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A Place for Regions in the Modern U.S. Survey?
David M. Wrobel
| In the fall of 2000, when I began teaching at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a young Hawaiian woman in my introductory U.S. history survey (1865–present) class asked me if there would be much coverage of Hawaii in the course.1 Having recently relocated from the East Coast where I had not worked with any Hawaiian students and had not given much thought to the place of the Pacific Rim in the U.S. survey, I was unprepared for the question, but spent time during the semester thinking about Hawaii's place in the course. The experience illuminated a larger set of complications for teaching the introduction to modern U.S. history. As a British expatriate who for nearly two decades has taught this course close to fifty times at two large state universities, one private regional university, and two liberal arts colleges, and in three regions—the East, the Midwest, and the West—I have often struggled with the place of place in our efforts to condense nearly a century and a half of national experience into two and a half hours of face time a week for fifteen weeks. |
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I understand that our colleagues teaching European and world history face even greater challenges regarding chronological breadth of coverage, as they are rarely slow to remind us. But on one level, Europeanists have an advantage: they are analyzing, especially in the modern period, the interactions of nation-states on a continent. Historians of the United States deal with a geographic area comparable in size to Europe but belonging to a single nation and marked by significant regional differences and conflicts of interest. Yet, as a category for analysis, region is far less evident in modern American history teaching than the nation-state is for modern Europeanists. |
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Such pedagogical matters bring to mind earlier explorations of the place of regions in the national story. In the wake of World War I the historian Frederick Jackson Turner suggested important parallels between American regions (for which, unfortunately, he used the less positive term sections) and European nation-states. He wrote a memorandum on the matter for President Woodrow Wilson's edification titled "International Political Parties in a Durable League of Nations," which his friend and Harvard University colleague Charles Homer Haskins presented to the American delegation in Paris in December 1918. Turner suggested that a system of European region-wide political parties would mirror the American system of national political parties, which worked across regional lines in a large geographic area and would help ensure lasting peace in war-ravaged Europe. Turner's memorandum had no discernible impact on the peace negotiations; we are not sure whether Wilson (who had known Turner from their days at Johns Hopkins University a generation earlier) even read the document. Nonetheless, Turner's effort to influence contemporary affairs should at least remind us that region has at times been a useful unit of analysis for American historians in the twentieth century and perhaps merits fuller consideration in our survey courses.2 |
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Regions are prominent in the opening chapters of the second volume of U.S. history texts, which begin with the aftermath of sectional conflict and the efforts to reconstruct the South, then move on to explore the New South and the conquest of the Far West. They go on to address the regional divides manifested in the election of 1896, with William Jennings Bryan's fusion ticket winning the South, the Plains, and most of the West, and William McKinley's Republican party controlling the industrial Northeast and Midwest and most of the West Coast (a near mirroring, in reverse, of the "blue" and "red" states in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections). Regionalism reigns in the coverage of the late nineteenth century in those textbooks. |
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