Teaching It Can’t Happen Here in the Trump Era

Abstract

In the dystopian 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis imagines what it would look like if fascism came to the United States. It Can’t Happen Here is a richly productive text for anybody interested in teaching fascism, but the work requires pedagogical caution, as students tend to find it overwhelming, especially in the post-2016-election era. In this short essay, I consider how best to teach students to read a novel that, though originally intended as a satirical take on the political situation of the United States and the world in the interwar period, has now become unnervingly relevant and prescient.

Teaching the difficult heritage of Italian Fascism

“…Perhaps surprisingly, however, to date there has been remarkably little research carried out into how we teach key controversial historical topics, the history of Fascism being a prime case in point (see Williams 1994; Cooper and Nichol 2015; Goldberg and Savenije 2018). A recent, novel exception regarding the teaching of historical Fascism(s) is elucidated in Riccò (2020).…”