Teaching History to Undergrads: An Interview with Sam Wineburg

Randall Stephens

Sam Wineburg is a professor in the School of Education at Stanford University and director of the Stanford History Education Group.  He has written and taught widely on historical consciousness, questions of identity and history in recent America, and the uses of the past.  He's the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001); Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School Classrooms (TC Press, 2011), with Daisy Martin and Chauncey Monte-Sano; and editor of Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (NYU Press, 2000) with Peter N. Stearns and Peter Seixas. (In 2006 Joe Lucas interviewed Wineburg in Historically Speaking.)  

Below I ask Wineburg about one of his courses and the challenges of history education.

Randall Stephens: What made you decide to teach a course on "Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States & the Quest for Historical Truth"?

Sam Wineburg: When I moved to Stanford from the University of Washington in 2002, I began to encounter very bright students in our Masters of Teaching program who were highly critical of their high school history books, but who reserved a sacred place for Zinn's A People's History. It had been years since I read the book, so I went to the bookstore, purchased the latest edition and started to read. The first thing that popped out at me was that despite the fact that the book had been in print for over two decades no new scholarship had been incorporated in Zinn's narrative. Chapters on the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War and everything prior to 1980 were frozen in amber. It was as if, once you came to your historical conclusions, you never had to rethink your position in light of new scholarship—such as the opening up of the Soviet archives and the light these documents shed on spies in America, or the tell-all exposes of the Emperor Hirohito's inner coterie and how these memoirs changed our ideas about how close (actually, how distant) the Japanese were to surrender before Hiroshima. The more I started to dig the more I started to realize how useful A People's History would be pedagogically, particularly for students who conceptualize the past in stark binaries of true and false. 

Stephens: Why have historians had such varying views of Zinn's bestselling work?

Wineburg: I think most historians agree that the book is pretty weak as a piece of historical scholarship. The most favorable review of the book was by Eric Foner, who when he published his review in 1980, was fairly close to Zinn politically. But even Foner's review spelled out serious reservations. Since then, Michael Kazin, the editor of Dissent and a historian with impeccable leftist credentials, gave A People's History a good thrashing in a review published in 2004. It seems to me that the most ardent fans of the book come not from the community of professional historians, but from the ranks of high school teachers, Hollywood personalities, and Amazon.com reviewers.


Stephens: How do you try to get students to think about the debates of history or the contested nature of history?

Wineburg: I do what Louis Gottschalk did in developing the History Workshop back in the 1930s at Chicago. I have students take a claim and then follow the chain of evidence for it back to its source. This is not easy with Zinn, as the book contains no footnotes. So, we have to figure out where Zinn gets his information by looking at his bibliography (there is no archival research in the book—all of Zinn's references are to secondary sources). So, I have students go back to the books Zinn read, and then have them go to the notes in these books to try to figure out how Zinn has used this information and whether its original context has been preserved. This course is part of Stanford's freshmen seminar program, so my students are young people who only months before had been in high school. They have never experienced anything like this before. Nearly all of them are survivors of AP history, where history class meant memorizing copious amounts of factual information to do well on the 80 multiple choices items so they could get into a college like Stanford. They know a great deal of historical information but have little sense of what history is as a discipline, as a unique way of knowing. And too often our broad survey courses assume that undergraduates already have this foundation in place, when what students actually know how to do is score well on standardized tests.

Stephens: To what extent are high school teachers in the US getting students to engage in historical thinking?

Wineburg: I am loathe to generalize to all history teachers. At the same time, all we have to do is to look at a decade of No Child Left Behind, a failed policy inherited by the Obama administration and given new life by it. With a relentless focus on high-stakes testing there is little time to engage students in the kind of focused analyses that truly develops the critical capacity for thought. I sometimes see high school classrooms that do this when I consult with independent schools. But the reality that most public school teachers deal with is quite different. Becker's notion of "every man his own historian" has never been more pertinent than in the age of Google. Students know how to find information but many are ill-equipped to answer whether that information should be believed in the first place. In that sense, teaching students how to think historically has never been more essential to the vitality and ongoing health of the republic. If you don't believe me, just tune into Glen Beck the next time he hosts David Barton.

Spotting Anachronisms and the Development of Historical Consciousness

Randall Stephens

In the forthcoming January 2012 issue of Historically Speaking Donald Yerxa interviews Zachary S. Schiffman. In Schiffman's new book, The Birth of the Past (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), he looks at how the past emerged in the West—a past that was more than just before the present, but different from the present.

The interview and Schiffman's accompanying essay remind me of David Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). "Historical insight has indeed progressed," wrote Lowenthal in his now-classic text. "Awareness of the past as a web of contingent events subject to unceasing re-evaluation supplant notions of a predestined unfolding or moral chronicle. Antiquity no longer automatically confers power or prestige, nor do primordial origins seem the sole key to destiny's secrets. The old exemplary use of the past 'has been undermined, battered and exploded by the growth of history itself'"(364). Moderns are attuned to anachronisms in ways that premoderns were not. That cell phone, fax machine, Prius, or electric guitar does not belong in that 16th-century woodcut print. (I include one of my 19th-century Star Wars pics I created recently to have fun with this idea. [I saw another photoshopper do something similar.] It's not so far off from how things operate at a Renaissance Fair, where a friend told me he recently spotted some dudes decked out in Star Wars gear.)

Yerxa asks Schiffman to explain some of the outlines of historical thinking in the interview.

Yerxa: Would you distinguish among several notions that often get sloshed together in our thinking and writing: the past, anachronism, historical consciousness, and historicism?

Schiffman: “The past” is a very tricky term, largely because it is so commonplace. On this account, I find it useful to distinguish between “the past” as the time before the present, and “the past” as a time different from the

present. Priority in time does not automatically entail difference, and it is the sense of difference that constitutes “the past” as a conceptual entity. . . .

The distinction between past and present calls to mind the idea of anachronism, another tricky term. An anachronism is, purely and simply, something taken out of historical context—think of the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch,” a plot device in the faux-medieval comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An idea of anachronism is an awareness of things taken out of context—hence the hand-grenade scene in Monty Python strikes us as “funny,” in every sense of the word. And this scene also demonstrates that the idea of anachronism can manifest itself in many different ways, not simply by the scrupulous avoidance anachronisms but also by the wanton indulgence in them. That the indulgence in anachronisms need not be funny—in any sense of the word—is demonstrated by the Renaissance idea of the “living past,” which at one and the same time accepts and transcends the distinction between past and present. For the humanists, this distinction evoked a gap—what Barkan calls the “sparking distance”—that inspired a dynamic interaction with the classical tradition.

The idea of anachronism brings us to a consideration of “historicism,” a term that has occasioned many disputes and much misunderstanding because it weaves together diverse strands of thought, each with its own long, complicated history. On this account, I find Friedrich Meinecke’s definition of historicism as the nexus of the ideas of individuality and development to be the most simple and elegant, for it precludes having to trace historicism’s many strands back to their beginnings. Meinecke located this nexus in the late 18th century, but some scholars have challenged this interpretation, claiming that there was a Renaissance historicism born of the idea of anachronism, which engendered an acute sense of historical and cultural relativism. However, as I realized many years ago in my dissertation, an idea of anachronism simply constitutes an awareness of individuality, which does not necessarily entail one of development. Ironically, Meinecke’s definition of historicism has led me to a conclusion that would have caused him to roll over in his grave, namely that a sustained sense of the difference between past and present was born of Cartesian relational thinking before “the past” became historicized in the late 18th century. . . .

How might history teachers use creative anachronisms to talk with students about historical thinking? Could we develop a Where's the Anachronistic Waldo games that exercise the historical part of the brain?

Avast! Pirates in History

Heather Cox Richardson

One of my favorite graduate students was an expert on pirates. Trying to supervise his research meant that I had an opportunity to learn from him enough about historical piracy to have a working knowledge of it. From Roger, I learned that we actually have very few primary sources directly discussing pirates, and that much of what popular histories say of piracy is fantasy. I also learned that piracy was an economic and political enterprise that was vital to countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that early governments largely accepted it.

Finally, I learned that piracy is every bit as active today as it was in the Golden Age of Piracy, as men at sea make a living by stealing the wealth of others. There are even, my student pointed out, websites for the reporting of pirate attacks, although he explained that the legal tangles such accusations launch means that piracy remains seriously under-reported. There are also companies that promise protection against pirates, selling technology that makes the days when sailors rounding Cape Horn scattered carpet tacks on their decks to thwart robbers seem quaint indeed.

It is in honor of this student that I carry my keys on a fob of pirate flags.

Roger also inspired me to start reading about pirates on my own. Some of the scholarly books out there, notably Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates, are smart and worth reading.

But Roger’s tutorial taught me enough to know that the best book on pirates I’ve come across is William Gilkerson’s Pirate’s Passage. It purports to be a children’s story, although the themes it addresses are relevant to everyone. It is the story of the relationship between a young boy in Nova Scotia in the 1950s and an old sailor who brings a 35-foot yawl into the family dock on a treacherously stormy winter night. While the actual age and status of the old sailor is deliberately obscure, there is little doubt that he is—or was—a pirate.

As the weeks pass, the boy endures bullying from the local rich family that is trying to get control of his mother’s valuable real estate and develop it. In the evenings, the mariner tells the boy stories of pirates. Eventually, the child’s quest to defend himself from the local thugs and save his mother’s property becomes a personal exploration of wealth, ownership, and piracy, in the past and the present, forcing the boy to make decisions about what is truly just.

Pirate’s Passage is an engaging romp that tells good history. The author clearly knows his primary sources on piracy, and he often includes passages from them as the elderly man reads to the boy. Gilkerson situates Sir Francis Drake, Mainwaring, Morgan, the buccaneers, and all their peers in their proper times and places; he also brings to life what it meant to be a sailor tied to the pirate life: hunting pigs on Hispaniola, raiding passing vessels, and getting a share of the take—a rough life, to be sure, but one that compared favorably to life on a Royal Navy ship, where lice, scabies, whipping, injuries, and endless work were the norm.

But Gilkerson does more than provide a good account of historical pirates. His book is a profound reflection on the meaning of history. The mariner refuses to let his young friend imagine the pirates as fun swashbucklers. They are human beings, trying to negotiate the shifting spheres of politics and power in order to survive and, whenever possible, make their fortunes. The first conversation the old man has with the boy about pirates begins with an observation that speaks directly to what historians do: “Rules are a given,” he says. “What could be more important than seeing who makes ‘em, and who breaks ‘em, and who makes their own, and how it’s worked through time?”

As the old man tells his stories and advises the young man’s exploits, he insists the boy look deeply into cause, effect, and, critically, responsibility. When his young friend dismisses Drake as a criminal, the mariner asks him to reconsider. Was it Drake who was the criminal, he asks, or Queen Elizabeth, who encouraged the famous pirate to go strike a blow for England? Who, exactly, is a pirate, when governments as well as individuals engaged in piracy? What justification for theft of property is acceptable? Are the rules the same for the rich as for the poor? These questions are not just academic in Pirate’s Passage, either. The local family persecuting the boy’s mother represents the local government, forcing the boy to cross a number of legal lines (in extraordinarily interesting ways) in order to protect her property. He becomes, the mariner tells him, a member of the Brotherhood.

In the end, the boy must sift through not only the past but also the present for his understanding of justice. He does so with the guidance of a wily old mariner, who refuses to let him accept easy answers.

It turns out the old salt is not just a pirate, he is a historian.

June Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

It's a little past mid-June. And that means . . . the June issue of Historically Speaking is now on the Project Muse site. (As usual, access it through your library's website or through a university or college computer.) Hard copies should be arriving in mailboxes about right now.

This latest features a roundtable on teaching high school history; interviews with Robert M. Citino, Leo Damrosch, Thomas Albert Howard, Simon Price, and Peter Thonemann; essays by Sean McMeekin, David T. Courtwright, Bruce Mazlish, and Toby Wilkinson; and review essays by Aaron L. Haberman and William R. Shea.

Toby Wilkinson's "The Army and Politics in Ancient Egypt" is particularly relevant with the ebb and flow of the Arab Spring. An excerpt:

To the student of Egypt’s ancient history, the pervasive influence of the army in the country’s current politics comes as no surprise. Throughout the pharaonic era, from the foundation of the Egyptian state (ca. 3000 B.C.) to its absorption into the Roman Empire (30 B.C.), military might played a role at least as important as hereditary succession in determining who ruled the Nile Valley. The first king of the First Dynasty, Narmer, won his throne by force and proclaimed his victory in a great commemorative stone palette decorated with scenes of military victory. Celebrated as Egypt’s founding document, the Narmer Palette stands today in the entrance of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, just yards from the site of the popular uprising that recently unseated President Hosni Mubarak.

In the centuries and millennia following Narmer, the kingship of Egypt was always vulnerable to seizure by the strongman of the day, despite its presentation in art and writing as a sacred institution, god-given and immutable. More often than not, that strongman was an army commander. This pattern of succession is most apparent at times of political upheaval, for example the century of turmoil that fol- lowed the collapse of the Middle Kingdom in the 18th century B.C. In this uncertain time, when the kingship passed from one claimant to another with bewildering rapidity, one of the men who seized the throne (and ruled long enough to commission a stone statue of himself) was called Mermesha. His name simply means “overseer of the army.” Another ruler, King Sobekhotep III (ca. 1680 B.C.), started his career in the palace guard and rose through the ranks of the army to a position where he was able, successfully, to challenge for the throne. On his royal monuments he made a virtue of his background, openly flaunting his non-royal origins so as to distinguish himself from the tired and discredited royal family that, a generation or two earlier, had led Egypt into disunity and chaos. Sobkehotep III did not inaugurate a dynasty of his own, but instead in typical army fashion he left the throne to three brothers—Neferhotep I, Sahathor, and Sobekhotep IV—who shared his military background (their grandfather was an infantry officer).

Even in periods of strong central rule, such as the “golden age” of the Egyptian Eighteenth Dy- nasty (ca. 1539–1319 B.C.), a close study of the historical sources reveals the central role of the army in the succession to the throne. The founding kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty came to power as victors in a protracted civil war. Once established in the royal palace, they were keen to portray themselves in a new light: as kings by divine right, the guardians of Egypt’s religious traditions. Yet they never forgot their military origins. Thus when the childless Amenhotep I looked for an heir to succeed him, he chose an ambitious and dynamic army leader (the future Thutmose I) who would extend the borders of Egypt and forge an empire in the Middle East. Thutmose I’s surviving royal inscriptions betray his origins. In a tone of rampant militarism, they extol warfare as the righteous duty of an Egyptian ruler, and laud the king as a great warrior who is ready to roam the earth and take on any adversary: “He trod its ends in might and victory seeking a fight, but he found no one who would stand up to him.” . . .

Historically Speaking (June 2010)

Jihad-cum-Zionism-Leninism: Overthrowing the World, German-Style
Sean McMeekin

Is “Right Turn” the Wrong Frame for American History after the 1960s?
David T. Courtwright

The Politics of Religion in Modern America: A Review Essay
Aaron L. Haberman

Military History at the Operational Level: An Interview with Robert M. Citino
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

The Birth of Classical Europe: An Interview with Simon Price and Peter Thonemann Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Historical Thinking at the K-12 Level in the 21st Century: A Roundtable

The Historian as Translator: Historical Thinking, the Rosetta Stone of History Education
Fritz Fischer

Making Historical Thinking a Natural Act
Bruce Lesh

Considering the Hidden Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History
Robert B. Bain

“The Music Is Nothing If the Audience Is Deaf”: Moving Historical Thinking into the Wider World
Linda K. Salvucci

Galileo Then and Now: A Review Essay
William R. Shea

Tocqueville in America: An Interview with Leo Damrosch
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

God and the Atlantic: An Interview with Thomas Albert Howard
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Ruptures in History
Bruce Mazlish

The Army and Politics in Ancient Egypt
Toby Wilkinson

Limits of History, Limits of Historians

Randall Stephens

Timothy Chester has an interesting review of Sarah Blackwell's life of Montaigne--How to Live--in the TLS (May 7, 2010). Reading Chester's appraisal, I came across one of Montaigne's signature critiques. He took aim at historians, who, he thought, often made things up or misread evidence. It got me thinking about other judgments. Book reviews in history journals often point out the logical inconsistencies, over generalizations, silences, or glaring absences in a historian's work. "Historian X should really have looked at evidence Y." Here are a few such critiques, starting with that of the French Renaissance man of letters.

Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions," in The Complete Works of Montaigne, ed., Donald M. Frame (Stanford University Press, 1958.), 239.

They choose one general characteristic, and go and arrange and interpret all a man's actions to fit their picture; and if they cannot twist them enough, they go and set them down to dissimulation. Augustus has escaped them; for there is in this man throughout the course of his life such an obvious, abrupt, continual variety of actions that even the boldest judges have had to let him go, intact and unsolved. Nothing is harder for me than to believe in men's consistency, nothing easier than to believe in their inconsistency.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History," Cultural Studies 6:3 (October 1992): 337.

In the academic discourse of history--that is, "history" as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university "Europe" remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call "Indian," "Chinese," "Kenyan," etc. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called "the history of Europe." In this sense, "Indian" history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject-positions in the name of history. That Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge itself becomes obvious in a highly ordinary way.

Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York's Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (Garland, 1997), 159.

If maritime history, amateur and professional, has largely ignored the seaman, this is only part of a larger pattern in the writing of American history: neglect of the lower classes. We live, it is said, in an affluent, mobile society, we are all middle class, and it has always been so, more or less: thus the biases with which we view the contemporary scene have been reflected in our view of the past, and the existence of a lower class has been denied, or, when its actions forced some recognition, it has been contended that it acted as the tool of more prominent citizens.

See also this previous post: "I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad"

Don't Know Much about History and the Film Chalk

Randall Stephens

Believe it or not, the first day of class fast approaches. Soon, if you teach that is, you'll be standing in front of 20-30 college or high school students, mouths agape, eyes starring blankly, heads wearing baseball caps.

A few years back my cousin, Janelle Schremmer and her husband Troy Schremmer, starred in the film Chalk (2006), a Waiting for Guffman-esque mocumentary about the sometimes harrowing, sometimes exciting world of high school teachers. (Picked up by Morgan Spurlock's company, it's now airing on the Sundance channel.)

The movie is a scream for those who've endured some bad moments in front of a chalk or white board. Like other mocumentaries, Chalk relies on well-timed silences and awkward interactions. One particularly excruciating plotline involves a history teacher whose angling for a teaching award. His politicking and pandering is tough to watch, though, hilarious.

The film gets at the difficulty of engaging students in subjects that are foreign to them, history being a prime example. See the youtube clip here of Troy, playing Mr. Lowrey, who asks students on the first day of class: "What comes to your mind with 'history'"? Students gaze into nothingness, blank faces, disinterest, maybe disgust.

Bad first-day questions aside, ain't it hard to get the average student to think historically? In Sam Weinberg's words:

Historical thinking is unnatural. It goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think. We are psychologically conditioned to see unity between past and present. A colleague of mine teaches at Queens University in Belfast. He gives his undergraduates a 16th-century quote from Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) where she refers to the Irish as “mere Irish,” at which point the Catholic kids take umbrage. But when you go to the Oxford English Dictionary and look at 16th-century references for “mere,” it means “pure, unadulterated”—it’s a compliment, not an insult. It is an impossible psychological challenge to check every word, to read documents from the past and constantly ask, “Does this word mean the same thing that I think it means now?” (From an Joe Lucas's interview with Weinberg in Historically Speaking, Jan/Feb 2006.)

So, how can the history teacher or prof get students even vaguely into the subject? More than that, though, how can the history instructor facilitate historical thinking in the classroom? One step in the right direction is to set the tone on the first day of class. That involves something more than asking students "What comes to mind when you think of the word history?" Here are a few things I've done in the past, some more successful than others.
.

• Have students name their favorite dead person. (I ask them to exclude grandmas and grandpas. Too easy, too boring.) Follow up with a discussion of how history helps us understand the words and deeds of the dead. Is history a kind of necromancy?
• Have the student identify the most significant national incident to have taken place in his/her life. Ask them why they think that is important and what it might tell us.
• Ask students what it means to be an "American"? See if they can think of how history has shaped our national identity.
• See if students can name several ways that life today differs from life in the 19th century. (That might be tricky, I know, if they have no idea how the 19th century is unlike today.)
• Ask students the broad question of whether history has a direction. Is the world better or worse in 2009 than it was in 1700? Why?

I'd like to know what other exercises teachers and profs use as a hook on that first day.