America in the World ca' 1607

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America in the World ca. 1607

• Tom Ewing
• Teaching American History Grant
• Roanoke Higher Education Center
• March 2, 2006

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• When does United States history begin?

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When does United States history begin?

• 1776
• July 4, 1776
• July 3, 1776
• 1775
• 1607
• 1492
• What about states other than the original 13
  colonies? When does United States history begin?

• SOL answer Virginia and United States History
• Essential Knowledge Characteristics of early
  exploration and settlements in the New World
• New England was settled by Puritans seeking
  freedom from religious persecution in Europe.
  They formed a covenant community based on the
  principles of the Mayflower Compact and Puritan
  religious beliefs and were often intolerant of
  those not sharing their religion. They also
  sought economic opportunity and practiced a form
  of direct democracy through town meetings. The
  Middle Atlantic region was settled chiefly by
  English, Dutch, and German-speaking immigrants
  seeking religious freedom and economic
  opportunity. Virginia and the other Southern
  colonies were settled by people seeking economic
  opportunities. The early Virginia cavaliers
  were English nobility who received large land
  grants in eastern Virginia from the King of
  England. Poor English immigrants also came
  seeking better lives as small farmers or artisans
  and settled in the Shenandoah Valley or western
  Virginia, or as indentured servants who agreed to
  work on tobacco plantations for a period of time
  to pay for passage to the New World. Jamestown,
  established in 1607 by the Virginia Company of
  London as a business venture, was the first
  permanent English settlement in North America.
  The Virginia House of Burgesses, established by
  the 1640s, was the first elected assembly in the
  New World. It has operated continuously and is
  today known as the General Assembly of Virginia.
• But also this statement USI.4a Spain Francisco
  Coronado claimed southwest United States for
  Spain.

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Teaching with Timelines

• 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America
• 1497 John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) explored
  eastern Canada
• 1540 Francisco Coronado claimed southwest
  United States for Spain.
• 1608 Samuel de Champlain established French
  settlement of Quebec
• 1682 Robert La Salle claimed the Mississippi
  River Valley

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Age of Exploration Timeline from The Mariners
Museum
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Teaching the Age of ExplorationFairfax County
Public Schools Site
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Session Outline

• America in the World ca 1607 in the SOLs
• Strategies for understanding and teaching America
  in the World
• Starting points When does US history begin?
• Teaching causation with timelines
• Landscapes of history
• Syncretic change
• New perspectives on Imperialism
• Two Worlds Atlantic and Indian Oceans
• Asia and America Past, Present, and Future
• Women and gender in world history
• Transnational Perspectives on American History
• Online resources for U.S. and World History

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External Review of the U.S. Department of
EducationTeaching American History Grant Projects

• Conclusions from the Executive Summary
• TAH project activities display some, but not all,
  of the research-based characteristics of
  effective professional development. Project
  directors' and participants' reports suggest that
  TAH professional development offered active
  learning, promoted coherence, and encouraged
  professional communication however, generally
  speaking, the use of traditional training formats
  hampered most projects' ability to offer other
  characteristics of research-based, high-quality
  professional development. Follow-up activities
  also fell short of meeting teachers' classroom
  needs.
• While TAH teacher work products demonstrated
  teachers' knowledge of facts, they also revealed
  participants' limited ability to analyze and
  interpret historical data. Findings from the
  exploratory study of teacher work products
  (lesson plans and research papers) indicated that
  while teachers had a firm grasp of historical
  facts and some lower-level historical thinking
  skills, they had difficulty interpreting and
  analyzing historical information. Although the
  teacher work products reviewed ranged in quality,
  nearly all products earned low scores on
  historical analysis and interpretation.
• http//www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/teaching/us-histor
  y/teaching-exec-sum.html

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Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters.
Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in
Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993)

• Book examines cross-cultural conversionan
  extremely complicated process involving the
  communication of beliefs and negotiation of
  values across cultural boundary lines, but a
  process that had the potential to bring about a
  thorough transformation of an entire society.
  (p. vii)
• Syncretism (definition) the combination of two
  different forms of belief or practice.
• Syncretism represented an avenue leading to
  cultural compromise it provided opportunities
  for established beliefs, values, and customs to
  find a place within the framework of a different
  cultural tradition, and by doing so, it enabled
  expansive traditions to win popular support in
  foreign lands. Thus cross cultural conversion and
  the spread of religious and cultural traditions
  over long distances depended heavily on processes
  of syncretism that established lines of
  communication and mediates differences between
  interacting traditions. (p. viii)

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Bentley, Old World Encounters

• Syncretism represented an avenue leading to
  cultural compromise it provided opportunities
  for established beliefs, values, and customs to
  find a place within the framework of a different
  cultural tradition, and by doing so, it enabled
  expansive traditions to win popular support in
  foreign lands. Thus cross cultural conversion and
  the spread of religious and cultural traditions
  over long distances depended heavily on processes
  of syncretism that established lines of
  communication and mediates differences between
  interacting traditions. (p. viii)
• The conversion of an entire society to a
  foreign cultural tradition entailed a
  thorough-going process of syncretism. Foreign
  traditions always arrived in pieceswrenched from
  the political, social, economic context in which
  they had originally developedand converts always
  selected certain elements that they adopted,
  adapted, emphasized, or otherwise appropriated
  for their own purposes. In communicating and
  explaining an alien cultural tradition, they
  fractured its original elements, restated them in
  new terms, endowed them with different meaning,
  and assembled them in a new way that made sense
  and significance from their own cultural point of
  view. In doing so, consciously or not, converts
  also retained elements of their inherited
  traditions and incorporated them into the
  alternative from abroad. Furthermore, they
  integrated the foreign cultural alternative in
  their own ways into their larger political,
  social, and economic orders. Thus, large-scale
  social conversion always involved some degree of
  syncretism rather than wholesale acceptance of an
  alien system of beliefs and values social
  conversion depended on some form of compromise
  between the demands of an inherited cultural
  tradition and the promises of a foreign
  alternative.syncretism represented the drawing
  of new cultural boundary lines reflecting the
  relative strengths and attractions of several
  traditions engaged in cross-cultural encounter.
  (p. 16)

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John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History. How
Historians Map the Past (New York, 2002)

• We know the future only by the past we project
  into it. History, in this sense, is all we have.
  But the past, in another sense, is something we
  can never have. For by the time weve become
  aware of what has happened its already
  inaccessible to us we cannot relive, retrieve,
  or rerun it as we might some laboratory
  experiment or computer simulation. We can only
  represent it. We can portray the past as a near
  or distant landscape, much as Friedrich has
  depicted what his wandered sees from his lofty
  perch. We can perceive shapes through the fog and
  mist, we can speculate as to their significance,
  and sometimes we can even agree among ourselves
  as to what these are. Barring the invention of a
  time machine, though, we can never go back there
  to see for sure. (p. 3)
• So what if we were to think of history as a kind
  of mapping? Ifthe past is a landscape and
  history is the way we represent it, then this
  might make sense. (p. 33)

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Jodicus Hondius Map, 1606
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Jodicus Hondius Map ca 1633
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World Map ca 1699
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ArtistSaul Steinberg (1976)
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Visualization Exercise

• How would you draw or describe the view from
  Jamestown ca 1607? What would be the important
  features that the first Virginians would see
  when they looked at the rest of the world?

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J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human
Web. A Birds Eye View of World History (New
York, 2003)

• Web a set of connections that link people to
  one another. (p. 3)
• What drives history is the human ambition to
  alter ones condition to match ones hopes. But
  just what people hoped for, both in the material
  and spiritual realms, and how they pursued their
  hopes, depended on the information, ideas, and
  examples available to them. Thus, webs channeled
  and coordinated everyday human ambition and
  actionand still do. (p. 4)
• Old World Web Eurasia and North Africa 2000 BCE
  500 CE

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Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient. Global Economy in
the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998)

• Main arguments
• Europe was not dominant economically,
  politically, or militarily in the world prior to
  1800
• The center of world trade ca 1500 was Asia and
  the Indian Ocean
• European economic development depended on using
  American silver to buy into the Indian Ocean
  system
• The decline of the Asian economy preceded (and
  made possible) the rise of the West
• World economic cycles are recurring Asia will
  become a center of world economy again

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Bushs Passage to a New India, Times of India
March 1, 2006
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Michael Adas, ed., Islamic and European
Expansion. The Forging of a Global Order
(Philadelphia, 1993)

• Collection of essays exploring global history in
  comparative terms, focusing on Islamic and
  European expansion from multiple perspectives.

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Michael Adas, Introduction, in Islamic and
European Expansion

• The spread of Islamic civilization, European
  overseas expansion, the rise and decline of the
  South Atlantic slave trade, industrialization and
  the completion of Europes drive for global
  hegemony, all have key European (or North
  American) components. But each of these processes
  has been grounded in the historical experiences
  of non-Western societies, and each in turn has
  been profoundly influenced by the responses of
  African, Asian, Latin American, or Oceanic
  peoplespractitioners of the new world history
  have very often adopted this perspective because
  they see it as the most effective way of bringing
  the experience of the people without history
  into the mainstream of teaching and scholarship.
  Over the past two or three decades ie
  1960s-1990s, global and comparative history have
  proved compelling vehicles for relating the
  development of Europe to that of the rest of the
  world and of challenging the misleading myth of
  exceptionalism that has dominated much of the
  history written about the United States. (p. xi)

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David Thelen, et al, Special Issue, The Nation
and Beyond, Journal of American History 86/3
(1999)

• Transnational Perspectives
• Articles on the environment, immigration, empire,
  black history, labor history, colonial North
  America, women, and frontier myths

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David Thelen, The Nation and Beyond
Transnational Perspectives on United States
History, Journal of American History (1999)

• By the turn of the twentieth-century, history
  had added pedagogy as a civic justificationloyalt
  y to and focus on the nation-state should define
  the events to be studied in classes on modern
  history and the perspective from which they
  should be studied. The organizing narrative
  should identify and link events from the past by
  one themethe nation in which those events
  occurredThe function of history, particularly in
  the schools, was to provide the vision of a
  single people with a single destiny. Trying to
  define and contain experience within national
  borders, such history was particularly vulnerable
  to and suspicious of boundary-crossing ideas,
  institutions, and peopleimmigrants, mestizos,
  half-breeds, mulattoes, Creoles, people whose
  liminal experiences and identities could not be
  easily corralled. (p. 967)
• On a more prosaic level, the prefix trans
  suggests three angles for observing the encounter
  of phenomena we are interested inpopular
  culture, politics, migrationwith the
  nation-state. We might imagine from afar how the
  phenomena passed over the nation, observing the
  nation as a whole or how it passed across the
  nation, seeing how it bumped over natural and
  man-made features or how it passed through the
  nation, transforming and being transformed.
  Andtransnational history would convey the
  open-endedness both of the past and of our desire
  to explore border crossings and to look
  critically at the nation-state itself. (p. 968)

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New Perspectives on Empire

• Main themes in bookThe impact of the West is a
  key theme in world history, especially since
  1800. The extent of Western (Europe and the US)
  dominance represented a new era in world history.
  But making the rise of the West into the key
  narrative of world history can mis-represent the
  interactions between imperial power and colonized
  peoples. Thus Curtin follows a different
  approach
• This approach is based on the conviction that
  theory and broad generalizations often conceal so
  many exceptions that they are in danger of
  becoming only vague reflections of realityIt may
  be that the sum of partial truths, arrived at by
  asking a variety of different questions about the
  past, may lead to a better understanding of how
  human societies change through timeThere is no
  recognized term for this attitude toward
  historical knowledge, but eclectic empiricism can
  serve as well as any other. (pp. xi-xii)

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Philip Curtin, The World and the West

• Territorial empire, like the massive European
  migrations overseas, belongs to the industrial
  age. Before about 1750, significant European
  control over territorial empire was still
  confined to the Americas, but even then the area
  governed was a shadow of what text-book maps show
  as Spanish and Portuguese America. The maps show
  European claims to sovereignty, whereas real
  government administration as of 1800 covered only
  the highlands from central Mexico to central
  Chile, most Caribbean islands, and much of
  coastal Brazil. Otherwise, the Europeans actually
  controlled only enclaves within territory they
  claimed but did not try to govern. Such enclaves
  to the north of central Mexico included scattered
  mining centers, trading towns such as Santa Fe,
  and bits of California surrounding mission
  stations. Elsewhere in North America, the pattern
  was similar. Real control extended over the
  coastal settlement areas from Quebec to Georgia,
  but beyond the Appalachians the dominant pattern
  was that of an overland trading-post empire. By
  1800, not a quarter of the territory of the
  Americas was actually governed by
  EuropeansEuropean empires overseas had
  increasing administrative power as well, but an
  enormous gap could sometimes exist between their
  claims to authority and the reality of power they
  were capable of exercisingPublished maps colored
  appropriately to show French, British, or
  Portuguese territory merely showed claims to
  legal sovereignty, not the reality of power
  exercised on the ground. (pp. 12, 15, 17)

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Review Historians Writing about World History

• John Lewis Gaddis
• Philip Curtin
• Jerry Bentley
• William McNeill and J. R. McNeill
• Michael Adas

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Review Historians Writing about World History

• John Lewis Gaddis
• Philip Curtin
• Jerry Bentley
• William McNeill and J. R. McNeill
• Michael Adas
• Where are women in World History?

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Peter Stearns, Gender in World History (New York,
2000)

• Book explores intersection of two active fields
  of research and teaching world history and
  gender history.
• Case studies from the classical period through
  the present
• Opening questions What happens when a society
  that emphasizes womens obligations to men
  encounters people from another society that
  believes that women are by nature more moral than
  men? How will a society that stresses the
  importance of keeping women at home deal with
  cultural influences from another society that
  highlight sexy styles of dress and varied work
  roles? (p. 1)

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Peter Stearns, Gender in World History (New York,
2000)

• Using results on men and women as a
  vantage-point on the nature of cultural exchange
  drives home key characteristics of interchange
  itself. World historians increasingly emphasize
  contact as one of the anchors of their ambitious
  project, a means of linking individual societies
  to broader, sometimes global processes.Along
  with variety, the gender factor consistently
  suggests complexity even the most overt cultural
  compulsion does not generate the expected or
  desired resultsComplexity results from a common
  impulse toward syncretism societies tend to
  borrow some elements and combine them with
  homegrown components, thus producing a system
  that differs both from tradition and from the
  foreign model...Using historical examples, in
  sum, helps us look for examples of syncretism or
  efforts at compensatory power when a new case of
  cultural contact is presented. This is more than
  a classroom result. Societies togay and in future
  will continue to develop new patterns of
  interaction that may call existing gender
  arrangements into question. (pp. 155, 157)

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Online resources for world history

• Journal of World History
• Scholarly articles on world history, especially
  in the pre-modern period
• Online http//www.historycooperative.org/jwhinde
  x.html (2003-present)
• World History Connected
• Teaching resources and strategies for world
  history
• http//www.historycooperative.org/whcindex.html
  (2003-present)

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Center for History and New MediaGeorge Mason
University

• History Matters
• Many Pasts Primary Sources by Time Period
• Making Sense of Evidence Methods of teaching
  primary sources
• http//historymatters.gmu.edu/
• World History Matters
• Teaching resources and materials for world
  history
• http//worldhistorymatters.org/
• Women in World History
• Modules, studies, and resources for integrating
  women into world history
• http//chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/index.html

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Tom Ewings courses on World Historyhttp//www.hi
story.vt.edu/Ewing/Index.htm
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Tom Ewings courses on World Historyhttp//www.hi
story.vt.edu/Ewing/teaching.htm