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Fifth in a Special Series
Internationalizing United States History
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Editor's Note | |
| IN 2000, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) published The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession, an account of the findings of a four-year study by the joint OAH/New York University Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History. The La Pietra Report boldly called for the "internationalizing" of American history, noting that "historical inquiry must be more sensitive to the relevance of historical processes larger than the nation." To overcome what many find to be the provincialism of United States history, the Report advocated that teachers and scholars of American history relate "national experiences to larger processes and local resolutions."1 To this end, the Report enumerated a number of teaching objectives focusing on context, analysis, and the development of historical understanding about the emergence of the United States in the contemporary world. A subsequent panel on the La Pietra Report at the OAH annual meeting in Los Angeles in April 2001 and an online discussion of the problems and processes of internationalizing American history, hosted by George Mason University's History Matters web site in November 2001, revealed both the interest in and concerns about such an undertaking. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, as many have observed, amplified the immediacy of such a project. |
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Much of the Report outlines how teachers of American history might go about this task, beginning with the undergraduate curriculum where future teachers receive their training. Indeed, since American college students usually take the U.S. survey course at the beginning of their undergraduate careers, the U.S. survey course, the Report noted, was particularly suited to revision, as it is "properly a focal point for the creation of an internationalized American history."2 The Report also advocated changes in graduate education at both the M.A. and Ph.D. levels, and called for expanding the opportunities for study and research abroad. |
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The editorial staff of The History Teacher is pleased to initiate a Special Series on Internationalizing United States History. Professor Carl Guarnieri's essay, "The U.S. Survey Course in an Era of Internationalization," represented the first in a series of articles dedicated to the goals and objectives outlined in The La Pietra Report, and was featured in our November 2002 issue. The February 2003 issue featured another essay in this series, "Implementing the La Pietra Report: Internationalizing Three Topics in the United States History Survey Course," by Professor Thomas Osborne. The August 2003 issue included "Poor Relation or Honorable Peer? Reflections on American History in French Universities," by Professor Marie Bolton. In the February 2004 issue we introduced our fourth feature in this series, "'And, We Burned Down the White House, Too': American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism" by Professor M. Alison Kibler. In this issue we are pleased to include our fifth essay in the series, "Settling Accounts with Settler Societies: Strategies for Using Australian Women's History in a United States Women's History Class" by Professor James Tagg. We expect to feature additional essays in the future, and invite teachers and scholars of history to comment on this series and submit manuscripts on the topic. |
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Notes
1. Thomas Bender, Director, The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession (Bloomington: Organization of American Historians, 2000), 3. The text of the full report is available online at http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/final.html.
2. Bender, 11.
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