In a recent New York Times article, Frederick Logevall and Kenneth Osgood bemoan the decline of political history. Arguing that universities have essentially stopped hiring political historians and offering courses in the subject, Logevall and Osgood suggest that the broader shift toward social and cultural history in the past 40 years has limited students’ knowledge of nothing less than the “democratic process” itself. By not understanding the machinations of high politics, the authors suggest, students lose sight of “how politicians and governments in other times have responded to division and challenge,” a particularly useful lesson given today’s political climate.[1]
The piece triggered a slew of scholarly responses – including ones here and here and a rather epic series of Twitter posts from Tom Sugrue. Julian Zelizer offered the first response to Logeval and Osgood, who argued that political history hasn’t died, but changed. Zelizer suggests that the field has experienced a recent “renaissance” by incorporating social, cultural, and, institutional history into the study of policy elites. Zelizer doesn’t dispute Logeval and Osgood’s pessimism with regards to the academic job market, but instead notes that fusing the methodologies of traditional political and non-political history allows scholars to bridge the gap between various historical periods – for example, “the transformations of political culture between Reconstruction and the Progressive Era,” “the transatlantic world of political ideas from the start of the Republic through today,” and “the rise of the conservative movement and transformation of the Republican Party.” Making these connections, Zelizer suggests, can help students make sense of today’s politics and makes students “very receptive and excited to the new approaches in political history.”[2]
This conversation got me thinking about how teachers can and have translated this “new” political history into pedagogy. One of Zelizer’s points about new political history is that it presents new opportunities – perhaps in different ways than a study of political elites – to connect past and present. Implicit in this argument is that new political history allows one to trace the development of not only institutions, but also ideas, over time. In my post-1865 U.S. survey, I establish three main themes: the development of the American welfare state, America’s role as a global power, and struggles for equality. I aim to thread these themes through the curricula to provide students with an organizing framework around which to understand and synthesize the thousands of words they will read throughout the semester. I view these themes as ideological anchors with which my students can form, at the very least, a skeletal narrative about post-Civil War American history.
However, I am finding it easier to trace the history of an idea, or ideas, in my writing than in my classroom. Lately, I find myself grappling with how to get my students to see the forest for the trees – to “zoom out” and see the broader, and more abstract, evolution of ideology in history. In my U.S. survey, my students are sometimes more intrigued by discussions of the cult of personality. I felt this acutely during a lecture last week, during which one could hear a pin drop during my description of the array of personalities involved in the 1912 election, but the rustling of papers during my attempts to highlight the broader and more long-term, significance of the election itself. My students hung on every word as I described the assassination of William McKinley, but I could sense that I had lost some of them while describing the various components of the American left at the turn of the century. I liked that I had engaged my students, but wondered about their takeaway.
How have others managed this balance and taught various types of political history?
[1] Frederik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History,” The New York Times, August 29, 2016.
[2] Julian Zelizer, “Political History is Doing AOK,” Process: A Blog for American History, August 31, 2016.
