Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening
of the Twenty-First Century: A Round Table Discussion

Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser
Contributing Editors, Textbooks and Teaching

To consult syllabi for the United States history survey course developed by several participants in this round table, see http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/.	1
Editors' Introduction
In our inaugural foray as editors of the "Textbooks and Teaching" section, we focus on the teaching of the American history survey, the task that probably has the broadest impact of any professional service regularly performed by readers of this journal. Last summer we hosted a "virtual round table" using e-mail and an electronic listserv as our modes of communication. Over the course of five weeks, eleven participants exchanged views on the means and ends of teaching the survey. What follows is a condensed and consolidated version of this provocative on-line conversation.	2
The participants included junior and senior scholars who teach at a variety of colleges and universities spread across the country:
Charles W. Eagles is professor of history at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, where he has taught since 1983. A historian of southern race relations and the civil rights movement, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. His latest book is Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama.1	3
Douglas R. Egerton is professor of history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. He did his graduate work at Georgetown University, and he writes mainly on African American history. He is the author, most recently, of He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey.2	4
Karl Jacoby is an assistant professor at Brown University. An environmental historian who received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997, he has just published his first book, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation.3	5
Pauline Maier is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968 and has written widely on the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. Her most recent book is American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.4	6
Elisabeth Israels Perry originally trained at the University of California at Los Angeles as a European historian but now specializes in American women's lives and politics in the Progressive Era. She is the author of, among other works, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith.5 She and Lewis Perry together hold the John Francis Bannon Chair at St. Louis University.	. . .