In Defense of Teaching the XYZ Affair

I just got back from the OAH meeting in Atlanta.  It was a great weekend.  One of the panels that I was most excited to attend was the SHEAR panel on “New Knowledge in Old Containers: How Early Republic Scholars are Changing the Story.”  During the panel, John Larson gathered together four past SHEAR presidents (Patricia Cline Cohen, Drew Cayton, Harry Watson, and Mary Kelley) to talk about the ways that they incorporate (or try to) new scholarship into their teaching.  John Fea’s storified tweets from the panel are here.
I enjoyed the panel immensely, and not just because it was extremely encouraging to hear these senior scholars whom I admire so much talk about how they, too, have trouble getting their students to do the reading.  I particularly enjoyed listening to Cohen talk about the process of revising her textbook to incorporate new material.  The questions she deals with in the book are the same ones we deal with in the classroom.  If something new comes in, then what has to go out in order to make room for the new stuff?  It’s a good question.  Much of the discussion on the panel focused on meeting the students where they are and finding the materials that would engage them.  Larson talked about how he polled his students to find out what they cared about most, and restructured his survey to reflect these themes: money, sex, race, and salvation.  Kelley and Cohen, too, talked about the ways that their students respond particularly well to issues of sex and gender.  Questions of citizenship, so long at the center of the study of the early republic, seems to be limiting our ability to get our students to sit up, pay attention, and enroll in our classes.  This is all well and good and important, and certainly stuff that I find true in my own classroom.  
But. 
Throughout this discussion about the value of teaching the history of daily life and things like this, the XYZ Affair became the straw man that we are all supposedly taking out of our courses in order to make room for this other material.  And personally, I still teach the XYZ Affair, and don’t plan on taking it out of my class anytime soon.

I should say that I don’t teach the survey here, and so I teach the XYZ Affair in my courses on the American Revolution and on the US and the World.  In these classes, it is essential material and precisely because it allows us to include some of the important new scholarship on the early republic that I find most exciting: the stuff that tells the story of the early republic in an international and global framework.  If our courses have general narrative arcs, I would say that my American Revolution class is largely about the unlikelihood of the Revolution and the instability of the nation in the early republic.  Students come in expecting a story about triumphal origins.  I teach a course that has its fair share of founding fathers, of course, but we also ask things like: why might a person have chosen to be a Loyalist?  Why would that decision make sense?  We read Pauline Maier’s Ratification and ask: why might you have not wanted this Constitution?  Why does that opinion make sense?  What the XYZ Affair (along with other related diplomatic history topics) does in a course like this, then, is to help us carry those threads into the early republic.  I think (hope) that it also meets the students where they are in some ways—if not by talking about sex, then by talking about a global America, and asking questions about how the US fit into a larger story of world politics.  
Yes, part of it may be dry diplomatic history, but if we talk about it in terms of contingency, and in terms of how Americans at the time understood their position relative to the great European powers, then it becomes engaging again.  In order to tell important stories about sex, race, money, and salvation, do we really need to take out the XYZ Affair?

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