“Pivoting the Center”: Diverse Surveys of American History

In a "virtual round table," scholars from all over the United States, representing different generations and situated at a wide array of institutions, discussed the pedagogical strategies they used and themes they emphasized in the course.1 As they grappled with the place of political, social, economic, and cultural history in their surveys and reflected on the issues of audiences and course objectives, they consistently affirmed their intentions to make the American history survey at the opening of the twenty-first century implicitly, if not explicitly, multicultural.