How the Colleges Skew U.S. History

Minding the Campus

What about the situation at a larger--and more nationally renowned--History Department? To find out, I turned to the fall 2012 offerings at UCLA.

The department's webpage excitedly announces three new course clusters in which undergraduates can specialize. Two of the topics raise eyebrows: "Gender, Sexuality, Women" (tailored to those, apparently, for whom the department's more general race/class/gender approach isn't enough) and "History in Practice," which seems to invite politicization. "This cluster," the department indicates, "aims to provide an organizational footing for the Department's commitment to applying history in the service of the larger community." The third new cluster is oral history.

At the class level, this semester the UCLA department website lists 16 courses in U.S. history since 1789. No courses deal with the Early Republic or the early 19th century. The only coverage of the Civil War comes in the form of small portions of thematic courses dealing either with race or gender (Slavery: Narrative, Novel, and Film, History of Women in the U.S., 1860-1980).It offers no classes on U.S. military history or U.S. constitutional history. The only standard survey comes in the class dealing with the New Deal, World War II, and the immediate postwar period.

Look what the department emphasizes. A quarter of the classes deal with race. Another two courses focus on ethnicity--including Asian-American cuisine; another two focus on gender. Fifteen or twenty years ago, students might encounter these courses in an ethnic studies department, not a history department at one of the nation's leading public universities.

Consider, moreover, what students receive from two of the few UCLA courses whose topics, at first glance, appear to be "traditional." One course, on social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, is hopelessly slanted toward the left. We might expect some treatment of significant right-wing social movements, including the grassroots conservative activists profiled in Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm; the conservative women mobilized by Phyllis Schlafly to oppose the ERA; the pro-life activists mobilized by Roe; and perhaps most broadly, the emergence of a powerful grassroots movement of conservative Christians who played a critical role in American society for the next three decades. But these are not covered. Whom does the course profile? African-Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, "At Large Advocates," and "Radical Women and Gay Women."