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E Pluribus Unum |
This web site, titled American History and Culture, is the product of a collaboration among three teachers. Our collective object is to bring our research, thinking, and experience in teaching about three snapshots in U.S. history – the 1770s, the 1850s, and the 1920s – to other teachers and their students in the survey course in an effort to explore and illuminate some themes and ideas about the subject in general. The periods under scrutiny were chosen because each represents, in its own way, a turning point in the history of the country: a time when big ideas and the actions of intelligent, forceful people collided and resulted in change that proved to be resounding, if not cataclysmic. Sometimes that change was indeed cataclysmic and, as Lincoln said, “fundamental and astounding.”The essays and resources collected here are meant to be used by teachers and students. Thus the overview essays that lead readers to resources; thus the collection of lesson plans that accompany each section. Both the essays and the lesson plans are largely framed around primary source materials. It does not need stating here that it is when students actively engage such documents – speeches, advertisements, broadsides, diaries and letters, interviews, testimony at trial, personal accounts, and the like – that productive historical learning takes place – but there, it is stated. With these essays and activities we attempt to bring the researcher into intimate contact with these living documents; we try not only to raise challenging and complex questions about the people and events involved with the creation of the documents, but also to move the researchers to ask their own questions of the sources. Among the three of us teacher-historians there is no common preference for one style of history over another or collective belief in a theory of historical causation – only a shared conviction that there is nothing quaint about what people thought and how they acted a hundred years ago, or two or three hundred; that they, in the past, were every bit as intelligent and aware as we are, perhaps more so; and that, therefore, the testimony that they have left us in their speeches and ads and other varieties of documents is worthy of careful reading, close analysis, and substantial esteem.This project is entirely online. All sources referred to are freely available on the internet, along with many other relevant and related sources that can be found by following links, visiting trusted sites, or doing basic searches online. Much is being written currently about teaching with the tools and resources of technology. We hope, along with many teachers who use the internet extensively in their classrooms, that teachers using information in this form and abundance can be less “the sage on the stage,” and more “the guide by the side.” But at the same time we believe that the teacher’s role does not thereby diminish in its importance, that the instructor does not disappear, that the “guide” of the pithy rhyme should assert firm direction in helping students parse and judge among a profusion of plenty of online resources that can sometimes be overwhelming. Likewise, we hope, with the individual teacher who might find this website useful: the essays and activities on the site are somewhat idiosyncratic to our own research and teaching, so we urge educators to customize and modify at will. If others see things differently, desire to access a suggested collection of resources otherwise, or want to change the content of activities to suit their own style and students, then we invite and urge them to do that and more. The internet empowers teachers as well as students.Much is written in the early 21st century about the men and women who came of age in the 1940s and fought World War II. Those people are often called, especially among popularizers of history such as Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw, the “greatest generation.” Much credit is indeed due to that generation: they made real sacrifices as they fought the good war, they defeated the enemy where he lived, they did so without significant complaint, and they returned to the home after the war was over and went about resuming their lives and leading the nation to unprecedented prominence and prosperity. Perhaps in the WWII generation, we see the twentieth century embodiment of an American way of life that had already been defined by earlier generations faced by serious challenges to their ideals. Two of the generations of Americans under study here seem to have done as much, perhaps even more. The men and women of the 1770s and 1850s not only fought the wars and defeated the enemy, but they also defined the issues, faced the difficult decisions, identified the causes and sources of things that impeded the realization of their ideals, and then set out to change those ideas and institutions. They did not settle those issues permanently; in some cases, most notably the question of the status and relationship among the races in America, they hoped or pretended to hope that the problem would somehow solve itself. Perhaps the challenge of race was simply too intractable at a time when all the other big issues had to faced, as well. Perhaps the founding generation believed and understood that, and resigned themselves to the supposition that certain compromises would have to be sufficient for the short term. The dilemma of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote eloquently about the equality of all men yet owned hundreds of slaves, stands out as an example, embodied in the person, thoughts and actions of one man, of a generation that failed to resolve a problem of the most difficult and agonizing proportions. It was left to the justly famous generation more than four score years later, that of the 1850s, to decide that the issue of slavery and the problem of race could not be ignored or negotiated. It was that generation which risked facing those challenges and dealing with them, as Lincoln, again, said, “even by war.”Those people living and acting in the 1770s and 1850s not only sacrificed and fought the battles, but they also engaged the ideas fully. They wrote, spoke, and acted on the premise that ideas have consequences. It is sometimes startling to encounter documents -- many of which we have tried to gather here on the web site -- created by people of those times which boiled over with such passionate feeling about things which now often seem to us to be abstract: liberty, the rights of men and women, political and civil reform, and the necessity to take action when ideals clashed with circumstances. It is easy to forget that it was they who secured those blessings for us. “Taxation without representation” was more than a rallying phrase for citizens in the colonies in the 1770s: they thought, wrote, and spoke about how taxes and governing and liberty were inextricably inter-related; they publicly debated almost infinitesimal differences between internal and external taxes at a level of public discourse which would be incomprehensible to those of us in the 21st century who are accustomed to receiving the issues of the day in pre-digested “news bites.” Even Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” was anything but common, as anyone who has actually read the pamphlet well knows. It has been said that a “semi-literate blacksmith” of the time could read, understand, and be moved by it; let the student and teacher judge, by reading the document now, whether the same could be said about the abilities of the average citizen of more recent times.Paine stated, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” That power, he meant, came from the force of ideas, not arms or dollars. When we look back at the generation of the 1770s we marvel at the power of their ideas, but we don’t forget that they translated their principals from the abstract to the practical by employing their more quotidian but equally vital skills of organization, persuasion, consensus-building, and day-to-day politics. This facility for implementing lofty ideals by accomplishing concrete deeds seems to be distinctly American. And so it was, in many cases, with the reformers of the 1850s, who were impelled by their firm belief in the necessity of reforming palpable evils such as slavery and excessive drinking, to write, speak, act, and risk their lives and fortunes for the sake of their ideals. Perhaps when we look back for the generations that were truly the “greatest,” we might find that it was those of the 1770s and 1850s that fit that description best.The generation of the 1920s is a different story, in many ways a more complex one. That decade stands out in U.S. history not because of the ideas generated, but because it is the time when we can first recognize ourselves as being modern Americans. People in that time reaped and enjoyed the benefits of prosperity. They benefited from the industries and institutions that had been built by other generations. They enjoyed the peace and seemed to forget about the recent untidy war. They purchased, they consumed, they dressed up, they smoked, they raced and toured and traveled, they danced, they sang and listened and recorded, they acted and watched, read about, and admired other actors and actresses – they did everything that we do now. They were moved and excited by things and activities. Not all of them did these things and only these, of course: many groups who were not included in the mainstream, for a variety of reasons, were not swept up in the powerful current of the consumer culture. Many of those groups on the margins had to face issues and make decisions about their own place in American society, trying to determine whether and how they would fit in. In those actions and those thoughts we find struggle, traction, and risk.Three decades, three generations of Americans. Much of American history and culture is revealed in studying each of them separately and then looking for common themes among them. Other times, most notably the 1960s, stand out prominently in the need to understand "what went on" during those times that helped shape so strongly what were are now in the 21st century; perhaps, given time and resources, we will be able to include other snapshots of American time under the AHC umbrella. In the meantime, we have here and offer the 1770s, 1850s, and 1920s. The three decades under consideration here, it is believed, more than most others, help us answer the question that is central to the broad survey of U.S. history, "What is an American?"
-- Dr. Arnold Pulda
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The E Pluribus Unum Project is funded
by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and co-directed
by Professor
John McClymer, Department of History, Professor
Lucia Knoles, Department of English, Assumption College, and
Dr. Arnold Pulda, Director of
Gifted and Talented student programs for the public schools in Worcester,
MA. Visitors are encouraged to send
inquiries or suggestions.
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