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PRO: <HISTORY IS WORTHWHILE |
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The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. --Paul Johnson
Nothing is inevitable in life. People make choices, and those choices have results, and we all live with the results. --Stephen Ambrose
The writing of history is clearly an act of manipulation. It has to be, for the past is too vast, too full of an unimaginable number of details to be dealt with except by simplification. . . . Even the most dispassionate historian, trying to select fairly, with intelligence and discretion, manipulates in spite of himself, by nuances, by repudiation, by omission, by unconscious affection or hostility. --Fawn McKay Brodie
To allow time for students to acquire their textbooks, this first unit does
not have assigned reading from them. Instead, it is the material
posted on this page that is relevant to this issue.
The
dual-founders of history as practiced in the Western World
Herodotus (484?–425? B.C.) A Greek historian who has been called the Father of History. He was born in Halicarnassus, Asia Minor. Only scant knowledge of his life can be gleaned from his writings and from references to him by later writings. His work was the first comprehensive attempt at secular narrative history, and it serves as the starting point of Western historical writing. Herodotus was the first writer to evaluate historical, geographical, and archaeological material critically. The focus of the history is the story of the Persian Wars, but the extensive and richly detailed background information put Greece in its proper historical perspective. He discusses the growth of Persia into a great kingdom and traces the history and migration of the Greek people. Among his grand digressions are fascinating histories of Babylon, Egypt, and Thrace, as well as detailed studies of the pyramids and specific historical events. The value of the work lies not only in its accuracy, but in its scope and the rich diversity of information as well as the charm and simplicity of his writing.
Some samples of Herodotus' writing:
Force has no place where there is need of skill.
Men trust their ears less than their eyes.
Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.
Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.
The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.
Thucydides, 460-404 BC.
Herodotus, writing a few decades earlier than Thucydides,
recorded almost all he heard, whether he believed it himself or not.
Thucydides stands at the other pole; he gathers all available evidence,
decides what he thinks is the truth, then shapes his presentation to
emphasize that truth. We see everything through his eyes, and his views on
the forces which shape human events emerge on every page. Some samples
of his thoughts:
Men naturally despise those who court them, but respect those who do not give way to them.
The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.
The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.
Wars spring from unseen and generally insignificant causes, the first outbreak being often but an explosion of anger.
BALANCED AND USEFUL HISTORY.
It is important for students
to understand from "where I'm coming from" when it comes to how I will
present material. This following article was instrumental in making me
re-evaluate how I taught American history.
"Nothing Wrong with Teaching
What's Right About U.S.: Historians have focused on America's weaknesses, not its strengths."
By Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman (December 30, 2001)
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most Sovietologists were caught
flat-footed. With their lives' work based on the assumption of an enduring
communist state, they were ill-prepared to offer explanations when V.I.
Lenin's legacy went poof. Many American intellectuals find themselves
similarly empty-handed after Sept. 11.
The fall of the twin towers shook the twin assumptions of a generation of
scholarship: that America's relations with the Third World are essentially
wicked and that our country's domestic history can only be understood as a
continuing battle over race, class and gender. For more than 30 years,
scholars on the cutting edge of academe have helped students learn how to
identify where the U.S. fell short of its ideals, when it served only its
economic interests and how it turned a blind eye to those crushed by its
national ambitions.
Then came Sept. 11 and the spontaneous, heartfelt flag-waving that followed.
The America that academics had persistently characterized as "wrong"
had been wronged. Students returned to their classes changed. But they found
minimal guidance if they were looking for an intellectual bridge between love
of country and a sophisticated understanding of the nation's place in the
world. A lot of intellectuals burned that bridge decades ago. There are
numerous examples of the castigating tendency of American scholars, but my
personal favorite is an anthology I reviewed a few years back. This textbook
gave undergraduates three articles on World War II. The first was on Japanese
internment, the second on segregation of black troops in the South and the
third on harassment of Italian Americans. Every article discussed an aspect of
the war that was absolutely true, yet, collectively, they made for a portrait
of the war that was fundamentally false. No Adolf Hitler, no Emperor Hirohito,
no Holocaust--only an imperfect America battling its demons.
Historians who step out of this mold risk censure from academia's ivory tower.
Take professional attitudes toward Stephen Ambrose, arguably the nation's most
widely read historian, whose books frequently reach the best-seller list.
Ambrose is often disparaged as a superficial popularizer, but one senses that
what really bugs many fellow academics is his admiring portrayal of the
national experience and virtual silence on topics of race, class and gender.
Or take the critiques of Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, who for years has
suggested that something besides simple "American arrogance"
accounts for the Cold War. In conversation, and sometimes in print, other
historians often dismiss this careful scholar as an apologist for the powers
that be.
I understand modern historians' dilemma. As a fortysomething person, I grew up
with Che Guevara, Bob Dylan and the Vietnam War. I come from the activist
left, and I am proud of that heritage. I remain a liberal. Like many of my
colleagues, I hesitate to write books or give lectures that might appear to
whitewash America's character flaws or its choices as a superpower. But it is
time to admit that this generation of historians--with some notable
exceptions--has yet to deliver to students, and to the public, a usable and
balanced interpretation of the past.
Too many researchers have done a better job documenting the republic's
weaknesses than revealing its strengths. This lopsidedness ill serves both
foreign and domestic audiences. Our academic communities produce most of the
world's scholarship on the United States. Too often they implicitly encourage
critics in other countries to assume that America is culpable for all that
goes wrong. Foreign readers sometimes parrot the very things we have said
about ourselves. As teachers, we urge youth to learn from the country's
errors, but offer few lessons in what it has done right. How are they supposed
to build the future with only the blunt instrument of disillusionment?
I returned to the classroom Sept. 12 profoundly aware that I had not done
enough to prepare students to think complexly and comparatively. My dismay
deepened when one of them came back from a teach-in I had recommended
convinced that the real reason for the U.S. war in Afghanistan is to build an
oil pipeline across the country.
Since Sept. 11, I've been editing old lecture notes and asking students new
questions. Last week, at semester's end in my foreign-policy class, one
student summarized what she had learned by saying that the United States does
not help other nations just for humanitarian reasons. I agreed with her and
asked if she thought the same statement might apply to Mexico, from which she
commutes to school in San Diego.
But tinkering with classroom dynamics is not enough. We need to change our
approach more fundamentally. To begin, intellectuals should think harder about
how to apportion responsibility for world problems and stop reflexively
blaming America. That Saudi Arabia is undemocratic or that Israel and
Palestine have yet to resolve their conflict is not the fault of the United
States. Those countries are the primary actors in determining their fates. Our
country can answer for its friends no more than it can answer for its enemies,
sovereign nations all. We do not control the world, nor should we aspire to
Second, we need to recognize that the United States often has played at least
a decent hand in the game of world politics. Our country made its debut in
global affairs in 1917, when the intractable dilemmas of the Third World were
well advanced. Even so, Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which culminated in
the formation of the League of Nations, gave hope to colonized peoples that
self-determination was possible. During World War II the United States led the
effort to create the United Nations, the first body to give a voice and vote
to every country, no matter how small or poor.
These accomplishments do not obviate the fact that U.S. foreign policy has on
other occasions been hopelessly stupid, arrogant and even destructive. (The
ongoing punishment of Cuba is an example.) And, internally, issues of race,
class and gender have certainly fractured our society--but we work on them.
Many nations do not. We need to examine the U.S. within the context of world
history, comparing the nation not only with its ideals, but also with its
contemporaries.
Third, we need to be more self-critical if we want to exert the best
intellectual leadership. A few weeks ago, a conservative group associated with
the vice president's wife and former head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Lynne Cheney, published a list of quotes by academics about the
war in Afghanistan. The organization charged professors with being
insufficiently pro-American. Intellectuals have scorned the broadside as
"Cheney's blacklist."
It is easy to write off inflated, patently partisan criticisms made by people
we do not like. But that is a poor way to learn. It is far better to examine
why the critique resonates with the public. If some American intellectuals are
not as prepared to defend the nation as they are to criticize it, they may
deserve the accusations of "unpatriotic" that we have parried for 30
years. The political right will capture the American flag only if we hand it
to them.
Lastly, it would not hurt for professional skeptics to meditate--only briefly,
if it hurts too much--on the nature of American goodness. What the nation does
right is typically underrated, underreported and underappreciated by
academics. When I interviewed him for a book I wrote a few years ago, Canada's
top TV and radio regulator gave me a lecture on American cultural imperialism
through TV and radio airwaves. He surprised me by what he said next.
"Don't get me wrong," he interjected emphatically. "I have no
doubt that the Americans will always be the first to go to the mat for freedom
in the world."
This is a lesson that scholars can embrace and share. An open-minded
examination of America's historical willingness to defend freedom might help
those students with flags pinned on their backpacks to fit their newfound
patriotism with what they also learn about the nation's flaws.
The tragedy in New York and at the Pentagon rekindled respect for our country.
Academics who ignore this risk becoming as irrelevant as yesterday's
Sovietologists. Indeed, the twin assumptions of fin de siecle scholarship
deserve to come down. America is more than the sum of its problems. Some of
the nation's intellectuals may have been lacking this perspective on Sept. 11,
but it's a precious piece of wisdom we can take away from ground zero.
SECONDARY SOURCE: Review of Sam Wineburg's HISTORICAL THINKING & OTHER UNNATURAL ACTS
No doubt that some will be frustrated by the approach in this course, because what we are trying to do does not come naturally. As the following book argues, "historical thought is not a natural process: it "goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to [understand] the past."
Taped to the door of Sam Wineburg's office at the University of Washington's College of Education are paired photos of dogs and their comically similar owners. Professor Wineburg greeted me with a pop quiz: "Which twins look most alike?"
Behind this playful question is an educational psychologist's interest in how people think, especially about history. Wineburg's "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" shows that historical thought is not a natural process: it "goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to [understand] the past."
Wineburg told me his interest in this subject first awoke when he took a history class he couldn't ace with his good memory. He learned that histories aren't objective summaries of the facts but interpretations and arguments made out of information that's always incomplete. "But how did historians do that?" Wineburg asked. "Their books seemed like products of naturally systematic thought--which wasn't how my mind worked, but maybe I was just dumb!"
Wineburg's research into history and the mind has won many honors during his 12 years at the University of Washington. Through having students and professors think aloud while reading documents, he found that only novices just read something and decide what it means. "A historian's thought process is full of hunches and reverses, constant self-questionings and I-don't-knows," Wineburg explained.
Standardized history tests inhibit this kind of thinking, besides guaranteeing that students will seem vastly ignorant. "Periodically, starting with the first national survey in 1917, Americans have concluded from factual tests that kids don't know history. The conclusion isn't logical." Wineburg smiled wryly. "Kids have just never remembered the facts that adults sitting around a table making up a test say they should remember."
He pulled a U.S. history text from a shelf. "Why not teach how to question the facts? Here's Rosa Parks: 'Tired after a long day's work, she sat down in the front section reserved for whites.' Actually, Parks sat in the middle of the bus, available to anyone unless the front was full. Other accounts have her saying she wasn't especially tired and wasn't sure why she kept her seat when challenged. Did Parks intend an act of civil disobedience? Why do these historians disagree?"
Comparing documents, Wineburg added, "is detective work that kids are usually deprived of. It shows them that no single authority has the whole story, and it raises real questions of meaning." He paused, considering. "Every topic doesn't need endless debate. Students stay engaged once they realize history's not a fixed story they must swallow whole but a way of thinking they can apply to life."
Americans need this way of thinking, Wineburg told me. "We're deluged by conflicting, fragmented information that tries to steer us in particular directions. We need to raise citizens who ask themselves, 'Is this true? Who's saying so? What's the nature of the evidence?' Taught this way, history is a training ground for democracy."
Is such training too hard for schoolchildren? "We underestimate kids' abilities to think. Or we believe their self-esteem depends on having tasks they easily do. But we feel good about ourselves by doing things we thought we couldn't do, with capable people around to pick us up after a tumble and show us our reach can exceed our grasp."
"Historical Thinking" is an academic book, but not daunting or dry, and full of stories any reader can enjoy. Wineburg describes Primo Levi's moving encounter with the student who swore that if sent to Auschwitz he could have escaped. There's a chapter on drawings that schoolchildren made of their mental pictures of Pilgrims, Settlers, and Hippies for one of Wineburg's studies--readers can bypass the statistical tables and walk right into these young imaginations. The high-school history class discussion that veers off the rails is as gripping as well-crafted fiction.
Wineburg's conversation with me was no merely academic exercise either. "History gives us a kind of humility," he mused at one point. "I can read something written in 1860 but not know what it meant to live in 1860. I never lived in a world where you could wake up in the morning and go to an auction and buy people. Studying history, we think our way into what living in that world was like. It's the only form of time travel that exists."
ONE'S
WORLDVIEW & THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
DEBATE ISSUE:
Why is history perceived so differently?
PERSPECTIVE A:
George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent vs. Strict Father
[SOURCE: The Nation as a Family by The Rockridge Institute Web source: http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/nationasfamily/nationasfamily ]
ISSUE SUMMARY. As a rule, humans understand abstract or complex ideas in terms of more concrete or accessible concepts. Usually this process involves the use of a metaphor. For example, Americans—like many other cultures—understand a complex, hard-to-conceptualize social group, our nation, in terms of something closer to home, our family. Models of idealized family structure lie metaphorically at the heart of our politics. The very notion of the founding fathers uses a metaphor that construes the nation as a family, with familial roles, such as parents and children. We think metaphorically without realizing it—the Nation as a Family, with citizens as family members, is such a natural metaphor that we don't even notice it is there.
But it is there. And it drives how we think about political and social issues.
In American culture there are two opposed and idealized models of the family, the Nurturant Parent model and the Strict Father model. The metaphor of the Nation as a Family maps the values and relationships from those family models onto our politics, creating "liberal" and "conservative" political positions that we understand through our models of family structure.
The progressive worldview represents, metaphorically, the Nurturant Parent family model, and the conservative worldview represents the Strict Father model. The two models come with distinct moral systems that are founded on different assumptions about the world, interpret shared values such as responsibility or fairness differently, and center around different moral priorities.
In other words, our beliefs about what a family should be exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build. For instance, those with a strong Strict Father model are likely to support a more punitive welfare or foreign policy than someone with a strong Nurturant Parent model, who are likely to favor more cooperative approaches. Those with a strong Nurturant Parent model are more likely to favor social policies that ensure the well-being of people such as health care and education, whereas someone with a strong Strict Father model would object to social programs in favor of promoting self-reliance.
For more information about George Lakoff, click here for his own summary
The Progressive/Liberal Worldview: The Nurturant Parent Family Model
In the Nurturant Parent family, it is assumed that the world is basically good. And, however dangerous and difficult the world may be at present, it can be made better, and it is your responsibility to help make it better. Correspondingly, children are born good, and parents can make them better, and it is their responsibility to do so. Both parents (if there are two) are responsible for running the household and raising the children, although they may divide their activities. The parents' job is to be responsive to their children, nurture them, and raise their children to nurture others. Nurturance requires empathy and responsibility.
In the Nurturant Parent family, the highest moral values are Empathy and Responsibility. Effective nurturing requires empathy, which is feeling what someone else feels—parents have to figure out what all their baby's cries mean in order to take care of him or her. Responsibility is critical, since being a good nurturer means being responsible not only for looking after the well-being of others, but also being responsible to ourselves so that we can take care of others. Nurturant parents raise children to be empathetic toward others, responsible to themselves, and responsible to others who are or will be in their care. Empathy connects us to other people in our families, our neighborhoods, and in the larger world. Being responsible to others and oneself requires cooperation. In society, nurturant morality is expressed as social responsibility. This requires cooperation rather than competition, and a recognition of interdependence.
In the conservative worldview, it is assumed that the world is, and always will be, a dangerous and difficult place. It is a competitive world and there will always be winners and losers. Children are naturally bad since they want to do what feels good, not what is moral, so they have to be made good by being taught discipline. There is tangible evil in the world and to stand up to evil, one must be morally strong, or "disciplined."
The father's job is to protect and support the family. Children are to respect and obey him. The father's moral duty is to teach his children right from wrong, with punishment that is typically physical and can be painful when they do wrong. It is assumed that parental discipline in childhood is required to develop the internal discipline that adults will need in order to be moral and to succeed. Morality and success are linked through discipline. This focus on discipline is seen as a form of love—"tough love."
The mother is in the background, not strong enough to protect and support the family or fully discipline the children on her own. Her job is to uphold the authority of the father and to care for and comfort the children. As a "mommy," she tends to be overly soft-hearted and might well coddle or spoil the child. The father must make sure this does not happen, lest the children become weak and dependent.
Competition is necessary for discipline. Children are to become self-reliant through discipline and the pursuit of self-interest. Those who succeed as adults are the good (moral) people and parents are not to "meddle" in their lives. Those children who remain dependent—who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant—undergo further discipline or are turned out to face the discipline of the outside world.
When everyone is acting morally and responsibly, seeking their own self-interest in a self-disciplined fashion, everyone benefits. Thus, instilling morality and discipline in your children is also acting for the good of society as a whole.
