Thinking Historically with Adult Students

(This post began as a response to the first in a series concerning Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001) on John Fea's blog: The Way of Improvement Leads Home, "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts--Part One.")


I teach adult students--minimum age is 25--in six week classes that usually meet twice per week for 3 1/2 hours (there's an option of once per week and two eight-hour Saturdays). I lecture too much in these classes. The lectures give me a sore throat, and are grueling endurance tests for the students, but they also stimulate innovative uses of PowerPoint.

A new class begins tonight: Pacific Northwest History. My usual first week lectures include a 42 slide presentation ("Inventing a Hinterland") and another 60 slide presentation ("Historiography and Colonization"). Both presentations offer up some gems, but can be deadly if I fail to engage the students in thinking historically.


I tend to get some mileage from images and text from George Vancouver's journal concerning some enigmatic poles. Vancouver died failing to comprehend their purpose, and I reveal the findings of ethnography only after considerable effort on the part of the students to comprehend their purpose from Vancouver's descriptions.

In the past, I have presented an extract from the pen of Captain James Cook as a photocopy with the title "hostilities expected":

During these visits they gave us no other trouble than to guard against their thievish tricks. In the morning of the 4th we had a serious alarm. Our party on shore, who were employed in cutting wood and getting water, observed that the natives all around them were arming themselves in the best manner they could, those who were not possessed of proper weapons preparing sticks and collecting stones. On hearing this I thought it prudent to arm also, but, being determined to act upon the defensive, I ordered our workmen to retreat to the rock upon which we had placed our observatories, leaving the natives in quiet possession of the ground. Our fears were ill- grounded. These hostile preparations were not directed against us, but against a body of their own countrymen, who were coming to fight them; and our friends of the sound, on observing our apprehensions, used their best endeavors to convince us that this was the case. We could see that they had people looking out on each point of the cove, and canoes frequently passed between them and the main body assembled near the ships. At length the adverse party, in about a dozen large canoes, appeared off the south point of the cove, when they stopped, and lay drawn up in a line of battle, a negotiation having commenced. Some people in canoes, in conducting the treaty, passed between the two parties, and there was some speaking on both sides. At length the difference, whatever it was, seemed to be compromised, but the strangers were not allowed to come alongside the ships, not to have any trade or intercourse with us. (Italics added)
James Cook, Captain Cook’s Voyages Round the World (1897), 427

It is a remarkable passage that should provoke a number of useful questions. I like to highlight the potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding. The novelty of Northwest Coast social and economic conventions, not yet understood by Cook and his crew (and probably not much understood at the end of their month in Nootka Sound) become evident in the expectations of attack when their "friends" are arming themselves against "strangers". Yet, Cook almost seems to comprehend that control of international trade was a central motivation for the threat of hostilities.

Even the name Nootka stems from misunderstanding. A separate handout has this passage alongside another from the same source. I label them "Nuu-chah-nulth orature".

So, the Chief told them to go out there again and see, you know. … They started making signs and they were talking and they were saying, ‘Nu-tka-icum.’ ‘Nu-tka- icum,’ they were saying. That means, ‘You go around the harbour [to find better anchorage].’ So Captain Cook said, ‘Oh. They’re telling us the name of this place is Nootka.’ That’s how Nootka got its name.
… But the Indian name is altogether different. …
We call white people ‘Muh-mul-ni’ because … they came in boats that looked high and strange to us, and muh-mul- ni means ‘houses on the water.’ Those people seemed to be in houses floating on the water.”
Mrs. Winnifred David, Sound Heritage, vol. 7 (1978); quoted in Ruth Kirk, Tradition and Change on the Northwest Coast (1986), 201

I generally try to get the students to frame some historical questions stemming from these passages. In place of their own questions, they usually leave with some of my generalizations about mutually beneficial trade and the failures on intercultural communication.

Tonight, students are receiving as photocopies the chapter in Cook's A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784) from which this passage is extracted. They are also receiving the Sound Heritage article "The Contact Period as Recorded by Indian Oral Traditions," edited by Barbara S. Erfrat and W.J. Langlois that was Ruth Kirk's source for the brief extracts in her book.

When we meet for the second time, Wednesday, I will expect that they have read these twenty-five pages and written half a dozen questions that require research to answer.

My plan tonight is to start with the questions:

1. What is history?
2. Why does history merit our attention?
3. What are the boundaries of the Pacific Northwest?

All of these questions are addressed to an extent in my PowerPoint presentations, which we may or may not get to.

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Getting it Right

Still working on an article that no one will ever read for an encyclopedia that no one will ever buy, I just came across a few marvelous articles on the Blackfeet Nation's newly designed website. Last week, the site had a modest welcome page and no links. Today, the site seems almost complete.

The writing about Blackfeet history is fresh, fervent, and perhaps well-described as Blackfeet Nationalist. Under "Our History," the site offers an article, "We Come From Right Here." I had to read this as quickly as possible because I've long known that the Piegan Blackfeet insist they have been in Montana 10,000 years, while most books state they were migrating southwest fresh from the Canadian Prairies about the time they fell into a fight with Lewis and Clark on the explorers' return from Oregon in 1806. Some of the history books put the Blackfeet in Montana a century or two before that.

But scholars write books and give lectures and huff and puff about times in which they never lived, worlds into which they never stepped foot, and languages they can never hear spoken by the ancients they study. As an example of how little is really known about Indians in the pre-Columbian period, experts can’t even agree if the population of the Americas was 8 million or 112 million. If they know so little that they can’t get within an order of magnitude of each other, why bother guessing about anything else?
"We Come From Right Here"

The link may change, and the text, too. The site is still under construction. Readers of this blog may know what I think of these population figures. If not, click the "depopulation" link below and read away.

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Errors of Fact

I'm not blogging much of late because I'm struggling to finish an overdue encyclopedia article that compresses all of Montana Indian history into sixty or so double-spaced typewritten pages. Along the way, I'm reading and rereading every book in my library that bears on the subject, probing the depths of the web, and working JSTOR for all it's worth.


The Error

This morning's coffee goes down with a few pages of light reading in The Lance and the Shield: the Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993) by Robert M. Utley. It seems fair to say that no one knows more about the military history of the nineteenth century Western frontier than Utley. Indeed, the Western History Association's award for the best book each year concerned with the military history of the frontier is called the Robert M. Utley Book Award.

Imagine my dismay, then, when I read the following sentence:

In the summer of 1866 the army built three posts along the Bozeman Trail: Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C.F. Smith.
Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 71

In 1865, the U.S. Army sent General Patrick Edward Connor’s Powder River Expedition into northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana with hopes of pacifying the Indians who resented travel through their hunting lands. The expedition established Fort Connor in August 1865 (renamed Fort Reno in November 1865) on the upper Powder River in Wyoming, and then left the region.

Connor split his forces into an ambitious three-pronged assault to converge on the Powder River. His orders to his subordinates stated, “You will not receive overtures of peace or submission from Indians but will attack and kill every male Indian over twelve years of age.”* General John Pope, upon learning of these orders, insisted that steps to countermand them be put immediately into action. The Army did not need more bad press of the sort generated in the wake of the brutal Sand Creek Massacre in southeast Colorado. Nevertheless, the expedition continued with Connor’s orders intact.

No friendly Indians were encountered during the campaign, and there were few significant engagements with hostiles. One band of Arapahos was attacked on the Tongue River, losing their winter food stores, clothing, and most of their horses. Several bands of Lakota—Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, Miniconjou, and Sans Arc—harassed Connor’s two eastern columns marching together up the Powder River. The soldiers were well armed and two thousand strong, but were on the verge of starvation, and suffering from the drought. A summer storm brought sudden cold and wet conditions, killing most of the Army’s mules. Further upriver, Oglala led by Red Cloud and Cheyenne led by Little Wolf continued the attacks.

The Army’s efforts seemed to embolden, rather than pacify the Sioux (mostly Lakota), Cheyenne, and Arapaho that had been wresting the area from the Crow, and attacking immigrants. Fort Reno became the first of three forts along the Bozeman Trail that aggravated the Lakota and Cheyenne.

The following summer, troops under the command of Col. Henry B. Carrington built Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming and Fort C.F. Smith on the Bighorn River in Montana.

If Utley can make such an error, anyone can. Of course, some writers make more errors than others. This sentence stands out in Utley's work because it is rare.

*H. D. Hampton, “The Powder River Expedition 1865,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 14 (Autumn 1964): 8-9.

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The Joker

I felt a sense of revulsion when I saw in the newspaper the image of Batman's Joker now covering Obama's face. My immediate sense was that this image carried a threat of violence against the President himself, and this sense was mixed up with the recognition of the old racist tradition of black-face from Vaudeville.

Threatening the President with harm? Racism?

I'm not certain.

Because of a writing project for an encyclopedia that is rapidly approaching its second deadline, I'm deferring the work I planned to do on President Bush the Elder's education program and his speech to school children in 1991. Meanwhile, I've been arguing on Facebook with a couple of aspiring members of Congress that were part of the Tea Party protest this past weekend, arguing about the size of the event, which looks from the films to be less than 200,000 if not close to the ABC estimate of 60,000 to 70,000. Certainly the crowd was no where near the two million they claim.

This evening they started attacking the Obama Administration for playing the so-called "race card." My quest for context led me to a stunning piece in the Boise Weekly, "Tea Party Inspired by Racial Fears" by Nathaniel Hoffman. Hoffman's summary of the motives of the crowd, as he sees it, may not be one hundred percent accurate, but it's an interesting perspective:

A few common themes unite the Tea Partiers, as far as I can tell: some evolving form of Christian patriotism, an aversion to paying taxes, fear of police with an equal and contradictory adoration of the law and the military, and a personal reading of the Constitution and Founding Fathers that borders on idolatry.
Hoffman, "Racial Fears"

Most of the rest of the article highlights ways that racism might at least appear to be an underlying issue. I'm not certain that Hoffman is correct, but it's food for thought.

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Obama, Bush, School Speeches

On 8 September 2009, President Barack Obama will address the nation's school children. Notification of this upcoming speech set off a storm of controversy; I highlighted some of the extreme rhetoric present in one online discussion site in "Say What? Obama and the Children." A more productive consequence of the firestorm was that it drove me, a historian, to look at another Presidential speech: President George Bush's 1991 address to students at Alice Deal Junior High (now called Alice Deal Middle School).

President Obama's speech is available on the White House website.

On 1 October 1991, President Bush addressed students in Cynthia Mostoller's classroom at Alice Deal Junior High in Washington DC. The message was broadcast live over CNN, PBS, the NBC radio network, and the now defunct Mutual Broadcasting System.

House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt criticized the speech, according to the Washington Post, "the Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students." The cost was $26,750. The Scripps Howard News Service called it the "Bush teach-in" and highlighted the political significance.

Bush's appearance was part of a White House effort to discredit Democratic charges that he has no domestic agenda by promoting the education goals he laid out for the nation six months ago.
"Bush Tells Children Stupidity is Not Cool," Scripps Howard News Service (2 October 1991)

The Baltimore Sun compared Bush's effort to the style of President Theodore Roosevelt, "the effect was part bully pulpit, part campaign ad" (quoted in The Volokh Conspiracy).

I'm in the process of writing something focused on the context of Bush's speech. Look for "Revolutionize American Education" later this week.


For clearheaded, rational analysis of why Obama's speech, as well as it's predecessors by President Reagan and President Bush should all be resisted, read Popehat's "Why I Oppose President Obama Speaking to the Nation's Schoolchildren."


Update, 8 September 2009

The Billings Gazette (Montana) has a video of local students' reactions.

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