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Scott E. Casper | More than the Sum of Its Parts: Rethinking the History Curriculum | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative
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March, 2009
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More than the Sum of Its Parts: Rethinking the History Curriculum


Scott E. Casper
Contributing Editor, Textbooks and Teaching


Every history curriculum is a historical artifact. It reflects changing notions within the discipline at large: the fields we value (or have valued at some point in the past), the geographical and chronological division of national and regional histories (as imagined currently or long ago), and perhaps the importance we place on methodological thinking, seminar-style teaching, and independent student research. It offers evidence also of a department's institutional history: course descriptions written by faculty long since departed or retired, classes that reflect the changing interests of particular faculty at midcareer, new courses or entire new fields introduced by recently hired scholars fresh out of graduate school. In many departments, the curriculum is an artifact of accretion rather than design. 1
      Several national projects over the past two decades have sought to spur a more holistic imagination regarding history curricula. In 1990 the Association of American Colleges (AAC) collaborated with twelve learned societies, including the American Historical Association (AHA), to rethink the content and structure of liberal arts majors. The resulting AAC/AHA report, "Liberal Learning and the History Major" (1991), became the framework in which eight institutions received "support for a two-year project to re-form academic majors." The Quality in Undergraduate Education (QUE) project, launched in the late 1990s by the Education Trust and the National Association of System Heads in association with Georgia State University, brought together "faculty at selected four-year public institutions" and "partner two-year colleges" to devise "discipline-based standards or student learning outcomes for student learning" in biology, chemistry, English, history, mathematics, and physics majors. Most recently, a working group of the National History Center, supported by a grant from the Teagle Foundation, has produced a white paper, "The History Major and Undergraduate Liberal Education" (2008), which seeks to offer "a more explicit understanding of the relationship between the history major and the broader goals and processes of liberal learning" and thereby to encourage discussions about the history curriculum in a larger context.1 . . .
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