The Missing Third Humanities: Why American Civilization Deserves Its Own Course

The Missing Third Humanities: Why American Civilization Deserves Its Own Course

For decades, American universities have argued about a problem hiding in plain sight. Traditional humanities education has often been organized around Western civilization, while courses in Eastern humanities opened another enormous intellectual world: India, China, Japan and other Asian civilizations. The debate over what these courses leave out has produced world-history programs, multicultural requirements, ethnic studies, Native American Studies and countless specialized courses.

But perhaps we have been making the solution more complicated than it needs to be.

There should be a third major humanities course: American Humanities.

Not another American history course. Not a Native American elective sitting at the edge of the curriculum. Not a few Indigenous readings inserted into Western Humanities so the syllabus appears more inclusive. American Humanities should stand alongside Western Humanities and Eastern Humanities as a serious study of a major civilizational world.

And it should begin long before anyone called this place America.

America Did Not Begin With Columbus

Western Humanities does not begin with the United States Constitution. It reaches backward through Shakespeare, the Renaissance, Christianity, Rome, Greece and other civilizations and traditions that contributed to the Western intellectual world. Eastern Humanities likewise reaches deeply into the philosophical, religious, literary and artistic traditions of Asia.

American Humanities should receive the same treatment.

Long before European ships crossed the Atlantic, the Americas contained hundreds of nations and some of the world’s great civilizations. They developed political systems, diplomatic traditions, religions, philosophies, agriculture, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, art and enormous bodies of oral literature.

The Maya developed sophisticated writing, mathematical and astronomical traditions. The Haudenosaunee created a confederacy joining separate nations within a larger political system. Pueblo peoples developed complex societies adapted over generations to the environments of the Southwest. Throughout the Americas, different peoples developed their own ideas about political authority, justice, family, property, warfare, diplomacy, spirituality and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

Those aren’t merely subjects for archaeology and anthropology.

They are humanities.

When we study Plato, we don’t merely ask where he lived and what happened to Athens. We ask what he thought.

When we study Confucius, we don’t merely study the political history of ancient China. We ask what he thought.

Why should an Indigenous thinker be treated differently?

American Humanities would ask not merely what happened to Native peoples, but what Native peoples thought.

That single change would transform the course.

Then Columbus Arrives

If the course begins with civilizations already living in the Americas, Columbus no longer begins the story. He enters it.

That distinction is enormous.

European ships arrive in worlds already filled with governments, alliances, rivalries, religions, economies and intellectual traditions. Europeans bring their own political ideas, Christianity, technologies, commercial ambitions, domesticated animals, weapons and diseases. Indigenous nations respond through diplomacy, trade, alliances, resistance, warfare and adaptation.

Then Africa enters this developing American civilization through one of history’s great human catastrophes: the Atlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans are forcibly transported across the ocean, but they do not arrive without culture. They carry languages, religious traditions, agricultural knowledge, craftsmanship, stories, music and memories.

Now the humanities course becomes something extraordinary.

Indigenous America, Europe and Africa are occupying the same geographical world.

Their encounter includes conquest, slavery and attempted cultural destruction. It also produces exchange, adaptation, resistance and new cultural forms. Later migrations from Asia and elsewhere add still more intellectual and cultural traditions.

The result is not simply transplanted European civilization.

Something new develops.

American civilization.

The Native Soldier in France

And American Humanities cannot end when the colonial period ends.

Consider one remarkable example.

More than 12,000 Native Americans served during World War I, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Many entered military service during a period when U.S. citizenship still did not extend to all Native Americans.

Now put one of those soldiers in France in 1918.

Suddenly the supposed boundaries between Native American history, American history and world history disappear.

A Native man whose ancestors belonged to a sovereign Indigenous nation is wearing the uniform of the United States and participating in a global conflict among the world’s great powers. The war contributes to the destruction of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian imperial orders. Across the world, people are arguing about nations, citizenship, sovereignty and self-determination.

Meanwhile, Native soldiers bring something else onto the battlefield: their languages.

Choctaw and other Native servicemen used Indigenous languages for military communications during World War I. Languages belonging to cultures subjected to American assimilation pressures suddenly possessed enormous military value because enemy listeners could not readily understand them. The practice foreshadowed the much more famous Native Code Talker programs of World War II.

Think about what is contained in that one story.

Language. Citizenship. Sovereignty. Assimilation. Patriotism. Identity. War. Empire. Technology. Democracy.

That’s humanities.

And the story doesn’t end at the Armistice.

Congress enacted legislation in 1919 providing a route to citizenship for Native veterans who met its conditions. In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act extended U.S. citizenship to American Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States who had not already acquired it, while the much larger questions of tribal sovereignty and equal political participation remained.

The Native soldier in France therefore isn’t a sidebar to Western history.

He is standing directly at the intersection of civilizations.

That is exactly why we need American Humanities.

Universities Already Know Something Is Missing

This isn’t an imaginary problem.

Universities and scholars have been arguing about the boundaries of the traditional humanities curriculum for decades. The famous fights over Western Civilization requirements produced arguments about Eurocentrism, multiculturalism and whether a broader curriculum could preserve intellectual coherence while including civilizations traditionally left outside the Western canon.

One response was to create specialized programs. Another was world history. Another was multicultural education.

Those approaches accomplished important things.

But they also created a new problem: the missing intellectual traditions can become scattered.

Native political thought might appear in Native American Studies. Indigenous religion might appear in religious studies. Maya civilization might appear in anthropology. Native literature might appear in an English course. Federal Indian law appears somewhere else.

A student can encounter pieces without ever being invited to see the whole civilization.

The American Philosophical Association itself identifies Native American philosophy among areas traditionally underrepresented in philosophy curricula. Universities such as Northwestern have offered courses specifically treating Indigenous thought as philosophy—asking questions about knowledge, ethics, justice, reality and obligations toward the natural world.

That is an important change.

But why stop with individual courses?

Don’t Replace the Other Humanities. Add the Missing One.

The argument for American Humanities does not require eliminating Western Humanities.

Quite the opposite.

Western Humanities deserves serious study. So does Eastern Humanities. Students should encounter Greek philosophy, Roman political thought, European literature, Christianity and the Enlightenment. They should encounter Confucianism, Buddhism, Hindu philosophical traditions and the great literary and artistic traditions of Asia.

The answer to an incomplete library isn’t to burn one wing of it.

Build the missing wing.

American Humanities could give the civilizations of the Americas enough intellectual space to be understood before immediately comparing them with Europe. Students could encounter Indigenous political philosophy, spirituality, literature, diplomacy and concepts of humanity and nature within their own historical worlds.

Then Europe arrives.

Then Africa.

Then Asia.

Then the civilizations interact.

Now comparison becomes meaningful because students actually know what they are comparing.

Someone Has Already Used the Name

Perhaps the most interesting thing I found while researching this argument is that “American Humanities” isn’t even an unprecedented idea.

The National Association of Scholars has proposed a core curriculum containing separate Eastern Humanities and American Humanities sequences. Its proposed American Humanities curriculum differs substantially from the one argued for here, concentrating primarily on American literature, visual art, film and music. But the structural idea is already on the table: American civilization can justify a coherent humanities sequence of its own.

So the question isn’t whether the words American Humanities can appear in a college catalog.

They can.

The more interesting question is:

Where should the American story begin?

If it begins with the United States, we have already skipped thousands of years of American intellectual history.

If it begins with Columbus, Europeans still get to walk onto the stage before the audience has met the people who were already standing on it.

Start earlier.

Let America speak before Europe arrives.

Then study what happened when the worlds met.

The Missing Third Course

There is something deeply strange about an American student being able to recognize Socrates as a philosopher and Confucius as a philosopher while never being asked whether the peoples who inhabited the student’s own continent also produced philosophy.

There is something incomplete about studying European political thought while treating Indigenous confederacies principally as historical curiosities.

And there is something profoundly limiting about encountering Native Americans primarily when Europeans encounter them.

American Humanities changes the camera angle.

The Indigenous civilizations are no longer waiting offstage for Columbus.

They are already speaking.

They are governing.

They are arguing.

They are worshipping.

They are making alliances.

They are telling stories.

They are creating art.

They are thinking about what it means to be human.

Then Europeans appear.

Africans arrive under horrific circumstances.

New peoples arrive.

Civilizations collide.

A new world develops from an old one.

And centuries later, a Native American soldier is standing in a trench in France, speaking an Indigenous language into a military telephone while empires collapse around him.

That single image should be enough to destroy the idea that Indigenous American civilization belongs only in the opening chapters of American history.

It belongs in the continuing intellectual history of the world.

We already know how to build courses around civilizations. We have been doing it for generations.

So don’t abolish Western Humanities.

Don’t diminish Eastern Humanities.

Complete the picture.

Western Humanities. Eastern Humanities. American Humanities.

Not three boxes separating humanity.

Three doors into it.

And behind the third door is a civilization that was never missing from history.

It was missing from the curriculum.