How the Colleges Skew U.S. History

KC Johnson:

American history has been radically transformed on our campuses. Traditional topics are now not only marginalized but "re-visioned" to become more compatible with the dominant race/class/gender paradigm.

In two posts last fall, I took a look at U.S. history offerings at Bowdoin College. The liberal arts college, one of the nation's finest, long enjoyed a reputation as a training ground of Maine politicians, at both the state and federal level. The staffing of its History Department suggests that the college has abandoned that mission, with the intent to exclude significant portions of the American past. (Two of the department's five Americanists specialize in U.S. environmental history; the department's only non-environmental 20th century U.S. historian has a Ph.D. in the history of science.)

The department's own U.S. offerings featured a heavy course emphasis on Western U.S. history, including a history of California, seemingly odd choices for a school in Maine but a subfield that heavily stresses such trendy themes as environmental degradation, exploitation of Native Americans, and discrimination against Hispanics and Asians. In the previous semester, the department's token "traditional" course topic, a class on the Cold War, was taught by the school's historian of science and featured heavy use of film.

What about the situation at a larger--and more nationally renowned--History Department? To find out, I turned to the fall 2012 offerings at UCLA.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 28, 2012 1:11 AM
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