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Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context

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Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context History without Borders: Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context Alison Games?: Historians of the United States possess an enduring fascination with the practice of their craft.’ Discussions about nationalism and multiculturalism have, in recent years, heightened the intensity with which historians debate the value and function of American history in the college curriculum. In the spring of 1994 two of the major journals €or Americanists yielded riches indeed for those con- cerned with teaching American history. In “Why the West Is Lost,” James A. Hijaya queried the structure of U. S. history classes which emphasize the eastern seaboard and the British colonies to the neglect of the rest of the continent.’John Higham, in “The Future of American History,” raised important questions about the continu- ing centrality of the history of the United States, and he urged col- leagues to search for a cohesive and coherent national history.? Higham noted, however, that historians could similarly pursue a second approach to American history: they could “prepare to follow another subject beyond national lines, toward whatever periphery may help one define its center.” He also observed that American history was no longer told entirely as “a national story enclosed in a national arena.”‘ Higham’s eulogy for national histories, however, was unduly premature. While scholarly monographs may offer com- parative or transatlantic interpretations of particular problems in “Alison Games is assistant professor of history, Crinncll College, Grinnell, Iowa. 1 See, for example, Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of Interna- tional History,” and Michael McCerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational Histo- ry,”’ American Historic.al ReL’ieic, XCVl (October, 19911, 1031-67; and Eric Foner, ed., The Neut American History (Philadelphia, 1990). 1 James A. Hijaya, “Why the West Is Lost,” William curd Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., LI (April, 19941, 276-92. See also the many responses to Hijaya’s article in the Williani arid Mary Quarter/.v, 3rd ser., LI (October, 1994),717-55. .< John Higham, “The Future of American History,” The Journal ofAmerican Histwy, LXXX (March, 1994), 1289-1309. 4 Ihid., 1307, 1292. See also a similar observation in Ian K. Stccle. “Empire of Migrants and Consumers: Some Current Atlantic Approaches to the History of Colonial Virginia,” Virginia Mngnzinr <$History and Biography, XCIX (October, 19911, 489-512. Steele maintains that Atlantic approaches arc almost the reigning orthodoxy in early American history, but I would suggest he exaggerates the direc- tion of colonial history: Atlantic dissertations and monographs are the exception, not the rule. 160 Indiana Magazine of History American history, these interpretations have yet to transform text- books or syllabi. This article explores the presence of national bor- ders in the teaching and interpreting of American history and suggests that Americanists consider the value of shedding altogeth- er the twin encumbrances of national identity and modern national borders in their conceptualization of the American past. Preoccupations with national identity and the rigidity with which historians cling to events within the borders of the United States seem particularly odd to those who study the colonial era. Historians interested in the destruction of old societies and the cre- ation of new ones in the Americas are best served by considering the problems of new world societies in transnational contexts. The most valuable context for understanding events in the Americas is an Atlantic one; it was the meeting of people and pathogens from both sides of the Atlantic-from Europe, Africa, and the Americas -that helped dictate patterns and practices of settlement from Tierra del Fuego to Newfoundland.5 An appreciation of the Atlantic region as a coherent whole explains the particular configurations of cultures in the Americas more satisfactorily than do national histo- ries, which obscure the extent to which processes of change were replicated in many parts of the Americas. The devotion to national histories, however, is pervasive in the teaching of U.S. history in the United States today. Symbolic of the neglect of the Atlantic context in US. history classes is the status of the Caribbean in history classes and texts. That a case even needs to be made for the inclusion of the Caribbean may seem startling to some, outrageous to others: Latin Americanists teaching in the United States automatically include the Caribbean in their survey classes. How it transpired that the Caribbean left North America and joined Latin America is an intriguing question which is closely related to the way in which Americanists center their courses on anachronistic national borders. This fact, combined with the non- participation of the British island colonies in the American Revolu- tion, resulted in the expulsion of the Caribbean from the history of the continent and the denial of the real cultural, economic, and political connections between the West Indies and North America. This article surveys the current place of Caribbean history in three different types of U.S. history courses: the US. history sur- vey (which remains the bread-and-butter course for Americanists); the upper-level colonial survey; and the survey of the Revolutionary period. Discussion will then turn to the historiographic conventions which continue to exclude the Caribbean and will conclude by proposing an alternative approach to the study of colonial British 3 I am indebted to Alan Karras for numerous conversations about the value of studying the Atlantic world. See especially his introduction to Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, eds., Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492-1888 (London, 1992). History without Borders 161 America that might restore the Caribbean and the Atlantic world as a whole to the place their history merits. The focus here will be on the British West Indies in the colonial period, but the argument presented below for the inclusion of the Caribbean in North Ameri- can courses is intended to provoke similar debate among those in other fields and periods. Historians engaged in the teaching of North American history to American students confront the problem of teaching history to students who are seeking their own heritage. In the words of David Lowenthal, “History tells all who listen what supposedly happened, suggesting how things came to be as they are. Heritage passes on exclusive myths of origin and continuity, endowing a select group with power and prestige.”fiA critical examination of a distant past appeals to many students less than a search for answers to contem- porary concerns. Jingoistic American college students have an interest in history that is at times genealogical. They are, with few exceptions, relentless Whig historians in that they would rather explore those aspects of the past that endured into the present than consider the paths not taken. Students feel little compunction in leaping across the centuries to announce that because a certain condition existed in the seventeenth century it offers an exact explanation of a contemporary problem. One student noted that the French introduction of alcohol to Indians in New France precisely explained the heavy rates of alcoholism on twentieth-century reser- vations in the Dakotas. Particular contexts mattered little. Indeed, by the same logic, students in introductory classes happily employ their modern stereotypes in their analysis of the past: one student who contended that all English people are and have always been “extremely snooty” found this observation to be a persuasive expla- nation for economic conditions in seventeenth-century Virginia. Even the most cynical student appraises any aspect of American history as a tale of progress. Who but a college student in search of her heritage could rewrite the Civil War as a great moment for the United States, as a celebration of nationhood?: The ease with which students reshape the information they learn in college classes to conform to their preconceptions about American history might fill 6 David Lowenthal of University College London addressed this problem of his- tory versus heritage in a letter published in Perspectiivs, XXXII (January, 1994), 17- 18. Lowenthal argues in this letter for the necessary distance of the historian from the time period under study: the historian, he observed, is always an outsider, a for- eigner to the past. This insistence by students on progress, almost regardless of any material cov- ered in their survey classes, raises interesting questions about the tenacity of popu- lar cultural icons. Michael Frisch observed that students in his survey classes at SUNY-Buffalo possessed a body of knowledge about American history almost entire- ly divorced from material they had actually learned in high school or college. He pub- lished his findings in an article entitled “American History and the Structures of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography,”Journal of Amer- ican History, LXXV (March, 1989). 1130-1155. 162 Indiana Magazine of History history instructors with despair but for one thing: the eagerness with which students make such connections shows us that they find important meaning in the patterns and stories of the past. In time, perhaps, the material we offer for their rumination might encroach on and alter their myths of an American past. The students’ genealogical perspective often results in an in- tense study
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