If there's one thing that teaching a seminar on United States history up to 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) has reminded me, it is that this country has always been dominated by racist liars willing to use violence and ideology to exploit other people. So the election results, while beyond disappointing, shouldn't come as a giant surprise. From 1492 onwards, the onslaught has been relentless. And the reason the fascist governments of some states have started banning stuff from school curriculums is that they want you to think the poor are poor because of their own moral and other inferiority, not because of centuries of deliberate social, political, emotional, physical, and economic oppression. That way the people at the top don't have to do anything about inequality and can argue that those who try for more progressive policies are just unpatriotic troublemakers ruining it for the rest of us.
Deciding on my books for the course was challenging. Since most of the students are in the Masters in Teaching program, I started by going to the New York State Social Studies Framework and using their periodization of American history to select weekly topics. Then I went to the American Historical Society, the Organization of American Historians, and the Pulitzer to find award winning academic books written in the past 10 years. Then I shuffled those around, picking and choosing, until I had a syllabus. I hadn't read any of them, so it was a bit risky. Some turned out to be excellent choices, others not so much, but we have had fun with them anyway.
We started with some review articles to give them a sense of how academic history has been written over the past, oh, one hundred years. Then we spent some time with the American Historical Association's report on teaching history in schools (which was both reassuring and depressing. Reassuring because most teachers are doing a fine job. Depressing because of political pressures to make them leave some parts out).
Then we moved on to the books:
Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, Hill and Wang, 2014. We all loved this book. Her thesis was deliberately subtle, and the book was smart and fascinating. The Mandan live on the upper Missouri river, in present-day North Dakota, and this is the story of how they survived during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, Liveright (Norton), 2017. My students liked this book more than I did. While she got her point across (that slavery was commonplace and central to colonial New England), she added in unnecessary embellishments that she didn't have evidence for and I kept sighing and throwing the book down.
Robert Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence, Omohundro/UNC, 2021. I would teach this again, for sure. I mean, he had me with his opening chapter about newspapers, and kept my attention with his analysis of patriot propaganda about slaves and Indians conspiring with the British. It was one of the books we kept coming back to in later discussions
Michael Hattem, Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution, Yale, 2020. This was a complicated cultural history about the uses of memory and history in creating a political idea of America. Parts of it were excellent and parts of it got kind of fuzzy.
Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, Harvard, 2018. We all found this book to be very frustrating. Everything James Madison ever said about the Constitution and how he changed over time, written in a rather inaccessible academic style while purporting to be cutting-edge. My students started referring to the author as Johnny G, and not in a respectful way.
Michael John Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion & the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, Omohundro/UNC, 2022. Such a good book. It focused on the Great Lakes region, and showed one of the systems by which white Americans made money off of Native lands and peoples. I wore my Lake Superior sweatshirt to class that week.
Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, Belknap (Harvard) 2022. This may have been my students' favorite book even though it was possibly the least mineable for material to use in a high school classroom. It was basically about yellow fever in New Orleans and I want to tell you more, but it is quite a complex argument.
Thavolia Glumphy, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, UNC, 2022. This should have been better than it was, and I think the fact that she was asked to write it for the UNC press's series on the Civil War meant that although it had a topic, she struggled to find a theme and a thesis and it got repetitive. And while she made many claims that rang true, she often had no evidence for them but acted like she did. I was disappointed.
Richard White, The Republic for which it stands: the United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, Oxford, 2018. I didn't realize when I assigned this book that it was over 800 pages. Once I got my hands on an actual copy, I quickly decided we'd only read the first third of it (the Reconstruction part), a decision that made me popular with my students. It was also more of a survey than a focused monograph, so perhaps not as appropriate for the course, but we still had a useful discussion. Plus, the late nineteenth-century is one of my favorites to study (but not to live in, no, not at all).
Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, Harvard, 2021. I haven't quite finished this yet, because we're talking about it next week in class, but it is a very solid book.
So, there you are. I accidentally taught a class about race in America. But you can't talk honestly about America without talking about race, so I guess it was bound to happen.
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