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Balancing the Local and the Global: The American Civil War in Western Canadian Classrooms
Frank Towers
| Before arriving at the University of Calgary in the western Canadian province of Alberta in 2004, I taught Civil War history in the United States and in Turkey. My earlier experience cautions me against making too much of the national educational setting at the expense of issues that transcend a particular country. The local and national context that students bring to the classroom influences teaching and educates the instructor as much as the students. At the same time, teaching in Canada has made me more aware of how deeply some Civil War narratives have been embedded in global culture and how the war serves popular understanding of modernity. |
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Teaching the history of the Civil War outside the United States requires that instructors balance global themes with connections to the local world of their students. This claim should seem like a reasonable proposition about teaching American history internationally. It runs up against a popular emphasis, however, on adapting course content to the particular culture(s) of students, an emphasis that is itself a reaction against an older tradition of nationalist teaching that marked the beginnings of international U.S. history instruction. Early in the twentieth century, most international instruction in U.S. history occurred under the auspices of American religious and government agencies geared toward "spreading American political and cultural values." After World War II, "cultural exchange" replaced cultural conversion as the guiding principle for teaching American history abroad. Factors influencing this change included an understanding of cultural difference as something to be respected rather than erased; an anticolonial theme in U.S. Cold War rhetoric aimed at countering suspicion of U.S. world hegemony; and scholarship that emphasized conflict and inequalities of power rather than consensus and contentment. Meanwhile, the growth of American studies internationally increased U.S. history offerings at non-American universities and employment opportunities for teachers unaffiliated with missionaries and Washington, D.C.1 |
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Today, making U.S. history engaging for non-American students presents a greater challenge to teachers than does overthrowing the jingoism of an earlier time. To combat students' perception of American history as irrelevant to their own experience, teachers working outside the United States advise that colleagues first recognize the cultural context that students bring to the classroom and then look for connections between the local setting and issues in the American past.2 |
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In western Canada, this approach offers some thought-provoking parallels between the American Civil War and Canadian history. Foremost among them is the question of regional separatism. The Bloc Québécois, a self-described "sovereigntist" party that advocates "the full development of the Quebec nation," is currently the third largest party in the Canadian parliament. To accommodate Quebec sovereigntists, in 1982 the federal parliament passed the "notwithstanding clause," which, reminiscent of South Carolina's nullification doctrine, allows a provincial veto on federal legislation.3 |
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