The dilemma is obvious: In most history texts and in all but the most experimental curricula, the past is divided into two parts, the history of the United States and the history of the rest of the world. The characteristic split between American-history and world-history courses in high school and college not only leaves bridges unbuilt but also fosters in many students an unfortunate tendency toward historical isolationism, as the complexities of most of the world’s history seem oddly unrelated to the glorious saga of our own ascent.
We are admittedly at a difficult moment for teaching history at the general-education level. There are those educators -- some historians and even more policy officials -- who urge a narrow curriculum that teaches the values of our nation and civilization alone, preferably without warts. Some indeed recommend this narrowness even while boasting (inaccurately) that ours is the only nation that has eagerly sought to learn from the outside world; since we’ve adopted the best of other cultures, the argument seems to run, studying our own culture is enough.
Most of those historians concerned with general education, however, incline toward a wider international perspective, which is turning up in world-history courses in a growing number of curricula at various educational levels. Nevertheless, the question of how to relate American history to the larger picture remains.
Linking different segments of a history curriculum has always been a difficult task, since the discipline is not as rigorously sequential as, say, mathematics or a foreign language. Historians have usually favored an arrangement of courses that emphasizes separate cultures or nations, on the ground that uniqueness of place is a basic ingredient of historical comprehension. This choice is hard to assail, but it can make it more difficult, for students and teachers alike, to relate one course to another in a history program. The task is particularly difficult where American history is concerned, for the hallowed tradition of dealing with our own national past as a distinct entity is often based on unexamined assumptions about the uniqueness and probable superiority of the United States.
With the classic history package of past decades, which usually required students to take a Western-civilization course either before or after some United States history, educators at least might assume that students would make some connections between the two based on their shared heritage. Because the United States emerged in large part from a Western background, historians felt no particular need to point out relationships between the two. Most students in fact emerged with only a hazy idea about how the two puzzle pieces fit together, often assuming American superiority to European chaos. This result was usually ignored, however, and may even have appeared salutary to some scholars, for if students could simultaneously think of their own society as heir to glorious Western traditions and at the same time better than the Old World, they might be doubly inclined toward loyal citizenship.
The trend toward replacing Western-civilization courses with some genuine world history, which includes the European tradition and much else besides, logically forces a more explicit examination of assumptions about the connections between United States history and other history courses. If students learned a hodgepodge of history within a largely Western context, their ability to connect is strained beyond reasonable bounds when the whole world’s past is considered.
The conceptual challenge is considerable when students have to relate a world-history course to what they know about American history from a separate course taken in a different year. The challenge is further complicated for students who typically have a deeply ingrained set of biases about American importance and uniqueness.
World historians understandably have been reluctant to include much about the United States in their courses. Their material is already so vast that the temptation to rely on separate coverage of the United States can be almost overwhelming. Further, many of them are eager to de-parochialize American students, a process that can take the form of playing down the Western tradition in general in favor of the less familiar cultures of, say, Asia and Africa.
American historians, whether critical or not of the hallowed -traditional-values approach, rarely allude to world history, because of resolute commitment to the adequacy of a national explanatory framework and, sometimes, considerable ignorance of alternatives. As a result, the task of putting the pieces together is left to students, who even when eager can rarely figure out how to do it.
One begins the task of helping students put together major ingredients in their history programs and of relating United States history to the history of other parts of the world by recognizing that masses of narrative detail about American history are not required in a world-history course. The United States began to achieve far greater importance in world history through its economic and then diplomatic efforts after 1870, and the amount of attention provided should vary accordingly.
Focusing on three basic questions can help curriculum planners relate United States history to world history without letting the American tail wag the global dog:
* How does the United States fit into the larger interpretive schema applied to other parts of the world? Courses that explore theories about frontiers, or about political tensions in new nations, or about the global commercial pecking order all have applicable frameworks. They can provide an economical means of revealing national patterns and a firm reminder that the U.S. has not been exempt from a number of forces that have shaped and constrained other societies.
* Should the United States be regarded as a civilization in its own right, or can it be included as a part of Western civilization? This is the core issue as far as locating American history is concerned, for it forces comparison with European patterns instead of assuming connections or uniqueness without analysis. A case can be made in both directions, but the main point is to examine the ingredients of the comparison and the objections that any framework must be able to answer.
* What did the United States contribute to world history as it became a major world power in the last 125 years; in what major changes in the 20th century did the nation play a leading role? Dealing with this final set of questions forces one to realize that in many respects the United States has maintained trajectories established earlier by the dominant capitalist nations in Western Europe, becoming itself more militarized in the process. This continuity was important in world history, but hardly novel. Further, many of the 20th century’s most striking new directions, from decolonization to the ascendancy of East Asia, developed on largely non-Western bases. On the other hand, exploration of American influence over aspects of international popular culture (comparable to the English influence over international sporting tastes a century ago) opens somewhat more unusual territory. The questions involved in such comparisons are complex, but must undergird any description of America’s actions in wars and alliances, depressions, and international economic aid.
These exercises are not designed to teach students dogmatic truths (new or old) about the comparative history or world role of the United States. The point, rather, is to ask questions that will help students intelligently assess any claim to American uniqueness or to understand why foreign views of the United States (and its history) may well differ from their own. The result enriches American history by providing different vantage points for looking at often familiar material. It enriches world history by adding an important case. It connects otherwise separate facets of a student’s historical learning around some common questions about comparability and interaction.
The task of improving integration is not, of course, a one-way street. The approach sketched here must appeal to historians teaching American history as well as to world historians. Without overturning conventional geographical distinctions as a basis for teaching history, we must find ways to talk across boundaries. The current pattern, which encourages students to see the United States outside the processes that describe the rest of the world and to view history itself as a random set of geographical chunks, is both risky and unnecessary. As we increasingly realize how intimately our nation is affected by international forces, we can realistically, even excitingly, teach that its past has been part of a much broader historical panorama.
Peter N. Stearns is professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.
