My Eyes Are Bigger than My Stomach

Or my mouth is smaller than my eyes. Or something.

The canonical course on American economic history spends:

• one week on the Spanish conquest
• one week on Amerindians
• one week on colonial settlement
• one week on the American Revolution
• one week on Alexander Hamilton
• one week on agriculture in the Old Northwest
• one week on New England manufactures
• one week on slavery
• one week on the Civil War
• one week on the Gilded Age
• one week on Populism
• one week on Progressivism
• one week on immigration
• one week on the Roaring Twenties
• one week on the Great Crash and the Great Depression
• one week on the New Deal

And we have overshot the end of the semester by three weeks.

I have students who have never lived under any president not named "Clinton" or "Bush," students who graduated from elementary school in 1998.

So I am going to try to greatly compress the first half of the course so as to make space for post-WWII economic history: 1865 by week four!

Comments

[David Lloyd-Jones]

What?

You mean you don't think that slavery and its results account for half of America's economic history?

And the Spanish-American War, and its results, most of the other half?



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[David Lloyd-Jones]

Hmmm.

Make that "the various Spanish-American wars."





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[Matt]

You sound like my high school American history teacher.

[sm]

You gotta set priorities or the recent past is always left out. I say that as a medieval historian.

[Octavian]

I have always wondered why not teach history courses backwards. While there are obviously problems with getting students to appreciate antecedents sufficiently, this strategy of teaching history backwards solves the much larger problem of allocating the proper amount of time to the more recent events.

Richard Dawkins (sp?) did something similar in his book the Ancestors Tale, which traced evolutionary history backwards.

[robertdfeinman]

Doesn't this assume that they learned nothing in high school?

Perhaps you are going to focus on the philosophical discussions that went on during each period, rather than the events. This would be good, I don't think this gets covered much in high school, except for the founding fathers.

I don't see any acknowledgment of labor history. Where is the history of the IWW, AFL, CIO and all their predecessors? Kids today think that the working conditions are some sort of natural law, rather than the result of 100 years of bloody conflict to win workers rights.

[Brian]

Cut the end, not the beginning. If Professor Delong is doing his job anywhere as well as the examples of his excellent and readable papers imply, then students will be more than interested enough to read deep into more modern periods. Frankly, given its impact, were it me I'd be spending even more time on the Depression, including at least one separate week on events versus another on historiography, merging weeks like the Northwest Ag and New England manufactures week to do it.

[jamzo]

what about a week on "the supply-siders", "the friedman's", "reganomics" or whatever label you would apply to the economic ideology that has prevailed over the lifetime of your students

[rea]

"the various Spanish-American wars."

Oddly, my history books only mention one . . .

[Barry]

I imagine that 'various Spanish-American wars' is referring to US-Latin American relations.

[don majors]

"So I am going to try to greatly compress the first half of the course so as to make space for post-WWII economic history: 1865 by week four!"

Good plan. Better examples of writings that have currency. Recent familiar situations and proponents of American economic history will stimulates interest -- in the personalities and their politics.

I had a professor 50 years ago who taught a course: "Modern Germany" (an elective "social relations" course for engineering students.) I couldn't get enough of the required readings and book reports -- Bismark through Adenauer -- awesome.

[shah8]

I would probably have to reiterate the first comment. Slavery was kinda massively important to american economic history (and also determined political history as well, in many forms). Some of that stuff before it is going to have be compressed even more. Which is why slavery is important. It's a really good way to describe the pre 1865 economy and explore how the tentacles reached everywhere else.

Aside from that, this is what every history teacher in the US has gone through since, oh, probably the 1950s. Amazingly, thousands of years of european history gets taught quite efficiently, I hear.

[esb]

Hummm ...

Let me suggest "agriculture, timber and fisheries in the old Northwest."

And what happened the week on the development of the wine industry in California???

I would have come south 50 miles to sit in for that week.

[Nor Izzatina Abdul Aziz]

I so wanna joint this class. Reading book is not the same plus not being in America another problem.I think there is no class on American history 3000 miles from here.

[dave]

"I have always wondered why not teach history courses backwards."

I'm with you, Octavian. To me it's a question not just of lecture time, but of progressing from the more to the less familiar.

I've long thought this of "regular" history but never really thought about the economic kind. It'd certainly make life interesting.

[dave]

Assuming this is the US, does Spanish activity justify a whole session? I'd combine Revolution/Hamilton, Northwest/manufactures, slavery/Civil War, Populism/Progressivism (maybe throw them in to the whole Gilded Age thing too, or should that be split c.1896 with each political movement in the section of which it's more characteristic?) and Depression/New Deal too. There, I bet I've undershot. Can I have a couple of weeks' paid leave now? :D

[wood turtle]

I hope that somewheres in there you can explain to them the whys and wherefores of NAFTA.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

rea,

Far be it from me to defend the integrity of the history books you have had thrown at you in an American schooling.

Try the US vs. Mexico, the US vs Cuba (several times), the US genocide in the Philippines, the US vs Guatemala, the US vs. Nicaragua...

Ya get it? C'mon, you can try. It isn't that complicated.

Hey, there weren't any Spaniards in Hawaii. America's wars weren't *all* against Spain.

* * *

A general observation, to myself as much as to my audiences out there: in the 1770's the inhabitants of the 13 colonies probably thought that Britain was right down the tubes, just as most of the world now assumes that the USA has shot its wad and is on the fast down-skid.

The colonists then went on to found a great nation, but Britain's best years, as an imperial power at least, were still ahead of it in the time of the Pitts.

One is tempted to think that America is now all washed up and gone -- and clearly the best is behind it.

Still, as Gibbon said, "there's a great deal of ruin in an empire."

The world is probably stuck with America for a while yet.

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