History and today.

I've started thinking already about next year's literature-based American History study.  Last year we did "prehistorical North America through the War of 1812."  This year we're doing "19th century" -- really, "war of 1812 through U.S. entry into WWI," with half the year spent on Civil War and related topics.  Next year we'll wrap it up with "Twentieth-Century America" -- which is really going to be "World War I through 9/11/01," I think.

When I prepared the book lists for the first two-thirds, I started by picking up a couple of good high-school history textbooks and reading through them to get an idea of which topics to cover.  I think this time around, though, I am not going to do that.  That approach forces you to start in the past and look forward.  It's also an approach in which everything is important -- in which it's hard to make priority choices, given the limited time we have to spend.  But I need a way to decide which topics we must cover and which must be set aside.   So I think maybe the best approach is to start in the present and look back.  I want to ask myself, "Where are we now?  And how did we get here?"

It's not that I want to focus heavily on current events with the kids I'm teaching, who will be two fifth-grade boys and one seventh-grade girl next year (plus whichever younger kids "tag along" with the subject from day to day).   I don't think they are old enough to really dig into the complexities of modern-day politics, domestic and global.  

But I do want to supply them with the basic historical background they will need to understand today's United States and its place in the world.  I want to steep them at least a bit in the past, so that when it comes time to understand a complicated present, they'll have some idea that it didn't come out of nowhere.  And so when I select topics, I want to do it with an eye toward setting the stage for today.  That, I think, will be my primary organizing principle, since I can't cover everything.  Does this topic help us understand where we are today?  Here in the U. S.?

I think it has a way of focusing how to teach about things.  It's so easy to think of the twentieth century as a string of "eras:"  the World War I era, the Depression era, the WWII era, the Cold War era, the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and so on.  I was tempted to break it up like that myself.  But there are other ways to think about all these pieces, less as discrete time blocks than... phenomena maybe?   The end of American isolationism and the beginnings of intensive global involvement, for better or worse.  The great migrations from rural areas to cities, and from south to north.   U.S. involvement in the Mideast.

Let's talk presidents.  I'd rather cover a few in depth than all of them superficially.  In the 19th century I planned to cover biographies of only three presidents, the most interesting ones:  Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt.  In the twentieth century, whose full biographies to cover?  It strikes me that two are no-brainers:  FDR and Reagan.  They make interesting counterpoints, if nothing else.  When I was talking it over with Hannah I also ticked off "and Kennedy," but when I mentioned that to Mark he said "No way.  Kennedy's only interesting because he was assassinated.  You want an interesting character study, you want to do Lyndon Johnson."   

"Nixon maybe?"

"Well, sure, he's a character too, but a lot of interesting things happened under Johnson.  Think about it."  And I am thinking about it -- he has a point.

Anyway, I am a long way from committing anything to paper, but I will definitely have food for thought over the next few weeks.

Comments

[Barbara C.]

I don't know if you've ever checked out "Don't Know Much About American History" by Kenneth C. Davis. It follows a question/answer format of short essays with timelines (if I remember correctly) and he sometimes gets into long-term and present-day relevance. I bought it thinking it would be a good spine when we get to that subject.