A Hotline for Teachers

Heather Cox Richardson

It hasn’t been a great week for history teachers. News media made headlines out of a new report that only 13% of high school seniors are proficient in American history. Students perform worse in history than other subjects routinely tested in the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Who is to blame for the appalling condition of our historical knowledge? Most of us could make a pretty decent list of things that make it difficult to teach history today, but according to Rick Santorum, the problem is liberal teachers. In Ames, Iowa, hot on the presidential trail, the Republican former Senator from Pennsylvania ignored the Texas textbook controversy, the Virginia textbook controversy, the rewriting of history by David Barton and Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and Mike
Huckabee. Instead, Santorum declared:

We don’t even know our own history. There was a report that just came out last week that the worst subject of children in American schools is — not math and science — its history. It’s the worst subject. How can we be a free people. How can we be a people that fight for America if we don’t know who America is or what we’re all about. This is, in my opinion, a conscious effort on the part of the left who has a huge influence on our curriculum, to desensitize America to what American values are so they are more pliable to the new values that they would like to impose on America.

The bad news for teachers continued. How does Congress propose to combat this deficit in history? By slashing, or perhaps eliminating altogether, the funding for the Teaching American History program.

So for all the disheartened teachers out there, I offer a ray of hope. Months ago, I mentioned a high school sophomore who had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Just yesterday, the student sent me a copy of her final project for National History Day: an interactive website about the history of the hotline. There was a strict word limit and an equally strict limit for images, so the project does not take long to read. But I highly recommend you take some time to click through it (my favorite is the section on pop culture). It shows that, without a doubt, at least some students are learning and some teachers are teaching well.

The student is a minor, so I’m not going to give her name, but hats off to both her and to her teacher, Mr. Christopher Kurhajetz!

Nice work, both of you. You give us hope.

Revere, Revisited

Chris Beneke

Now that public interest has shifted to the contents of Sarah Palin's email account, it appears that the dust has settled on her imaginative reconstruction of Paul Revere’s Ride. It was fun while it lasted. The high point may have been Steven Colbert’s demonstration of how Revere could have rung a bell and fired multiple warning shots from a front-loading (single shot) musket, while riding on a rocking, coin-operated steed.

The editors of Revere’s once relatively sedate Wikipedia page were kept very busy with this extra attention. Palin supporters descended upon them with Palin-friendly edits. Then the gawkers, like me, stopped for a look. The page saw as many as 140,000 visitors on June 6.

At least we were all motivated to learn something about Paul Revere and the American Revolution (how many of those 140,000 were history professors and teachers making sure they had their stories straight?). The chief authority on this topic might be David Hackett Fischer, author of the magisterial book with the deceptively quaint title Paul Revere’s Ride. But Fischer appears to have (wisely) made himself scarce during this controversy.

Though the subject was one on which very few, outside of the Minute Man National History Park, are expert, Palin’s Revere comments gave some very respectable historians and pundits a chance to address the public on an early American history topic and to reflect more broadly on our commitment to education.

Here, forthwith, is a brief snapshot of the historically informed media attention:

In the New Yorker, Jill Lepore described Revere’s ride as a form of “hyperlore, which passes from one computer to the next, along a path best called hyperbolic.” Lepore provides a helpful link to Revere’s 1775 deposition for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which is held at the venerable Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to read Revere’s account, charmingly laden with contemporary expressions and the variety of spellings for which early Americans are justly known.

On Salon.com, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg were in grading mode, awarding Palin an "'F' on the Paul Revere quiz." They continue: "Okay, Sarah. Here's your guide to what you need to know about Paul Revere. He did not ring bells or fire warning shots. He did not warn the British. He did not defend ‘freedom.’ And he did not yell, ‘The British are coming!’ because he was a British subject in 1775. As Professor David Hackett Fischer explained in his book 'Paul Revere's Ride,' Revere would have shouted, ‘The regulars are coming!’ That is, the regular army. Americans in and around Boston were called ‘country people.’ Revere was not defending a nation, because the nation we became did not exist yet. Before the phrase ‘United States of America’ was born with the Declaration of Independence, those resisting British power, identifying with the Continental Congress, were collectively known as the ‘United Colonies.’"

Burstein and Isenberg’s larger point is that Palin, who lacks “a basic respect for knowledge” should be, but is decidedly not, “embarrassed by her ignorance.”

Robert Allison, was more sympathetic to Palin in his New York Daily News oped, finding several nuggets of truth in her understanding of Revere’s Ride: “[S]he was, in a sense [right]. Revere, in fact, was warning the British Empire—of which Massachusetts was part—that it could not invade the rights of Americans. Revere himself did not ring bells or fire shots, but the colonists he alerted did. The British troops beginning their march westward heard the bells, and knew the alarm was out. The rest of it—the warning about being secure and being free, was metaphorical . . .”

Allison’s larger point is that historians should take responsibility for failing to educate the public and be grateful for this opportunity to share what they know. "Sarah Palin is not a historian. . . . She is a politician, and quite emphatically a representative of ‘ordinary Americans.’ If her reading of Revere is too subtle for the professoriate, and if she comes across to many as woefully misinformed after visiting these sites, whose fault is it? Hers, or ours, as tour guides and historians?"

Acknowledging how much we all could do with more learning, Pulitzer-Prize winning commentator Leonard Pitts, Jr., observes that "while it is comforting to think Palin’s gaffe speaks only to her own considerable limitations, it is also short-sighted. The evidence suggests that she is less an exception to, than a reflection of, a nation that is in the process of forgetting itself."

Which, I now editorialize, makes Congress’ recent decision to gut the Teaching American History (TAH) program especially disappointing. I just assisted with a TAH proposal and was looking forward, as part of the proposed program, to take local elementary school teachers on a tour of the battle sites at Lexington and Concord, showing them where Paul Revere was likely to have been captured—and where he warned the Regulars that colonial militia were mustering—as well as discussing Paul Revere’s Ride with them.

The alarm has rung, but getting the actual message out will now be more challenging.

.-- .... .- - / .... .- - .... / --. --- -.. The Telegraph and the Information Revolution

Heather Cox Richardson

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent his famous telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?” from the U.S. Capitol to his assistant in Baltimore, Maryland. (See the dots and dashes in the title.) Morse had begun his career as a painter, but, the story goes, keenly felt the problems of communication over distance when his wife took ill and died while he was away from home. By the time he got the hand-delivered note warning him that she was sick, she was already buried.

While it had been a personal crisis that inspired Morse to pursue the telegraph, the importance of the new machine reached far beyond families. The telegraph caused a revolution in the spread of information in America. The information revolution, in turn, changed politics.

Notably, historians have credited the telegraph with hastening the coming of the Civil War. Before the time of fast communication, politicians could cater to different voters by making contradictory promises. Antebellum Democrats and Whigs could endorse slavery in the South and attack it in the North. Since news rarely traveled far, their apostasy seldom came back to haunt them.

The telegraph changed all that. It offered voters a new, clear window on politics. Now reporters could follow politicians and send messages to editors back home.

But faster communication did not necessarily mean accuracy. On the contrary, partisan editors tried to position their journalists in critical spots so they could control the spin about what was going on. They happily spun stories that would discomfit politicians they opposed. As the sectional crisis heated up, the telegraph enabled partisan editors to portray far away events in ways that bolstered their own prejudices.

On-the-spot reporting took away politicians’ ability to ignore the gulf between North and South. It forced white Southerners to defend slavery, and made Northerners sensitive to the growing Southern power over the government. The political parties could not remain competitive nationally, partisanship rose, and the country split. The result was bloody.

Information might come faster with the telegraph, but it was not necessarily more accurate. The same could be said about radio and television, which provided more information than ever, but still used a strong editorial filter.

Now a new tool has the potential to deliver the accuracy the telegraph promised. The internet provides even faster and more thorough information, with far less editorial filtering than ever before. This has given us instant fact-checking, in which politicians who vehemently deny saying something often find one of their statements with those very words posted to YouTube. It also gives us immediate commentary by specialists on a subject under discussion, judging the value of a proposed policy.

The internet has also given us a sea of bloggers who follow local developments and produce verifiable information that would never make it onto an editorial desk but that might, in fact, turn out to be part of a larger pattern. Joshua Marshall at www.talkingpointsmemo.com put such information together during President G. W. Bush’s second term to uncover the U.S. Attorney removals, a story the mainstream press initially missed altogether.

The web has the potential to break down editorial partisanship, but this accuracy has an obvious stumbling block. Will readers be willing to investigate politics beyond their initial biases to entertain a range of ideas and reach clear-eyed decisions about policies? Sadly, studies so far indicate the opposite, that people use the internet to segregate themselves along partisan lines and reinforce their prejudices rather than to tear them down.

The telegraph initially promised to break the close relationship of politics and the press by giving people access to events unfiltered by partisan editors. It failed. The telegraph only increased the partisanship of the news Americans read. Now the internet has the potential to break the ties between the press and politics for real. But can it, in the face of entrenched political partisanship?

One hundred and sixty seven years after the telegraph tapped out its famous words, we’re still struggling with the same questions.

Archeologists and Historians at Work

Randall Stephens

What do historians do? How do they go about their work?

The work of a historian is not entirely unlike that of an archeologist. Both see through a glass darkly. (Maybe that's more "darkly" for an archeologist.) They look at primary source materials (material culture and texts), make comparisons to corroborate evidence, think about the context of one era compared to that of another, and use secondary literature to give them a bigger picture.

A great deal of interpretation and analysis informs the work of archeologists and historians. What's more, archeologists often disagree with each other just as historians do. Questions still remain open for debate. And debates can easily become politicized, tied into issues of national identity, or personal.

The hard work of archeology is spelled out clearly in a wonderful piece in the latest issue of National Geographic: Robert Draper, "Kings of Controversy: Was the Kingdom of David and Solomon a Glorious Empire—or Just a Little Cow Town?" National Geographic (December 2010)

See, for instance, how Draper sets up the nature of controversies:

In no other part of the world does archaeology so closely resemble a contact sport. Eilat Mazar is one of the reasons why. Her announcement in 2005 that she believed she had unearthed the palace of King David amounted to a ringing defense of an old-school proposition under assault for more than a quarter century—namely, that the Bible's depiction of the empire established under David and continued by his son Solomon is historically accurate. Mazar's claim has emboldened those Christians and Jews throughout the world who maintain that the Old Testament can and should be taken literally. Her purported discovery carries particular resonance in Israel, where the story of David and Solomon is interwoven with the Jews' historical claims to biblical Zion.

Draper also sheds light on how texts are used (or misused) to ground the material evidence. Pieces of the puzzle are put together slowly over decades:

The books of the Old Testament outlining the story of David and Solomon consist of scriptures probably written at least 300 years after the fact, by not-so-objective authors. No contemporaneous texts exist to validate their claims. Since the dawn of biblical archaeology, scholars have sought in vain to verify that there really was an Abraham, a Moses, an Exodus, a conquest of Jericho. At the same time, says Amihai Mazar, Eilat's cousin and among Israel's most highly regarded archaeologists, "Almost everyone agrees that the Bible is an ancient text relating to the history of this country during the Iron Age. You can look at it critically, as many scholars do. But you can't ignore the text—you must relate to it."

Of course, historians don't use hard science or equipment in the same ways that archeologists do--carbon dating, chemical analysis, shock-proof computers that can handle intense heat and dirt. Historians don't typically study prehistorical cultures. And, historians spend their time digging, mostly, in the comfort of air-conditioned archives.

Still the similarities and points of contact between the two fields is quite interesting. We read evidence, whether that be in the form of pottery shards and olive pits stuck in the side of a Palestinian hill or 18th-century English newspapers and court records.

Does the ambiguity of the archeological record produce controversies that burn hotter than historical controversies? After reading the National Geographic article, I could not think of historical debates that rage with the same intensity.