Teaching History Through the Arts

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Metropolitan Books, 2000) and Jackson Lears's Something for Nothing: Luck in AmericaBuffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hill and Wang, 2000) and Lewis A. Erenberg's Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (University of Chicago, 1998) are equally invaluable histories of major episodes in American popular culture.

But those are the exceptions. Most of the books on which I relied were written by scholars in art history, music, literature, or film studies. If, for example, I wanted a new interpretation of American culture after World War I, two of the most innovative studies are Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), which concentrates on the intellectual interchange between white people and African-Americans, and Carol J. Oja's Making Music Modern (Oxford University Press, 2000), which analyzes the influence of European modernist music on American composers and songwriters. But Douglas is a professor of English and comparative literature, while Oja is a professor of music. Similarly, Wanda M. Corn's The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (University of California Press, 1999), a book filled with insights not only about American painting but about larger trends in American culture, is the work of an art historian.

Indeed, many of the most suggestive re-examinations of American culture are not written by academics at all. Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Crown Publishers, 1988) and his latest book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006), together with David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (Knopf, 2005) and Richard Schickel's Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Doubleday, 1985), are all stimulating works of cultural history written by people who are primarily freelance journalists and film critics.

Yet while the majority of American historians seem uninterested in writing about American culture, their counterparts abroad continue to publish books that deal with novels, music, photography, and film. I recently received a new collection of essays called Satchmo Meets AmadeusThe Education of Henry Adams, Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. It was also made clear to me that I'd better know what abstract expressionism was if I had even the faintest prayer of becoming an American historian.

I was not alone. Nor am I being wistful about the good old days when Orson Welles and Saul Bellow were culture heroes to a generation of tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking connoisseurs, the types who are standing in line for the next showing of The Sorrow and the Pity in Woody Allen's Annie HallCulture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Pantheon, 1984), Lasch became more interested in psychology and social criticism, as in such best-selling books as The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Norton, 1978).

Then Levine published his most influential book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in AmericaUlysses, much less the three-page sentences in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!?

Levine surely did not intend to turn his colleagues and students away from cultural history. Indeed, he continued to write about American culture throughout his career. But Highbrow/LowbrownotThe Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards and a very young Robert Redford. They can see Dustin Hoffman in 1985 as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. They can grasp why Marlon Brando was so mesmerizing in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, and why he became an American cultural icon. They can learn something about Charlie Parker's music and his life by watching Clint Eastwood's Bird. And they can begin to appreciate 20th-century dance by viewing the films of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.

Whether students take advantage of all those opportunities is uncertain. But they have the chance to ascend the cultural staircase. And if they get to the top, they may figure out for themselves why Marcel Duchamp's painting was both so infuriating and so central to the culture of our own time.

Re: Teaching History Through the Arts

There's so much to disagree with here that it's difficult to know where to start.

An undergraduate survey course in American history is typically, in my experience, divided into two semesters: the first semester dealing with American history through the end of the Civil War, and the second semester going from Reconstruction through the present. Each semester is roughly fourteen weeks, so in the first semester students are handling about two decades' worth of history per week. The second semester, in contrast, goes at a leisurely decade-per-week pace (compare that with a typical Western Civilization survey course, where students go through more than a century every week).

In the two or three classes per week, it's just a sad fact that the students can only be taught so much. For instance, in a week of studying the second decade of the twentieth century, students will typically learn about Wilsonian foreign policy and the nation's entry into the First World War, labor strife and the advent of modern industrial techniques, women's suffrage, the first "red scare," and a wide variety of other cultural, social, and political phenomena and events. In addition to their course books, they might also be assigned works such as The Jungle or Sister Carrie to give them a different viewpoint of the era. In short, survey courses cram a lot of information into a very small amount of class time, but they clearly can't cover everything.

Now, would it be nice if a survey course on American history covered Marcel Duchamps? Well, I suppose so, although it might make more sense to cover an American artist. But we have to bear in mind that we're dealing with a zero-sum game here: for everything that gets added, something else gets dropped. So what should we drop to make room for a discussion of the 1913 Armory Show? The American realist movement in literature? The impact of the automobile on American society? The creation of the Federal Reserve System?

There is, to be sure, a tendency to omit those subjects that are covered by other courses. If a university has an art history survey course, the history department might not feel obliged to devote a portion of the general American history survey course to art history. In allocating a scarce resource like a syllabus, that's not such a bad approach. The other alternative would be to make the American history survey a ten-semester course, and just throw everything about American history into it.

I agree with what you say, Joe, though it sounds like you're not exactly disagreeing with the author; you're confirming what he says but giving more plausible explanations for the observations he's making.