Today’s post is in the vein of ProfHacker, which is to say that it’s part descriptive of my practices in the classroom, and part a request for others to help work through a common problem.
Having just completed two consecutive semesters teaching the first half of the U.S. survey, I’m hoping to spend a little time this summer mulling how to improve the design of the course. At Framingham State, it runs “from the Age of Discovery to Reconstruction,” according to the course catalog. For our Europeanist readers and colleagues, that may seem like a mere drop in the bucket, but it’s quite a lot of ground to cover in just fifteen weeks. As a survey, everything feels like it gets short shrift. This much I knew going in, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity to reflect.
To start, I’d like to pose a problem I dealt with this semester at the beginning of the course. I encourage students to think about American history as something that predates Plymouth, Jamestown (I teach in Massachusetts, so that’s sometimes a bit of an afterthought), and Columbus. We talk about what it means to select different starting points on the first day of class—how does the story look different if we frame it from 1607 versus 1620?—and in the process introduce the “greatest hits” that most students have heard of before they get to their first college-level history class.
Then I hit them with the twist: what if we started in 10,000 BC? How does the history of the United States look when framed not in terms of Columbus or John Smith or John Winthrop, but the Bering land bridge? I mean it to be provocative, but I also mean it to push them outside their comfort zone by asking them to “face east,” as Dan Richter has written. And yes, I’ve borrowed his story—with attribution!—about looking back through the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
On a practical level, I reinforce the message in the first “real” class the next day with a lecture that runs from 10,000 B.C and the Bering land bridge right up to 1491, trying to put the course in a context that recognizes that the American past relates to Cahokia, Mississippian cultures, political shifts in the Great Lakes region, the Iroquois, and so on, just as much as it does to Jacobean England. The lecture is designed to do two things: first, make students aware of the deeper American past; and second, to puncture the romantic notion that Natives were, in Alan Taylor’s words, “environmental saints.” Empires rose and fell in the Americas, there was military conflict, cultures outstripped natural resources, and so on. After that, we read Alfred Crosby’s essay on “ecological imperialism,” discuss European empires, and then it’s straight to Jamestown.
I think we meet the second of those objectives, and that students come out with a more complicated and/or nuanced understanding of Natives. But the lecture doesn’t sit well within the overall narrative of the course. It’s a quick and dirty fix to an issue that deserves more but for which I haven’t yet found space within the constraints of the survey. So I want to do something better to fully integrate the pre-Columbian past into the survey without losing any areas that I need to cover as part of the university’s mission to train K-12 teachers (they have state requirements for coverage).
Perhaps an assignment? I was intrigued by the post that circulated last week asking, “What if people told European history like they told Native American history?” Inviting students to make the same move (pace Richter as well) would encourage them to see later events—Jamestown, the American Revolution, Andrew Jackson’s presidency—from the perspective of natives. But I don’t know.
What do you think? If you cover the pre-Columbian past in the US survey, what techniques have you found successful? Or, more interestingly, what ideas have crashed and burned?