a. Motivation means "why they did what they did." For example, when the framers of the Constitution wrote that document, their motivation was to preserve the Union and the fruits of the American Revolution by establishing a government strong enough to protect national interests, yet checked and balanced so that it would not endanger the liberty of the people or the legitimate sovereignty of the states.

As noted above, some historians use motivation to mean real reasons as opposed to expressed or ostensible reasons. Although at times this distinction works well, we should use it with care, lest we treat every single historical actor as an unredeemable hypocrite. For example, Charles A. Beard argued that the framers of the Constitution really intended to create a government that would protect their own property, unintentionally implying that they had no larger goals in mind. Generations of later historians have had fun beating Beard up on evidentiary and interpretative grounds, to such an extent that his original insight -- that historical actors often do things for a variety of reasons, some of them less noble or selfless than others -- got lost.

b. Intention means "what they thought they were doing, and what goals they sought to achieve." Thus, the intentions of the framers of the Constitution have to do with the way that they thought the proposed Constitution would function once it was adopted, and what kind of nation they hoped the Constitution would foster.

a. issues of evidence (what kinds of things we can learn about the past from documents and artifacts), and b. issues of historical method (what kinds of questions we can ask about the past, whether as a general matter or with respect to a specific piece of historical evidence).

At this point, some may ask, "Why should our students care how historians do their work?" There is a wide range of answers to this question, but the most important is, "Students should learn how historians do their work because it is an excellent way to learn how to think critically about the past, and about uses of the past in present-day argument."

Historians' study of history has changed dramatically during the twentieth century. First, historians now emphasize the differentness of the past as a key part of the historical enterprise of recovering the past. Because the past is seen as fundamental ly different from the present, it now makes little sense to study history for the purpose of acquiring mechanical analogies with which to guide our activities in the present (e.g., "What would Lincoln do about health care?"). Second, and closely related to the first point, historians have turned away from the attempt to identify, articulate, and apply general laws of history or principles of historical development that hold true despite differences in time and place. Thus, the other old justification for studying history -- mastering the laws of history -- also has lost its relevance.

Given these changes in the ways that historians seek to understand the past, why, then, study history?

(i) Carved above the entrance to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., is the admonition: "The Past is Prologue -- Study the Past." We are, in large part, the product of ideas, events, processes, and conditions that either are deeply rooted in the past or are modern responses to problems equally deeply rooted in the past. We cannot understand modern problems fully or usefully without understanding their sources and history. This is not history of the "What would Lincoln do about health care?" school -- rather, it is, "If we are to respond effectively to the health-care problem, we ought to understand how that problem came to be."

(ii) Our students will have to cope, as adults and as citizens, with arguments about the present that draw on the past -- whether those arguments cite the past as authority or dismiss it as irrelevant. The study of history is thus one of the best spheres of human inquiry for students to develop the skills of critical thinking -- about the structure, continuity, and consistency of argument; about the use or abuse of evidence; about the necessity of civility and mutual respect in legitimate argument; and about the ability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate argument (both in substance and methodology).

Some students of history demand an overarching philosophy of history which they hope to use as an intellectual framework to structure their knowledge of the past. Many of the great thinkers of human civilization -- for example, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold J. Toynbee -- have sought to articulate such philosophies. Most practicing historians have grave problems with this quest, because the search for an overarching framework tends to produce a tendency to shoehorn any and every historical fact into that framework, often bending the fact in question out of recognizable shape. As the great legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin once observed, "Historians make lousy philosophers, and philosophers make lousy historians."

Nonetheless, we can present a set of general statements that will give a sense of the nature of history. History is at least two different things -- the past and the study of the past. The following generalizations apply to both understandings of the term:

• History is HUMAN. It is both the record of what human beings have thought, said, and done in the past and the accumulated body of work expressing what human beings think and have thought about history.

• History is INCOMPLETE. We will never know everything about the past "as it happened," and no history has the last word about the past or any aspect of it.

• History is CONTEMPORARY. Our present concerns have a lot to do with which aspects of the past survive in the modern historical memory, and with how we examine, describe, and interpret that past (including how we add to or prune out evidence of the past that survives in the modern historical memory).

• History is CONTINGENT. It need not have happened the way it happened, and no historical interpretation is ever fore-ordained or predetermined.

• History is UNCOOPERATIVE. The past does not easily yield its secrets (and sometimes does not yield anything at all), and historians' arguments and interpretations don't always answer our questions -- at least, not the way we want them to do.

• History is PLURALIST. There is no single explanation for a historical event, and there is no single "correct" way to do history.

One more point, the foundation for what has gone before: When historians "do" history, are they engaged in a quest for historical truth? The problem with this question is that it confuses two levels of historical understanding -- historical facts, which include such things as the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and historical explanations, which seek to provide answers to such questions as "Why did the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor?"

Historical facts are easier to view in terms of truth versus falsity than historical explanations -- e.g., it was the Japanese, not the Burmese, who attacked Pearl Harbor, and they did it on 7 December 1941, not 8 December 1941 or 7 December 1991.

Historical explanations are much harder to address in terms of their "truth." Is it true, for example, that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they felt that they were defending their interests against aggressive American foreign policy? This is at least one reason that modern historians have assigned for the raid, but there are others. In essence, the problem is that no historical event happens for just one reason, and the historian's assignment of greater or lesser weight to certain reasons or causes is a matter of scholarly plausibility, not truth or falsity.

What historians do is to look at the past (or what we can glean or salvage of it), try to figure out what we can describe or explain, and do it as honestly and responsibly as we can, knowing that other historians will disagree and that we in turn may come to change our minds.

In designing this curriculum, we have adopted a chronological structure for American history. Our decision is not, and should not be seen as, a requirement that students memorize dates for the mere sake of the rote exercise. Rather, chronology remains a valuable historical and pedagogical tool -- if we teach it as a tool for students to use to organize their historical knowledge.

• Students at the elementary level need not absorb the exactitudes of chronology -- but they should grasp that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong, Abigail Adams and Nancy Reagan could not have met one another. They should know (and they may well grasp already) that their childhood is a different time from their parents' childhood, which in turn is different from their grandparents' childhood. They should know, for example, that American children before the 1940s did not have television, that American children before the 1900s did not have movies, and that most American children before 1900 did not have the automobile.

• Students at the middle-school level can master the details of historical chronology, once we explain what its uses are and how it can help them to master history. Again, they should not be forced to memorize lists of dates just for mnemonic exercise; rather, they should be trained to orient themselves in history first by reference to chronology. (A useful framework is the list of Presidential terms; although it tends to have the disadvantage of teaching students that history is measured by Presidencies, it has the advantage of being a relatively short and easily mastered body of data. If students can absorb, without outside compulsion and with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, lists of Oscar or Grammy or MTV awards, or lists of World Series or Super Bowl or NBA playoff winners, they can easily master the list of the Presidents.)

• Students at the secondary-school level, having (we hope) absorbed basic American historical chronology, can put it to work in mastering the methodological ideas listed above about what historians do and how they do what they do.

1. The Americas to 1500

2. Contact: Europe and America Meet, 1492-1620

3. The Founding of New Societies, 1607-1763

4. What Was the American Revolution?: 1760-1836

5. The Ambiguous Democracy in America, 1800-1848

6. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war": 1848-1880

7. "What, then, is this American?": 1865-1900

8. Waves of Reform, 1880-1921

9. Boom and Bust, 1921-1933

10. The Age of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945

11. "Leader of the Free World": 1945-1975

12. A Nation in Quandary, 1975--

A. Geography as the Setting of American History

B. The Evolution of American Political Democracy

C. The Evolution of American Political Ideas

D. The Evolution of American Society

E. The Question of a Distinctive American Culture

F. America as a Gathering of Peoples and Cultures

G. The Development of an American Economy

H. The Changing Role of America in the World

A. Geography as the Setting of American History

As the poet Robert Frost put it, "This land was ours before we were the land's." American history, among other things, is the evolving story of how the American people interacted with the North American continent -- how American Indians sought to live in harmony with it, how European settlers and their American descendants sought to populate and tame it, and how the geographical facts of America shaped the Americans' understandings of themselves and their place in the world.

• First, the existence of a vast "new" continent suggested the inexhaustible richness of America -- in arable land, potable water, navigable rivers and streams, and organic (timber, animal furs) and mineral (gold, silver, iron, petroleum) wealth. This assumption that the riches of America were without practical limit drove the westward settlement of the continent (colonization, settlement, development, wars of territorial acquisition) and shaped the many ways in which Americans used or wasted those resources . As noted below, it was not until Americans began to realize that the vast natural resources of America were nonetheless limited that they also began to take seriously the obligation to care for the environment.

• Second, until the development of airplanes, rockets, and missiles, Americans believed that the continent was isolated from the great wars of Europe and Asia by two vast oceans. This sense of geographic insulation fostered Americans' sense of their own nation as a haven of liberty -- a view that, for most of our history, encouraged Americans to welcome immigration (though, as always, with varying views of the immigrants based on their race and ethnic origins). Geographic insulation also promoted a sense of geographic invulnerability, and thus furthered an American attitude towards world affairs that oscillated between cool indifference and arrogant preaching. Americans' arrogance especially manifested itself in the ways that the American nation dealt with its neighbors in North, Central, and South America, in particular after President James Monroe promulgated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which warned European powers not to interfere in American concerns while providing a warrant (intended or not) for later American interference in the affairs of America's neighbors.

• Third, the sheer size of America dictated that there was, and could be, no comprehensive, all-embracing plan of settlement of the continent. The thirteen colonies were founded at different times, for different reasons, by different people, and the same pattern of diversity reasserts itself with respect to the founding, settling, and political development of the other thirty-seven states. Geography thus dictated that, throughout American history, American political development had to take account of a wide range of differing state and sectional interests, based on differing economies, ethnic origins, and cultural and religious values. Geography was thus a prime force behind the development of one of the key features of American politics -- federalism, the division of sovereignty (ultimate political power) among the federal government, the state governments, and the people.

• Fourth, Americans' belief in the seeming inexhaustibility of the nation's resources tended for many decades to prevent most Americans from paying attention to the effects they were having on the environment that they were taught to master. It was only in the 1900s that Americans began to ask tough questions about the effects of industrialization, urbanization and suburbanization, and the development of the automobile and the airplane on the natural world. Geography, broadly conceived as a theme of American history, thus embraces the rise of a conservation movement, and then an environmental movement, pitting a new model of human beings as stewards of the natural world against the traditional model of human beings as masters of the natural world. In addition, until the late 1960s, the dominant view that the American continent existed to be developed and exploited by human beings warped white Americans' views of American Indians, relegating the continent's original inhabitants to the unenviable role of primitive savages. The growth of an environmental consciousness among more and more Americans gave new legitimacy to American Indians' criticisms of and opposition to development and exploitation of the land and its resources.

We have to be careful not to posit an inevitable march of democracy and progress -- or an equally invalid American fall from grace and innocence. The paradox of American political democracy is that, while America (both as British colonies and later as an independent nation) was by far the freest part of the Western world in whatever period, American democracy was at the same time deeply and agonizingly inconsistent. To cite two obvious examples, the nation barred African-Americans from citizenship and suffrage (constitutionally, until Reconstruction; legally and practically, until the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, if then) and excluded women (from suffrage, until 1920; from full equality under the law, to the present day).

American political development encompasses a wide variety of institutional frameworks and intellectual assumptions. The range of institutional frameworks goes from the various Indian political systems, to the Spanish and British colonial empires, to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of 1787. The constitutional system itself changed character even within the nineteenth century, going from the antebellum Constitution of limited federal power, to the Civil War ordeal of the Constitution, to the activist Constitution of the Reconstruction era, to the late nineteenth-century Constitution of a permanent Union, subordinate states, and restrained federal power. Then, in the twentieth century, the constitutional system experienced the rise, first during the Progressive era and then in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of the activist state; then endured an agonizing reappraisal and curtailment of activist government in the 1970s and 1980s; and now, in the 1990s, is attempting a tentative revival of activist government.

Ideas about government -- its appropriate sphere of activity and its appropriate limits -- also have mutated throughout American history. Although we address this subject more fully in the next subsection, we can understand the history of American political democracy as a succession of readjustments to such balances as:

1. national authority v. state sovereignty/rights

2. majority rule v. minority rights

3. democratic power v. judicial review

4. activist state v. individual liberty

5. traditional values v. individual liberty

6. separation of powers v. checks and balances

7. executive power v. congressional oversight

American political democracy may also be seen as the gradual expansion of what the historian Henry Adams once called the "political population" -- that is, those who had the power to take part in governing themselves. Beginning in the colonial period and persisting into the early Republic, the political population encompassed (with only a few local exceptions) white Christian males with a sufficient amount of property to establish their political independence. In the early and middle 1800s, the abolition of property qualifications and all but the broadest religious tests dramatically expanded the political population -- but barriers of race and sex still barred African-Americans and women from direct participation in politics. The Civil War and the Fifteenth Amendment broadened the political population further to include African-American men and men from other racial minorities (in theory). The Western territories' desire to win statehood drove many of them to recognize women as members of the political population, and in 1920 nearly a century of struggle by women led to the Nineteenth Amendment, which brought women within the political population. Still other reforms eliminated such bars to political participation as the poll tax (the last remaining vestige of the colonial-era property requirements) and lowered the voting age to eighteen.

This succession of hard-won reforms, most of which ultimately took the form of amendments to the Constitution, looks good on paper -- but students ought to consider for themselves whether these achievements are true victories for expanding democracy or only paper triumphs.

C. The Evolution of American Political Ideas

Although scholars might disagree as to the following list, we identify eight major ideas that have driven American politics for centuries and that still drive American politics today:

i. liberty (or freedom): the general idea that human beings are free, that they are not owned (whether by other human beings or by society at large), that they have freedom to live their own lives and to decide what shape those lives ought to take. This idea is at the heart of the key documents of the American political tradition -- specifically, the Declaration of Independence (1776), Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863) and Second Inaugural Address (1865), and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (1963) -- and is what peoples in other lands focus on first in their understanding of American history.

ii. individual rights: In a way a subset of the general concept of liberty or freedom, individual rights are ideas as to what government may not interfere with in the individual's life -- for example, freedom of religion means that government may not tell us whether or how to practice our religious faith; freedoms of speech and press mean that government may not dictate or limit the views we express; criminal procedure rights are conditions that the government must satisfy before it can bring its weight down on us to punish us; and so forth. In the twentieth century, individual rights have expanded to include affirmative rights -- defined and protected by statute and by the constitutional doctrine of equal protection of the laws -- to such things as unemployment insurance and social security.

iii. equality: Explicit in the Declaration of Independence and implicit in the original Constitution, but first given explicit federal protection by the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, equality (the right to equal treatment) also has been a powerful American political idea -- as an actual condition of American life, as a goal toward which Americans aspired, or both. And yet the exact nature of American equality as an actual condition of life and as a national aspiration has always been subject to controversy. One vital question that students should confront in considering the theme of equality in American history is, "How sincere is the American aspirations to achieve equality for all the American people -- including those who differ in race, sex, ethnicity, religion, culture, or economic status from those Americans with political power?" This question is posed most starkly by the history of African-Americans' struggle for legal, political, and social equality, but it is equally challenging when applied to the historical experiences of such groups as women, non-Christian Americans, or Hispanic-Americans.

iv. the rule of law: The rule of law always has been a fundamental principle of American politics; it is also the basis for constitutional government (discussed immediately below). Although Americans' understandings of the nature of the rule of law have changed over time, Tom Paine's proud boast that "in America the law is king" has been a centerpiece of American political ideology. The rule of law connects with equality, for anyone from the richest to the poorest expects the law to bind or protect him or her equally. The rule of law also is closely linked to individual rights, for rights are to be protected by such institutions as courts, which embody and defend the ideal of rule of law. And, of course, in the Anglo-American common-law tradition, the rule of law is generally regarded as the basic safeguard of the general concepts of liberty and freedom.

v. constitutional government: In some ways, as the noted Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell argued, American contributions to the theory and practice of constitutional government may well be the most enduring American contributions to politics, and to h uman civilization. These contributions include the idea of a written constitution; the development of the constitutional convention as a means for writing constitutions; the invention of the ratifying convention or popular referendum as a means for the w hole political population to decide whether to approve or reject constitutions; and the specific features of the Constitution of 1787 as amended -- separation of powers, checks and balances, constitutional protection of liberties and rights, limited government , effective government, constitutional change, and judicial review.

vi. the democratic republic: This seemingly simple phrase actually stands for the complex and evolving American model of a democratic republic, one based on the people, who elect (directly or indirectly) those to whom they entrust the power of govern for limited periods. It also encompasses the whole development of the American political system, including the often problematic growth of democracy (see subpart B above), the creative development of democratic politics, and the evolution of the fed federal system (see immediately below).

vii. federalism: As noted under subpart A above, federalism was a consequence of American geography and the complex spectrum of interests and differences among the peoples of the several states. The task of dividing and balancing powers between the states and the federal government, again, cannot achieve a final, permanently stable form; it must always remain in a delicate tension, responsive to the specific challenges of each period. The idea of federalism has long fascinated political theorists t throughout the world as a possible way to preserve the unity of political populations divided by religion, ethnicity, or culture; the American variant has become increasingly influential precisely because it seems over time to have accomplished those goals for the American people (see also subpart F below).

viii. judicial review: In some ways, judicial review -- the entrusting, to an unelected body of judges, of the power to interpret the Constitution to regulate the actions of the democratically-elected parts of the political system -- is the most remarkable American political invention. What most Americans do not understand is the constraints on the courts' power of judicial review -- (a) the requirement that unelected judges explain and justify every assertion of this power; (b) the scrutiny of judges' exercises of this power by the rest of the government, the legal profession, and the people as a whole; and (c) the prospect, via the amending process, that the people (through their elected representatives at the national and state levels of government) might overturn a decision of the United States Supreme Court purporting to hand down an authoritative interpretation of the Constitution as reason for striking down action by the democratically-elected components of government.

D. The Evolution of American Society

This theme intersects and weaves together other themes -- the diversity resulting from American geography (subpart A), and from the coming together of a remarkable range of peoples and cultures (subpart F); the evolution of American political democracy (subpart B) and political ideas (subpart C) as forces shaping the growth and development of society; the growth and development of a distinctive American culture as a component of society, drawing on and synthesizing the range of cultures brought to America (subpart E); the influence on society of economic growth (the rise of an independent and healthy American economy -- subpart G), diversification (the development of a range of industrial enterprises, and the gradual division of society into sections and regions, and into urban, rural, and suburban areas -- subparts A, C.vii, and G), and transformation (from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a postindustrial/service economy -- subpart G).

Another important historical (and modern) issue falls under this heading. Some students of American history argue that inquiries into the nation's social history should emphasize the development and evolution of class lines within the great body of the people; others reject a narrow, European-based definition of class as inapplicable to American life, without inquiring into the exact nature of this supposedly "classless" society. We seek a middle ground, rejecting old ideas of class (like those found in pre-1789 France) while nonetheless acknowledging the development and growth of social stratification in American life (though much simpler and less rigid than its European, Asian, or Latin American counterparts).

In general, social stratification based on birth -- the heart of which was a vague but socially important distinction between "gentlemen" and "the common sort" -- was a fact of life during the colonial period. It received its first abrupt and serious shocks during the Revolution and early national periods, was severely damaged during the years before the Civil War, and was shattered by the war and Reconstruction. Social stratification then achieved a new basis (of wealth, entrepreneurship, ethnicity, and the rise of the professions and the new managerial middle class) in the late nineteenth century. On this basis, social stratification and diversification of society continued to grow and develop throughout the twentieth century. Barriers that excluded women and members of religious, racial, and ethnic minorities from the professions gradually diminished in power in the middle and late twentieth century (though never fading away). Still, Americans, whether consciously or unconsciously, continued to recognize and shape their lives by reference to such social distinctions as the kinds of jobs or careers they pursued; the nature and extent of education they were able to amass; the places where they could afford to live; and the kinds of homes they had or cars they drove.

An essential component of any account of the evolution of American society as a theme of American history is the history of struggles by excluded groups -- most notably African-Americans and women -- to break into the political population and the mainstream of American life. Although the modern civil-rights movement established the model for other modern rights campaigns to follow, movements for rights, justice, and equality for excluded groups began long before the modern paradigm -- of legal challenges to existing barriers, social and political protest, and educational activism -- was established. These crusades had two components. At their core, at least at first, was a battle for legal equality and legal recognition of individual rights. Complementing and eventually overshadowing the legal battle was a larger social struggle, designed to capture the imagination and the allegiance of the general public by dramatizing the injustices suffered by the group seeking redress. This latter component of the struggle was driven by the recognition that legal equality was not full equality if it left undisturbed the social prejudices that lay at the root of discriminatory legal doctrines and practices.

E. The Question of a Distinctive American Culture

What is a national culture, and do Americans have one? The following is offered as a tentative definition only: A nation's culture is its shared body of discrete ideas, patterns and habits of thought, customs, and modes of expression, all of which make up not only the nation's identity but its way of life, broadly defined. A national culture forms the set of conceptual lenses through which that nation's people views the world and their place in it, as well as their dealings with one another beyond the narrowly political and economic realms.

The eminent sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote an influential book describing the United States as "the first new nation" -- that is, the first nation deliberately invented as a nation, lacking most of the traditional determinants of national identity. The American people chose to be a nation; for this reason, one of the most important components of a distinctive American culture is American political culture, which includes institutional arrangements, political ideas and beliefs, and habits and p patterns of political behavior.

But there is a distinctive American culture beyond its political component. It has developed in a three-stage process:

• Americans prove that they have a culture. Beginning in the colonial period and persisting into the years before the Civil War, Americans set out to prove to Europeans that they were not unlettered, provincial colonials existing on the edge of civilization -- that they, too, could achieve greatly in such fields as literature, art, science, and technology.

• Americans prove that they have their own culture. Ironically, this stage (which dominated the period from the 1820s through the end of the nineteenth century and, to a lesser extent, well into the twentieth century) was the mirror-image of the first stage. Now Americans believed that they had to demonstrate, not that they had a culture at all, but that the culture they had was their own, independent creation rather than a derivative offshoot of Europe.

• Americans invent cultural forms, examples, and forces that influence world culture. This stage, which began in the mid-nineteenth century and persists to this day, goes beyond the traditional forms of "high" culture such as written literature (novels, plays, short stories, essays, and so forth) and the fine arts (painting, sculpture, music). One of the foremost examples of American culture reshaping the world is the field of science and technology. The list of American technological inventions and advances with world impact include achievements in energy and power generation and transmission (steam, electricity, nuclear power); communications (telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, radio, television); transportation (steam-powered ships capable of crossing oceans, automobiles, aircraft, spacecraft); information science (computers and electronic data storage); and military technology (nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, space satellites). Another cultural sphere in which the United States has transformed the world is popular culture -- the development and spread of mass media (motion pictures, radio, and television programming); music (ragtime, jazz, musical comedy, big bands, country & western, and the myriad forms of rock and roll); genre entertainment (mysteries, science fiction); fast food; clothing (for example, blue-jeans and T-shirts); and so forth.

American ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity are historical facts as old as the first European settlements -- older, if we keep in mind the extraordinary range of cultures among the American Indians. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy are only two of the leading Americans who have had to remind their compatriots that we are all descendants of immigrants and that the United States is a nation of immigrants, all the stronger for its remarkable cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity protected (at least in theory) by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

This theme -- "America as a gathering of peoples and cultures" -- embodies a vitally important and deeply troubling paradox of American history. Immigration always has been the most important way that this gathering of peoples and cultures has taken place. For most of American history, Americans who were already here (except for the American Indians, who viewed the influx of European immigrants with apprehension and skepticism) cheerfully drew on immigration as an essential resource to continue the building of American society and the expansion of the American nation. And yet the celebration of immigration as a general concept has always coexisted uneasily with an often virulent dislike of and distrust for many of the major ethnic, racial, and religious groups that made up the successive waves of immigration. Nativist opposition to immigration is a recurring undercurrent of American political and social history; the groups that have been the focus of hostility, distrust, and persecution include immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Southern and Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Korea, India, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and Africa; Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, believers in Shinto and Santeria; and so forth. Targets of persecution also include, and always have included, the oldest Americans -- American Indians, who (as noted earlier) until our own time were stigmatized as primitive savages incapable of becoming "civilized."

For much of the twentieth century, Americans celebrated the idea of the "melting pot" into which peoples from all over the world leaped, only to be poured out as Americans. In the last two decades, some Americans have suggested that the image of the melting pot be supplanted by that of the American mosaic. In the American mosaic, each ethnic, cultural, religious, or racial group retains its distinctive heritage and identity yet plays a vital part in creating a larger, more comprehensive American nation. The metaphor of the mosaic arguably may be closer to the spirit of the national motto ("E pluribus unum" -- or "out of many, one") than is the metaphor of the melting pot. But it has not yet prevailed in a nation where many Americans (themselves descendants of immigrants) still insist that newer immigrants must submerge themselves in a pre-existing "American" identity. The great challenge that faces the American republic, after more than two centuries of struggling with the challenges and the difficulties of diversity, is to work out a new consensus on the appropriate balance between the claims of different group identities and the goal of identifying an American common ground.

G. The Development of an American Economy

Today, in an age where Americans are increasingly concerned about the nation's ability to cope in a global economy, it is vital to address the history of the American economy -- how it began; how it developed over time, adapting to new challenges and new opportunities; how it gradually became an important part of the world economy; and what effects it has had on the other components of American history.

The economy of American Indians has long been dismissed as a "primitive" economy, emphasizing hunting and gathering, only gradually adapting to include the cultivation of crops. Recent scholars have tried to redress the balance by redefining "primitive" to remove its pejorative connotations, by emphasizing the harmony between the economic life of American Indian nations and the environment, and by demonstrating how American Indians' advice to and education of European settlers was vital to the survival of those settlers.

From settlement to the American Revolution, the American economy was a "colonial" economy, in which the colonies provided raw materials (crops, iron ore, timber for ships, furs, cotton, and so forth) to -- and for the benefit of -- the mother country. The colonies had more direct economic contact with Great Britain, or its Caribbean possession, than they did with one another. One vital force leading to the American colonies' breach with the mother country was the colonists' growing resentment of their dependent, subsidiary role in the economic life of the British Empire.

The period between the Revolution and the Civil War witnessed the growth of a young national economy. Although still largely agricultural, the economy also fostered the development of manufacturing and industry (complemented by the rise of a fledgling labor movement). Serious and vigorous economic and political competition among the sections (North, South, and West) was a primary force shaping the development of American politics. At the same time, the nation slowly developed the foundations of a unified national economic system. This consolidation of American economic life was driven by such technological developments as the invention of the steamboat, the railroad, and the telegraph; by the development of new economic enterprises (e.g., railroad and telegraph systems) capitalizing on these technological advances; and by the linking of the nation's several regions through the construction of "internal improvements" such as canals and roads and toll bridges. The Union's possession of these economic advantages was a major factor in its victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In the decades following the Civil War, the United States established itself as a major factor in the world economy. Development of new means of communication and transportation further knitted a national economy together, making possible the rise of great industrial enterprises. Legal ingenuity also assisted the growth of these enterprises by the development of such forms of organization as the business corporation, the trust, and the holding company. At the same time, this period witnessed the rise of dissatisfaction among American labor; craft and industrial workers attempted to organize themselves into unions to protect the rights of individual workers from the disproportionately great and growing power of corporate management.

One of the driving forces behind the Populist and Progressive Movements was the demand for government action either to break up the consolidations of great wealth and economic power or to control the powers these consolidated entities wielded, in order to protect the worker and the individual consumer. Thus, in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s one of the great spheres of activity for government was the enactment of laws and the establishment of the first regulatory agencies to restrain the powers of business. In the 1920s and early 1930s, however, an aggressively pro-business climate led either to the retrenchment or the abandonment of these efforts.

The feverish growth of the economy in the 1920s, and the indifference to the potential drawbacks and weaknesses of that expansion, carried in their wake the catastrophe of the Great Depression (1929-1941), which in turn led to a profound shift in American thinking about the relationship between government and the economy. The programs of the New Deal at first focused on controlling the dangers and defects of economic competition; when these programs turned out to be constitutionally invalid and economically ineffective, the New Deal shifted emphasis to controlling the deleterious effects of an unregulated economy, establishing the "safety net" that has minimized the effects of later severe economic downturns.

The war years and the two decades that followed were the high-point of American economic history. Dazzled observers believed that the remarkably vigorous growth of the American economy was here to stay; they hailed the creation of a new middle class of well-paid industrial workers, middle managers, and professionals as the realization of the "American dream."

The period since the late 1960s has demonstrated that the "American dream" was short-lived. Two clusters of developments spelled the end of Americans' dreams of continuing economic and social prosperity: First, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a continuing climate of economic recession and industrial retrenchment led to the loss of thousands of jobs. Second, in the 1970s and early 1980s, American corporations seemed increasingly unable to compete with the industries and products of foreign competitors -- specifically German and Japanese electronics and automobile manufacturers. In particular, the successful Japanese challenge to the primacy of the American automobile industry spelled economic disaster, not just for the "big three" auto manufacturers, but also for the dozens of industries (for example, steel) dependent on a healthy domestic automobile industry. In the 1980s, many Americans believed that the "malaise" of the 1970s was at an end. But the 1980s was an era of feverish economic "growth" based not on the real flowering of productive industry but on the ever-more-frantic manipulations of corporate takeovers and stock manipulation. In the years following the 1987 stock-market crash, The 1980s' house of cards collapsed; worried observers suggested that the American economy's ills were perhaps endemic, and that it was necessary to reconceive what the goals and emphases of the nation's economic system should be.

H. The Changing Role of America in the World

The place of America in the world has changed dramatically since European explorers confirmed the existence of the American continents. America has been a potent and complex symbol -- of the possibilities of wealth and power; of the promise of freedom; of a haven for the persecuted, the homeless, and the stateless. The founding of new societies in the Americas has also helped to expand the world's intellectual horizons, to transform the economic life of the human race and create a truly global economy, and to provide a new and vigorous force in every aspect of world culture. But these profound American influences on world civilization have taken place (since 1776) through the world's framework of nation-states. And, in the modern era, efforts to come to grips with world problems most take account of concepts and doctrines of national sovereignty -- however outmoded such doctrines might appear to be in an era of global warming and environmental crisis. In this section, therefore, we find it necessary to emphasize the evolution of American foreign policy.

Americans always have been ambivalent about their nation's place in the world, veering between the desire to preach their own virtue as a model for the rest of the world and the equally strong desire to tell the rest of the world to go hang itself and leave the United States alone. As noted above, this complex and contradictory approach to America's place in the community of nations was shaped, in part, by geography -- the insulation of the Americas by two great oceans from the concerns of Europe and Asia. In part, as George Washington pointed out in his 1796 Farewell Address, it also was a matter of necessity, even of self-preservation -- a consequence of the initial exceptional status of the United States as a fledgling democratic republic in a world of hostile, monarchic world powers.

Thus, for much of American history before the twentieth century, the American republic was serenely indifferent to the rest of the world, except when the rest of the world impinged on American interests (as with Thomas Jefferson's disastrous embargo against European belligerents in 1807 or the equally disastrous War of 1812) or when an American neighbor possessed something that the American people wanted (for example, Great Britain possessing Canada [1812]; Mexico possessing Texas and California [1845-1848]; Spain possessing Puerto Rico and Cuba [1898]). Even when the United States "opened" Japan in 1853, the effort was undertaken largely because of American resentment that Japan would not offer port privileges to American whalers cruising the Pacific, or aid to whalers and commercial vessels experiencing difficulties near Japanese waters. The one great exception was the Monroe Doctrine (1823), and that was still a reassertion of the insulation of the New World from the greed and depredations of the Old, however much later Administrations sought to distort it into a blank check authorizing the United States to dictate to its Latin American neighbors how they should govern themselves and how they should deal with their powerful American neighbor.

In the twentieth century, as European powers set out to carve empires for themselves in Africa and Asia, the United States at first decided to join the fray, albeit in the posture of a fair arbiter seeking to restrain European greed. The classic example was Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door policy for China (1900). And yet the arm's-length, idealistic component of American thinking about world affairs was alive and well. Thus, when President Woodrow Wilson sought to dictate to the rest of the world how the victorious and vanquished powers of the First World War should behave toward one another, he was drawing on a diplomatic tradition as old as the Republic.

With the collapse of the Wilsonian initiative to rewrite the rules of world politics, the United States returned to its posture of serene indifference to the world beyond the Western Hemisphere. Only the development by Germany and Japan of the capacity to bring military power to bear across the previously impregnable shields of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans persuaded the American people that they had to take a hand in world affairs.

In many ways, the Second World War was the highpoint of American participation in the community of nations. The United States, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, resurrected the Wilsonian ideals of a transformed world politics, to be purged of wars of aggression and colonial empires. Even the development of the Cold War (1945-1991) between the democratic West and the Communist East fitted well within the Wilsonian model of what the United States should do as a world power. The development of nuclear and thermonuclear arsenals created a new category on the international scene -- the superpower, a nation possessing the might to affect the lives of virtually every inhabitant of the planet. At first, the concept was used only in military terms, limiting the "superpower club" to two members, the United States and the U.S.S.R. In the 1980s, the idea of an economic superpower emerged, with Japan and Germany as leading exemplars.

The difficulty during the Cold War was that the United States soon discovered the limits of being a superpower. The risks of nuclear war made a titanic struggle to destroy the power of world Communism at best unpalatable. The inability to use conventional military power to foster democracy or to combat indigenous revolution (either under the banner of Communism or stigmatized as such by its adversaries) brought increasing frustration in its wake. If the Second World War became the model for Americans of a "good war," and a good foreign policy, the ambiguous Korean Conflict and the failed Vietnam Conflict became models for how not to conduct foreign policy.

The summary discussions above, and the twelve chronological essays that follow, are only introductions to the rich, complex, and challenging body of ideas, information, and interpretation that makes up American history today. In conclusion, we stress the point with which we began. Those who teach history, at whatever level and by whatever means, are partners in a common enterprise. We must work together to help one another in the challenging and vitally important task of preparing our students to understand the importance of the past both in and of itself and as a part of the present and the future.