America and the World

Today, many professional historians and educators urge introducing students to a subject they call “America and the World” (1). Their refrain extends many historians' earlier entreaties to broaden a field of scholarly inquiry and instruction once designated as “U.S. diplomatic history.” To trace the changing nature and contents of this field over a century, this short sketch will highlight several prominent schools within “U.S. diplomatic history.” Then it will trace efforts to expand the field's bounds to encompass “American foreign relations,” “American international relations,” and, most recently, “America and the world.” The increasingly diverse scholarship that has accompanied these shifts has shaped—and continues to reshape—teaching at every level of the curriculum. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when educators sought to divide history school curricula into coherent sequences of individual courses, they organized their subject matter around nation states. Professional history itself had developed in

Curriculum · Diplomatic history · Field (mathematics · International relations · Library science · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sketch · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subject matter · World history · Race, History, and American Society · History · Law