Note: This post is dated--I wrote this a couple of weeks before Trump announced his first bid for the presidency. Now I'm fairly confident that this time period will get a name that references the era of division, but I will leave this to professional historians. And I will let them debate whether it will be the "long era" of division and start with 1968, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or the "shorter" era starting with Reagan. And what it will end with is perhaps still in our future. I am not going to update the post below because I think it is still helpful for thinking about the post-Watergate era. So here is the original post:
I have at least 3 posts that I have started now and haven't published. I started them, and then did the digital equivalent of crumpling them up in a ball and tossing them in the wastebasket. Why, you ask? Because, like so many U.S. history teachers, I have trouble figuring out how and when to "end" U.S. history class.
The problem is not the literal "end" or last day of class. I have a lesson for that. (See this post).
The problem is what do to about the period 1970ish through, well...through what exactly? The nineties? September 11, 2001? The second Gulf War? Obama's election?
And is this time period going to be covered in one unit? Or two...perhaps one unit focusing on domestic and one on foreign policy? And in either case, what would this unit or units be called?
That last question might seem like a rather silly one. Why should the name of the unit matter?
I would argue that it matters a great deal. Deciding on a name for a unit makes it a unit, with an overriding essential question as opposed to just one isolated lesson after another, emphasizing one historical fact after another. For example, most of us don't teach units called "the 1950s," followed by "the 1960s," right? Instead, we conceptualize events into units: usually, Cold War, Civil Rights and Vietnam. And whatever important events might have happened in 1854 or 1857 or 1860 other than Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott or Lincoln's election have long since taken a back seat to the impending Civil War. We don't teach "the 1850s." We teach about the events leading up to the Civil War as a unit.
We do this because it helps our students make sense out of what is otherwise just one fact after another. We have to make choices so that history becomes meaningful. We have to teach themes and make connections.
So what choices do we make about the events that took place from the 1970s to the present? I'm going to take a cue from the "The Tyranny of Coverage," chapter one of James Loewen's Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks & Get Students Excited About Doing History and think about forests, trees, and twigs. (I have mentioned this chapter before--see here and here--because it is such a good starting place for rethinking how one conceptualizes a unit and a whole course. Put it on your summer reading list!)
So I decided to make a list of topics from the period 1970 to the present that I consider to be pretty important--the kind of things you would hope a relatively educated person might know. These are the things Loewen describes as "trees." The "twigs" are the specific names, dates, places, etc. that make up the content of any particular topic or "tree." Below is my list of "trees" and in parentheses are some of the twigs, in order to clarify what the topic includes. Note that the list is in the order that I came up with things--it is vaguely chronological, and the only reason I am numbering the items is so I can refer to things in the discussion that follows the list. Ready? It's quite a list...
