… AMERICAN HISTORY
"If you teach American history outside America, it is very likely that you will have to teach well outside your special area of expertise. Thus, I have often taught twentieth-century American history as well as courses in my specialist area of early America. This year, for example, I teach seminars in American history between 1932 and 1975 while doing courses on early America and on the Atlantic world. On Friday mornings, some students get to overdose on my teaching, as they first listen to my lectures on the Atlantic world then participate in my seminars on mid-twentieth-century American history.
I haven't asked them how they connect one subject area to the other. The differences, however, between how the two subjects are taught must be immediately apparent. In my courses on early British American and Atlantic history, I range widely over both time and space, with most lectures concentrating on specific geographical areas rather than on topics defined by chronological boundaries. In my seminars on mid-twentieth-century history, however, chronology rules. Seldom pausing to differentiate between the various regions of America (although regional differences in America in the twentieth century were at least as great as in the seventeenth century), we move each week from one decade of American history to the next, from the depressing 1930s, to the dull 1950s, to the exciting 1960s, ending back in depression with the 1970s.
My teaching methods are hardly unusual. Indeed, these frameworks—thematic and regional for early America, chronological for the history of the United States—are normal for teaching these subjects. Look at any textbook on American history. All textbooks devote considerable attention to the colonial period. But more often than not, chapters on colonial life overlap in time. In George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi's conventional summary of American history, for example, the colonial period is treated in three separate chapters: one concentrating on regional differences in settlement, one on colonial ways of life, and one on politics and empire. The textbooks are designed to get students to be able to compare and contrast colonization in, say, Barbados, Virginia, and Massachusetts before 1660 or to be able to explore how consumption patterns shaped colonial social patterns…"
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Armand
learns to pay attention to all of the details when buying two-part epoxy...
