This summer, at Illinois State University, the historian Andrew Hartman organized a graduate seminar around the topic of American history survey courses. He focused especially on “the history wars”: contemporary political debates about how U.S. history should be taught. Most of his students were teachers already working in secondary schools.
Five of these high school history teachers wrote essays that now have been published in the new (fall 2021) issue of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. Introducing these essays, Hartman explains the assumption and the common reading that underpins the five teachers’ work:
One of the most powerful forms of constructing the American history narrative can be found in surveys of U.S. history, books assigned in high school and college classrooms that sometimes even attract readers beyond the classroom. In short, the course objective was to think deeply about the construction of the narrative of American history by reading, analyzing, and critiquing five of the most popular and intriguing U.S. history surveys, written from a diverse range of perspectives and with distinct objectives. We read, in the following order: Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States; Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom; and Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. We also read the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report.
The teachers’ contributions to this forum are:
- Andrew Erford, “The 1619 Project and the Importance of Historical Significance and Argumentation in the History and Social Studies Classroom”
- Chad Kuehnl, “1968: A Thematic Inquiry”
- Kelly Schrems, “Protest as an American Tradition: Narrative Discourse in the American History Survey”
- Hunter Watts, “Charting the Present of Teaching the Past: Propoganda and 1776 in the History Classroom”
- Cameron Zindars, “Saving American History”
Blue Book Diaries 