Teaching, writing, researching, and reading. This is a routine I suspect many of the readers of this blog currently partake in daily. I like to think about ways I can incorporate what I’ve read or researched into my daily teaching agenda. Thinking about how I can incorporate the latest in intellectual history scholarship, for example, helps not only tie together the larger themes of a survey class, but they also help a topic of history come alive for students in ways they never considered.
Last fall, I tried to spruce up my African American History Until 1865 survey with a bit of African American intellectual history. I wanted to incorporate the early history of African American history, for two reasons. First, I wanted to make sure students understood that the world of African Americans in the early republic and antebellum periods, while always connected to slavery, also included the different ways in which African Americans defined themselves in a hostile country. Second, I wanted to give my students the tools by which they would understand why they were in an African American history class at a Historically African American school in Orangeburg, South Carolina (I teach at Claflin University). I knew my students were at least somewhat familiar with the story of slavery and freedom. But the discussion we had about early African American history—aided immensely by Stephen Hall’s A Faithful Account of the Race—was illuminating for me. I found that my students, when learning about these early attempts to write a history of African Americans, were genuinely moved and engaged by the history they learned.
I decided to carry this over into the spring semester and my survey of American history since 1865. Here, my thinking was influenced by Jill Lepore’s These Truths and the structure of her book. While reading the book for review purposes elsewhere, I was taken by Lepore’s concentration on the rise of “public opinion” during the era of the World Wars and the Great Depression. For the rest of the semester, I plan on taking a similar tack when it comes to talking about “public opinion” and mass culture during America’s twentieth century. Likewise, in my Contemporary History of Europe class (beginning in 1815), I’ve spent considerable time explaining terms and ideas such as liberalism, nationalism, and Fascism. Again, I’ve discovered that my students are genuinely curious about such ideas, as they’re constantly exposed to these terms every day via the news and social media.
I assume that we all use elements of intellectual history in our survey courses. I enjoy doing so because it gives me extra incentive to stay current with intellectual history—not to mention allowing me the chance to get my students minds to churn a little more, and spark some engaging conversation in class. I am curious—how do you use intellectual history in survey courses?
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Great post, Robert. As you know, I’m using Lepore’s These Truths as the assigned textbook for my survey, and precisely because her framing of narrative US history as intellectual history is so appealing and so useful for my students. I will be starting a series here at the blog after Spring Break on teaching with These Truths. I hope you will contribute!
Sounds like I will definitely have to contribute to it!
I’m not sure how to answer this, because it’s never occured to me that you could or would teach a history survey without intellectual history. Maybe because my surveys are World History, and so many touchstones of those narratives are large-scale cultural and intellectual shifts, and so many of those cultures and ideas are not that familiar to so many of my students. My Asian history courses require a firm foundation in religious and cultural and intellectual worlds without which the social and political (and sometimes economic) history is practically non-sensical; it probably is somewhat of a sign of my training in “Asian studies” that I take a very multi-disciplinary tack in those courses, but I like to view it as a strength of history that it can encompass many fields.
Oh, this is a great point. What I want to emphasize is how often we don’t even *think* about what we’re incorporating into our survey courses. Yet, it’s a reminder of how all of our work as academics–the teaching, the writing, the researching, etc.–all flow together.
I use intellectual history as a framework—getting students to think about the base assumptions and ruling ideas of the period (e.g. paradigms, limits to thought). I also use intellectual history, in a theoretical sense, to get students to ponder history as a critical thinking tool (via “historical thinking”). It’s about thinking philosophically about historical events as practice for thinking critically about what’s happening today. – TL