April Tellez will discuss how her focus on Indigenous histories across the Americas fundamentally structures her course to combat Eurocentricism in both teaching and understanding and pays homage to the integral civilizations that pre-existed European invasion of Indigenous land. By approaching U.S. history from a hemispheric construct of the Americas rather than simply on land that territorially becomes the United States, the course celebrates the many Indigenous identities in the classroom and connects Indigenous peoples and experiences to one another, resulting in a pan-Native amassing of collective identity and power. By centering Native stories, contributions, and experiences, students learn of American history not from the traditional East to West narrative, but as a history of people of color with agency that fundamentally contributed to Euroamerican understandings and practices of democracy.

Tim Draper’s presentation will relate the transnational to the regional and local as he outlines how the scholarly and physical exploration of the near may relate to the far away in both the classroom and research. After bringing the themes of transnational history from Bridging Cultures to the classroom, Professor Draper began incorporating such themes into analyses of Illinois and Midwestern history. His early approaches in the classroom and at conferences was to highlight the transnational in relation to the Civil War and immigration, focusing on Illinois’s role. Presently, along with a chemistry professor, Draper is researching the state’s past by hiking human and natural historic trails, which relates the transnational connections of Illinois from encounters between Indigenous People and the French through industrial age immigration and, finally, to international projects in art and physical science. An overview of these approaches will show (1) relationships between the local, regional, and transnational narratives of the past and (2) the ability to “walk history” into the classroom.

Joy Schulz will show how primary source documents from the nineteenth century link Atlantic slave narratives to indigenous cultures in the United States and Polynesia. Schulz will demonstrate how using global source materials can help students in US survey courses to understand broader themes regarding U.S. nationalism and expansion.

Allie Frickert will discuss ways to infuse environmental history and sustainability themes into the US History survey course through using the lenses of the Atlantic World and Pacific world to explore underlying environmental factors that shape history. By examining the interconnectedness of ecosystems and human societies across world systems, students learn how environmental factors serve as catalysts for historical developments. By tracing the impact of phenomena such as climate shifts, resource exploitation, and ecological exchange on the trajectories of societies, especially in Africa and the Americas, students can comprehend the profound influence of environmental dynamics on historical events. Integrating these perspectives into the curriculum enriches students' understanding of the past and also equips them with the critical lens necessary to analyze contemporary environmental challenges and their historical roots.