1:00-2:15P  TR  BH 142
This section fulfills COAS topics requirement.
This section meets with HON H229

Summary: "What Rome was to the ancient world, what Britain has been to the
modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow," Walter Lippmann
announced on the eve of global victory in 1945. For the United States, the
twentieth century was an era of supreme confidence punctuated by moments
of self-doubt. This course will witness that turbulent era through the
eyes of the leaders, scientists, and writers who made history. For those
who engineered America's rise to global power and oversaw the defeat of
fascism, communism, and colonialism, the personal was political. By
studying the lives of influential women and men, we will learn how their
hopes and fears, their fortunes and accidents, as well as their decisions,
shaped America's place in the world.

Rationale and Objectives: This course will teach the history of the United
States foreign relations through the use of biographies as texts. This
choice is based on a couple of observations: First, traditional monographs
and texts, because they are episodic, distort students' sense of the
passage of time. Secondly, students are much more interested in biography
than they are in other forms of historical writing, and I think for the
right reasons.

When I first began teaching history survey courses, I noticed an off
feature of many student essays and reports. They tended to define
characters by the events and ideas of a particular time - the Progressive
era, say, or the Depression - without recognizing that people who lived in
those periods very likely were alive to see what came before and after. In
one assignment, I asked students to write the life story of an imaginary
person who lived from 1880 to 1939. Predictably, few of the students wrote
about the ways the memories of events early in life affected their
character's understanding of later history. But more surprisingly, many of
the students were unable to acknowledge that institutions and ways of life
could pass away in a single lifetime. Their characters accumulated
memberships (in the Knights of Labor, the U.S. Army in France, the stock
exchange, and the WPA) keeping them all until death. Moreover, almost none
of the students gave their character a life, no marriage, family,
neighbors, or friendships, no youth or dotage. Even when looked at
individually, people were just units acted upon by history.

This point of view is reinforced by popular media - movies and television
- but also by historical monographs, many of which use a narrative form
that highlights individual reactions to singular events. Students quite
naturally come by an understanding of the past that devalues the
historical role of such things as hope, luck, memory, and regret. It
becomes hard to explain to students that when Lyndon Johnson thought of
the viet Cong, he pictured the East Texas farmers he knew during the 1930s
who wanted to ride into town to string up a few bankers.

Biography puts this realism back into history, which is why students like
it. In teaching courses on World War II and Vietnam I have used biography
to show students how people make history while getting on with the more
important business of making a life for themselves. At first I worried
that too much emphasis on biography would cause students to lose a sense
of chronology and knowledge of key events, bu if anything, placing events
in the context of a life makes it easier for student to remember their
timing and importance. Students also gladly read my weekly reading load
from 80 to 100 pages a week and without hearing any complaints.

Biography is a good way to introduce new college students to a new way of
thinking about history. Adding this rich context allows students to
develop an ability to "think in time," to reason critically about
decisions made in the past. Students can see not just the choices that
were made, but the ones that could have been. They can reason through a
complex chain of causation, calculating the relative influence of
experience, accident, pressure, prejudice, culture, and material interest
upon the policymaker. The connections between domestic and foreign policy,
between business, government, and the academe, are clearer. Once they
undertake this kind of analysis students can begin to see the limitations
of biography as a narrative form and to seek multiple perspectives.

Methods: I plan a participatory exercise in which students use
biographical research to come at a problem (the Cuban Missile Crisis or
the Versailles Treaty) from multiple points of view. To perform well,
student will have to define their character's core motivations and to know
what positions are negotiable and what interests must be protected at all
costs. Students will also learn the craft of researching and writing
biography by undertaking their own research project using primary sources,
particularly government documents. They will read and critique each
others' work. Class discussions will focus less on dates and names and
more on motives, plans, and outcomes.