A Crossroads Resource

I. Crossroads Background Survey Course for Teachers of American History

Relationship to CROSSROADS


The CROSSROADS college survey course for American history uses the system of periodization and the eight overarching themes developed for the other components of the CROSSROADS curriculum development project. (See CROSSROADS Essays in American History by Richard B. Bernstein for a complete discussion of periodization and themes.) The periodization system is as follows:

  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--

The eight basic themes, known as "Topics of Continuity and Change," are as follows:

  1. Geography as the Setting of American History
  2. The Evolution of American Political Democracy
  3. The Evolution of American Political Ideas
  4. The Evolution of American Society
  5. The Question of a Distinctive American Culture
  6. America as a Gathering of Peoples and Cultures
  7. The Development of an American Economy
  8. The Changing Role of America in the World

The American history survey course is part of the CROSSROADS curriculum project. The elementary-school component of the CROSSROADS curriculum introduces students to the ideas (i) that important things about the world they live in, the nation of which they are a part, and the lives they lead have roots in the past; (ii) that the past is the record of what human beings like themselves thought, said, and did; and (iii) that the past did not happen all at once, but has a structure known as chronology. The middle school curriculum, the keystone of the CROSSROADS project, introduces students to the chronological structure of American history and to the eight overarching themes of American history defined by the CROSSROADS curriculum, and enables them both to orient themselves within that structure and to think about the past as historians do. The high school curriculum refines and extends the understanding of American history that the students have acquired to date, challenging them to make first ventures of historical exploration and analysis, to compare and contrast historians' changing explanations of the past, and to engage with the various forms of historical data and evidence.

The survey course is the traditional "last stop" for students who choose not to go on to become professional historians and the nontraditional first stop for beginning teachers who are preparing to teach social studies and/or history. It ought to be something more, providing students who choose not to pursue historical careers with a serious grounding in American history that they can draw on in their future lives as adults and citizens. It ought to give a sense of the perennial contests over the meaning of the American past among historians, and among the American people as a whole. It ought to give a sense of the value such skills as assessing evidence, making and evaluating arguments, and critical thinking.

The basic text for this course is Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (New York: Knopf Textbooks/McGraw-Hill, 1993) to be supplemented by documents and historiographical readings identified in the syllabus. Unfortunately, publishers of historical textbooks have not kept in print such valuable historiographical anthologies as Sidney Fine's and Gerald Brown's The American Past (4th ed., New York: Macmillan, 1973); the leading documentary anthologies, such as Henry Steele Commager and Milton Cantor, eds., Documents of American History, 10th ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1989) and Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., An American Primer (New York: Mentor/NAL, 1965), are either too costly or three decades out of date; and the cost of such individual collections of documents and historiographical excerpts as the Amherst Series published by D. C. Heath & Co. precludes their use as a set of course supplements.

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