Up-to-date? Where to End the US Survey

[smccormack]

I recently brought home Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal from my public library (click here for a New York Times’ review). The book, written by two Boston Globe reporters, examines a period that intersects closely with my time on earth so far. I grew up south of Boston, Massachusetts, so James “Whitey” Bulger’s criminal history has been a local news topic for all of my adult life. Whitey, for those not familiar with the story, spent nearly two decades as (simultaneously) a criminal and FBI informant, and then many years on the run before being tried and convicted in 2013. Reading the book made me realize how little I actually know about Boston in the 1970s and 1980s.

When my students ask why my sections of the second half of the United States survey end in the early 1970s instead of going to “the present,” I respond with a smile: “If I lived it, it’s not history!” As I think more about this question, however, I am forced to face reality: I am uncomfortable teaching about events that I can remember. This is particularly true when it comes to political events in the 1980s because I can vividly recall watching the evening news with my parents. When I read about events from this era it’s always with a faint recognition of what I had seen or heard as a teen.

            With each passing year in the classroom, however, will come the inevitable need to expand time frame of the US survey for the sake of my students, many of whom were not yet born when I graduated from college. They don’t remember the politically-charged Olympic Games of the Cold War era, Bill Clinton’s denials of infidelity, or even September 11th. So how do we as historians decide what is “history” -- i.e., included in the survey and other courses -- and what is current events? Does my “If I lived it ....” litmus test have any credibility?

Probably not. And yet I remain perplexed by the enormity of what stays and what goes content-wise if I teach beyond the year of my birth. In an earlier blog I admitted that I’m already overwhelmed by my perceived need to cover a ton of content in US I (see TMI: Overloading the US Survey). I’ve resolved this academic year to revise my US II syllabus and bring my students to 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan. Now what? What stays and what goes?

Or, what if I let the students determine the content of our last two weeks of the semester? What if I tweak my syllabus to the point that I reach my usually stopping point (the war in Vietnam) with time to spare, which I would then dedicate to specific topics about which the students are curious?

Have you or one of your colleagues in another field tried this approach? I would love to hear from anyone who has experimented with course content in this way. In particular, how did you determine the topics to be covered? How did students respond to the experience? And would you do it again?

[MelRodriguez]

This is an interesting question to debate; I can see both the need for students to feel connected with the more recent history, but also the inclination of "if I lived it, it doesn't feel like history to me." Most importantly, I'd love to hear from other historians and how they deal with where to end the survey course. Is this problem unique to the U.S. course or happens with all survey courses? I would love to hear from you. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

[eric_hinderaker]

As a historian of early America, I am inevitably a bit frustrated with the short shrift generally given to the 17th and 18th centuries in US history surveys.  However, when it comes to the modern half of the survey, I feel passionately that we need to teach up to the near-present--at a minimum, we should include 9/11 and its consequences.  We may be able to remember the 1980s, or the 1970s, but our students cannot.  They have only the dimmest sense of how now-distant events like the Vietnam War or the Reagan presidency connect to their own life experiences.  Even 2001 is probably too long ago for our students to remember, and in another few years most of them will not yet have been born.  History is a discipline that uses the past to give students leverage over the present.  We fail our students if we ignore the issues and occurrences that are of the most immediate and vital interest to them.

[smccormack]

Thanks for the response, Eric.  What would you recommend trimming from the second half of the US survey to make more space at the end of the course?

[eric_hinderaker]

Ha!  Well, that's a good question, Suzanne.  I think we should conceptualize every course as a coherent story.  In the case of a survey course, it needs to have a clear chronology and a clear story arc.  If we begin with a good sense of what the course is about in its entirety, then we can judge how well its component parts contribute to telling that story.  Once we have the entire arc of a course in mind, then we can think about how to break it down into its constituent parts.  This can be a very simple exercise.  For example, if your survey begins at 1877, then your course (if it runs to the near-present) covers a period of about 130 years.  If you give a single midterm, you want to be somewhere around halfway through when exam time comes--or at about 1942.  That date should cause us to ask, does World War II come before or after the midterm?  As a general rule for the survey, I would argue that you want to be more efficient with the earlier material so you have time for the later material; so, my advice would be to get to the end of World War II before the midterm exam.  If that seems impossible, then we need to think carefully about how we allocate our time, where things get bogged down, and where there might be a more efficient approach.  For me, the key to this whole exercise is to value the larger arc of the whole story, in its entirety, over the specific details of its constituent parts.