Teaching American History in a Global Context

Carl J. Guarneri, Jim Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317459019
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Monetary Policy

This comprehensive resource is an invaluable teaching aid for adding a global dimension to students' understanding of American history. It includes a wide range of materials from scholarly articles and reports to original syllabi and ready-to-use lesson plans to guide teachers in enlarging the frame of introductory American history courses to an international view.The contributors include well-known American history scholars as well as gifted classroom teachers, and the book's emphasis on immigration, race, and gender points to ways for teachers to integrate international and multicultural education, America in the World, and the World in America in their courses. The book also includes a 'Views from Abroad' section that examines problems and strategies for teaching American history to foreign audiences or recent immigrants. A comprehensive, annotated guide directs teachers to additional print and online resources.

PART I

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CALLS FOR CHANGE

Position statements by history organizations have played an important role in the movement to internationalize American history. These statements construct an authoritative rationale for enlarging the context of our history teaching, one that includes disciplinary, pedagogical, and civic components. Moreover, thanks in part to these organizations, the introductory U.S. survey course has become a focal point for reform. How should the American history survey relate to world history surveys? How might its topics, themes, and periods be reshaped by transnational and comparative perspectives? Can globalized introductory courses become levers of change for the entire history curriculum? Reports from history organizations have stimulated discussion of such questions at teacher workshops and department meetings around the nation.

One shot across the bow of tradition was fired in 1994 by the National History Standards for Grades 5–12, the result of a collaborative effort among scholars, teachers, and educational organizations funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. Intended only as voluntary guidelines, the Standards for United States History were pounced on by traditionalists for belittling America’s achievements and paying inadequate attention to such figures as Paul Revere, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Edison. Amid the furor over the Standards’ emphasis on social history and their alleged demotion of the Founders, their innovative call for a closer relationship between U.S. and world history was ignored. Even within the Standards, this call was honored more in principle than practice. In the specific content standards for each period, the era of exploration and settlement was envisioned in international and Atlantic terms, but after the American Revolution the Standards retreated inside U.S. borders in quite conventional ways, at least until World War II.

A more sweeping reform in the direction of internationalizing American history was envisioned by participants in the La Pietra project of New York University and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). In the 1990s the OAH, led by Journal of American History editor David Thelen, began a drive to internationalize its membership and publications that culminated in the La Pietra project. More than seventy-five scholars and teachers met in a series of conferences held in Italy from 1997 to 2000. The report they issued aimed to enrich the scholarship and teaching of American history by suggesting ways in which many U.S. history topics could be reenvisioned in light of their connections to global forces and trends. It provided a list of teaching objectives for a globalized U.S. history, concluding that “broader-gauged historical training … will … better prepare students to understand not only American relations to the rest of the world, but … the everyday life of Americans within the borders of the United States, past and present.” The report suggested various reforms in history education, including more foreign-language study, better teacher preparation in world history, and reorganized history major requirements. Perhaps most important, the La Pietra Report specifically highlighted the introductory American history course as the logical place to instill habits of global awareness in students.

One hoped-for result of the reforms proposed at La Pietra is a concept of American citizenship informed by global knowledge and committed to “a global human commons.” “Preparing Citizens for a Global Community” is what the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) had in mind in its position statement first approved in 2001. Without specifically addressing American history, the NCSS endorsed two versions of a more globalized education: “international education,” which involves studying a non-U.S. world region in depth, and “global education,” which entails studying transnational issues and problems and their potential solutions. Both are reference points for an internationalized American history to connect to and compare with.

During the 1990s, the American Council on Education (ACE), the coordinating body for American institutions of higher education, undertook a series of projects to promote the internationalizing of American colleges. The approach was multifaceted, including reports on internationalizing the faculty, student body, and curriculum and suggestions for engaging American campuses with overseas partners and problems. An ACE initiative on internationalizing teaching and learning at American universities enlisted a task force of historians appointed by the American Historical Association. Their report to the ACE, “Internationalizing Student Learning Outcomes in History” (2006), is a remarkably useful document for U.S. history teachers. It picks up where the National History Standards left off by providing a global context for developing students’ historical skills. The report also seconds the La Pietra group’s call for globally informed citizenship. Most important, it develops the La Pietra Report’s focus on the American history survey course. Declaring that the U.S. history survey can be a “vital building block” for further curricular changes, the AHA/ACE group offers insights about the scales, boundaries, and periods of American history. Within each period of U.S. history, the report offers specific suggestions about topics, themes, and comparisons that connect local, regional, and national developments in the United States with global trends. Although these suggestions are meant to differentiate college from secondary-school history courses, there are good pedagogical and civic reasons why the foundation for these “building blocks” ought to be laid in earlier grades.

Chapter 1

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The National Standards for History (Excerpts)

National Center for History in the Schools

The development of national standards in United States and World History presents a special challenge in deciding what, of the great storehouse of human history, is the most significant for all students to acquire. Perhaps less contentious but no less important is deciding what historical perspectives and what skills in historical reasoning, values analysis, and policy thinking are essential for all students to achieve.

The following criteria, developed and refined over the course of a broad-based national review and consensus process, were adopted by the National Council for History Standards in order to guide the development of history standards for grades kindergarten through 12.

1. Standards should be intellectually demanding, reflect the best historical scholarship, and promote active questioning and learning rather than passive absorption of facts, dates, and names.

2. Such standards should be equally expected of all students and all students should be provided equal access to the curricular opportunities necessary to achieving those standards.

3. Standards should reflect the ability of children from the earliest elementary school years to learn the meanings of history and the methods of historians.

4. Standards should be founded in chronology, an organizing approach that fosters appreciation of pattern and causation in history.

5. Standards should strike a balance between emphasizing broad themes in United States and World History and probing specific historical events, ideas, movements, persons, and documents.

6. All historical study involves selection and ordering of information in light of general ideas and values. Standards for history should reflect the principles of sound historical reasoning—careful evaluation of evidence, construction of causal relationships, balanced interpretation, and comparative analysis. The ability to detect and evaluate distortion and propaganda by omission, suppression, or invention of facts is essential.

7. Standards should include awareness of, appreciation for, and the ability to utilize a variety of sources of evidence from which historical knowledge is achieved, including written documents, oral tradition, quantitative data, popular culture, literature, artifacts, art and music, historical sites, photographs, and films.

8. Standards for United States History should reflect both the nation’s diversity, exemplified by race, ethnicity, social and economic status, gender, region, politics, and religion, and the nation’s commonalities. The contributions and struggles of specific groups and individuals should be included.

9. Standards in United States History should contribute to citizenship education through developing understanding of our common civic identity and shared civic values within the polity, through analyzing major policy issues in the nation’s history, and through developing mutual respect among its many people.

10. History standards should emphasize the nature of civil society and its relationship to government and citizenship. Standards in United States History should address the historical origins of the nation’s democratic political system and the continuing development of its ideals and institutions, its controversies, and the struggle to narrow the gap between its ideals and practices. Standards in World History should include different patterns of political institutions, ranging from varieties of democracy to varieties of authoritarianism, and ideas and aspirations developed by civilizations in all parts of the world.

11. Standards in United States and World History should be separately developed but interrelated in content and similar in format. Standards in United States History should reflect the global context in which the nation unfolded and World History should treat United States History as one of its integral parts.

12. Standards should include appropriate coverage of recent events in United States and World History, including social and political developments and international relations of the post–World War II era.

13. Standards in United States and World History should utilize regional and local history by exploring specific events and movements through case studies and historical research. Local and regional history should enhance the broader patterns of United States and World History.

14. Standards in United States and World History should integrate fundamental facets of human culture such as religion, science and technology, politics and government, economics, interactions with the environment, intellectual and social life, literature, and the arts.

15. Standards in World History should treat the history and values of diverse civilizations, including those of the West, and should especially address the interactions among them.

Developing Standards in United States History

Periodization for U.S. History

Students should understand that the periods into which the written histories of the United States or the world are divided are simply constructions made by historians trying to impose some order on what is inherently an untidy past that can be read and conceptualized in a variety of ways. In a nation of such diversity as the United States, no periodizing scheme will work for all groups. Native American history has benchmarks and eras that sometimes but not always overlap with those of European settlers in the colonial period. For that matter, Iroquois history would have to be periodized differently from Sioux or Zuni history. African American history would have its own watersheds, such as the shift from white indentured servitude to black slave labor in the South, the abolition of the slave trade, the beginning of emigrationism, and so forth. So also with women’s history and with Mexican American history.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Calls for Change
• Part II. Widening the Horizons of American History
• Part III. Teaching American History in a Global Context
• Part IV. Views from Abroad
• Part V. Additional Resources
• Editors and Contributors
• Index