The textbook in American history is an institution in itself. Such texts are used in Advanced Placement (AP) courses in 11th grade in high schools across the country, and they show up again in the two-semester surveys of American history that millions of college students take in their freshman year, often required by state legislatures or college trustees. The texts can turn authors into millionaires and make a lot of money for successful publishers. They are also in some ways works of art, accurately summarizing the scholarship of hundreds of historians who have labored in the primary sources and diligently produced monographs unreadable except to the erudite or masochistic. The texts bring together inquiries in political, diplomatic, economic, labor, intellectual, religious, cultural, ethno-racial, and gender history—and whatever other kind of history industrious American historians have invented.
Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People
Brand: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
1328 pages
$84.86
I'm the Teacher, You're the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom
University of Pennsylvania Press
256 pages
$17.54
The textbooks are also behemoths. They are the volumes that are causing health nuts to worry about the burden of backpacks on schoolchildren. Unto a Good Land—a survey of American history recently published by Eerdmans—weighs between 6.5 and 7 pounds on my bathroom scale. It has more than 1,200 pages, and they are double columned. Over 800 words can be crammed into a single page, although there are also pictures, maps, cartoons, engravings, and inset sections entitled “In Their Own Words” that break up the text. There are also appendices that reprint the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation, election results, and a chart of population growth. Instructors can get a manual and a “Test Bank” that has lecture notes, discussion items, and multiple choice and essay questions for exams. Students can go online to a website to get full texts of documents. But Unto a Good Land also provides outlines for each chapter to help students, and at the end of each chapter this text is exemplary in recording a short catalogue of books for additional reading. The lists are elementary enough so that students may actually use them.
Such texts usually don’t become the permanent possession of students, for (in high school) they turn in the books at the end of the year, or (in college) sell them at once to used book dealers. One step ahead of the second-hand trade, publishers and authors regularly put out newer editions. What is the point of these textbooks and the course that they help to define? I think that the answer to this question has little to do with the students and an awful lot to do with the profession of history and its professoriate.
When grownups assign a text to teach in high school, they use it to prepare the students for the college placement test—a test that will enable them to get college credit for the basic course in American history. The emphasis is on a whole raft of dates, names, and occurrences. For example, students learn that Jonathan Edwards was a great American Calvinist preacher and theologian. In New England in the 1730s and 1740s he led the revivals of religion in what was later called the Great Awakening. Edwards introduced passional forces into American spirituality and frightened respectable conservatives. In 1741, in Enfield, Connecticut, he delivered a sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which is a good example of his reasoning and of the emotional style unleashed in the Awakening.
The battle of Antietam during the Civil War was a dubious victory for the North in 1862, but General Robert E. Lee had tried to invade the North, and had had to retreat. The outcome prompted Abraham Lincoln to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. Lincoln wanted to ensure that the English did not recognize the Confederacy. Yet the Proclamation of January 1863 only freed slaves in areas that the South held.
The grasp of several hundred of what I would call “factual groupings” such as these two will serve a student well in the U.S. History ap exam, and every text repeats the same conventional bits of narrative. Students who successfully remember this material often then do not have to take history in college. In this case the function of the texts is entirely test-driven.
For students who use the texts in college, the issues are different. They still get the latest up-to-date packets of information that are of concern to one or another group of professional historians. But there is a greater emphasis on the various subgenres of American history that professionals have cultivated. There is a background of political history and foreign policy that will always include matters as unimportant as post-Civil war foreign policy and forgotten political scandals of the 1920s. Students have to learn about the different sorts of colonies—royal, proprietal, or peculiarly corporate—and they still have to know something about all those bearded gentlemen who were presidents in the late 19th century.
At the same time, and more fashionably, authors will wed, often uncomfortably, the politics and foreign policy to other narrative lines that reach out to the social history that historians have practiced for the last two generations. So students will learn about the history of the family and about women; they will read about craftsmen and farmers and about the growth of industrialization and different forms of work. They will learn not only about Native American life and religion but also about slave life and religion, and how many varied peoples made America, and what their lives were like in New England mills, or in building railroads, or in trading in Kansas or Missouri, or in Spanish communities in the southwest. If the texts are really up to date, the student will hear about cleanliness regimes and patriarchical culture and different forms of domesticity.
In this case—where students use the text in college—the point is for them to acquire some of the knowledge that professionals have produced over the last thirty years. The book and the course are about the information professionals have amassed. The purpose of the course is to convey it to students. That is to say, there is little sense of what students should use this information for. The main idea seems to be that one out of every thousand of these students may become a history teacher, and the course might then be a venue in which that student could pick up the information to teach a new generation of students. I tell my graduate students that the best way to ensure success in the doctoral qualifying exams is to master any one of the texts; they are the Merck Manuals of American history.
If professional historians are religious, they mostly hide their religion under a bushel. They are much more likely to proclaim that they are feminist or politically liberal than that they are believers. There is plenty of religious history served up in most texts, but in comparison to the other forms of history that are “privileged,” as we say, in texts, religious history takes a back seat. Professional historians think, rightly I believe, that if you study religion you are probably religious, and the profession frowns upon this. Thus, again comparatively speaking, the texts devalue religious history.
Unto a Good Land is different. It self-consciously makes religious history much more central among the specialties included in its pages than do most texts. I bet you the six authors who have written it are themselves religious, though since I don’t know any of them, I may be wrong. I also think the space given to religion here is a more accurate reflection of the importance of religion in American history than one gets in the typical texts, though this is a treacherous judgment to make. I should add that Unto a Good Land covers all the standard topics adequately and without noticeable bias. Indeed, the treatments are often excellent. I found some of the writing on European empires in America in the 16th and 17th centuries confusing—a standard failing in texts. But Unto a Good Land is outstanding, for example, on the Revolutionary War and on 20th-century political developments.
So let me here at once make a summary evaluation. Teachers at religiously oriented schools could not do better than Unto a Good Land; teachers at other schools will not find the book deficient or partial in any way.
In fact, my principal criticism of this text is that it is too much like other texts. The authors make an astonishing statement. They say the United States “has never been a Christian nation.” On the contrary, the United States has in its essence always been a Christian nation, and this should be apparent to anyone with half a brain. In the passage that follows their mind-boggling statement, the authors argue that their “stance” is one that makes religion, and not Christianity in particular, central. In actuality what they do is to offer proportionately more religious packets of information in their book. That is the only significant way Unto a Good Land differs from other texts. It is at least 100 pages longer than the other four texts I have at my disposal, and the discrepancy is just that there are 100 extra pages on religious issues. The authors barely have a “stance,” except that as professional historians they are committed to force-feeding students this enormous quantity of data.
I will go even further. The United States is a Protestant nation. There are certainly other ways to organize the story of the nation—a text by Pauline Meier and others, Inventing America: A History of the United States (2003), does for technology what Unto a Good Land does for religion. Economic opportunity and the growth of enterprise strike me as another organizing principle. But Protestantism is right up with these. Look at the influences in England propelling colonists to the shores of the New World. Examine the spiritual foundations of politics during the Founding period. Consider the rationale for expansion in the 19th century; the background of Progressive era reformers; the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson and his righteous descendants from George Kennan and Dean Acheson to George W. Bush; the black religiosity of the Civil Rights movement; the crux of the culture wars of the last forty years. If you want an organizing principle, for God’s sake, what better one could you ask for? My problem with Unto a Good Land is that it really does not want a theme; it wants to be like other texts.
Patrick Allitt is an award-winning teacher at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student is about his experience teaching the “second half” of the American history survey, from 1877 (the end of the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War) to the present. Allitt is a good instructor and a good analyst of the professorial life. If you want to know what it’s like teaching this sort of class to undergraduates, Allitt gets its right. From the feeble attempts the students make at writing expository prose, to the loony emails and weird excuses for non-performance, to the roll of toilet paper to give to students in tears, to our craven unwillingness to give a grade below B- , it’s all there.
Allitt does not use a textbook. He laments the writing in the texts, and assigns a lot of primary sources and some monographs. The main reason students seem to like texts, he says, is that such books supply a baseline for “what will be on the exam.” As a substitute, he distributes outlines so that students will have some sense of what they are expected to know. Still, Allitt does not tell us—either in the syllabus for the course, which he reprints, or in his class-by-class analyses—what themes govern his survey. He shows us that he acquaints the students at length with the history of American popular culture; with environmental history; with business and economic history; with lots of social history of immigration, women, farmers; African American and Native American history; and politics and foreign policy. But nowhere in a book devoted to teaching the subject of American history at an introductory level does the author tell us how he integrates this material or interprets it. As professional historians would say, some approvingly, there is no “master narrative.”
That is, Allitt’s course, to me, has all the defects of a textbook. Part of his teaching excellence is that he displays, like the texts, a real grasp of historical details. Nonetheless, we have no idea of how all these details fit together. I took the final exam, which Allitt suggests his readers do, and did pretty well, after applying his curve. But half the test was one-word answers, or an equivalent. Of 58 questions, I got 18 wrong. Professor: rethink what you are doing!
Reflecting on these issues and on my profession has been discouraging. As members of a community that in effect creates its own norms and that with some autonomy oversees its own commitments, historians surely should have a major say in what and how we teach. But I also believe that the teaching should not be almost entirely about us. We have collectively failed. All those state legislators who mandate that students take American history did not do it for us. American history is still at the core of many general education requirements, and is not just there so that universities can make available jobs for historians.
Aside from systematizing their learning, what ought these legions of historians to be doing in the American history survey? Why should the students be in the class, learning about these various factual matters? Here I am on the side of the legislators: we ought to be offering sophisticated and reflective education for citizenship in the Republic. The operative words here are sophisticated and reflective. We want to produce patriots in the sense that our students should come out of our classes with some understanding of what the relation of the national past is to present endeavors.
When politicians discuss social security, I want my students to know that it was created in a certain way, for certain reasons. When George W. Bush tells the American people in a presidential debate about the Dred Scott case, I want my students to know what he is talking about; and I want them to say: What is this guy saying? When the nation honors Rosa Parks, I want my students to know that she did not just suddenly decide to stay in her seat on the bus. When the president talks again and again about evildoers so glibly, I want my students to think: this is not new, we have been accusing others of evildoing for centuries.
If we are not teaching citizenship, or something like it, all we are doing is affording people material for trivia games.
Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has won four different teaching awards. He is preparing a short American political history, From Sea to Shining Sea. It roots the past story of the United States in an expansive Protestantism.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
