About

For the past seven years, I’ve taught introductory US history using conventional — and often quite costly — survey texts that most students quite likely do not actually take the time to read. While these texts are useful for establishing a common denominator for the course as a whole, my sense is that they lull students as well as the professor (me) into a false sense of security. Students understand that the material they need to know is in the text, and if need be they can feverishly catch up on missed/skipped readings before each exam. Or not. The professor (again, me) also knows the material is there and therefore feels at liberty to ignore the text for nearly the entire semester. In the end, the text — at least as I’ve experienced it — becomes a piece of furniture that no one actually uses.

Although students themselves are ultimately responsible for keeping up with the material and for actually devoting their energy to learning US history, it strikes me as somewhat of a waste of time and money to continue running a university course this way. What if — instead of assigning set readings from week to week and followed them up with lectures in class — we posed a series of broad questions that students would be obligated to research, present and discuss? And what if everyone were more or less free to pursue the answers to these questions using whatever resources seemed appropriate?

For starters, I would hope that our class time itself would become, in a sense, the course text. That is, the three hours we spend together each week would be devoted to introducing and synthesizing knowledge; students would have to demonstrate that they had put forth an effort to learn something, and they would need to blend what they’ve learned with the material their classmates bring with them to class. This will not only give us the opportunity to discuss basic research techniques, but we’ll also learn something about the process of making history.

Secondly, I would also hope such an approach would introduce students to the avalanche of free historical material that’s available on the internet. From primary sources to old, digitized textbooks to innovative projects assembled by schools, universities and museums, it’s possible to learn a vast amount about the past without relying on a textbook to get us started. By taking advantage of these resources, we can think about the US survey in a more open-ended way. Students will be encouraged to devote their time to pursuing topics and themes that are of greater personal interest, though we’ll devote some effort to bringing everything together to form a more coherent and integrated sense of US history since the end of the Civil War.

For those students who prefer to use a conventional textbook, an earlier edition of The American Promise — the text I’ve used many times — is available on Amazon for literally pennies. Alan Brinkley’s Unfinished Nation is also quite strong and is very inexpensive in older, used editions. David Noble and Peter Carroll have a fantastic book as well called The Free and the Unfree; it’s not a textbook per se, but it covers the material we’ll be examining from a distinctively progressive point of view. And it can be had for cheap (as can the older edition.

One note of caution: if you order a text from Amazon or any other online vendor, you should go ahead and pay the extra cost for priority shipping. Media Mail takes about 4-6 weeks to Alaska from most places in the lower 48, so if you go the least expensive route you shouldn’t expect your book to arrive until sometime in February.

For the trule committed freeloader, I’ll be placing an assortment of texts on library reserve. There’s also a free online textbook from the Digital History project. Or you can take your chances with Wikipedia, which provides a tolerably competent overview of the period.