'Coverage' and 'Uncoverage': Teaching the U.S. History Survey in New Zealand in Twelve Weeks"

Abstract

This issue’s forum centres on that most basic of course offerings, the one that probably has the widest impact of any course taught in an academic department: the introductory survey. In this instance, we focus on the survey of United States history, that is, the ‘typical’ introduction to U.S. history from the colonial era to the present, customarily taught over two semesters, which one would expect to find in any number of history programs in the United States. We wondered how widespread the survey of U.S. history, defined this way, was in Australia and New Zealand, how practitioners framed or presented the subject matter to Australian and New Zealand students, and if there were any particular challenges in teaching this kind of course in our part of the world. As a preliminary effort toward answering some of these questions, and to provide something of a framework for the two essays that follow, we conducted a brief and very informal e-mail survey of U.S. historians in twelve history departments in Australia and New Zealand. What we found was that a good deal of diversity characterizes the teaching of the U.S. survey in Australia and New Zealand.