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The article discusses teaching North American indigenous and environmental history at the college level. It provides an overview of their historiography, and considers both traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge of the Americas and issues of sustainability. Topics include human ecology ad climate change, the culture of indigenous people prior to their contact with Europeans, ecocentrism, ethnohistory, transnationalism, and beliefs regarding time.

This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focuses on Chicano/a historiography, with some commentary on the recent emergence of Latino/a history and the future directions that this field may take. It engages three questions that have driven the field: What forces engendered the ethnic Mexican community in the United States? Who comprises it? And how does the past bear on the present? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how to improve secondary school instruction by expressing the importance of historiography to prospective teachers. The author argues that high-school history courses are fact-centered and do not promote an understanding of history as a discipline. The Content Specialty Test in New York is mentioned and the author argues that the test does not measure a person's ability to apply key historical concepts. The author also details several assignments she gives to her students including one in which she allows her students to use only archival primary sources.

An essay is presented which explores U.S. church history and the secularization of history studies in the twentieth century. In this article, the author discusses aspects of his religious upbringing in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and his religious-based studies at Haverford College, Yale University, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He is critical of historical research trends that seek to deny or ignore the fact that religious beliefs helped to shape American culture and character.

The article, concluding a forum on the study of American Jewish history and its place in the larger field of U.S. history, responds to preceding articles by Hasia Diner, Paula Hyman, Alan Kraut, and Tony Michels on the author's first article. Topics addressed include: the development of Jewish studies in the United States; the author's concepts of "communalist" and "dispersionist" approaches to American Jewish history; American Jewish feminism; antisemitism in postwar American academia; post-Jewish and, more broadly, "postethnic" culture; and others.

The article responds to the preceding article by David A. Hollinger on the study of American Jewish history, and why it has been overlooked withing the larger field of U.S. history. Hollinger's concepts of the "communalist" and "dispersionist" approaches to American Jewish history are discussed, and his assertion that American Jewish historians have been overly communalist, or concerned primarily with self-consciously Jewish people and organizations, is critiqued. Also discussed are the concepts of multiculturalism and Jewish identity in the United States.

The article responds to a preceding article by David A. Hollinger on the study of American Jewish history and its place in the larger field of U.S. history. Hollinger's concepts of "communalist" and "dispersionist" approaches to American Jewish history are reviewed, and the atmosphere of antisemitism that remained in American academia in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed, including the prejudice faced by Jewish graduate students and professors. The author then relates his own experiences as a Jewish historian.

The article discusses how to define American Jewish history, and how it relates to the larger field of U.S. history. Two approaches to American Jewish history are defined: the "communalist" approach emphasizes Jewish organizations and institutions and the activities of people with an active Jewish identity, while the "dispersionist" approach studies the lives of members of the Jewish diaspora independently of their personal involvement with Judaism or "Jewishness." Also discussed is the concept of "post-Jewishness," and the related "postethnic" concept.

The article responds to the preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author argues for not allowing the field to go out of balance in the opposite direction, through too much focus on international politics at the expense of U.S. domestic affairs. He argues for the importance of U.S. policy and politics, using the history of the Vietnam War as an example.

The article responds to a preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author takes issue with Zeiler's focus on the centrality of the state and state power, and with the idea that diplomatic historians have led their own field back to the mainstream. She argues that in many ways they were pushed by other subdisciplines, such as ethnic, postcolonial, borderlands, transnational, and world history.

The article responds to a preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author takes issue with Zeiler's wish to retain the state and state power as topics of central relevance for the study of diplomatic history; she argues that power and the state have never been a focus only of diplomatic history, and that furthermore, foreign relations scholarship has explored important areas not shaped by state power.

The article responds to a preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author finds Zeiler overly optimistic about these developments and discusses three potential risks that they raise: the return of a belief in American exceptionalism among U.S. diplomatic historians; methodological difficulties raised by trends in transnational research; and related difficulties in producing genuine historical syntheses.

The article discusses the transnationalization or internationalization of historical writing, with historians from different countries cooperating and collaborating with increasing ease and frequency. In particular, the article traces this trend among American historians, examining their interest in world or global history, exploring patterns in American historiography of situating the United States in a global context, and also discussing contrary trends among historians whose focus is exclusively national.

This essay examines how and why historiography—defined to mean the study of the history of historical writing—first emerged as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry in the United States during the period from 1890 to the 1930s by focusing on the practice of historiography by three of the most influential American historiographers whose work spans this period: J. Franklin Jameson, John Spencer Bassett, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Whereas the development of historiography as a field of study signified a recognition that historians and historical writing are themselves products of the historical process, American historiographers in this period at the same time used historiography to further a scientific ideal of objectivity that was premised on the belief in the ability of historians to separate themselves from that process. Modern scholars (notably, Peter Novick) have attributed to scientific historians like Jameson and Bassett a simplistic and naive positivism; but the ability of these historiographers to recognize the subjective character of historical writing and yet affirm a belief in objectivity reveals that their understanding of historical truth was more complex than modern scholars have acknowledged. In turn, by questioning the belief that the historical profession was originally founded on a naïve faith in the ideal of objective truth, I demonstrate that New Historians like Barnes were more similar to their predecessors, the scientific historians, than they (or later scholars) acknowledged. Thus, rather than portraying the shift from scientific history to the New History as a linear trajectory of development from objectivity to a more relativist viewpoint, I argue that New Historians like Barnes at once expressed a greater recognition than his scientific predecessors of how historical writing was the product of its context, while still insisting on his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article records an extended conversation conducted online among a number of scholars and experts in which they discuss the legacies of the Vietnam War, including its impact of history and historiography. They note the importance of the emergence of scholarship from the Vietnamese, presenting that side's viewpoint of the concerning their wars with France and the United States. They compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The participants in the discussion are David Anderson, California State University, Monterey Bay; Christian Appy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Mark Philip Bradley, Northwestern University; Robert K. Brigham, Vassar College; Ted Engelmann, Vietnam veteran and photographer; Patrick Hagopian, Lancaster University, England; Luu Doan Huynh, Institute of International Relations, Hanoi; Marilyn B. Young, New York University.

Asserts that even in an era of unprecedented nationalization in historiography, the study of American history is still deeply influenced by the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism. Resiliency of the nation-centered historical tradition in the United States; Impact of exceptionalism on Frederick Jackson Turner; Paul Kennedy's `Rise and Fall of the Great Powers'; `The Liberal Tradition in America,' by Louis Hartz.