In this class, we will be exploring the history of the United States over the last 165 years or so. But this will not be a typical history "survey" of the sort you might be accustomed to from high school. It will be different in at least three ways:
We will not even attempt to "cover" everything; instead, we will "uncover" what historians do.
Instead of attempting to cram every person, place, and thing that was important in this period into your head, I want to introduce you to what U.S. historians actually do. So instead of organizing our study around the question of "What happened next?" we will be considering bigger questions, like these:
- How do historians decide which stories about the past 165 years are important to tell?
- What makes the stories professional historians tell about this period different from other stories about the past, including ones you may have heard outside of any history class?
- Why is it possible to tell different stories about the same past events, even when the basic facts about many events are already known?
By seriously pursuing these questions, my hope and expectation is that you will emerge from this course with a much better understanding of American history than you would get from a class where the teacher is bound and determined to "cover" a fixed body of content.
We will not work our way through a textbook; instead, we will work on writing pieces of a textbook for future students.
I believe the best way for you to understand what historians do is to do it yourself. One of the things historians do is synthesize complex interpretations of the past into concise narratives aimed at students like yourselves. In this course, you'll try your hand at writing and refining such narratives by writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, and reading chunks of an imagined textbook (forthcoming 2018) for high school seniors.
We will not begin in 1848 and proceed chronologically to the present; instead, we will often start with present-day events and highlights and work our way back to 1848.
Most history courses you've had probably began at some past Point A and moved through a series of events to Point B. This course will be driven, instead, by questions about Point B. I have drawn these questions from recent headlines from the fall of 2013. In searching for answers to them, we will work back to various Point A's, all the while remaining open to the possibility that Point A will be much farther or closer in time than we might have suspected.
This approach may seem disorienting at first, but it will allow us to tackle two more big questions:
- Do any institutions, laws, and decisions made as long ago as 1848 still affect how Americans live and think today? If so, which have the greatest influence?
- Can studying the history of the United States since 1848 illuminate or help solve present-day problems?
By seriously pursuing these questions, I hope you'll leave the course understanding that historians have a particular way of thinking about things that can be applied to the present moment as much as to 1913 or 1863. Our premise is the simple belief that human beings make their futures under particular circumstances created by events, human choices, and larger structural forces that have their own histories. That is, if you want to understand why things are the way they are in our world, you can't look just to biology or psychology or contemporary social and economic arrangements---you must also look to the past.