History, threaded (II).

Part I is here.

Here are the rest of the threads of history I think I might use for my literature-based study of (loosely) 20th-century America next year.  Recall that the first five are:  (1)  America as superpower, (2) Establishing current US borders and holdings, (3) African-American history and civil rights/equality in general, (4) changes to the American experience of childhood; and (5) economics.

Thread 6.  Roots of the War on Terror.  Post-WWII partition of the Middle East; Russians in Afghanistan; Iran hostage crisis; Reagan's strikes on Libya; Iran-Contra affair; US involvement in the Middle East; the first Gulf War; the first attack on the WTC; 9/11; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; domestic civil liberties issues raised by the Patriot Act and the establishment of the DHS.

Thread 7.  Party lines, scandal and hostility.  Teapot dome scandal, big government vs. small government, pro- and anti-war stuff, Watergate, the "Reagan revolution," Iran-Contra, Bush v. Gore, "red states" and "blue states" as a cultural meme

Thread 8.  American mobility.  Increased use of the automobile; national roads; economic migrations (rural to urban, south to North, plains to West coast); migrants and immigrants; the interstate highway system; air travel.

Thread 9.  Environmental movements.  National parks and wilderness preserves, Rachel Carson, EPA, endangered species act, 1970s energy crisis, controversies over global cooling and warming, international treaties.

Thread 10.  Mass communication/pop culture and computing.  Radio, cinema, telephones, broadcast television, cable and satellite television with increased "channeling" of viewers, computers and the Internet, social media.

Thread 11.  Selected Presidential biographies and in-depth look at the administrations.  I argue that the bios and administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan are the three most worthy of special attention.

With the exception of the Presidential biographies, all of these threads are chosen in an attempt to explain how we got where we are today.  They are meant to be filaments from pre-WWI America to today's newspapers.  Why is the US occupying the land that it does?  Why do we find ourselves with China as the only other credible superpower?  Why were so many people so excited about the election of the first African-American president? What does the current recession mean?  Why do we have to take off our shoes in the airport?  Why do people disagree about what to do about global warming?  What are red states and blue states?  What was it like before there was an Internet?

Comments

[Sara]

Will do you any history of religion? It was really the only missing thread that jumped out at me reading through your list, and I think it's fairly important for understanding where we are now: the birth of fundamentalism (using that term correctly, not as a slur), decline of mainline denominations, Vatican II, the rise of the Religious Right and increase in political ecumenism between formerly hostile evangelicals and Catholics.

[bearing]

I probably will, but I will be covering it within my family. This list includes the topics I will be teaching to the children of two other families (who are, incidentally, not Catholic). I think it would be difficult for me to teach a lot of that material to other people's children, and probably inappropriate; in other cases, it's just not that important to the other families (for example, the changes to the liturgy after Vatican II are very important to our family, but not so much to the children of our non-Catholic friends -- at least not so much that it's appropriate to dedicate scarce instruction time to it). We have time to cover additional material on our own as necessary.

Some of it will come up naturally as I teach other topics. It's hard to understand the landslide election of Reagan, for example, without understanding a re-forming of political alliances including the evangelicals and Catholics...

[Sara]

That is interesting to me - you've got no shortage of hotly-debated topics to cover already, so why do you think it would be uniquely difficult or inappropriate to teach religious history?

Here's my pitch: American religiosity today is a huge anomaly. All other developed nations are pretty thoroughly secularized. Knowing something about why that is strikes me as extremely relevant to people of all faiths or none.

[bearing]

Because I believe it's the job of the parents to teach in depth questions of theology, faith, and morals to their children. I don't appropriate that job from someone else unless I'm specifically tasked to do it. And what I've been asked to do is teach "American history," not Church history or even the history of religion in America.

I also am teaching world history to the same kids. Obviously I covered things like the German and English Protestant revolutions. But I didn't in that group teach much about the theological differences between the groups except what was necessary to understand the facts of what happened.

These are nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old kids. We have plenty to work with in our sessions together, and I *am* covering the Church in America in greater detail with my own son separately. But (for example) the Quaker family of the young man I teach undoubtedly wants to spend more time on the very interesting history of the Quaker people in the US than Ion the Catholic history, and time is limited. You see?

[MelanieB]

I think this is a fascinating way of teaching history and makes so much more sense to me than a strictly chronological approach. Thank you so much for sharing.