Teaching Populism

One of the most fascinating things to me about teaching this semester is that I have not mentioned the Populists in my US, 1877-1920 course except in passing. I also do not discuss the Populists in my modern US survey course.

I was surprised when they didn't get mentioned in my survey course, but I am downright shocked at their omission this semester. But when I think about, the Populists seem to me to be such an outlier to American history, that I'm not sure what kind of larger narratives they fit into.

Part of this is that I teach the Gilded Age and Progressive Era course thematically rather than by chronology. I simply think the era makes almost sense chronologically because so much is happening at the same time. So I talked a lot about race, with weeks on Native Americans, segregation, imperialism, and immigration. Then I moved on to discussions of gender and sexuality for a couple of weeks (and God do they love talking about the history of sex. So do I which makes it fun!). Now I've moved on to politics. The semester is ending so next week I am discussing political Progressivism and the week after World War I. This was the week I thought I would squeeze the Populists in--I'm discussing labor. But again, they are such outliers to the larger questions of labor during the GAPE. So they are just getting dropped. I am also not discussing William Jennings Bryan or the election of 1896 at all. Were I teaching this course chronologically, or from a primarily political perspective, all of this would get serious play.

But what do you think matters more for students, birth control or Populists? Hell, what matters more for our understanding of the past? I would fall decidedly on the side of birth control. Next semester, I am teaching a labor course. There I am already planning on taking a week to talk about rural labor during the GAPE and that of course will be dominated by the Populists. But I wonder if I am the only U.S. historian who sees the Populists fading from their teaching narratives, as interesting as they might be.