Atlantic History: Web Resources

Work in Progress

Instead of a European discovery of a new world, we might better consider it as a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.
D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (1988)

Atlantic history concerns four continents--Europe, Africa, North America, and South America--and the islands between from the fifteenth century to the end slavery in the Americas in the nineteenth century. Its principal theme concerns the movement of peoples, flora and fauna, and ideas. The Atlantic world shaped the foundations of the modern world.

National histories have proven inadequate for understanding such transnational phenomena as slavery, colonialism, disease, the economic expansion of Europe, and environmental transformation.

Oxford Bibiographies asserts the field is "determinedly polycentric rather than monocentric." That is, Europeans are not actors to whom colonized peoples react. Rather, the Atlantic World was one in which diverse peoples interacted in complex and ever-changing ways.

This post lists websites that have value to students and faculty in college courses in Atlantic History (a course that I will teach for the first time in fall 2014). It will be updated. Suggestions are particularly welcome.

General Sites

"Atlantic History," Oxford Bibliographies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/atlantic-history.

H-Atlantic Discussion Group, http://www.h-net.org/~atlantic/index.html.

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825, Harvard University, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/.

European Exploration

The European Voyages of Exploration, University of Calgary, http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/index.html.

1492: An Ongoing Voyage, Library of Congress, http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/1492.exhibit/Intro.html.

Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-indians/essays/columbian-exchange.

Slavery

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database, Emory University et al., http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces.

The African Slave Trade and the Middle Passage (part of Africans in America), PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr4.html.

The Abolition Project, East of England Broadband Network, http://abolition.e2bn.org/index.php.

African History

African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, http://www.umes.edu/ajcjs/default.aspx?id=148.

"I Speak of Africa," King's College, London. Online Exhibit, http://www.kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/i-speak-of-africa/.

Kingdom of Ghana, African Studies Center, Boston University, http://www.bu.edu/africa/outreach/resources/k_o_ghana/.

The Ouidah Museum of History, Department of Cultural Patrimony, Benin, http://www.museeouidah.org/accueil.htm

Timbuktu: World Heritage Site, National Geographic, http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/world-heritage/timbuktu/.

European History

Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.asp.

British History Online, Institute of Historical Research and History of Parliament Trust, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/Default.aspx.

North America

American Memory, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/.

The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/index.html.

Latin America and Caribbean

Digital Library of the Caribbean, Florida International University, http://www.dloc.com/ufdc/.

Piracy

Piracy Trials, Library of Congress Law Library, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/piracy/piracy_trials.php.

"Sir Francis Drake: A Pictoral Biography by Hans P. Kraus," Rare Book & Special Collections Reading Room, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake-home.html.

Products

Sugar in the Atlantic World, University of Michigan, http://www.clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/sugarexhibit/exhibits-caseonlinesugar.php.

PowerPoint in the College History Classroom

As a student, I railed against textbooks and lectures. I wanted primary sources, strong monographs, discussion and debate. In addition to learning the names and principal achievements of the European Renaissance, I wanted to argue about the implicit ideology at work in the label for that era. Taking notes while a professor summarized some of the key relationships between political adversaries in the early American Republic was one thing. I wanted to read their letters. From these texts, it would have been possible to construct my history of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with John Adams. That history could then be submitted to expert critique from my peers and from my professors. I wanted seminars. Seminars should not be limited to senior capstone courses for undergraduates, and then required in the distribution on graduate student transcripts. Rather, the methodology of the seminar should inform every history course even down into the college preparatory courses in high schools.


Becoming a Lecturer

As a young professor, I constructed some of my courses to satisfy those old student cravings. For the senior level Indians of the Pacific Northwest which I taught for several years at Washington State University, for example, students purchased a stack of texts that included monographs and compilations of primary materials. Students had to read these texts, discuss them in class, and write papers about them. That process of reading and writing with a bit of class discussion was a normal part of undergraduate history courses.

Of course, indigenous history presents complications. A putative Native autobiography highlights certain problems. Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (1940) was written not by the veteran of the Nez Perce War of 1877, but by his friend, Anglo-American rancher Lucullus Virgil McWhorter. The words in the text were spoken by Yellow Wolf, but the arrangement of the materials and the presentation of his memories was put together by the Anglo-American. Such texts formed a foundation from which I hoped that students would develop their own narratives. It was even possible to visit the archives in our library and examine McWhorter's papers. As Yellow Wolf told his story to McWhorter over several years, the rancher took notes. From these notes, he wrote the "as told to" Indian autobiography. Those notes are in the WSU library.

Seminar was not part of the name of the course, nor part of its official description in the university catalog. Students resisted my methodology. They wanted to be fed. They wanted me to make deposits that they could withdraw with interest at exam time.* As time went on, I developed a series of lectures for this course.  What I had to say about McWhorter and Yellow Wolf pushed aside what my students might have said.

In my lower division courses, the seminar structure was out of the question. I did not attempt to transform these into seminars, but embraced my destiny. Teaching became public speaking. One semester, Introduction to Comparative American Cultures 101 had two hundred students. Lecture was the only way to effectively feed large groups of hungry learners. Despite my proclivities, I learned to entertain. But even in lecture there are ways to provoke student engagement. It is not all passive note taking. One particular semester, I felt pleased after one class session late in the semester that was mostly question and answer during which I called upon more than two dozen students by name. Ninety percent of the students were silent, but I had a normal classroom full of engaged learners who I knew by name mixed into the larger crowd.

In those large courses, my lectures were driven by questions. Some of my questions went unanswered. From overhead transparencies of images and snippets of text, students confronted primary sources. How does a concentration camp differ from an internment center?

I have made the statement here that enemy aliens would be accepted in the State of Nevada under proper supervision. This would apply to concentration camps as well as to those who might be allowed to farm or such other things as they could do in helping out. ... I do not desire that Nevada be made a dumping ground for enemy aliens to be going anywhere they might see fit to travel.
Governor E.P. Carville to General DeWitt, February 1942 (quoted in Personal Justice Denied, 102)

Heart Mountain, Wyoming

Effective speakers who can entertain hundreds of undergraduates and fill their heads with knowledge and ideas for reflection are not necessarily effective teachers. I struggled to be both. Some students said nice things about my presentations. Sometimes they complained that they could not stop thinking about my class. That complaint was a compliment!

Beginning ten years ago, overhead transparencies gave way to PowerPoint slides. Classroom technology made it easier for me to prepare lecture materials. These innovations also made student note taking easier, or perhaps less necessary. Students demanded that PPT slides be available on Blackboard for review. Gone were the days when academic success rested upon the ability to convert an audible stream by a professor to a filled student notebook.


Transforming Technology

Students have access to the visual component of the lectures before they are presented. This structural change offers opportunity to renew my early vision for effective college history. My PowerPoint presentations had been listed on previous syllabi for my course as "lectures". In the current iteration of Pacific Northwest History that runs for six weeks beginning in mid-August, the term "lecture" appears no where on the syllabus. Now they are called "thematic presentations".

Changing the name is only the beginning. More substantive is a transformation in my expectations for the students, and for myself. In the past, as I constantly revise and update old presentations, these have been posted to Blackboard by mid-day before each class period (classes meet once or twice per week, depending upon whether they include Saturday session or not). Students are able before class to print the slides in a format that provides them with room for taking notes. In the current class, these presentations are  available on Blackboard as much as one week before each class session. I ask students to review all, or specified parts, of each presentation before each class.

Instead of racing through each presentation to "cover" the material, I highlight certain portions. My slide shows remain inordinately long, but the lectures are shorter. Some sequences of slides are raw material for the students to use as a resource alongside the assigned texts--books and primary source material--to answer questions during small group discussion.


Fomenting Resistance

For years I have cajoled students into interrupting my lectures. I have urged them to revolt, to take control of the course and their own education. I have suggested that the design of a lecture is something that demands disruption. Never did I urge disruption simply for its own sake, nor disruption that interferes with the learning process. Rather, I have insisted that more learning takes place when they argue with and interrogate the speaker (me). They learn more when they force me to adapt what I have prepared to their preparations, and to their experience of the past. Some students embrace such dialogue, but it is too easy to sit back and take notes. Many fall into the passive pattern that has been a mode of school as long as any of us can remember.

Some of the ways that students actively engage professors during lectures was brought out during an external review of my graduate degree program while I was a student there. Such reviews are part of the re-certification that university programs must undergo periodically. One of the reviewers--a professor from another university with a similar degree program--asked a group of graduate students to comment on certain qualitative aspects of ourselves both as a group and as individual students. We were asked to compare our self-evaluation to our perceptions of our peers in the two principal departments that fed our interdisciplinary program. We took courses in both American history and American literature. As part of our response, we described the classroom dynamic in a course on early nineteenth century American history in which there were undergraduate students, graduate students in History, and graduate students in American Studies (my degree program).

American Studies students, we explained, frequently interrupted the narrative of the professor's lecture to raise substantive issues with historical interpretation. We sought to engage our teacher in discussions concerning the merits and deficiencies of this or that historian's approach to his or her subject. The History graduate students, on the other hand, were difficult to sort from the undergraduate students with one or two notable exceptions. Several of them tended to raise their hand during lecture for the purpose of asking, "Professor Hume, could you repeat that date?" American Studies students raised their hand to inquire whether the professor thought that subsequent scholarship had confirmed or refuted Reginald Horsman's assertion that belief in white supremacy was planted deeply in the nation's dominant ideology by the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of Hume's discussion of race seemed to come from Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (1981).


Illustrative Lesson Plan

Pacific Northwest history for adult students (age 25 and older) is one of my regular courses. These courses last six weeks, in which time we pack in a full semester's content and labor. Due to the shortened duration of the course, class sessions typically run 3 1/2 to 4 hours on weeknights, and occasional 7 1/2 hour Saturday sessions. My PowerPoint slide show are the visual and textual element in excruciatingly long lectures. Although originally conceived as stimulants to imaginative critical reading of the key text, and intended to provoke rather than stifle discussion, these slide shows easily become the forum for a kind of talking that leaves me hoarse and leaves my students numb.

Before next week's class, students are to review the slides in "Gold in the Klondike." They also must explore a website that offers many digitized images and texts concerning the last major gold rush in United States history. My "thematic presentation" concerning the Klondike gold rush has more than fifty slides. Flipping through them in front of a group of students could easily become a three-hour monologue.

This presentation has four parts: allure of gold, economics of gold, creating questions, and Seattle Spirit. The first two sections highlight the significance of gold rushes to Western American and Pacific Northwest history, the debate concerning the gold standard and bimettalism during the presidential election of 1896, Adam Smith's synopsis of economic theories of value in Wealth of Nations (1776), and a few related points. I will lecture through that portion, although a few slides pose questions that elicit student response. The other two sections comprise the bulk of the slides. Some concern Seattle's early history from the Arthur Denny party to the completion of the Great Northern Railway with that city as its western terminus.

The section creating questions offers a series of images of newspaper advertisements from 1897-1899, followed by extracts from letters written by a prospector who died in Alaska in 1900. Students are to develop historical questions from their examination of these images and texts. In class, they will present their questions and we will discuss how additional sources could serve to help develop answers.

The notion of the Seattle Spirit is an odd one. Sometimes, it seems, folks suggest that something in the air in that city develops marketing genius. Such successful businesses as Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nordstroms reveal a thriving business climate that contrasts with the city's early failure to beat Tacoma in competition for the Northern Pacific Railroad terminus. During the centennial celebration of the Klondike gold rush, there were a number of claims made both for the significance of this gold rush to Seattle's development and the almost mystical Seattle entrepreneurial spirit. Students see some of these assertions in the slides. Having them pore through the slides before class makes it possible to avoid flipping through the projections during a lecture. Instead of lecture, students bring evidence to bear on the issues raised in these assertions, evidence that they compiled from their exploration of digitized images on a website. If we need to look a the the slides, the projector is there, but it is not necessary.

Instead of taking notes on my narrative of these events and their significance, students work together to craft their own explanations. What is the historical significance of the Klondike gold rush to Seattle and the broader region? The answers my students develop are more important than my own.


*See Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continum, 1993). Friere's critique of the banking concept of education informed an earlier post: "Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning" (August 2009).

The American Story

George Chalich was a high school teacher who inundated the junior class with factoids. I loved the factoids he gave us, but hated the slow pace of presentation and the alienating absence of dialogue. We memorized, to the last comma, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution; lengthy definitions of socialism, communism, totalitarianism, republicanism, and democracy; salary schedules for the federal judiciary, members of Congress, and the President; and the eight characteristic behaviors of the "good citizen": I can recall the first two: 1) "a good citizen votes;" 2) "a good citizen votes intelligently." Chalich's stories evoked an alternative vision of good citizenship. Drawing on his Serbian heritage, his story of the beginnings of the First World War becomes a lesson in historiography: "Gavrilo Princip was a Serbian patriot, the newspapers never get it right." The so-called assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand was not a criminal act, but an assertion of the patriotism of a nation within.
Spring Wind Rising (1994), 185-186.

We sat in our straitjackets, took notes, and made efforts to memorize George Chalich's lists. Most of my classmates learned to hate history. Skill at memorization was not high among the talents of teenagers in the 1970s. Even those good at it rarely look back with fondness upon the experience. It should be clear that the pedagogy of memorization is far from an exemplary model for nurturing historical knowledge, let alone historical thinking in high school students. Nor does this failed pedagogy serve the adults who return to school in middle age.

Teachers who are passionate for history should infect students with their enthusiasm, not inoculate them against outbreaks of history mindedness. In a recent National History Center roundtable, the panelists agreed, "that instilling the love of history into students’ lives was the most important objective in a survey course." Salt Lake City, Utah teacher Fiona Halloran notes, "Students come to class hoping for pleasure but fearing pain." She suggests liberty in their writing assignments:

Offering students liberty means asking them to write essays about dissent, identity, and hunger. What do those things mean? Let them decide. As they struggle to match historical events and ideas to concepts like resistance, they will have to wrestle with the most difficult questions history has to offer. ... [Assessment liberty] invites students to tell you about the ideas they found most compelling and their work is therefore brighter, more forceful and more specific.
Halloran, "Historical Gardening"

San Francisco's Valerie Ziegler emphasizes teaching students the process of producing history, and also gives them room for decision. She draws from the Reading Like a Historian project of the Stanford History Education Group (a project led by Sam Wineburg whose Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts I have mentioned in "Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning" and other posts). She looks to students to create their own answers to historical questions.

Each lesson in this curriculum begins with a debatable historical question that requires students to formulate answers based on their reading of historical evidence. My students leave my class with confidence in their reading, writing and understanding of how the story of history is told. They develop skills they can use beyond high school.
Ziegler, "Crafting a Love for History"

Chalich's memorization scheme aimed at cultivating a sense of citizenship (voting, not assassinating heads of states). Today's emphasis upon teaching and learning (the lingo that replaced the term pedagogy) cultivates behaviors that are necessary to an engaged and effective citizenry. Several panelists emphasized historical thinking as central to successful democracy.

In the final analysis the effective U.S. history course fosters active citizenship. History education is the best way to reach for equity, social justice, and new hope. Sitting in our classrooms today are the century’s new leaders; within them the seeds of true equity, gentleness, compassion and service are sown.
David Mitchell, "Primary Sources: The Seeds for Student Growth"

By examining how previous generations of citizens grappled with the issues, students see that they too have a role in shaping the events of their time. They have a stake—more to gain—in looking at how we got to this point. The spirited debate over who should bear the cost of the national road two hundred years ago is the health care debate of today.
William E. White, "The Idea of America"

Andrew Johnson explains in "Let the Questions Guide You," his contribution to the roundtable, how his course is built around four central questions. Well-informed readers will recognize the sources of his questions in famous political speeches and poems.

Each quarter of the school year is framed with a guiding question. “Was this nation conceived in liberty?” compels a study of colonial times, the Revolution and the Constitution, and the Washington and Adams administrations. The question itself constitutes both a compelling essay question as well as a sorting tool for what content to include and what to leave out. Similarly, “Is our government of the people, by the people, and for the people?” compels a study of the abolition movement, the Civil War, and Progressivism.
Johnson, "Let the Questions Guide You"

Lendol Calder, whose "uncoverage" model clearly influences the other panelists, discusses an assignment he uses the first week of his college U.S. history survey.

In the first week of my course, students write a two-page history of the United States. I don’t allow them to look anything up, which makes students think I am testing their factual knowledge. In fact, I use the assignment to learn what students think the story of American history is. By “story” I mean the basic interpretive frame they use to make sense of the American past.
Calder, "But What is Our Story?"

Calder emphasizes that factual recall is not the forte of a well-trained historian so much as an inquiring mindset.

The mark of historical mindedness is not recalling that “this happened and then that happened.” Rather, it is a distinctive sort of questioning and a distinctive method of discovery supported by certain habits, skills, and dispositions.
Calder, "But What is Our Story?"

All of the panelists emphasize student engagement with primary sources. They each emphasize at least some of the processes Calder has called the cognitive habits of the historian: "questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one's knowledge"(Calder, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," The Journal of American History (March 2006), 1364).

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.

Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning

"Am I a professor? Then what will I say today? But if I am a teacher, what will they do today?"
Lendol Calder, 1370

The New Social Studies of the 1960s aimed to transform classrooms that had been conduits for the transmission of knowledge into agents of cultural change. Looking back from the standpoint of 1992, Byron Massialas summarized the prospects of teaching through inquiry.

Through a proper classroom environment and teaching method, students of virtually any age could be involved in reflection and critical thinking. Springboards from any of the traditional social sciences and history could be introduced into the classroom to create interest and reflective thinking about social events.
Massialas, "Retrospect and Prospect," 121

His use of springboard as metaphor for the value of history, sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines all serving something higher called Social Studies merits more examination than I can give it here.

Although the reform movement began with consideration of social-political contexts and psychological factors affecting students, Massialas tells us, many teachers embracing this reform movement emphasized "the structure of knowledge of the organized disciplines" (121). Historians, for example, failed to see that their disciplinary knowledge and processes were means to another end, a place to start but not the map. History dominated the curriculum that Massialas and his associates sought to transform into Social Studies. They conducted empirical studies of classroom practices that "confirmed the idea that a social-issues, rather than a traditionally chronological, curriculum is more in tune with the demands of modern society" (122).

The New Social Studies Movement ended by the mid-1970s; that is, it ended before I took a course in Social Studies teaching methods from a historian.


Undergraduate Education

O. Gene Clanton espoused some of the ideals of this now defunct reform movement. He advocated inquiry-based teaching of history in his methods class as theory, and his practice seemed to reflect this theory. Clanton had been my professor two years earlier for the second half of the American history survey: U.S. History, 1877 to present. In that class, he structured our classroom practices around what he called an inquiry approach. He divided the class of sixty or so into two groups; his teaching assistant took the other half. We then sat in a circle and talked about the documents--primary sources, mostly texts--that followed each narrative chapter in Richard N. Current, American History: A Survey, vol 2.

Clanton's teaching of history was refreshing and liberating. But it was not the method of inquiry-based reflective thinking and learning espoused by Massialas and his colleagues. Clanton did most of the talking.

In Inquiry in Social Studies (1966), Massialas and C. Benjamin Cox make the point that a discussion technique does not necessarily alter the method of classroom as conduit.

[T]he teacher assumes the role of expositor of knowledge while his students act as recipients. The materials at hand are the sources of knowledge and the major task involved is most easily described as the process of transmitting finished knowledge from source to recipient. The techniques utilized in this transmission, whether lecture, discussion, student reporting, or film projection do not differentiate the method itself. If the intent is to inform students of some already organized system of predetermined knowledge, the method is expository.
Massialas and Cox, 62

Paulo Friere calls this expository method the banking concept of education. The teacher (subject) narrates to passive receptacles or listening objects (students).

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.
Friere, 53

The alternative sought through the New Social Studies was concept based, student centered, and focused on contemporary problems. The teacher was to manage and coordinate, rather than dispense, the construction of knowledge. In my education courses, the professors used the term facilitate.

The materials at hand are at once the sources of promising springboards or hypotheses and the compilations of factual evidence required to support or refute these hypotheses. The students in this case become participants in the process of reorganizing this knowledge around new centers of attention and interest. The learning situation is characterized by the seeking, discovering, reorganizing, and testing of knowledge.
Massialas and Cox, 62

This movement towards inquiry based teaching in social studies ran aground. When I was in college, several history professors dismissed it as a fad of the Sixties. Even so, to the extent that it was part of other educational developments that favored student centered education, it echoes through much of educational theory today, if not the practice of teaching. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that prescriptions for developing reflective thinking in high school and middle school social studies classrooms anticipate recent calls for rethinking the history survey in college classrooms.


Teaching and Learning

Checking e-mail in class is rude and immature, but it is also a predictable response to a worn-out pedagogy that no longer has a place in the history survey.
Lendol Calder, 1360

In his essay, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," Lendol Calder seeks ways to empower students as the agents of their own learning. He refers to a label Sam Wineburg used in conversation with him: the attic theory. Wineburg's attic theory of cognition resembles Friere's banking concept, or what Massilas and Cox call expository teaching.

As it happens, people do not collect facts the way homeowners collect furniture, storing pieces for use at a later time. ... Facts are not like furniture at all; they are more like dry ice, disappearing at room temperature.
Calder, 1361

Calder points out that covering a subject means not only going the length, but also connotes concealment. Historians, he alleges are quite adept at covering up, or "hiding what it means to be good at history" (1363). Like Wineburg in his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001), Calder attempts to identify the peculiar signature of the practice of history. He seeks to introduce to his students six "cognitive habits: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one's knowledge" (1364).

Calder's process in his course on American history since 1945 is particularly relevant to Patriots and Peoples (this blog). His course divides into six units; each goes through a three stage process. Film clips are used

to create an environment so rich in information and so charged with interesting problems that students who are inert in the face of lectures and textbooks will be stirred to ask a few historical questions. After the film awakens their capacity for wonder, I then send students out to do what historically minded people do: follow a question that takes them beyond what they already know.
Calder, 1364

In the second stage, the class examines primary documents. Entry to class requires a ticket: a three to five page essay on questions formulated by the student (inspired by the film), and using the documents as evidence. One gets the sense that Calder is looking for questions that are focused on the time and place of the United States in the past half-century or so, rather than broad universal questions of the sort favored by the New Social Studies reformers.

A generalization, in order to have wide applicability, must not refer to a specific event, period, or region. A more reliable and useful generalization would be one which, if formulated as a theory, can apply to all times and places.
Massialas and Cox, 333

After formulating their own questions, and answering them through analysis of prescribed documents, the students are prepared to read the work of professional historians. Calder uses Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States and Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. Johnson's work is stronger, that is, less polemical than Schweikart and Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States.


Theorie und Praxis

As a student in high school and college, I craved the rare opportunities to talk back, to argue with the professor, and to get expert guidance in my own self-directed study of the past and its relevance to the present. On the other hand, I would have felt cheated in a course concerned with the late-nineteenth century if the author of Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969) and Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900 (1991) should have considered it his place to be silent while my peers and I constructed our knowledge from William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech. It was good that the doctor in class was a teacher, but he needed to be a professor, too.

As a teacher, I remember that Clanton's practice did not quite match his theory. Nor does my own practice of PowerPoint based presentations interspersed with focused discussion quite match my theory tersely expressed in the title of Carl Becker's classic article, "Everyman His Own Historian." I follow Clanton in looking for balance between making useful deposits and facilitating student management of their investments.


Works Cited

Becker, Carl. "Everyman His Own Historian." American Historical Review (January 1932): 221-236.

Calder, Lendol. "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey." The Journal of American History (March 2006): 1358-1370.

Clanton, O. Gene. Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969.

________. Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continum, 1993.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

Massialas, Byron G. "The 'New Social Studies'--Retrospect and Prospect." The Social Studies (May/June 1992): 120-124.

Massialas, Byron G., and C. Benjamin Cox. Inquiry in Social Studies. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. New York: Sentinel, 2004.

Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.