Dan asked for a syllabus post, I believe, and who am I to say no? (I’ve mentioned before that teaching high school has made me much more cautious about what I say about my job, both for student privacy reasons and for general public-exposure reasons. But I’m not going to say anything here that I wouldn’t say to my students in the classroom, and in some cases I’ve already talked to them about some of this. I’m a big fan of transparency as regards educational objectives, etc.)
I’m teaching US History this year, for the first time. I have plenty of experience in US History, but this is the first time I’ve had to put together a full syllabus for a full survey course. It turns out to be something of a challenge. I’m in an easier position than I might otherwise be–I have a lot of support from my colleagues, I don’t have to navigate through a thicket of state standards, and my students are generally motivated and well-prepared. I also have the advantage of being a big geek about this kind of thing–I’ve been thinking about these issues (what’s important to know about US History, and why) for years.
Oh, but the challenges. The biggest one is that these kids only have one year of US History. I think it needs to be a two-year class, especially because a lot of these students haven’t ever had a real US survey before. They’ve had bits and pieces, and a lot of them have seen a decent amount of US history through a New York history class in middle school, but this is the only straightforward survey of US history that they’re going to get before college. (Not that I necessarily expect that they’ll take history in college. But they might!) I have one school year to teach them everything I think they really need to know about US history, while also teaching them about the structure and function of our government, and -also- continuing to develop core history skills. (Essay writing, argument structure, critical analysis of sources.) If I were Queen of the World, this would be a two-year course, with the end of Reconstruction as the breakpoint between the years. I am not yet Queen, though, so I have one year to work with.
One more thing: I really, really, really want to get past the Second World War. Part of why I think US is such an important class is that it helps us understand the country that we’re living in, but how much does it actually help if the kids never learn anything about the Cold War or Vietnam or counterculture or the Christian Coalition? Okay, fine, getting to the 1990s is extremely ambitious, but really, I should be able to get at least into the Cold War, right? That’s a totally reasonable goal.
Getting to that goal, though, requires winnowing. When I’m choosing what to cover and what not to cover, I keep asking myself, is this more important than the Vietnam War? Is this more important than mutually assured destruction? Is this more important than second-wave feminism? It’s so difficult because it’s essentially all subjective. Are the Intolerable Acts more important than the Kennedy assassination? Is the “slavery a positive good” argument more important than the Korean War? Is The Jungle more important than Watergate? I don’t think there are right answers, which is probably why every single teacher at my school teaches US a little differently, because we all answer these questions in different ways.
Before I talk about how I’m answering these questions, I’m curious what you guys think. Were there things that were included in your high school US History classes that you think could have been skipped? Were there things that weren’t included that you think you needed to know?
Posted Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 2:31 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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I took AP US History my junior year of high school, and my teacher DIDN’T manage to make it past 1950; I’m fairly certain that was the reason I scored a 4 on that AP exam when I managed to get 5’s on all my others.
So as a result, I’m utterly unqualified to help you decide what to winnow. But I would like to spend a few minutes jumping up and down, waving my arms, and yelling: “Oh, yes, really YES, you must must MUST find a way to get past WWII and the Cold War if at all possible! Please!”
I wish my students, who come to my local community college after high school, were not blank slates. It is as if no one taught them anything at all.
That said, here are the topics I lecture on.
American History to 1865
1. Summary of Colonization to 1770
2. The French and Indian War
3. Pre-Revolutionary Period
4. The American Revolutionary War
5. The Failure of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention
6. The First Three Presidents
The topics above have previously taken up to 2/3rds of a semester to get through. However, I try to follow up with these topics in order to finish the semester.
1. The Jeffersonian Era
2. Andrew Jackson (an important topic but not my favorite)
3. A Block Lecture on Slavery from 1500 to 1850
4. The Sectional Conflict between North and South
5. The Civil War
Eventual upgrades to the lecture portfolio should include the Transportation Revolution, Manifest Destiny, the Industrial Revolution and I’d feel better if I spent time talking about the activism of Women.
In other words, my American History to 1865 notes are very much a work in progress.
In American History since 1865 I lecture on these topics.
1. Reconstruction
2. Boom and Bust in the West
3. The Battle of Little Big Horn and US Policy toward the Native American popuplation.
4. Andrew Carnegie and the Second Industrial Revolution
5. American Imperialism and the Spanish American War
6. Theodore Roosevelt, his Presidency and Progressivism.
7. Woodrow Wilson and the Great War.
I’m not happy with what I have for the 1920s. The usual discussions about prohibition and such bore me to tears. Chatting about the three Republicans kills the students so at some point I think I want to do a block lecture of Women’s Activism from the end of the Civil War up to the 1930s.
By this point I normally move off onto foreign policy, describing how there are attempts to outlaw war and how they fail.
I give a very brief lecture on the Stock Market Crash, FDR and the Great Depression (in total, perhaps fifty minutes). This is the one topic that most students can usually regurgitate verbatim to you even if they hate history. They’ve had it pounded into their skulls.
Most history instructors would probably then spin up for World War II by focusing on Hitler. I do not do this.
Instead, I focus on Japan and start with our first contact with the Japanese back in the 1840s and 1850s. I do this so the students understand that wars are often decades in the making. I lead them up through to the oil and steel embargo prior to Pearl Harbor.
I get Hitler set up, usually in less time, again they’ve had that period covered for them in some degree.
By now I’ve reached the three-quarters mark of the semester. I’ll fight World War II. I suspect the best way to approach the topic is to focus on foreign relations among the allies and plans for the post war world. I do spend time talking about the strengths of the US and how we come to use the atomic bomb on Japan.
If I have time left, I move on to cover the Cold War policies of Truman, Eisenhower and JFK. Then I’ll cover the same Presidents per Civil Rights.
Ideally, I end the course around 1968 after MLK is killed.
As a personal rule, I do not talk about Vietnam. I can not seem to get the requisite distance from the material I need to be objective. Part of that is that I’m a vet who has been called a babykiller (wrong war) and that my father is a Nam vet (who was called a babykiller even though he worked on helicopters).
There is room for massive improvement in what I have right now. I would like to see more coverage on Women’s History and Latino History. I think I’d like to do even less social history (which I feel is a 300 level item not a 100 level item).
And finally, I try not to preach to them. I hated that when I was a student and I do my best to make sure they can form their own conclusions.
Probably far more than you wanted. I’d prefer to teach Western Civ myself.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
On the Outer Marches
I grew up in CT where they teach U. S. History in 5th, 8th and 11th grade and I only got to WW II once, in 11th grade (in 5th grade we only got as far as the Civil War because our teacher was obsessed with the American Revolution). To me, these are some of the important moments in American history that kids today should know about:
– the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, since it is the foundation of how our country runs and I think too many people have no idea why or how it came about or what exactly terms like checks and balances or separation of powers mean.
– the Spanish-American War, since it shows how journalism can be used to influence public opinion whether it be for good or bad.
– the Great Depression, most especially the WPA which gets short shrift in most survey courses, since it has a parallel to what’s going on now with our economy and was such an amazing undertaking (seriously — how many politicians today would argue that writers and artists were a legitimate part of the workforce and just as deserving of aid as laborers?).
– McCarthyism, since it shows how group think can lead to seriously bad things.
– Watergate, since it single-handedly changed the American public’s view of the government from one of trust to one of mistrust (as is evidenced by post-Watergate movies like The Conversation, the Parallax View, and Night Moves, among others).
– Reagan, since he helped screw up the country between breaking the unions, eliminating federal regulations wherever possible and helping to foster a partisan schism in the House and Senate that sees no signs of abating and where the idea of bi-partisanship is just that — an idea.
I’m sure there’s lots of other areas of US History equally as important, but that’s my 2 cents.
My highschool US history survey was 1 year, but it was a team-taught history-and-literature survey, taking up 2 class periods. I was pretty happy with it, and do remember remarking that we made it up to the 1950s at the end. It also helped to contextualize the history of ideas a lot, to see huge Hudson River School landscapes just at a time when locomotives and canals were spreading across New York. For example.
I don’t know if you could do it even with well-prepared highschoolers, but I’ve often wondered about teaching US history as a series of themes rather than as a timeline. For example, the effect of cheap iron on everyday life (canned food! cheap bullets! zippers!), or the overwhelming power of land-ownership as synechdoche for citizenship (that one always baffled me as a teen, because most of the people I knew rented).
I remember being shocked, when I got to college, at how little students outside the South had learned about that region. Mostly I could kind of accept it, except for Virginia. How can anybody understand U.S. history up to the Civil War while ignoring Virginia?
Not exactly a comprehensive answer to your question, but that’s what I have.
My AP History teacher was a Civil War buff. We got past it eventually, but I think he spent a good month going over each of the battles in loving detail. I stayed awake in class by taking notes in as small a script as I could write. I managed to fit the notes for an entire unit on one line of notebook paper. We didn’t get beyond WWII.
It took me until my history of science and women’s studies courses in college to gain any significant understanding of post-WWII US history. That, and watching The West Wing.
It doesn’t sound like this will be a problem for you at all, but my takeaway is: Don’t let your favorite time period dominate the syllabus.
I absolutely agree that it’d be great if U.S. History could focus a bit more on more /recent/ history because it really helps to provide a foundation for understanding where we are today better, especially as relates to situating current U.S. politics.
When I was in school, U.S. History was a requirement and so was American Government but while Gov did have more of a focus on political systems, it didn’t actually cover anything /new/ over what was studied in middle school U.S. History.
My sense from taking U.S. history across two different schools is that a lot of time is spent on the Civil War era in a lot of classes and then on WWII and I think that balancing a bit better between different eras might be worthwhile.
An alternative to going chronologically can also be to go thematically instead as there are many threads of things going on that cross eras and follow onto each other over time, but can get ‘missed’ when a ’strict’ ‘everything in chronological order’ approach is taken. For example, suffrage, from Abigail Adams’ comments during the Revolutionary period through various efforts throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century until the passage of the 19th amendment.
A blend of themes along with the traditional timeline-based approach could wind up providing a more comprehensive view, perhaps. I just found it jarring to be following a topic in the texts and in class and then having to drop it to look at something else only to come back to the theme later and would have found some value in following several important threads all the way through in ‘one go’ so to speak.
Things that I felt got short shrift in my U.S. History education:
- Early Suffrage and Civil Rights movements prior to the 1920s along with the evolution of those movements into the 20th century and how that translates into culture and politics today
- American Bohemia and the Labor Movement of the teens.
- Vietnam - the conflict itself was poorly covered, while the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and the cultural backdrop in the U.S. during this time period was fairly well covered.
- The Cold War - this was glossed over rapidly during the last 2 weeks of class and made it difficult to answer questions on the AP exam.
- Reaganomics - Also glossed over rapidly during the last 2 weeks of class and also on the AP exam. As I recall, I had an option on questions to choose though and was able to skip this one and pick one that had been more thoroughly covered.
Totally random thought: has anyone ever tried to teach a history course backwards?
I know it seems natural to treat history class like a story: “this happened, then this happened, then this happened.” But isn’t that kind of numbing? What if you treated it like a series of “and what were the seeds of that?” questions.
Like, just to take wars for example. Let’s say week one you start with “why did we go into Iraq and Afghanistan anyway?” That seems more likely to have the kids sit up and pay attention after summer break than the Pilgrims, even if, in your demographic, few of them are likely to be sent Over There any time soon.
And then you end week one by looking at how all sides in the debate over going into Iraq compared it to Vietnam: “it’s Vietnam all over again!” “No it’s not!” And then you have to ask: so what was the deal with Vietnam?
Or some other “and why was that?” narrative, like, al-Qaeda lived in Afghanistan because the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and they took it over because the Soviet Union collapsed, and then the Cold War ended. And what was the deal with the Cold War ending? Films of the Wall falling and jubilant crowds and then you ask — so what was life like behind the Iron Curtain? What is everyone in this video so excited about?
And at the end the couple of Cold War weeks you focus on how everyone framed it all in terms of World War II, and you’ve set up a bunch of questions about WWII. And after WWII you ask, why were the Germans so crazy pissed off anyway, and why were there all these tiny little defenseless ethno-democratic countries all over Europe for them to roll over? Well, let’s look at how WWI ended…
You do the Civil Rights marches first, and then you ask from that, what was so bad about Jim Crow anyway?
I really wonder if this might pique more interest and cause people to ask more historian-ish kinds of questions. History is arguably better understood as a set of questions about why things happened this way, than as the relation of a set of ongoing events.
And this has the bonus that you’d be worrying about “will I make it all the way back to King Philip’s War this semester?” and not “will I make it past WWII?”
Dear Susan,
This is an interesting site. It caught my attention because I would like some feedback from a history teacher about my historical novel “Pocket of Guilt,” a story based on a friend’s life who lived in Germany during and after WWII. It is from the German viewpoint and tells how German teens managed to save themselves and their families from starvation following the war.
I have always thought WWII to be boring and morbid considering the holocaust, but in researching for the book and listening to my friend relate his experiences, I realized there was an entirely little-known story to be told. I only alluded to the holocaust, choosing instead, to show how German families survived the bombs and devastating food shortage and their reaction to the day to day happenings as a result of the war.
Today’s kids know little about deprivation, or Hitler and his inhumanity to man. The book is an adventure story, is enjoyable reading, would appeal to kids, and help them to appreciate what they have.
My website is a WWII resource site for students, teachers, etc. to learn the fascinating things that happened in the U.S.from 1940 through 1945. Some topics covered on the site are Accidents and Natural Disasters, Airships, Collecting Scrap, Human Radiation Experiments (yes, in America), Illegal FBI Surveillance, News and Events, Quotes from Famous People (about governments and the people),Race, Politics, and New Laws, Science and Discoveries, Some Firsts in U.S. History, Entertainment including Big Bands, Movie Stars, Songs and Dances, and Comics. A sample scene is included from “Pocket of Guilt.”
I wish I could have had access to a site on WWII when I was a student and had a delightful novel to read that taught WWII history. The book and website are definitely not boring.
If you want to send me a mailing address, I will be happy to send you a complementary copy of the book and would be delighted if you would review it and let me know if you think it could be used in a public school history class. I would love to put your review on my website or as a blurb on the book cover for the second printing.
Good luck with your class.
Sincerely,
Dora Lee Thompson
weetgrindr@comcast.net
I totally understand your situation. US History is such a vast subject. Finding a solution is difficult. I think students should know the roots of our country, where we came from, the founders, the Civil War. It’s also important for them to be aware of the recent past, say, the last 100 years or so. This would include the two World Wars, the Cold War, Watergate, etc. By teaching history we are teaching children how they are a part of the long line of Time - what has happened before them and how it has triggered events to occur and how their actions today are going to influence what happens tomorrow. We are but links that connect the past to the future. To guide ourselves to a better future, we must know our past. I was little confused about all this till I browsed shmoop.com and got a better understanding of this subject.