meant students couldn't appreciate what the constitutional convention accomplished, which is easy to do if you compare the Virginia Plan with the Constitution. The Republican Party was founded in one year on one page, another a few pages later. And the movement westward was described as a sort of a rolling atrocity. Of course, I discovered those problems in the week the book was assigned, and then I'd have to start the class with "a few corrections" of the textbook. Some students though the textbook-versus-instructor battle was funny. For others it raised problems. What were they to believe? And the problem was not, for the most part, with interpretive issues, but with the basic information for which I used the text.
Holding the Story Together: Narrative
How do we hold the story together? Some books don't. They include many pieces of disparate information anecdotally, like beads without a string. I can't teach that way. Perhaps narratives are inventions, constructs, but we need them. And I suppose I really do believe that "one damn thing leads to another."
In writing Inventing America, my co-authors and I found one way of holding the pieces together. The distinction of that book lies in the serious attention it gives to the history of science and technology within American history. It is not, let it be said, a history of science and technology; it just adds those elements to the general story, where obviously it always should have been. The United States is, after all, known as a technological society. And we interpreted technology in a very broad way, to include all kinds of devices created by human beings to serve their needs. Under that definition, the constitution qualifies as a technological device.
Our publisher has since begun describing the book as concerned with "innovation," which is probably a better term. However, in writing the book we discovered that this topic was not just another "add-on," like so many generated by scholarship in recent decades. It was essential to discuss politics and the state to explain the role they played in encouraging innovation (a role than began with the American Revolution, which, I believe, played no small part in making Americans innovative). But technology also transformed ordinary life, from diet to transportation to communications. And sometimes it circled back into politics. Take medicine: it has, in recent decades, significantly extended people's lifespan -- which, of course, raises all kinds of social and political issues, such as health care for the aged. And so adding technology -- or innovation -- to the mix helps hold the parts of the story together.
Adding these new elements also lifts the story outside a narrow American context, making it global. Technology and science are by nature international, and their place in American history requires acknowledging that. Early American textile machines, for example, imitated British models; American rifles -- including the famous Kentucky rifle -- were adaptations of a form of gun that came from Germany. The cotton gin was an American creation, but it was needed to process cotton grown to feed English factories. To explain why the South was so good at growing cotton requires worldwide environmental comparisons. Once the links were there, it becomes easier to balance the parts: to see what belongs and what doesn't quite fit.
Did we realize these possibilities perfectly? No. But there will be a second edition. And it will, come to think of it, be part of the preparation of my 35th edition of the U.S. history survey course.
You are no doubt also continually revising the courses you teach -- trying to fix what was broken last year, to incorporate something new and exciting you've learned, to "get" those kids who seemed uninterested, and maybe to adjust for some new wrinkle in the AP U.S. History Exam. We tell the same story, but each year's telling is a little different than the last one.
Is that easy to do? Not really. But that's the challenge and the fun of it. Thomas Jefferson once said he was an old man, but a young gardener. Gardeners, like young people, are always looking forward to the next season when they can fix what went wrong this year. The U.S. history survey is much the same: like a garden, it is, and always will be, a work in progress. And there's a nice premium for teachers in working that "field": it keeps us young.
Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the coauthor, along with Alexander Keyssar, Daniel Kevles, and Merrit Roe Smith, of Inventing America: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton, 2003). She is also the author of American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997). Professor Maier delivered this address at the College Board Breakfast at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, March 27, 2004.
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