I’m teaching the second half of the U.S. survey for the first time next semester and it was a challenge to figure out what books to assign. The perennial questions about teaching the survey—depth or coverage?—play out in book selection too. Do we use a textbook? Do we go for certain kinds of texts—novel, memoir, monograph, synthesis? Do we focus on a couple themes and build the book selection around that? Do we want the students to get historiography? Do we want them to get lots of primary sources? How much do we think about the social location of the authors?
I actually don’t know what the good answers are to these questions but I can report the books I ended up with after a haphazard process that tried to take account of all these questions and more.
I almost went with a textbook. Gilmore and Sugrue’s new survey, These United States, seems impressive. But in the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t figure out what the textbook would be for in my classroom. The general consensus seems to be that most students don’t read the textbook from week to week but might use it for exam-prep. But I’m only giving one exam, and it will be based on my lectures. Furthermore, I expect students to not only read what I assign, but, most weeks, write something about it. I’m not sure I could get good writing assignments out of a textbook reading.
Textbooks don’t seem to help much in promoting historical thinking, understanding of historiography, or analysis of primary sources. But those three things sum up most of what we do, right? So what’s the point? Textbooks fill in the gaps and give students a fall-back, but I’m not sure that’s relevant in the age of Wikipedia.
The one thing that the textbook supposedly has going for it—that it gives students a narrative structure for American history so they can place events in time and context—isn’t actually operable if students aren’t reading it anyway. My sense is that it’s more important to grab students interest, even if it makes them confused, than to try to convey an orderly historical narrative. Students who are engaged can question their way toward a synthesis. Perhaps I’m being utopian, but there’s my rant for the day.
Ok, here are the books I chose:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Mine Okubo, Citizen 13660
Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to Black Power
Eric Foner, Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, Volume Two
The Foner collection is my concession to textbook-like features. As a collection of primary sources, it allows me to put a lot of documents in front of my students without spending a lot of time tracking down sources, scanning, uploading, linking, and so on.
The other three are each very different sorts of books. Herland is an early twentieth century utopian feminist novel, Citizen 13660 is a graphic memoir of Japanese internment, and At the Dark End of the Street is a narrative history from a professional historian. Gilman and Okubo are both short enough to read in one sitting if someone were so inclined. These books also have the considerable virtue of being cheap.
I didn’t set out to have this set of books, but what I’ve ended up with is a rather feminist group that seems relevant to our #metoo moment. Since women’s history is a weakness of mine, assigning these books is one way for me to push against that and try to become more informed.
Colorblind Christians 