Identify it, Define it, Do it: Military History and the AP US History Class

“The College Board doesn’t care about military history.” I emphasize this point each year, to my Accelerated US History students, most of whom will go on to take the AP US History exam. But I say this somewhat tongue in cheek.  After all, what I – and historians – consider military history often isn’t what my students think it is.

History surveys, especially the AP US History course, don’t have much room for comprehensive coverage of operational, grand strategy military history, or social histories of the military, but they have plenty of room for military history as examples of larger processes.

In high school, students are still learning key historical thinking skills as they approach the basic work historians do, learning how to identify historical developments and processes, as well as context.

This doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested in the complex intricacies of military history as it has traditionally been conceptualized. On the contrary, many of them will be happy to talk about that time they watched a cool World War II documentary online or point you to a video they saw once on YouTube about the Napoleonic Wars.

Our job as AP teachers is to knit together their interests with the skills we – and the College Board – want them to learn. (Although the following examples will also be useful in a non-AP history course

The College Board outlines six specific historical thinking skills that students need to develop as they study AP US History:

Figure 1: College Board AP US History Course Overview, “Historical Thinking Skills,” https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history/course

If you’re looking for ways to incorporate military history into your classroom, think about natural places in the curriculum where military history fits. Focus an activity, lesson, or part of a lesson around that.

Start by naming and defining military history with students. Whenever you do something in class that you see as military history, identify it as such for your students. We teach students how to analyze history from social, economic, and political perspectives, and we teach them about important categories of analysis like race, class, and gender. Likewise, students need explicit instruction to understand just what military history is as a field of study.

As teachers, we can emphasize the causes of conflicts and outcomes while also helping students see a few key moments in a conflict’s trajectory. For example, we might look at a selection of important battles in the Civil War to understand why the war lasted as long as it did. Battles fall easily into the broad umbrella of military history, but they also teach students the first historical thinking skill, Developments and Processes. Here, depending on time, it would be possible to take students step-by-step into one or more battles, showing the way they unfolded and were won or lost. Next, using Contextualization, individual battles could be considered within the larger context of the war. In other words, battles can be used to focus students’ on the microlens of a specific engagement and then to pull back to the wider lens of the war as a whole.  Using the U.S. Civil War as an example, you could ask:

• What happened at the Battle of Chancellorsville, and how did that engagement affect the war in the short-term?

• What impact did the death of Stonewall Jackson have on the Confederate Army?

• Why do people remember Gettysburg, but often forget that the Siege of Vicksburg ended at the same time?

Continuing with the theme of the Civil War, military history can be used to emphasize the College Board Historical Thinking Skill of Making Connections.  The era of Reconstruction cannot be fully understood without considering the United States’ military’s impact on southern life. White southerners resisted federal efforts to remake the South in part because they did not want to give up power and wealth based on racial hierarchy.  But their feelings related to military defeat, occupation, and armed Black soldiers were part of the story. Black southerners, meanwhile, were empowered by the ways the war had allowed them to emancipate themselves and their loved ones, including through military service.  And of course, whatever documents you choose to represent this story in your classroom will highlight the College Board Historical Thinking Skills of Sourcing and Situation and Claims and Evidence in Sourcing. General Sherman’s Field Order 15, for example, is often a staple in high school US history courses.

Arguably, the skills related to sourcing are the ones where military history can make its largest entrance into AP US History or a high school survey course, as, in the United States, the military is connected to everything. Any document connected to military history can be used to help students improve their skills of sourcing and situating evidence, and analyzing claims and evidence in sources.

As a historian of women in the U.S. military, I pull recruiting ads from World War II and the Cold War and use them as sources we can analyze to understand women’s roles in national defense or to contrast those images with sources we read about domesticity and the Cold War.

Finally, with regard to the last of its skills, Argumentation, the College Board has a history of using wars as the backbone for Long Essay Questions (LEQs) that consider continuity and change.

For instance, in 2015, the College Board released sample responses for the following two questions related directly to military engagements.

Evaluate the extent to which the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War, 1754-1763) marked a turning point in American relations with Great Britain.

Evaluate the extent to which the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) marked a turning point in the debate over slavery in the United States.

Neither of these questions asks students to talk about battles or strategies or armies, but talking about wars and how they affect both domestic policy and international relations is a key aspect of military history. Military history as a field is arguably most significant when people understand how military history affects people and governments. And it is these connections that the College Board’s historical thinking skills are trying to foster.

Moreover, military historians regularly use all six of these skills when they write and talk about the past. The differences, at the high school level, are ones of scale and intentionality. We have to choose to do it in a way that academic military historians do not.

In addition to the ideas above, there are many other resources I use with my students each year that touch on military history in some way. Below are three that offer some elements of military history and are great starting points to help students understand military history.

• Be Washington, an online, interactive game from Mount Vernon. There are four game scenarios, all of which have some element of military history. I tend to use the 1793 Genet Affair and the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion activities, which take 45 minutes to an hour altogether. This game focuses on Claims and Evidence in Sources, as students hear from a variety of historical perspectives to determine what they think Washington did in these events.

• The National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Knowledge 360 website has “American Indian Removal: What Does It Mean to Remove a People?” This resource is an excellent way to teach students about the removal of Native Americans from their lands. The lessons focus on Native Americans’ experiences and resistance, considering them as Developments and Processes. The site also offers primary sources and guided questions for students to help them analyze the materials.

• The National World War II Museum’s “Picturing the War in the Pacific: a Visual Time Line” and “Picturing the War in Europe: A Visual Time Line” are excellent resources for Sourcing and Situation, Claims and Evidence in Sources, and Developments and Processes, and perhaps even more, depending on how you use the materials. Create a free login at the museum’s educational resources page to find and access these plans. My students work together to match the dates, captions, and photographs together, checking in with me to confirm when they’re correct. When they finish, we organize them into a large timeline across our tables and discuss the progression of the war in each theatre. Depending on how well students work together, and the background knowledge they might have, each timeline can take 45 minutes or slightly longer.