Teaching the History of Our Times: Dominant Ideological Frameworks

I ended my post-Civil War U.S. survey course with a provocation.

The discussion began with a meditation on the so-called “War on Terror” as a framework for the history of the last 17-18 years. While the history of these times, this most recent generation, is still being worked out, I proposed to my students that 9/11 acts as a centripetal force in narratives of recent U.S. history. This proposition is unscientific, of course—resting only on a preponderance of journalistic anecdata. First drafts of our recent history seem to point to 9/11 as the central act of the most recent generation. And there is some truth to this.

The American political reaction to 9/11 colors both our foreign policy (obviously), but also our domestic policy and life. Apart from sending troops overseas and interacting with other countries based on their purported support, or resistance, to terrorism, our nation’s internal dynamics have been shaped by reactions to terrorism. From proposed austerities and distorted spending priorities, to terrorism alerts, airport security hassles, and heightened border fears and increased up oil production, our internal matters have been profoundly shaped by fallout from “terrorism.”

Historians are notoriously bad at predicting the future, but I told my students—in admittedly simplistic fashion—to expect forthcoming histories to characterize their lives as built around 9/11.

If we know, or expect, this to be coming, we can anticipate ways to break the teleology of 9/11 as an ideological framework for our time. The purpose of my session, of course, was to propose alternative modes of thinking. To escape dominant, hegemonic frameworks, other narrative forces must be handy. I warned them, however, that these other themes must necessarily feel foreign to them. If an alternative doesn’t make you uncomfortable—if it doesn’t feel at least slightly subversive—it  probably isn’t performing the needed intellectual work.

I should mention that this particular survey course is filled with second, third, and fourth-year students. I found them to be exceptionally hardworking—eager to participate, attentive, flexible, and thoughtful. I enjoyed them all term. We had developed a rapport, and I felt they could handle a provocation like this.

As a last caveat before we embarked on discussion, I proposed that whatever we allow as a contender must be pervasive, complex, and wide-ranging. The alternate dominant framework must affect everyone and complicate most everything. Here’s what I proposed for their consideration:

The first contender for alternate theme derived from the history they had just studied: imperialism. Thinking about the U.S. as an imperial power person think differently about the actions of, and reactions to, terrorists. Of course this topic arose, in our period of study, during The Spanish-American War. There is no way to the Rough Riders, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Treaty of Paris without contending with the United States’ world ambitions and the closing of its internal “frontier.” I argued that nationalist, racial, and capitalist ambitions factor greatly into the causes, internal enthusiasm, and outcomes of that war–including atrocities and perceptions abroad of the U.S. as an oppressive, hegemonic colonial power. The students must reckon with entrenched and lingering attitudes related to imperialism as they look ahead to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, inclusive of the War on Terror.

The second contender for an alternate dominant framework is race and racism. We’ve studied Social Darwinism and Eugenics during the term, and lingering cultural, social, and legal effects of both. Namely, white supremacy. We watched *Birth of a Nation* and discussed the KKK. They were also introduced to the Civil Rights Movement and its real, and purported, successes. #BlackLivesMatter arose in some discussions, and that cause exists within their memories. Many students cited the impression made by Barack Obama’s election in 2008 as important–a highlight even in terms of race relations. There no objections, then, to my proposing race and racism as a dominant lens with which one could scrutinize a great number of events.

Income inequality was proposed, by me (of course, if you know me), as a dominant theme for their lives. In our discussions the year 2008 arose again, courtesy of the Great Recession of that year, as decisive in their memories. Many could cite employment and money problems in their families as key to their development. And those effects lingered in terms of college decisions, in relation to geographic moves. No one cited divorce, out loud, but the literature on divorces includes many discussions about family finances as being key factors. But apart from personal experiences, our textbook (American Yawp) does a fine job discussing the 1980 Reagan-Era roots of widening late twentieth-century economic inequality.

A fourth contender for an alternate dominant ideological framework for my students’ lives is climate change. This has also been discussed in the textbook. In addition, I explicitly tackled, in lectures, both pseudoscience and the roots of the environmental movement in post-WWII U.S. history. On top of our classroom work, my teaching institution (Loyola University Chicago) possesses a recently founded Institute for Environmental Sustainability, and several of my students major or minor in environmental science, studies, or policy (on top of standard biology and pre-health majors). This means that discussions about climate and ecology are in the campus air they breathe. No objections arose to climate change as a proposed lens of recent history.

Technological inventions and changes, particularly the dawn of social media, were heartily endorsed by students as a fifth potential dominant framework for viewing historical change in their lives. Not only has the course consistently discussed technological innovation (a prominent theme in relation to the course’s express focus on health, medicine, and science) since the late nineteenth century, but their lives have played out online. The swim in social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) and navigate apps and the internet daily. Many students cited the ongoing question of social media manipulation during the 2016 election as a topic of intense interest. We did not explicitly discuss “disruption” in our final session (my bad), but surely that lingered in their mental backgrounds as we thought about the effects of technology on their entire lives.

As a sixth potential alternate dominant framework of recent history, a few of my students (not me) proposed changing social norms around sexuality.  More specifically, they mentioned gay marriage as a game changer in terms recent lenses with which to view the world. While I listened, their justification was less about evidence and more of the self-evident variety—in a “who would’ve ever thunk it?” fashion. My response was to say that while the legalization of gay marriage was exceptional and shocking for some, I didn’t think it rose to the comprehensiveness that I expect of alternate ideologies that help uphold, or structure, a society. An event or change that is shocking to the world may not be structurally world changing. But maybe I’m underestimating the total effects of gay marriage. I always reserve the right to be wrong.

That was it for in-class discussion. We did not discuss consumerism (an evergreen ideology in American culture, my bad), neoliberalism (my bad, but requires more time), hyper-patriotic nationalism, or liberty/libertarianism (a worthy topic). I also did not have time to dive into legitimate combinations, of twos and threes. It wouldn’t be too hard, for instance, to make a strong argument in favor of 9/11, economic inequality, and climate change as dominant factors in that period and moving ahead. Race and income inequality, for instance, have been key frameworks in recent years. But my point was, foremost, to find incremental ways to move beyond 9/11 as *the* dominant conceptual frame.

I also purposely didn’t discuss theory. I only clarified the meaning of a special term: teleology (focusing on definitions 1.c. and 2 in the link). Otherwise, the terms “hegemony” and “hegemonic” did not arise (I avoided them). Gramsci’s name never arose. It was, after all, a second-tier core survey course. The attention of my students, and their background knowledge, places some limits on the range of discussion. And I limited our conversation to about one hour.

Despite my caveats, the list above felt like a good start on alternatives—and a fine way to end the course. It gave them something to chew on as the went out the door. And I offered it as a question option on the take-home final I distributed the next day. Here’s the question: “Write a short history of your life in terms of recent history topics/themes covered on the last day of class.” About half of the class took advantage of that option on the final. – TL