George Blaustein (University of Amsterdam,Assistant Professor)
11 March 2019
Lecture: Of Trump and Textbooks: Notes on Teaching US History Outside the US
Abstract: For many years, “American History, Beginning to End” has been the title of my introductory survey course in U.S. history. I teach in Amsterdam, and now is a curious moment for teaching American history abroad. It is also a curious moment for the American history textbook. This talk will consider the predicaments of both. Textbooks are unusual animals. They are key texts in pedagogy, as well as complex works of art and narrative. U.S. history textbooks, when aimed at U.S. readers, announce a civic function: to read America into the future, to imply a futurity for the American “experiment.” Unfinishedness and enduringness remain the governing motifs. Those motifs might now seem bitter, tone-deaf, nostalgic or inadvertently comic. And they are strange motifs for the writing of American history outside the United States. Whence and whither the textbook? Amidst political breakdowns, some older texts take on new force; some newer ones have emerged to fill a vacuum with a new narrative; others grapple with a post-American world.
Bio: George Blaustein is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2018), a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the 20th century. His essays and reviews have appeared in N+1, New Yorker.com, Vrij Nederland, and De Groene Amsterdammer, as well as Amerikastudien/American Studies and American Quarterly. He received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University, and is the president of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA).