American History
05/10/2010 22:13
As I’m getting ready to read for my comprehensive exams, I’m struck by the number of books that are crossing my path about the role of history in society. Especially in popular culture and secondary education. This year began with a book about teaching history in “Intro Class,” and ended with a bunch of things jumping off the shelves at me: Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened (Loewen), Thinking Through the Past (Hollitz), Telling the Truth About History, (Appleby, Hunt, Jacob), and Who Owns History (Foner). Makes me think I have some particular interest in this angle of the history thing...
Seriously, though: lies my teacher told me? Are we to imagine some cabal of historians, textbook editors, publishing executives, school committees and teachers; all conspiring to defraud young Americans with propaganda about the American past? Really?
Wouldn’t it be more realistic to imagine that most people don’t know what really happened (and maybe think it’s impossible to know), and in the absence of knowledge opt for the most convenient and reassuring stories they can find? Even the historians who continue to over-write the central stories of America’s identity: are they saying the people who came before them were all propagandists and liars? Or something more subtle and interesting; which could be as simple as “okay, yeah, that happened. That’s all well and good. But what about this?”
With a universe of past events to talk about, you can write a lot of different stories. A historian acquires a point of view through education and life experience. So it matters whether the historian lived through the Revolution, the Great War, the Depression or the Cold War, etc.
Nothing earth-shattering here. These ideas are all old hat to professional historians and graduate students. We study historiography, the history of history-writing, to understand not only what happened, but what people said about what happened. What people believed was important about the past, and how that changes over time.
But we don’t do such a good job of telling that story to our relatives, friends and neighbors outside the profession. When Presidents’ Day rolls around, we all smile at each other and wink. “Parson Weems,” we’ll say to each other knowingly. But how many of our own kids get through high school without knowing that the Cherry Tree and other myths of Washington’s youth were fabricated by an itinerant book-peddling minister?
So I thought while I’m reading both the history and the historiography of the 19th & 20th century U.S., that I’d try to write about it for high school students and college undergrads. That I’d try to identify not only “what really happened,” but also what historians and regular people believed happened. What they thought was important, and how that changed over time. This can be tricky, because the same histories we read to find out what happened have to be read again, differently, to find what was on the historian’s (and presumably his audience’s) mind. This can be tricky, but it’s a skill high schoolers and undergrads need to develop if they’re going to keep from just passively believing everything they’re taught and told in life. It’s a form of critical thinking, and it’s a way of digging deeper into the past that reveals very clearly how important that past is to the present and the future.
At some distant future date this may be a book project. To me, 2 years seems like long-term planning. In the meantime, it’s my field reading and notes toward some type of story that digs into the American past and our stories about it.
Seriously, though: lies my teacher told me? Are we to imagine some cabal of historians, textbook editors, publishing executives, school committees and teachers; all conspiring to defraud young Americans with propaganda about the American past? Really?
Wouldn’t it be more realistic to imagine that most people don’t know what really happened (and maybe think it’s impossible to know), and in the absence of knowledge opt for the most convenient and reassuring stories they can find? Even the historians who continue to over-write the central stories of America’s identity: are they saying the people who came before them were all propagandists and liars? Or something more subtle and interesting; which could be as simple as “okay, yeah, that happened. That’s all well and good. But what about this?”
With a universe of past events to talk about, you can write a lot of different stories. A historian acquires a point of view through education and life experience. So it matters whether the historian lived through the Revolution, the Great War, the Depression or the Cold War, etc.
Nothing earth-shattering here. These ideas are all old hat to professional historians and graduate students. We study historiography, the history of history-writing, to understand not only what happened, but what people said about what happened. What people believed was important about the past, and how that changes over time.
But we don’t do such a good job of telling that story to our relatives, friends and neighbors outside the profession. When Presidents’ Day rolls around, we all smile at each other and wink. “Parson Weems,” we’ll say to each other knowingly. But how many of our own kids get through high school without knowing that the Cherry Tree and other myths of Washington’s youth were fabricated by an itinerant book-peddling minister?
So I thought while I’m reading both the history and the historiography of the 19th & 20th century U.S., that I’d try to write about it for high school students and college undergrads. That I’d try to identify not only “what really happened,” but also what historians and regular people believed happened. What they thought was important, and how that changed over time. This can be tricky, because the same histories we read to find out what happened have to be read again, differently, to find what was on the historian’s (and presumably his audience’s) mind. This can be tricky, but it’s a skill high schoolers and undergrads need to develop if they’re going to keep from just passively believing everything they’re taught and told in life. It’s a form of critical thinking, and it’s a way of digging deeper into the past that reveals very clearly how important that past is to the present and the future.
At some distant future date this may be a book project. To me, 2 years seems like long-term planning. In the meantime, it’s my field reading and notes toward some type of story that digs into the American past and our stories about it.
