Events Changed Amer History Hb

"Events That Changed American History" from the 20 Events series fits in perfectly with something that I would do if I were teaching an American History course (or pretty much any history course). The first thing that I would have students do is come up with either a list of the ten most significant events in American history, or the ten most important people, or both. I would then salt these away and at the end of the course the "final" would be the students making a case for the ten most important events (or people) in American history in order. When I start teaching a two-semester Introduction to Humanities course I will be doing something along those lines, although I know full well that most students know a lot less about the history of western civilization than they do about the United States. Still, the idea that you get students to recognize what they know and then build on that to see how much they have learned and how they change their minds at the end, appeals to me. Leslie Wheeler and Judith Peacock do not rank order these twenty events, instead arranging them chronologically. I can certainly see history teachings highlighting such things as the class gets to them as they go merrily along. The book was written in 1994, so clearly students today would all want September 11th to be on the list, which would lead to a fairly engaging discussion as to what it would replace on the list. Does it simply replace the last event on the list, the Reagan Election, or would the Seneca Falls Convention, the Pullman Strike, or the National Origins Act of 1924 be better candidates as the events that should be replaced? For that matter, I can make what I think is a fairly compelling argument that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was more important than his Emancipation Proclamation, but that gets complicated because it is hard to compete with the idea of freeing the slaves even if the document in question did not free all the slaves. That is just another great thing about this book, that it will certainly provoke students to ask why the Montgomery Bus Boycott is more important than Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech," and why the Treaty of Versailles is included but not World War I itself. The same thing applies to World War II, where only the Attack on Pearl Harbor is mentioned and not the dropping (or even the creation) of the atomic bomb. For that matter, why are the only two wars that are included the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War? There are answers to these questions, as well as counter-arguments, but there is nothing better than getting students involved in discussions to see if they agree the Declaration of Independence is more important than the American Revolution and Secession is more important than the Civil War. These discussion go back all the way to why Plymouth Colony is more important than Jamestown. If a teacher has students who are actually willing to get up in class and argue that an event on t