Incorporating Scholarship into US History Survey Courses

The only history course many college students will ever take is a U.S. history survey. Such courses bear a heavy burden, since they provide most college graduates with their only exposure to academic history. And they have a crowded agenda, with their most important responsibility the often daunting task of giving students an accurate picture of American history before or after the Civil War or Reconstruction, depending on the course. With everything these surveys are supposed to cover, how do you get historical scholarship into them? This presentation will describe how, during my decades-long teaching career, I have attempted to do that, with scholarship ranging from the work of Patricia Limerick to that of Steven Hahn.