Roundup: The History Classroom

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Janet Bagnall, "Teaching Sovereignty in Quebec Classrooms," The Gazette, November 6, 2012

. . . . Éric Lamoureux, 45, a history teacher at Vanier College, instructs students who have already had several years of Quebec history classes in high school. Students’ reaction to another course on Quebec history, complete with discussion of the two independence referendums, is “Oh, no, not that again,” he said. “Yet I teach a course on Montreal history and it’s full to the rafters.”>>>

Nicholas Ferroni, "Using Music in the Classroom to Educate, Engage and Promote Understanding," Huffington Post, November 8, 2012

. . . . Educators have been using music to effectively educate for as long as there has been music. Many of us were fortunate to have those unconventional and edgy teachers (mine were Mr. Caliguire and Mr. "Weez," and I can't thank them enough), who played the iconic protest songs from the anti-war movement of the '60s and '70s, and then we analyzed and discussed the lyrics. This was one of my favorite activities and it helped me understand the nation and its differing political views better than any textbook or lecture ever could. This, however, is not the method of using music in the classroom to which I am referring. The method of using music that I will be discussing can be applied to all subject areas and used to engage all learners.>>>

Lara Harmon, "Teaching with Food," Teachinghistory.org blog, October 15, 2012

We need food to live, but don't always think about where food that comes from. We carry foods and foodways with us as we immigrate, emigrate, or migrate. We share food and celebrate with it. Every bite we eat has a long history involving geography, trade, science, technology, global contact, and more.>>>

James M. Lang, "Teaching What You Don't Know," Chronicle of Higher Ed, October 22, 2012

. . . . I can confirm that easily enough from my own dozen years of teaching at a liberal-arts college. Although my background is in 20th-century British literature, I regularly have to dip back into the 19th century for my survey course on British literature. With almost no formal training in rhetoric, I count "Argument and Persuasion" among my standard course offerings. Every member of my department could make similar claims.>>>

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.

Advice for the Job Season: How to Think About Applying for a Job, Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

The academic job market is in full swing. That’s the good news.

And as usual, there are way too few jobs. That’s the bad.

At this point, I’ve spent significant time on both sides of the hiring equation, and have a few suggestions for navigating the job search.

First of all, you almost certainly will not get your dream job. But please, please hear this: THIS IS NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A GOOD CANDIDATE!!! It is because there are too few jobs. The C.V.s that come in for a search these days are frighteningly impressive. Yours is one of them. When committees have to choose whom to interview, I promise you they do not look at your materials and say: “Gee, why did this loser apply?!” They say: “And yet another terrific scholar. Fortunately for us, his work doesn’t quite fit what we’re looking for.” And they put your application aside.

While this is incredibly depressing when you’re going through it—and many schools contribute to the darkness by ignoring you, announcing the interview schedule before informing you you’re not on it, and so on—there is one important light to remember. YOU DO NOT WANT A JOB THAT IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR YOU. I know, I know, you want any job right now. But actually, you really don’t. Unlike many professions, it’s very hard for academics to change institutions. Try moving your family across the country for a job only to tell your partner six months later you hate your department and are going back on the job market to apply for a job on the other side of the country. Not a good idea. If a search committee doesn’t jump at the chance to interview you, you don’t want to interview them, either. The fit would have been a bad one.

Often, by the way, you won’t be able to tell whether or not your work is a good fit with a department. A scholar of the Taiping would seem, for example, to be a good candidate for an advertised job in nineteenth-century Asia. But that same (hypothetical) ad will not have mentioned that the department has a European scholar who is fiercely protective of his favorite course on world revolutions that highlights the Taiping. So even if you look at the description and think the fit should have been perfect, remember that there could have been a wide range of internal reasons you were not.

So if you’re almost certainly not going to get the job you want, or maybe any job, what’s the point in applying? You should consider jobs outside of the academy (more on that later), but you will have a better relationship with the academic job market if you reorient how you think about it.

If you can, try not to see applying for a position just as a job application. It is advertising. You are letting people who are in a position to appreciate the importance of your work know who you are and what you do. Until now, you have interacted primarily with just a handful of scholars, and most of them are at your own university. It’s the right time for you to take your scholarship to the world, and there is no better way to get an audience for it than to hand your materials to specialists around the country who are on search committees. They may not be able even to interview you because you do not fit the job at hand, but they may still be impressed with your materials. They might well remember you when someone asks for a recommendation for a conference panelist, or tell their editors that you have written an interesting manuscript and should be on their radar screens.

The only way to navigate such a bleak job market is to recognize that historians are a large community of scholars—to which you already belong—and that we are eager to hear what you’re bringing to the table.

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>

Our Pro or Anti-Slavery Constitution?

Steven Cromack

On January 27, 1843, during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison submitted a resolution to the Society for approval:  “Resolved, that the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell—involving both parties in atrocious criminality—and should be immediately annulled.”  As time wore on, his rhetoric and actions intensified.  On July 4, 1844, he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution.[1] Garrison believed that the Constitution was inherently evil because it supported slavery. That founding document was an affront to God.   

Is the Constitution pro-slavery?   

For the past four weeks, I have had the pleasure of attending the James Madison Foundation’s Summer Institute on the Constitution at Georgetown University.  The Madison Foundation awards fellowships to social studies teachers and aspiring teachers each year, usually one per state.  As such, I am surrounded by some of the best and brightest secondary social studies teachers from across the nation. These fellow teachers care deeply about their field and their career, and are just as passionate about the material they teach.  On Monday, in a morning discussion section, the topic of conversation was whether the Constitution was pro-slavery, a compromise, or something else. 

For a good portion of the time, the fellows discussed elements of compromise found in the Constitution.  Then Will Lorigan, from Indiana, argued that the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery document because while it conceded certain concessions to the Southern states, it also gave the national government the power and means to abolish the institution after 1808.  Another, Christopher Carl from Florida, added that the Northerners knew that by offering the Southern states serious concessions—proportional representation, the fugitive slave clause, and a ban on further legislation on the slave trade until 1808—they knew they would triumph in the long run.  Such assertions prompted significant and fascinating discussion.

It is a very intriguing argument.  Indeed, it seems that the Academy has been grappling with the issue of slavery and its role in the founding since the era of the Civil Rights movement. And the debate rages on.  In her 2006 book American Taxation, American Slavery, Robin Einhorn writes:

We can all agree that some of these masters had admirable qualities, that Thomas Jefferson was charming and eloquent, that James Madison was a talented political theorist, that George Washington was a brilliant general . . . .  Nevertheless, these men all owned human beings and, as politicians, defended the ownership of human beings— even when they believed that society would be better off if it acknowledged that “all men are created equal” . . . and so on.[2]

Throughout her book, Einhorn argues that slavery determined the economic system of the early United States, all the while undermining the spirit of a new American nation.

The historian Gordon Wood, however, lambasts those historians who considered the continuation of slavery as a failure of the revolution.  In a scathing review of Einhorn’s book, Wood writes:

It was inevitable that our recent accounts of the Revolution and the founding of the nation would reflect our increased understanding of the importance of slavery to the history of America. . . . to help satisfy the seemingly insatiable desire of many historians today to place slavery at the heart of America’s origins. . . . Robin L. Einhorn has no problem reading the present back into the past or, for that matter, reading the past forward into the present.[3]

Wood’s words essentially indict Einhorn for bringing the present perspective of hindsight into the past.

Was the Constitution pro-slavery or anti-slavery?  Was it a compromise or something else?  Such debates reveal the contested nature of history.  These men— Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—have long been dead.  Their writings live on.  Historians will never be able to fully know the inner worlds of these figures.  Scholars can never know their true intentions, or comprehend fully what they really meant.  The founders’ words offer clues, and perhaps if one gets enough pieces of the puzzle, an incomplete portrait emerges.  But if historians cannot agree on the shape of the piece, not even a partial picture emerges.

Another fellow, James Moran from Idaho, put it another way when he said, “the Constitution is what it is, nothing more.”

__________________

[1] “William Lloyd Garrison,” in American Political Thought, 6th Edition, ed. Dolbeare & Cummings (Washington: CQ Press, 2009), 203.

[2] Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 14.

[3]  Gordon Wood, “Reading the Minds of the Founders,” New York Review of Books, 28 June 2007.

When Is It Time to Stop Teaching Something?

Jonathan Rees

Those of us who teach the second half of the American survey course face a problem that only recent historians ever seem to face: our period keeps expanding.  Until there’s some kind of mass meeting where all we historians decide to move the dividing line in a two-course US survey sequence from 1865 or 1877 to 1900 or something, what counts as 1877 to the Present will only get larger.  This poses some problems for those of us who’d like to keep our courses current.

When I started teaching during the late-1990s, 1989 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that) was a natural time to stop.  A few years ago, I rearranged my entire survey course in order to make it up to September 11, 2001, without actually covering it as everyone I was teaching still remembered it perfectly.  Well, those days have changed.  Listening to my students talk, I realized it was time to recall the events of that day and at least a few of the ones following it because they were barely cognizant of what was happening at that time yet have been living in its shadow ever since.

Besides needing to make room for the near present, I’ve been trying to update some of my other lectures from further back in light of recent scholarship.  When I first started talking about the 1970s, it was all Watergate all the time.  After all, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened was the first book on that decade to come out after it ended.  Jefferson Cowie has absolutely torpedoed that stereotype forever.  I’ve also tried to include some of the absolutely amazing material that’s been written about the rise of conservatism in recent years by people like Kim Phillips-Fein and Bethany Moreton.

My problem, therefore, has not been what to include in the new lectures I’ve been writing.  My problem has been what to cut out.  Cover new ground in any depth and something has to go.  Since I’ve also tried to redesign my course to include less lecturing, some of these cuts have been quite painful.

For example, I used to work for Stanley Kutler.  If you know Stan, you know that he was the first academic historian to write a book about Watergate.  When you get Stan to talk about Nixon, he won’t stop.  Therefore, I picked up an enormous amount of information about Watergate almost by osmosis.  I’ve cut my Watergate coverage down from a lecture all its own to about ten minutes.  It just doesn’t seem as important as it once did, anyway. 

Another subject from the survey class I used to cover in much greater detail is the New Deal.  That was two lectures:  First New Deal in the first one, Second New Deal in the second.  The Depression got a lecture all its own.  It still does, but I’ve got the New Deal down to one lecture by simply admitting to myself that the long string of Alphabet Soup programs that history teachers have been teaching since about the time that Roosevelt died is actually rather boring.  I now cover the programs that I think were crucial (NIRA, Social Security, NLRA, and a couple of others) and let my students read about most of the rest.

Similarly, I used to have one lecture for the Populists and another lecture for the Progressives.  Maybe that’s because I was taught by so many political historians as an undergraduate and graduate student, but I’d rather be talking about scholarship that dates from after I was born, thank you very much.  If I enjoy it, I think they’ll enjoy it more.  Just because you learned it is no reason that you have to cover the exact same material that your professors did. 

Ultimately, I think the question of coverage is the key here.  As Lendol Calder has been saying for years, our survey courses do not have to turn us all into walking encyclopedias.  (In fact, if we do our jobs right many of your students will come back for more in upper-level courses.)  Since covering everything will get even harder as time marches on, perhaps its best to change your approach before defeat becomes inevitable.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs mostly about technological and academic labor matters at More or Less Bunk, but still writes about history there every once in a while.

Norway Doorway, pt 5: Sean Taylor on Reacting to the Past

Randall Stephens

One of the more enjoyable things about my Fulbright experience in Norway has been getting to know other American Fulbrighters and to hear about the work they are doing. Martin Fisk (Oregon State University, University of Bergen) is studying bacterial life "deep in the Earth and their impact on the rocks in which they are found. This research could contribute to solutions

of a number of environmental problems and help to identify evidence of past life on Mars." He's one of the researchers who is taking part in a future Mars Rover mission. Others are studying climate science, literature, drama, public art, the nature of genocide, and much, much more.

The historian Sean Taylor--a Fulbright scholar at the University of Agder in Kristiansand--is associate professor of history at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His research focuses on colonial, revolutionary, and early national America. While in Norway he is working on a dynamic new pedagogy that is changing the way we draw students into debates about history. Called Reacting to the Past, this history game offers students the chance to engage history on a more direct level.

The Reacting to Past website at Barnard College describes it as follows:

Reacting to the Past (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills.

In the video embedded here I speak to Taylor about his use of this pedagogy and how it has worked in his classroom. He also speaks to me about Barnard College's role in developing curriculum and hosting events. And finally Taylor tells me a little about how he'd like to use Reacting in the classroom in Norway.

The Confucians Who Saved Middle Earth

Steven Cromack

It is particularly hard to get students interested in United States history. But this can seem almost impossible when studying ancient civilizations. How could a teacher get her students interested in Confucianism? If 19th-century U.S. history seems distant, what about the Warring States period in 481 B.C.?

One of the ways might be to take the ideas Confucius posited and find them in today’s culture. According to Confucius, an individual must be great, humble, and exhibit tremendous self-discipline. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam are Confucian heroes. A teacher can use Tolkien’s Middle Earth to examine Confucianism and the Warring States Period of China.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth stands upon the brink of destruction. All that the dark lord Sauron needs to destroy the world is his “ring of power.” Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, possessed the one ring and brought it to the Council of Elrond. There he sat quietly as the leaders of the free races debated what to do with the ring. Eventually, the group decided that someone must cast the ring back into Mount Doom, where it was forged. No one, however, could agree on who could or should take the ring. At long last Frodo volunteered to carry the burden, bear its suffering, and resist the temptation to use its power. Tolkien writes, “At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. ‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’”[1] In the wake of this declaration, the free peoples of Middle Earth rallied behind the hobbit, and so began the journey of the fellowship of the ring. Throughout the journey, Frodo was tempted to use the ring and to surrender to its temptation. But, he resisted, often with the help of friend Sam.

With the collapse of the Zhou Dynasty, China entered a civil war that would last for several centuries. At the center of the Warring States conflict was a debate over the role and purpose of the emperor. In his Analects, Confucius posited that the king needed to exhibit te, or the great magnetic, moral force produced by holding fast to the “way of the ancestors,” (the tao.) In order to do this, the king had to follow the li, or the traditional, ritually prescribed actions including etiquette. In The Analects, the Master [Confucius] said, “He who rules by moral force (te) is like the pole-star, which remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it” (Analects, Book 2, Ch. 1). Confucius continued that the king must, “govern them by moral force (te), keep order among them by ritual (li), and they will keep their self respect and come to you by their own accord” (2.3).

Confucius’s words about how the king should act were merely an idealistic vision of what a good emperor should look like. He saw the reality of the Chinese monarchy: every dynasty rose in the glory of victory and fell violently from power. For Confucius, there was no good king, no savior, no real exhibitor of te at the top. Confucius believed that no living man could separate himself from the corrupting power that comes with ruling. If the king at the top could not provide order to tame the chaos, or provide stability for the bottom, what hope was there for the world, or those living in it?

Confucius believed that humans could impose their will on the world. As there was no savior coming to rescue the world, every person must act as the good king. Each individual must be the savior of everyone else and have the wholeness of a king. Everyone must exhibit te. On the part of the person, this takes tremendous self-discipline (8.4). According to the Analects, self-discipline meant that individuals must overcome selfish desires, remove all traces of arrogance, and “be loyal and true to your every word, serious and careful in all you do.” As for the person who has “taken goodness for his load,” as Frodo did, Confucius wrote (8.3):

In fear and trembling,
With caution and care,
As though on the brink of chasm
As though treading on thin ice.

Frodo and Sam took “goodness” for their loads and acted because Middle Earth was “on the brink of chasm.” For Confucius, the tao was “the way” to take control of the chaos, to free oneself from the pain of living in the midst of civil war or strife. Every individual has the capability to do this.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam exhibited te (moral force). They held fast to the simple ways of their people and were not corrupted like the race of men. They were the saviors of Middle Earth, had the wholeness of kings, and exercised tremendous self-discipline to resist a multitude of temptations. In the wake of their willingness to make the impossible possible, Middle Earth fell in line behind them. Frodo and Sam stepped in and acted as great kings.

What other Confucian heroes can you think of?
_______________

[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 264.

Capitalism and Colonialism

Dan Allosso

When I was reading for my US History oral exams, one of the historiographical arguments that really got my attention was the long-running debate over the market transition. The question of when America made the turn from being an agrarian, egalitarian society to becoming a commercial, class society fascinated me; and so did the heated disagreements of eminent historians. As I read more, I realized that a lot of the argument really had to do with the definition and grouping of these terms (as Michael Merrill brilliantly pointed out in a 1995 article called “Putting Capitalism in its Place”). Were Joyce Appleby and Christopher Clark (not to mention Allan Kulikoff or Winifred Rothenberg!) even talking about the same thing when they used the words capitalism, market, commerce, and agrarian? Did “agrarian” naturally line up against “commerce,” and did either side really own the moral high ground?

Now I’m teaching Honors US History to undergrads. Clearly it wouldn’t be appropriate to expose them to the full glare of this debate. It would not only take too long to do, but it would be drilling too deep in even an Honors general education class for non-history majors. But I don’t want to cruise through this moment in history without mentioning it – I’m trying to challenge these students to think critically, so it’s my job to bring up the complex issues the textbook buries.

I had them read a couple of chapters of Matthew Parker’s 2011 book The Sugar Barons. Parker writes about Barbados in the early decades of its sugar revolution, the 1630s and 40s. He includes a detailed description of the introduction of slaves into the British sugar economy, through an interesting series of highly conflicted excerpts from the memoirs of English observers. A really valuable addition, from my perspective, was Parker’s extensive use of letters between several Barbados planters and merchants and John Winthrop, Governor of the City on the Hill.

The direct connection between Boston and the West Indies is useful, I think. Unlike Virginia or the New Netherlands or the Spanish colonies, which are usually presented to students as business ventures, the New England colonies are often portrayed as the seat of . . . something different. Something exceptional. The early link between Boston and Barbados, the Winthrop family’s business interests in the Caribbean, and the close connection that developed during the English Civil War, when Barbados became a principal market for New England produce, are all important challenges to the idea that there was ever a clean separation between commerce and colonies.

This is not to say that the type of agrarian anti-capitalism described by historians like Kulikoff never existed. But perhaps it suggests that when such sentiments developed, they were reactions to a colonial system built on a very problematic type of commerce rather than attempts to claim that a naïve, pre-commercial yeomanry had ever existed in America. From this perspective, even the earliest “agrarian” documents like Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia seem to share something with writings of back-to-the-land idealists of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

Norway Doorway, pt 3: Trysil and Bergen

Randall Stephens

A couple of weeks ago I gave a series of lectures in Trysil, Norway, on American history, regional culture, and religion in the South. It was a wonderful visit, though, I think I never figured out just how to say "Trysil" like a native. (Spoken, it sounds like "Trusal" to me.)

My hosts were wonderfully gracious. Lively conversationalists and the sort of people you meet briefly and miss quite a bit when you're back on the road.

The school at which I spoke had a culinary, vocational program. Meaning: fantastic multi-course lunches that featured a salmon casserole and then moose burgers. Quite a few of the students here were part of a sports program. And, from what I understand, some of those were on the professional track, with sponsorships and bright futures. Xtreme energy drink ski suits with aggro fonts and nuclearized color schemes.

One of the sessions I gave in this lovely ski resort town was for teachers. I focused on the range of teaching materials and resources out on the world-web, inter-tubes:

"Teaching American History and Culture with Online Newspapers and Images."

The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division (www.loc.gov/pictures/) and the newly created Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) hold a treasure trove of historical and cultural artifacts. In this seminar we will explore using the free newspaper archive and the vast resources of images at the Library of Congress to reconstruct the past. Students could be encouraged to take a news item from 1860-1922—a political campaign, scandal, natural disaster, technological innovation, etc.—and then investigate that by using both newspapers and visual materials (prints, cartoons, photographs.) Students might be asked to outline what we learn about a particular period in history by examining the item being reported. Students might also explore the biases and perspectives of cartoonists and reporters. Questions like the following might prod the conversation: Why would a reporter or editor in the North take a different view of black voting rights than one in the South would? How did the political battles of the late 1800s differ from region to region? How are the views of contemporary Americans or Norwegians different today from those being studied here? Students should come away from the project with an understanding of the context of late 19^th and early 20^th century history, a greater appreciation of change over time, and insight into how news and other media shape our view of the past.

As part of that talk I gave a handout to the teachers that included the sources we discussed. Here's that list, with some brief descriptions

ONLINE RESOURCES FOR AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE

BOOKS

Google Books
http://books.google.com/

DATA MAPS

Bedford/St. Martin’s Map Central
http://worth.runtime.com/browse/Music

HISTORICAL IMAGES

Artcyclopedia (paintings, prints, lists of movements and countries)
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs On-line (cartoons, photographs, paintings)
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/

Picturing America (historical American paintings)
http://picturingamerica.neh.gov/

HISTORICAL MAPS

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (images, manuscripts, maps)
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/

LESSON PLANS/TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (lesson plans, guides, documents, and more)
www.gilderlehrman.org/

Smithsonian: Teaching American History
www.smithsoniansource.org/

Teaching History: National Education Clearinghouse
http://teachinghistory.org/

NEWSPAPERS

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

University of Pennsylvania Libraries: Historical Newspapers Online
http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/guides/hist/onlinenewspapers.html

SOME OF EVERYTHING

American Memory from the Library of Congress (music, movies, documents, photos, newspapers)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Archive (documents, movies, photos, music)
www.archive.org

Bedford/St. Martin’s Make History Site (documents, photos, maps, and more)
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/makehistory2e/MH/Home.aspx

Today I arrived in Bergen for three days of sessions with students and teachers at the Bergen Cathedral School, founded, according to legend, all the way back in 1153 by Nicholas Breakspear, who would go on to become pope Adrian IV. Breakspear . . . no relation to Burning Spear, right? (Check out where I am and where I'll be on the Google Map.) These are bright, bright kids. They will no doubt keep me on my toes!

When I'm not doing the shutterbug thing around town and on the wharfs, I'll be speaking about the following: “The Praying South: Why Is the American South the Most Religious Region of the Country?” and “What do American English & Regional Accents Tell Us about America?”

Next Week it's on to Øya videregående skole 7228 Kvål. Say that five times quickly.

American Pre-history

Dan Allosso
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I thought I’d try something different this fall, to add an element of perspective and Big History to the beginning of my US History survey.

So I pulled some of the latest ideas from genetics-enhanced archaeology from books I’ve read recently, including Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and How We Survived, Colin Tudge’s Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, and David J. Meltzer’s First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Although most textbooks nowadays briefly mention pre-Columbian America, the impression you get is of a pre-history that is vaguely understood, remote, and largely irrelevant to American history. By starting my syllabus at 36,000 BP rather than 1492 and devoting my first lecture to “Pre-history,” I tried to suggest to the students that the pre-Columbian American past is interesting and relevant.

Of course, you’d be interested in pre-Columbian Americans if you carried their blood, and I thought my students might be interested to know that outside the U.S., the majority of Americans are partly descended from the people who were here when the Europeans arrived. Norteamericanos are unique in the degree to which we didn’t mix, although the Mexicans and even the Canadians did much better than those of us living in the middle third of our continent. And I thought my students ought to understand that three out of the five most important staple crops in the modern world (maize, potatoes, and cassava – the other two are rice and wheat) were developed by early American farmers. Even the 2010 textbook I’m using fails to escape the gravity-well of the master narrative, repeating the myth that Indians were poor farmers and that agriculture was invented in the eastern Mediterranean and later in China.

Finally, I was really fascinated (and I hope some of my students were as well) by the recent developments in theories of migration. Although anthropologists are not yet unanimous on the issue, there is growing support for the theory that most of the people alive today are principally descended from an ancestral population of plains hunter-gatherers who migrated from Africa between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago and settled on the steppe north of the Black Sea. When the last ice age began, steppe and tundra environments spread across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and these people followed the herds of caribou, mammoth, and wooly rhinoceros. The plains hunters prospered as earlier human populations and their temperate forest habitats dwindled. By about 30,000 to 26,000 years ago, some of these plains hunters had spread westward into Europe (where based on genetic evidence they mixed with some older groups, including Neanderthals), while others had covered the entire breadth of Siberian and arrived at Beringia, their gateway to the Americas.

Most of my students seemed vaguely aware that the first Americans migrated from Asia across a “land bridge.” I tried to impress on them that Beringia, which lasted for 16,000 years and was 1,100 kilometers wide, was really not a “bridge,” and the people who crossed it weren’t “migrating.” They were living in Beringia and northwestern Alaska, just as they had done for hundreds of generations. But I think the most important element of this story is that it helps the students recognize that Native Americans and the Europeans they encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 were cousins who had expanded in different directions from the same ancestor population. The differences between them were extremely recent – as is recorded history.

As a final example of this recent rapid change, I talked a little about milk. Most people in the world cannot digest milk after childhood. The ability of Europeans to synthesize lactase and digest lactose is a recent mutation, dating to about 10,000 years ago. It corresponds with the domestication of the aurochs into the modern cow (several African groups like the Masai share this trait, but scientists believe they developed it and domesticated cattle independently), and the mutation probably spread rapidly because it gave its bearers a tremendous nutritional advantage in times of famine. This rapid spread of a biological change, I hope, will suggest other ways that Europeans and Native Americans diverged from their shared ancestry, while at the same time reminding my students of this shared heritage.

Norway Doorway, pt 1

Randall Stephens

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching several lectures in Stavanger and Bryne, Norway, as part of my work as a Fulbright Roving Scholar here. The students were bright and had, for the most part, high proficiency in English. Some, I figure, have a better grasp of English than do many American college students. (Thanks to all the teachers for being such great hosts!)

I gave a few talks and generated some discussion with students at the Stavanger Katedralskole, an institution that dates back to the early 19th century. The cathedral that looms next to it is Norway's oldest, dating to the 1100s. The beautiful interior of the school looked like something out of a Carl Larsson painting.

The school describes itself with the following on its website.

Stavanger Cathedral School, Royal Farm, is one of the oldest schools and has since 1800 been one of the most prestigious and tradition-rich school in Stavanger. The school is located between the city lake, Cathedral Square and within walking distance to almost everything in the city center. The school has teachers who are deeply committed and have a high professional competence. Stavanger Cathedral School is characterized by high job satisfaction among the approximately 485 students, and as a student here, you will develop friends for life! Student Activities at the school are varied and we have much to offer. Stavanger Cathedral School is a modern school, with well-equipped classrooms and special rooms.

I spoke to the students about American advertising in the postwar era, the 2012 election, and the founding of America. It was interesting to talk with them about the role the US plays in the world and to hear what they had to say about America from the vantage of Norway.

We started out our look at the founding by asking what role the government should play in the lives of citizens. "It should guarantee the welfare of all," said some. Others thought that governments should be responsible for securing education and equal opportunities. We had some time to talk about the long anti-government tradition in America and to focus on some of the debates among the founders over less or more government. That theme tied in well with the 2012 election, the Tea Party, and the views that GOP candidates have expressed about President Obama. I used a recent quote from frontrunner Mitt Romney: "President Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society, we're an entitlement society, where government's role is to take from some and give to others."*

One of the challenges for me will be to try to explain why so many Americans have a low opinion of the government and how that has been critical to the debates that have roiled the public over the decades and centuries.

Now, on to give talks in Porsgrunn and Oslo this week.

One, Two, Three O'clock, Four O'clock Rock Course

Randall Stephens

I'm teaching a course this semester on rock history. That's a topic I naturally enjoy and it fits in well with other classes I've offered--America in the 1960s, History of the Civil Rights Movement, the South since 1865.

But I've found my inner cynic asking, is this worth a semester of study, time, and attention? Does the subject lend itself to an academic, historical treatment. (Maybe I imagine a medievalist indignantly saying, "You teach what?!")

In the end, I think rock history does, in fact, deserve critical, serious treatment. Since the 1970s historians have studied and taught topics once considered to involve, as E. H. Carr might have put it, "facts" of no historical significance. We now have courses in our profession on sports history, the history of leisure, and more. So why not this? And, of course, it's not like this is the first time a rock history class has been offered.

Still, I like to challenge students now and then with questions about rock's relevance and larger cultural impact. The class is organized around a series of questions--some large, some small. On the small side, yesterday we asked why it is that over fifty years later most of the students in the class know at least 10 different Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller songs. Could the average college student come up with even three

songs from the 1920s? So . . . what accounts for the longevity of rock? Why has it lasted when other styles lay in the dustbin of history? Will twenty-year-olds still remember 1950s rock in another fifty years?

We can also talk about change over time and ask questions about how we get from point A to point B. The class reading from the other day covered the rise of Sun

Records, the critical response to rock in the media, and the appeal and star power of Elvis Presley. We looked at two versions of the same song to talk about how early rockers reworked what they sang. The orginal, Bill Monroe's 1947 "Blue Moon of Kentucky," is embedded above. Elvis's rock-a-billy retooling is obvious in the cover version from less than a decade later. But what accounts for the difference between the two? What musical developments were underway in the years between the two?

In addition we also have some overarching questions, like the following:

How did rock become the dominant genre of popular music?
What factors led to the popularity of certain bands and performers?
How was rock based on earlier styles of music?
In what ways did rock change society?
How can we best understand the relationship between fans and musicians?
Is “rock” still a viable form?

We'll see how well those questions work as the semester progresses. Perhaps I'll settle on other ones if these prove useless!

Doorway to Norway

Randall Stephens



"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness," Mark Twain famously quipped. So, here's to broad-minding it and globe trotting.



In spring 2012 I’ll be traveling to Oslo, Norway, to begin six months as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies. Rovers shuttle around the entire country, leading seminars with high school English teachers and teachers-in-training at colleges and universities, and deliver lectures and seminars to upper and lower secondary students on a variety of topics, broadly under American Studies themes.



For the students, or pupils as they calls them, I’m preparing lectures and discussions on: "Remembering the American Civil War 150 Years Later"; "To Begin the World Anew: The Founding of the American Republic and America’s Political Debates"; "Advertising the American Dream"; "European Travelers in 19th-Century America"; "Race, Rock, and Religion: 1955-1966"; "The Praying South: Why Is the American South the Most Religious Region of the Country?" (I've been thinking of another one on regional American accents and what those tell us about the nation's history.) My workshops for teachers will deal with online resources, getting pupils interested in historical and cultural debates, creating digital archives with students, and Norwegian immigration to America.



One of the country's most famous sons, Roald Dahl, once remarked: "Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English." I’m especially interested in the close connections between America, Great Britain, and Norway. Norwegian students learn English from a very early age and their proficiency and knowledge of both the US and Great Britain is surprisingly extensive. In English in Europe (Oxford, 2004), Manfred Görlach observes:

English first received a place in Norwegian secondary schools with the Education Act of 1869, and in 1896 it was made compulsory as the second foreign language in secondary schools. However, it did not become the first foreign language until 1935, and although English was well established as a school and university subject before 1939, the war accelerated a shift in emphasis from German to English. English played an important role in the democratization process in Norwegian primary education in the 1950s, under the slogan "English for everyone," and Norwegian children now receive at least seven years of compulsory English in school, and usually more after that. Today, a majority of Norwegians have had at least some formal training in English (63).

Though, it is true, students in Norway know less on the specifics and more on the generalities, and perhaps, gain much of their understanding from pop culture and television. (A little like knowing about California through Entourage, Baywatch, or Beach Boys songs.)



I’m just getting back from a one-week stay in Norway, where I met with my fellow Rovers—Isaac Larison and Sarah Anderson. (Both have terrific plans for conducting their work in the classroom and with teachers! Interacting with them and our hosts gave me some great ideas about how I’ll be proceeding. Isaac and Sarah will start their travels shortly.) I also got a good briefing about Norwegian life from the Fulbright office in Oslo—thanks to Kevin McGuiness, Rena Levin, and Petter Næss Sara Ullerø, and Abbey Schneider for the thorough orientation. And I spent some valuable time with the other Rovers observing English classes in Halden and Sarpsborg. Karin Pettersen, Steinar Nybøle, Thomas Hansen, and the faculty and staff of the Norwegian Centre for Foreign Languages in Education were tremendous hosts, telling us much about the Norwegian education and describing the ideological context of the system. A visit to Halden Fortress and a traditional four-course Norwegian feast in one of the castle’s buildings was a treat.



I’m looking forward to interacting with students and teachers and seeing how American culture is perceived through a Norwegian lens. In the months ahead I’ll be writing dispatches from Norway about my experiences in the classroom and my work with teachers.



Are Norwegian students more or less like American high school juniors and seniors/college freshmen and sophomores? How do they view the United States’ and America's relationship with the rest of the world? What interests them most about American culture and society? I’m eager to explore these and many other questions once I’m in Norway in four months. (I'm already thinking about a survey to conduct with the pupils about the US.)



Finally I want to get in a plug for the Roving Scholars Program. If you would like to teach and conduct research abroad and if you are at all interested in a Fulbright like this, you should apply for a position for 2012-13. The application deadline is in the middle of September. Have a look at the refurbished Norwegian Fulbright site here for more details.

School’s Back From Summer: Blogging about Teaching

Edward J. Blum



[This is a crosspost from Religion in American History]



Well, it’s about that time, that delightful and dreadful moment when classes begin again. Unless you are privileged to have a sabbatical or be on fellowship (cough, cough, Matt Sutton you lucky duck, cough, cough), the end of August is when the kids come back and time flies away. Alas, school’s back from summer!



This marks the beginning of my second decade of teaching, and I wanted to try something new not just within my classes, but about my classes. So, I’ve decided to start an interactive blog about teaching the United States history survey. I wanted to work through the changes that I’ve made, give my fellow teachers a platform to post and to discuss their teaching strategies, and to give students an opportunity to see behind the process of teaching and to participate in what is taught. I grabbed one of my favorite colleagues and teachers, Kevin Schultz from the University of Illinois, Chicago, author of a great survey textbook, Hist, and author of the tremendous new monograph Tri-Faith America, to help with the endeavor, and away we go. I invite you to join us over there with your own posts, reflections, thoughts, and considerations.



Religious history has been one of the ways my classes have transformed dramatically – not just the religious content of the course, but also the religious composition of the classroom. When I first taught in Kentucky, it seemed everyone knew what the Bible was. I don’t think that’s the case of my San Diego students. All of our classrooms and contents will be distinct, and I hope you’ll make your way to the blog to help me and others to teach better (or at the very least have some zany fun in the process). Like it or not, school’s back from summer.



teachingunitedstateshistory.blogspot.com

Sal Khan and Online Teaching

Dan Allosso

For those who don’t recognize his name, Sal Khan is the founder and faculty of Khan Academy, which offers over 2,400 educational videos on the web, free of charge. Khan’s goal is to educate the world.

He’s been featured on PBS’s News Hour, he’s on Forbes list of “Names You Need to Know,” he’s spoken at TED and at the end of his talk Bill Gates came up on stage to say how cool he thought Khan was.

In the TED Talk clip (at about 2:50), Sal Khan tells the story of how he began tutoring his cousins, and putting “refresher” talks on YouTube for them to look at when he wasn’t around. The cousins preferred the videos to the tutoring, and Khan realized the reason was that they could go over them at their own pace, without the pressure of a teacher looking at them. He extended this idea to the classroom, and suggested teachers use the videos as “homework,” and then follow up in class. Teachers become less involved in lecturing and more involved in mentoring, students get instruction that moves at their pace and requires them to master a concept before they move on (Khan says even smart students get to the end of traditional curricula with a “swiss-cheese” knowledge of a subject, which can cause problems for them later), and schools can focus less on teacher-student ratios, and more on meaningful interaction between teachers and students.

I think this is insanely cool. So does Bill Gates, and you can see what he says about it at the end of the TED Talk, and also in the clip from The Gates Notes on the Khan Academy homepage. Bill especially likes the fact that Khan “has taken all this material, and broken it down into little 12-minute lectures.” Of course I like this, because I’m doing the same thing with my online American Environmental History program. But more than that, I think it’s an editing process that helps you focus on what is really important in a topic.

Well okay, you may be thinking, but the Khan Academy format is better suited to some kinds of learning. Sure it is, but let’s not kid ourselves that there’s none of that kind of learning in what we do as history teachers. Even at the college level. Yes, he’s got a lot more math up there than he does history. And yes, I think that’s partly because history is much more driven by interpretation—it’s not just a careful accumulation of brick-like facts that get stacked one on another until you’ve built a wall (with apologies to Arthur Marwick). But the idea of turning lectures and discussions/reflections upside-down is exciting!

There’s been a lot of recent talk here and throughout the history blogosphere (for example) about the positive and negative possibilities of online education. I think Khan Academy is worth looking at carefully, and keeping a sharp eye on.

History and Myth

Dan Allosso

To follow up on Heather, Jonathan, and Chris's posts—and the general theme that we’ve been developing, about history education, the state of the profession, and writing for the public—I’ve been listening to James Loewen’s lecture series, The Modern Scholar: Rethinking Our Past. Like Lies My Teacher Told Me, (my thoughts on that book here), the lectures focus on bad history taught to high school students, and how we could do it better. Columbus, Civil War & Reconstruction, and the racial “nadir” of the 1890s-1920s are again central, as is Loewen’s critique of “heroification.”

Heroification, Loewen says, is the rendering of pivotal figures in American history (Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Wilson) as two-dimensional icons rather than as complicated humans. This process not only decontextualizes their achievements, it renders them useless as role models. And it feeds a myth-building process that is not only ethnocentric, but that stifles initiative and participation in civic life. At the moment, these are the parts that fascinate me: myth and participation.

The myths supported by mainstream high school texts include American exceptionalism and a subtler, but possibly more problematic, commitment to “Progress.” Loewen demonstrates that both myths are historically inaccurate with dramatic, fact-based counter-narratives. But I wonder whether myths can be defeated with facts? Maybe what is needed is a powerful counter-myth.

When I began thinking seriously about writing, a few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Terry Davis, author of the classic young adult novel Vision Quest. As the thousands who studied with Terry during his career at Mankato State can attest, Terry is not only a great writing coach, he’s a tireless advocate of serious writing for young adults. “You won’t have to condescend,” Terry said when he invited me to join his YA fiction workshop. So I tried not to, when I wrote Outside the Box. I tried to project myself back, and think about teen alienation from the inside, as I had experienced it myself.

I think it’s significant that Harry Potter never has to kill anybody. But what type of myth—what type of worldview—does this give to a generation growing up in a nation at war? Like the myth of Progress hidden in our high school histories, does it make the real world more or less comprehensible for young adults? Loewen says students are bored by history and sense that they’re being lied to. Unlike Harry Potter, their history teachers are not supposed to be presenting escapist fiction. But if Loewen is right, it’s not at the level of facts, but at the level of myth that high school history really operates. So what about alienation?

Young adults are expected to rebel, for a little while, from the society of their parents. But typically, they’re then expected to accept the authority of the people and institutions they had rebelled against. Their ultimate reward is that they will inherit that authority, and the cycle will be complete. This myth of cyclical youth rebellion is based on the myth of progress. What happens to it, if we admit there are limits to growth? If society’s current behaviors are unsustainable, should we be reassuring ourselves and our children that their alienation is just a phase that they’ll outgrow?

What does this imply for those of us who want to write history for young adults? Are there counter-myths that can be useful? The myth of “the little guy against faceless power” resonates in our culture, from the Terminator movies to internet conspiracy theories. Historians on the right and the left have built their narratives on this structure—it’s no accident that Glenn Beck hides his “let the corporate overlords do what they want” message in a swirl of populist rhetoric. Can this counter-myth be used to make space for young Americans to challenge authority on something more than a generational-hormonal basis?

All myths leave out detail and complexity. Can a historian work at the mythic level, without betraying history? America is said to be exceptional in the great distance between what our professional historians understand about our past, and what the general public believes. Is this because—unlike other cultures whose myths reside in shared ethnicity or religion or some other institution—Americans are held together by their mythical history? Should we distinguish even more than we do, between historians and people who write for the public?