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Teaching Immigration and Ethnic History at a Polytechnic University: Two Examples
ROBERT F. ZEIDEL
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TEACHING HISTORY ON a polytechnic campus poses several challenges, which are amplified when the professor tries to integrate his or her research specialty. The University of Wisconsin-Stout (UW-Stout), where I have taught American history for seventeen years, is the state's polytechnic university, where there is an emphasis on career training, collaboration with business and industry, and applied or hands-on learning. Liberal arts, with their tradition of broad-based and philosophical approaches to learning, provides a key component of all major programs and the foundations for some, but the students who choose to attend a polytechnic pursue higher learning with a practical bent. They seek to gain knowledge that will help them advance and excel in an anticipated profession. Teaching in this milieu has offered me two opportunities to incorporate into the curriculum my research interest in American immigration and ethnic history: first, as a component of a general survey course, and second, as the topic for a specialized course that will be part of a planned applied social science major. In both cases, I have had to tailor instruction so as to appeal to students with aptitudes and expectations that differ from those of traditional history majors. |
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Modern United States History is an introductory survey, taught primarily to freshmen and sophomores as a general education elective. As I sought to include immigration history, my first decision was whether to present it as a separate thematic unit or to integrate it throughout the course. My knowledge of the field led me to decide that a specific unit would tend to compartmentalize ethnic history by limiting it to a particular time period or treating it as a story unto itself. As immigration and the creation of a multiethnic society has been an ongoing part of American history since the start of colonization, I determined that it should be taught in that manner. Different aspects of immigration—arrival and restriction, for example—appear in different units and are tested on different exams. This allows the students to understand that immigration has been a part of several bigger pictures. I also determined to go "out of time period" by incorporating Irish and other pre-1865 immigrants and the Latino indigenous peoples who became Americans during the 1840s into a class defined chronologically as "1865 to present." This gives the students a more holistic mastery of the material. |
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The course presents ethnic history as parts of several units, within broad chronological parameters. "The Rise of Industrial America" includes an introduction of the push-pull factors that motivated immigrants to come to the United States, as well as a discussion of when, between the 1840s and 1920s, various nationalities or ethnic groups began to arrive in significant numbers. This includes the Mexicans who became Americans with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). The next unit, "The Gilded Age," includes immigration's social and cultural aspects, with special attention paid to the urban environment. "The Progressive Era," covered on a subsequent exam, makes students return to this material when we discuss, for example, how reformers such as Jane Addams focused their attention on recent arrivals. In "The Roaring Twenties" I take up restriction, going back to the 1840s and anti-Irish nativism, through the Chinese exclusion of the 1880s, and up to the imposition of general restrictions in 1917 and during the 1920s. The Progressive Era material also includes the internal migration of African Americans and their interaction with other groups in northern cities. Finally, at the end of the course, I return to immigration twice: first, in discussing the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 as an example—along with civil and women's rights—of the liberalization of American society during the later Cold War era, and then in presenting the backlash against recent immigrants, especially the so-called illegal aliens, as an example of the New Conservatism. This approach, I find, allows me to integrate my research interests in a way that gives students in an introductory course an appreciation of how and why immigration and the resulting ethnic diversity have been a long-standing, and at times contentious, part of American history. |
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