Publication Date

January 16, 2025

Perspectives Section

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Indigenous, Teaching Methods

This essay is part of “What Is Scholarship Today?

In 2007, I was invited to co-author a US history textbook for introductory college courses that became American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context. The opportunity to rethink US history by foregrounding the movement of people, goods, and ideas across borders dovetailed with how I teach and how I think about our nation’s past. I knew as I was writing that I was doing historical scholarship, though I couldn’t easily articulate why to fellow historians. Now I can.

Most monographs and articles privilege primary sources as evidence, while synthesizing historiography is how textbooks get constructed. For my chapters of American Horizons, which covered ancestral Indigenous peoples to the Seven Years’ War, I read deeply in the historiography and paid close attention to book reviews to guide me toward more recently published works. As I prepared for my oral exams in graduate school, someone remarked that I would never again be so current in my field. So true. But textbook writing brought me closer to catching up than at any other time since I earned my doctorate.

This project was reviewed more closely than any other academic writing I’ve done, and it altered how I saw the value of peer review. My chapters went through two drafts, on which my six co-authors, editors, and reviewers (usually potential adoptees) commented. That meant that far more experts read and critiqued my work for American Horizons than my first monograph. Our publisher asked reviewers to comment on chapter content and organization, as well as on how we might reach their students more easily. Like critiques generally, theirs were not always constructive, especially concerning content. But I marveled at how many I had to work with and how much they helped me write better for our target audience.

The best historical scholarship strikes a balance between complexity and accessibility. So must textbooks, though audience and the production process make achieving that balance trickier. Textbooks have two principal constituencies, the instructors who assign them and the students who get assigned them. Publishers must be particularly attuned to instructors, who often see complexity as the enemy of accessibility. Some reviewers remarked, “That’s way too difficult for my students” or “My students would get lost in all those names.” Many comments centered on my commitment to incorporate insights from Atlantic history while presenting Indigenous peoples and Indigenous polities as key actors and agents of change through all my chapters. This entailed presenting names of many distinct Indigenous peoples—about which certain reviewers complained. Why couldn’t I just say “Native Americans”? I also pushed back repeatedly at the publisher’s naming conventions, which referred to “the Iroquois” or “the Comanches” as if they were European-style centralized polities rather than decentralized Indigenous ones. The distinctions were, in my judgment, significant enough to keep.

Indigenous peoples had to be key actors in every chapter.

Indeed, I found that textbook writing required making constant judgments about what to include and what to exclude, decisions that invariably hinged on assessments of significance. This owed partly to length restrictions—a chapter could not exceed 80,000 characters. Once I had a full draft, inclusion of or more attention to one topic meant that something else had to be trimmed or excised. I used two criteria to determine what should stay or go: (1) the duty to present North America’s precontact and colonial past accurately and (2) the need to highlight and drive home the textbook’s central concept—the importance of the movement of people, goods, and ideas across borders. Both meant that I had to define significance in ways that clashed with some reviewers’ suggestions. By my criteria, Indigenous peoples had to be key actors in every chapter. When it came time to discuss and explain the Great Awakening, so did Moravians. There were so few of them, one reviewer commented, do they really need that much attention? Yes, because no 18th-century religious group better illustrated the core concept of American Horizons than Moravians, who evangelized on four continents and pioneered conversion techniques among Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans and their descendants in British North America and the Caribbean.

Textbooks are a valuable form of historical scholarship, one that far more people read—or, to extrapolate from the habits of many of my students, don’t read—than peer-reviewed original research. For someone like me, who teaches at a small residential liberal arts college, they have offered a way to bring what I do in the classroom into my scholarship and to, I hope, help students on other campuses see the US past differently and perhaps a bit more clearly.

John Bezís-Selfa is professor of history at Wheaton College.

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