One of the more challenging obstacles I try to overcome in teaching is getting undergraduates to see that the stories of the past are often much more complicated, multifaceted, and far less triumphant, than what they learned before they got to me. Students come to my lower-division undergraduate class, “American Identity and Belonging in the World War II Era,” eager to learn about how the United States defeated the Nazis—to learn about a time the good guys beat the bad guys. In my experience, my students tend to believe that because World War II was a global war against fascism, it was also an overwhelmingly democratizing event, both abroad and at home. Prejudice somehow evaporated for the duration, and everyone was eager to enlist in the military or otherwise help the war effort.

Additional Materials

We often think of textbooks as balanced, neutral narrators of the past. But textbooks are far from neutral. The authors of textbooks make decisions about what and who to leave in and leave out, how to organize and structure chapters, what language to use in describing the past, and what key points to emphasize for the reader. Making these kinds of decisions about how to construct the textbook narrative means that textbook authors are making implicit arguments about the past. Put another way: constructing a narrative—putting it together—is its own type of argument, even if it sounds neutral. Bringing forward one narrative over another subtly, but just as powerfully, makes an argument about who and what we should collectively know and value about the past.

The final project for this class is a Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report, in which you will evaluate a single textbook chapter* and its discussion of the World War II home front in the United States.