Putting History Teaching “In Its Place” Keith A. Erekson Keith A. Erekson is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he directs the department’s history teacher education program and the university’s Center for History Teaching and Learning. He gratefully acknowledges the feedback he received from delegates to the 11th annual Teaching and Learning in History Conference at Oxford University and the participants in Project 1776 at New Mexico State University. Readers may contact Erekson at kaerekson@utep.edu. 1 Lee Shulman, “Signature Pedagogies in the Professions,” Daedalus, 134 (Summer 2005), 52–59; Lee Shulman, “Pedagogies of Uncertainty,” Liberal Learning, 91 (Spring 2005), 18–25. 2 Sam Wineburg, Historical hinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia, 2001); Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1358–70; David Pace, “he Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” American Historical Review, 109 (Oct. 2004), 1171–92; Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow, “he History Learning Project: A Department ‘Decodes’ Its Students,” Journal of American History, 94 (March 2008), 1211–24. 3 Stéphane Lévesque, hinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century (Toronto, 2008); Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good (New York, 2009); homas Andrews and Flannery Burke, “What Does It Mean to hink Historically?,” AHA Perspectives, 45 (Jan. 2007), 32–35. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaq066 © he Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com March 2011 he Journal of American History 1067 Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 Over the past four decades, the reigning paradigm among history educators has tacitly ignored the concept of place in its emphasis on helping students “do history.” In practice, the slogan has included a range of activities, from skillful cognitive explorations of what it means to think and read and write “like a historian” to document-based questions on advanced placement history exams to simply giving students photocopies of “primary sources.” In recent years, the discussion has included an exploration of the concept of “signature pedagogy.” Drawing on his work with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Lee Shulman observed that some professions employ discipline-speciic pedagogies to train future practitioners in the knowledge, values, and worldview of the profession—law students debate practice cases, medical students conduct clinical rounds, and seminary students follow a routine of prayer and sermons. Shulman contrasted discipline-speciic pedagogy with the apparent default pedagogy of arts and science education grounded in textbooks and lectures and he called for the creation of signature pedagogies rooted in the theory and practice of individual disciplines.1 Historians have taken up Shulman’s challenge, and, in the process, have begun to debate the “signature pedagogy of history.” Scholars such as Sam Wineburg, Lendol Calder, and David Pace have applied recent indings in cognitive science to begin to identify the mental tasks performed by practicing historians—sourcing, corroborating, and connecting, among others.2 In another approach, Stéphane Lévesque, Keith Barton and Linda Levstik, and homas Andrews and Flannery Burke have sought to embed history pedagogy in “procedural concepts” (Lévesque’s term) unique to, or at least uniquely applied among, historians—change over time, context, narrative, empathy, signiicance, and distance from the past, among others.3 hird, Peter Lee and Rosalyn 1068 he Journal of American History March 2011 Where Do Historians “Do History”? he irst question for consideration is deceptively simple: where do we practice history? Most likely, the answer that initially springs to mind will be in an archive. his answer 4 Peter Lee and Rosalyn Ashby, “Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14,” in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed. Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York, 2000), 199–222; Michael Coventry et al., “Ways of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1371–402; Gaea Leinhardt, “Lessons on Teaching and Learning in History from Paul’s Pen,” in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History, ed. Stearns, Seixas, and Wineburg, 223–45. See also Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton, eds., Teaching and Learning in History (Hillsdale, 1994). In their review of the literature, Joel M. Sipress and David J. Voelker conclude that historians “do history by entering into a contested, evidence-based discourse regarding the human past.” See Joel M. Sipress and David J. Voelker, “From Learning History to Doing History: Beyond the Coverage Model,” in Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind, ed. Regan A. R. Gurung, Nancy L. Chick, and Aeron Hayne (Sterling, 2009), 27. 5 Calder, “Uncoverage”; Robert B. Bain, “‘hey hought the World Was Flat?': Applying the Principles of How People Learn in Teaching High School History,” in How Students Learn History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom, ed. John D. Bransford and Suzanne M. Donovan (Washington, 2005), 179–213; Daisy Martin and Chauncey Monte-Sano, “Inquiry, Controversy, and Ambiguous Texts: Learning to Teach for Historical hinking,” in History Education 101: he Past, Present, and Future of Teacher Preparation, ed. Wilson J. Warren and D. Antonio Cantu (Charlotte, 2008), 167–86. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 Ashby, Gaea Leinhardt, and the Visual Knowledge Project participants explore critical thinking in history to highlight historians’ use of evidence, argumentation, explanation, and perspective.4 Finally, Calder and Bob Bain emphasize the unique way that historians problematize previous stories about the past, formulate their own questions, and design and follow processes of inquiry.5 In part because of the context of Shulman’s plea, the parties pursuing cognition, concepts, critical thinking, and inquiry approach the question as an intellectual problem about disciplinary knowledge. All four approaches will be enriched by remembering that the power of the pedagogies highlighted by Shulman originates not in epistemology but in experience. Explicitly, learning occurs by inhabiting a professionally relevant place— medical students train at the bedside, law students argue in a mock courtroom, preachers practice at the pulpit. One other characteristic that further deines these places of pedagogy is that they are public. his observation does not discount the fact that the professionals also study, or attend conventions, or host consultations in their oice, or haggle with potential jurors and health insurance providers—it merely identiies as crucial the moment when a professional looks up from learning to diagnose a patient, persuade a jury, or preach a sermon. Where do we historians practice history? Can our students conceivably do history in the same places that we do? What would our teaching look like if we sought to put our students in the places of historical practice? We can put history teaching back “in its place” by uniting archival research, scholarship on the learning and teaching of history, and efective teaching methods within a new paradigm conscientiously constructed around the places of history practice. When our students experience where we do history they will more readily understand why we do what we do when we do history. Putting history teaching back in its place may also be the irst necessary step to restoring the value of history—in school curricula, in the humanities, and in public life. Textbooks and Teaching 1069 6 Stephen Botein et al., eds., Experiments in History Teaching (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); “A Midwife’s Tale,” prod. Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, dir. Richard P. Rogers (episode of American Experience, ex. prod. Judy Crichton), wgbh Boston (pbs, Jan. 19, 1998); Bonnie Goodman, “Top Young Historians,” History News Network, http://hnn.us/articles/28020.html. 7 Avihu Zakai, “‘Epiphany at Matadi’: Perry Miller’s Orthodoxy in Massachusetts and the Meaning of American History,” Reviews in American History, 13 (Dec. 1985), 627–41; Ruth Painter Randall, I Ruth: Autobiography of a Marriage (Boston, 1968), 95, 123; Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Uninished Civil War (New York, 1998). See also Edward T. Linenthal, “Violence and the American Landscape: he Challenge of Public History,” OAH Magazine of History, 16 (Winter 2002), 10–13. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 relects the roots of the historical profession in the work of Leopold von Ranke and the generation of American doctoral students who went to Germany for training among the sources. he answer relects over a century of academic historical practice emphasizing objectivity and archival sourcework. he answer provides context for the critiques of history education—from the “progressive historians” to the Foxire approach to active learning strategies—that have called for student engagement of primary sources. he answer also relects current rhetoric about historical practice: the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Laurel hatcher Ulrich created a compelling pbs documentary about her archival work to reconstruct the eighteenth-century world of the midwife Martha Ballard, the “Top Young Historians” spotlighted by the History News Network frequently share “personal anecdotes” that locate their professional development in the archive, and the academy rewards research far more than it rewards teaching.6 But is the archive the only place where we practice history? Do young historians have transformative experiences in archives, or is that simply what they imagine their established colleagues will want to hear? After a distinguished career, Perry Miller explained that his interest in Puritan history came not in an archive but in an “epiphany” in the jungles of Africa. Years after the death of James B. Randall, “the dean of Lincoln studies,” his wife revealed that his fascination with the sixteenth president originated when, as a child, he spent hours drawing and painting the craggy face of Abraham Lincoln. Free from tenure-track restraints, the journalist Tony Horwitz reported that his passion for Civil War history began as a child looking at photographs with his grandfather.7 he archive certainly forms an essential part of our experience, but not the most important. We do not just stumble into the nearest archive and ask for the daily special. Archival research is preceded by an intense and sometimes lengthy conceptualization process that involves at least the unarticulated awareness of present needs, current historiographical debates, the types of sources that may be relevant to needs and debates, and the collections and locations of particular archives that might provide those sources. his lengthy process also occurs, in practice, in conversation with others. We explain to grant funders, governments, and our employers why we must travel to the sources (or order reproductions of them). We engage the catalogs and collection guides preserved by families, maintained in archives, and indexed by librarians. We read, discuss, challenge, and absorb the interpretations (or dismissals) of our fellow historians, both past and contemporary. We receive feedback on our work from students, conference attendees, peer reviewers, editors, publishers, interviewers, and members of the general public who attend book talks and post comments on Amazon.com. True, we are hired individually and receive tenure and awards for individual contributions—but even hiring and tenure decisions rest heavily on the responses that our work has received in public. Readers, grant funders, and tenure and promotion committees all look for another narrative about our work—why we went to the archive, what we thought we might ind, how what we actually found advanced 1070 he Journal of American History March 2011 Can Students Really “Do History” in the Archive and at the Podium? Having located professional historical practice in the archive and at the podium, the question immediately arises: Can students really practice history the same way that trained historians do? To answer this question, I will look up from my own archival research and briely relate one story of students learning history in the archive and at the podium. he Southwestern Indiana Historical Society was organized in 1920 by the lawyer John E. Iglehart in Evansville, Indiana, and eventually drew over ive hundred members from all walks of life and from across the nation. hree times a year for nearly two decades they 8 In 1965 the Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore estimated that the number of components on a circuit would double every eighteen to twenty-four months. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, 38 (April 19, 1965), ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/ Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf. Over the long term, the rate has averaged around twenty months. he moment of turning from the archive to speak to the public unites all seven of the “new survival skills” articulated in Tony Wagner, he Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do about It (New York, 2010), 14–42. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 previous knowledge. he stories we tell others about the archive are just as important— possibly more so—than the stories we tell them from the archives. As we expand the view to see ourselves outside of the archive and engaged in a host of public conversations, we must next ask which of all the interactions will be most helpful in putting history teaching back in its place. If doctors meet patients in hospitals and lawyers join clients in the courtroom, where do we encounter our publics? On some occasions we meet the public as the informed provider of knowledge—we give lectures in classrooms, present papers at conferences, talk about our books in public or televised lectures, and make depositions to governmental hearings. In these settings, we draw on the knowledge gained in our research, determine what is important or relevant, and structure our presentation for the audience. On other occasions, we meet the public in a setting where they determine what is signiicant and pose the question to us. We work as park rangers at historical sites or docents in museums, we respond to journalists or documentary ilmmakers as talking heads, we serve as expert witnesses in the courtroom, we are hired as consultants, or we assess the value of an heirloom on Antiques Roadshow. In this expanded view of historical practice we see historians doing history in the archive and at the presenter’s podium. he crucial moment arrives when historians look up from their manuscripts, remove their white archival gloves, and—whether structuring presentations or responding to a prompt—decide which of all the sources examined and books read are most relevant to the situation and signiicant to the audience. hus the debate about the signature pedagogy of history must consider both how historians ind information, meaning, and evidence in the archive and how we evaluate, select, and organize our indings to address our publics and respond to their questions. he most critical act in the entire process is that of selecting what is most signiicant and relevant from a mass of information. Good history teaching, therefore, should place students in a position where they turn from their research to either make a presentation or respond to an audience’s questions, or both. In a world in which it has been estimated that the total volume of electronic knowledge doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months, no other skill is more vital for humans to master.8 Textbooks and Teaching 1071 9 William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Wik, Herndon’s Lincoln: he True Story of a Great Life; he History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana, 2006), 4. 10 A. J. Bigney, “How the Colleges Can Co-operate with the Historical Societies,” Indiana History Bulletin No. 1: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society, June 1924, p. 49; George Wilson, Historical Notes on Dubois County (40 vols. 1924–1941) (Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington), VI, 589, IV, 390, VII, 161, II, 215. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 came from Maine, California, and Texas to southern Indiana to hear historical papers read by one another—lawyers and politicians, university-trained historians and collectors, genealogists and high school drama teachers, college presidents and newspaper editors. Society members reacted to Abraham Lincoln’s biographers who had emphasized his presidential greatness by contrasting it with the “stagnant, putrid pool” of the Indiana frontier.9 Out of both familial pride and historical justice, the society worked to put Lincoln into proper historical context by conducting archival research, interviewing elderly residents, indexing old newspapers, erecting monuments, and writing and publishing about their indings. In so doing, members of this society believed it was critically important to help young people. One speaker noted that “if you can get a boy interested in any subject matter at this age he will probably retain his interest for a life time.” Society members believed that students could become interested in history, and they also thought that early twentiethcentury American school methods generally erased that interest. Catechized questions bore “no human interest and quite often hardly any connection between a question and the one before or after it.” School materials were “usually compiled in such a way as to be of little or no interest to a child.” One member observed humorously: “When the writer was a boy at school history was the driest subject on the program. . . . he class, as a unit, was sure that the island Noah’s dove found should be called History, because it was the only dry spot during the lood. Nothing could have been drier. All regretted that the lood did not cover it.” Beyond personal experience, society members also constructed their rationale based on the subject of their own historical interest—Lincoln became the greatest American with less than two years of formal education. Had they lived half a century later, these society members could have been advocates for critical thinking— they complained that students were taught to repeat answers “but not to think or initiate,” the “jar of memory was crowded but his ‘thinkbox’ was empty.” Had he lived then, Lendol Calder would have appreciated their critique of coverage: “he trouble with History is that too much is taught and not enough learned. he child is stufed with data and not fed.”10 As the inluence of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society grew, it was approached by school districts to provide training for teachers and to produce ready-made lesson outlines for class use. While the society’s executive committee entertained such requests, the discussion never turned into action. What emerged instead was a program of engaging students in the very activities of the society members—conducting archival research and presenting indings at society meetings. he Indianapolis insurance agent George Wilson advocated taking history “straight at the . . . boys and girls.” he society bypassed the classroom and the curriculum and pushed “school teachers to send their classes out to do some real irst-hand research work.” hey also experienced artifacts and places. A high 1072 he Journal of American History March 2011 11 On the activities of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society, see Keith A. Erekson, Everybody’s History: Indiana’s Lincoln Inquiry and the Quest to Reclaim a President’s Past (Amherst, forthcoming). Wilson, Historical Notes on Dubois County, II, 29; Proceedings of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society, June 15, 1923 (Willard Public Library, Evansville, Ind.), 7; Ibid., Feb. 12, 1924, p. 5; Bess Ehrmann, “Museum Collections,” Indiana Historical Commission Bulletin No. 16: Proceedings of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society, Oct. 1922, p. 81; Bigney, “How the Colleges Can Co-operate with the Historical Societies,” 49. 12 John E. Iglehart quoted in Indiana Historical Commission Bulletin No. 16, Oct. 1922, p. 22; Bigney, “How the Colleges can Co-operate with the Historical Societies,” 49–51; homas James de la Hunt, “Publicity in Newspapers,” Indiana Historical Commission Bulletin No. 16, Oct. 1922, p. 29; Edith horpe, “Captain Spier Spencer and the County Named for Him,” Southwestern Indiana Historical Society Papers (Willard Public Library); William L. Barker, “Resume of 1929 and 1930,” Feb. 12, 1931 (microilm: item 1j, reel 7), Iglehart Collection (Willard Public Library). Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 school drama teacher argued: “It is so much easier to get our children interested in the study of county history if they can really see and examine these things [and] they will be more permanently retained in the mind if they can see them.” A biologist with a selfidentiied “sideline” in history explained that “if you want to stir up the interest of our college students, all you have to do is to propose a journey to one of these historic spots, and their interest is easily aroused.”11 Encountering the traces of the past in archives, museums, and sites was only the irst step, however. he society’s founder “wished to have the schools interested so that students of history might later be able to do something along the line of historical papers.” A local college president ofered the college newspaper as an outlet for publication and a reporter for a local newspaper happily noted that school kids “have gone to the court house and to other sources of information and . . . have taken this material to the papers and the papers have given it space.” At one school, the history teacher organized a club in which students wrote a constitution, elected oicers, invited historians to speak to them, conducted research, and published their own newspaper. Club members worked collectively on a history of their community and the paper was read at the full meeting of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society. Ten years later the society’s president reported that the program helped students take an interest “forty years sooner than they would otherwise.”12 hus, my research in the archive helps me reconstruct a story of students thinking and acting like historians—both in the archives and in public. Not only does the evidence indicate that the students liked what they did, it also appears that they were successful in their work. he case of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society during the 1920s and 1930s is not unique. When a similar program was adopted in a neighboring midwestern county, parents wrote letters to the school superintendent: “My boy was never interested in any kind of history until he took up your outline. Now it is his favorite study.” Another reads: “My daughter will hardly go to bed of nights since she has begun her local history work. She wants to be interviewing some one about something all of the time.” A third: “he boys of our town are delighted. You have shown them that they can be both makers and writers of history.” In many ways, this approach is not dissimilar from the National History Day initiative that helps students study history and present their indings in regional, state, and national fairs. As early as 1910, the editor of Indiana’s state history magazine—a historian trained at Yale University and Columbia University—editorialized: “We too often take our students to the granaries into which long-known historical facts have been Textbooks and Teaching 1073 How Can Teachers Use the Archive and the Podium in the Classroom? With a new set of assumptions about and expectations for our students, we are ready to put them to work in the archive and at the speaker’s podium. Perhaps the easiest way to place students in public is to write the public into the assignment. Lendol Calder asked his students to write a memo to a U.S. senator recommending one of the course’s books 13 George S. Cottman, “Local History in the Schools—L. A. McKnight’s Work,” Indiana Magazine of History, 3 (June 1907), 93–95; Christopher B. Coleman, “Editorial,” Ibid., 6 (Dec. 1910), 184–86. See also Alan Haskvitz, “Local History and the Exemplary Award Winner: Letting Students Take Charge,” OAH Magazine of History, 4 (Summer 1989), 7–8. 14 Bruce VanSledright, In Search of America’s Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School (New York, 2002); Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (Mahwah, 2005); Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Researching History Education: heory, Method, and Context (New York, 2008). For sample lesson materials see Historical hinking Matters, http://www .historicalthinkingmatters.org. 15 Roy Rosenzweig and David helen, he Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998); James V. Wertsch, “Speciic Narratives and Schematic Narrative Templates,” in heorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto, 2004), 49–62; Ola Halldén, “On the Paradox of Understanding History in an Educational Setting,” in Teaching and Learning in History, ed. Leinhardt, Beck, and Stainton, 27–46. 16 Schaun Wheeler, “History Is Written by the Learners: How Student Views Trump United States History Curricula,” History Teacher, 41 (Nov. 2007), 9–24; Sam Wineburg, “he Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts,” in Teaching and Learning in History, ed. Leinhardt, Beck, and Stainton, 85–135; Margaret G. McKeown and Isabel L. Beck, “Making Sense of Accounts of History: Why hey Don’t and How hey Might,” ibid., 1–26; Halldén, “On the Paradox of Understanding History in an Educational Setting,” ibid., 27–46; James V. Wertsch, “Is It Possible to Teach Beliefs as Well as Knowledge about History?,” in heorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Seixas, 38–50. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 garnered by other writers and ask them to shovel piles of grain around from one place to another. We too seldom ask them to do the more vital and productive work of threshing out the wheat from the straw and the chaf, and themselves putting more grain into the granary.”13 A host of recent research conirms that students—as young as elementary school aged—can think and act like historians.14 Americans preserve diaries and photographs, evaluate the trustworthiness of sources, and bring their own organizing narratives and theories of change to bear on the assessment of new information.15 Students bring a lifetime of experience and knowledge to our classrooms and actively employ it to ilter our pronouncements, make sense of the world, create their own “private cognitive structures,” and learn to “know” what we teach by repeating our words while simultaneously not “believing” what we are saying.16 Our students are not simply “everymen” who may one day perform the quasi-historical action of balancing a checkbook. hey are historical beings who live and make meaning within temporality as they review old pictures, preserve the ashes of deceased loved ones, and reconnect with past friends via social media. Like historians, they are called on to place genealogical information about an ancestor into historical context, decide whether a present war bears any resemblance to past wars, or evaluate Barack Obama’s history of racism, Mitt Romney’s history of religion, or Dick Cheney’s history of terrorism and national security. Ordinary people do history every day—not in the same contexts, or with the same jargon, or by the systematic sophistication of academic historians—but they do it nonetheless. We must put history teaching into its place in classrooms on the new assumption that students are temporal beings and on the new expectation that they can reine and systematize the historical thought and actions that are already a part of their everyday lives. 1074 he Journal of American History March 2011 17 Calder, “Uncoverage”; Sam Wineburg, “Opening Up the Textbook and Ofering Students a ‘Second Voice,’” Education Week, June 6, 2007, pp. 28–29. 18 Beth Luey, “Teaching for Nonteaching Careers,” Public Historian, 4 (Spring 1982), 43–56; Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: he Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York, 1996); Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 2000); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and Public History: he Tough Stuf of American Memory (Chapel Hill, 2006). 19 Patricia Alvarez presents an application of HistoryAlive! press conference simulations of the U.S. Constitution, the compromise of 1850, and the Vietnam War in which students perform in roles as actor, reporter, historian, and public relations agent. See Patricia Alvarez, “Students Play the Notables: Testing a Simulation Exercise,” History Teacher, 41 (Feb. 2008), 179–97. 20 Barbara J. Howe, “Step Out of the Classroom and into Your Community,” OAH Magazine of History, 4 (Summer 1989), 3; Mary Johnson, “What’s in a Butterchurn or a Sadiron? Some houghts on Using Artifacts in Social History,” Public Historian, 5 (Winter 1983), 67–68. On the publication of oral histories, see, for example, Clif Kuhn and Marjorie McLellan, “Voices of Experience: Oral History in the Classroom,” OAH Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997), 23–31. Helen M. Lewis reports that her students wrote two books, one of which won an award. See Helen M. Lewis, “Community History,” Ibid., 11 (Spring 1997), 20–22. Michael Brooks, “‘Long, Long Ago’: Recipe for a Middle School Oral History Program,” Ibid., 32–35; Cynthia J. Little, “Neighborhood Adventures: Researching Self-Guided Walking Tours,” Ibid., 4 (Summer 1989), 21–25; and Charlene Mires, “Object Lessons: Material Culture on the World Wide Web,” Ibid., 15 (Summer 2001), 85–87. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 for adoption in the national history month reading list, Sam Wineburg assigned students to write to a textbook publisher to correct an error, and I have asked students to prepare a report for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.17 Students can write memos that recommend a book for purchase by the school library or evaluate a piece of writing for publication. Students can be introduced to case studies in which diferent audiences have responded diferently to museum exhibits about slavery or the Enola Gay exhibit, proposed state or national history standards, or a controversial monument or event in the local community. hen, the same writing assignment may be repeated for diferent audiences.18 In each case the audience exists only rhetorically, but its presence nevertheless inluences student performance. he students in the classroom can act as a public audience, though it is sometimes dificult to suspend the reality of their being peers. Students at the same school but not in the same class provide a more realistic experience. Students may assume the role of a public audience in debates, press conferences, or testimony before a government or community committee.19 When classes meet at the same time the audience may witness the presentation live; when they meet at diferent times the performance may be recorded. In another variation, student work could be posted on the wall during one time period and formally (peer) reviewed during another. Of course, the community provides ample opportunity for public presentation. Parents and interested citizens can be invited to attend presentations or see student exhibits mounted as a one-time fair or “museum for a day.” Student work may be displayed at local libraries, museums, and community institutions. Students may also publish their work in print or online for members of the community. Oral history projects have proven to be of great interest to communities when students publish their indings in a studentrun newspaper, a book, or as the audio for a community tour. One very innovative model combined students in ifth grade through eighth grade into an after-school program in which younger students conducted interviews under the advice and supervision of older students who had done the same work previously. he Internet allows for the public presentation of artifacts as well as text.20 Textbooks and Teaching 1075 21 For a discussion of problems with facsimiles and primary source collections, see Michael Eamon, “A ‘Genuine Relationship with the Actual’: New Perspectives on Primary Sources, History, and the Internet in the Classroom,” History Teacher, 39 (May 2006), 297–314. See also Brent Borg, “A Journey through Public History on the Web,” OAH Magazine of History, 16 (Winter 2002), 60–61. 22 For several useful exercises for teaching oral history methodology, see Paula J. Paul, “Fish Bowls and Bloopers: Oral History in the Classroom,” Ibid., 11 (Spring 1997), 43–48; and John F. Lyons, “Integrating the Family and the Community into the History Classroom: An Oral History Project in Joliet, Illinois,” History Teacher, 40 (Aug. 2007), 481–91. 23 For examples of genealogy exercises, see, for example, Fun and Famous Family Trees, http://genealogy.about. com/od/famous_family_trees/Fun_Famous_Family_Trees.htm; “Teaching with Documents: Little House in the Census—Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder,” U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.a rchives.gov/education/lessons/wilder/; and A to Z Teacher Stuf, http://www.atozteacherstuf.com/pages/347.shtml. 24 For examples of genealogical charting exercises, see, for example, Family History in the Classroom, http:// genealogy.about.com/od/lesson_plans/a/family_tree_projects_2.htm. 25 Ibid. 26 Linda Gordon, “Introducing Students to Family History,” OAH Magazine of History, 15 (Summer 2001), 19–22; Stephanie Coontz, “he Challenge of Family History,” Ibid., 28–30; John R. Gillis, “Your Family in History: Anthropology at Home,” Ibid., 31–34; Steven Mintz, “Does the American Family Have a History? Family Images and Realities,” Ibid., 4–10; Steven Mintz, “Teaching Family History: An Annotated Bibliography,” Ibid., 11–18; Steven Mintz, “Selected Internet Resources on Family History,” Ibid., 77–79. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 With a public waiting, our students can enter the archive with a greater sense of purpose. History teachers typically agree, in principle, that students should read primary sources, but in practice challenges arise: most communities do not house the National Archives or the Huntington Library and teachers have almost no means of funding travel for student research. Photocopies of sources, collections of sources in readers, and, more recently, the Internet have provided a substitute, but they reduce the archival experience to the senses of sight (and sometimes sound).21 he full archival experience cannot be achieved until our students have dust-blackened ingers and recognize the smell and feel of old paper. Putting history teaching back into its place in the archive means paying attention to senses as well as sources, to experience as well as e-holdings. Each day, students leave our classrooms and return to an archive they usually call home. When viewed as an archive, the home provides ready access to aging witnesses, historic photographs, unique documents, and valuable samples of material culture. Students can interview old people (anyone over the age of 30?) as the starting point for assignments that document and compare family experience to national narratives, newspaper accounts, or textbook treatments.22 Students who trace their family genealogy on a pedigree chart can make comparisons to the publicly available pedigrees of famous people—Albert Einstein, the pope, J. K. Rowling, or Barack and Michelle Obama—as well as to ictional/ictionalized characters such as Laura Ingalls Wilder or King Arthur.23 Students may chart the locations of ancestral residences on a map and compare the routes taken by their families to the east-to-west narrative of American history commonly presented in textbooks.24 Students may also track demographic and cultural features over time, such as height, health, occupations, cars, naming practices, child rearing, holidays, or favorite foods and pastimes.25 Writing assignments can summarize family values, explore the impact of experience on achievement, compare experience across generations, and contrast with the experience of families in other times and places.26 A recent survey found that 92 percent of history teachers use ilm in the classroom at least once per week, and a study in the United Kingdom found that students side with movies when the 1076 he Journal of American History March 2011 27 Alan S. Marcus and Jeremy D. Stoddard, “Tinsel Town as Teacher: Hollywood Film in the High School Classroom,” History Teacher, 40 (May 2007), 303–30. For lists of misuses of ilm, ideas for inquiry-based activities, and a model of a good viewing process, see Adam Woelders, “Using Film to Conduct Historical Inquiry with Middle School Students,” Ibid., 363–95. 28 Wineburg, Historical hinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 232–50. 29 James A. Percoco, A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History (Portsmouth, 1998), 67–80; Kuhn and McLellan, “Voices of Experience.” 30 Eric C. Schneider, “Picturing Delinquents, Institutions, and Families,” OAH Magazine of History, 15 (Summer 2001), 50–53. For examples of good analytical questions, see Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth I. Nybakken, “Photographs as a Source for Family History,” Ibid., 48–49; and Cecilia Aros Hunter and Leslie Gene Hunter, “La Castaña Project: A History Field Laboratory Experience,” Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002), 1456–60. 31 On Michael Bloomberg, see Michael Pollack, “For the Record, Mr. Mayor, Your Mother Called,” New York Times, July 14, 2006, http://nytimes.com/2006/07/13/nyregion/13mom.html. 32 Hunter and Hunter, “La Castaña Project.” 33 Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams (New York, 1921), 130–31. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 information contradicts what is found in textbooks.27 How many teachers assign students to watch movies with their families? Sam Wineburg found that parents who lived through particular events depicted in the ilm Forrest Gump were not content just to watch with their kids but instead discussed representation and interpretation in the ilm.28 Older adults can help students compare books and ilms such as Gone with the Wind, Roots, or Gandhi. And, of course, the witnesses can be invited to speak to the class.29 he home archive also houses photographs and documents. One student in Texas found a box of photographs documenting her grandparents’ activities, clothing, and landscape. Photographs open up questions and pique student interest when explored as texts, as documents, and as a history of family life.30 Students who examine their own birth certiicates may also ind information about their parents’ occupations and residences as well as the doctor and hospital (and the research can be put in the engaging context of debates over the birthplaces of Barack Obama, James Garield, and Michael Bloomberg).31 Research in the home archive has uncovered journals of grandparents leeing the Mexican Revolution and love letters written during the Great Depression and World War II.32 he cognitive and empathetic value of such an exercise was described by Booth Tarkington in the novel Alice Adams (1921) in which the title character, a teenage girl, stumbles on the love letters written by her parents. “For the irst time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. . . . Until this moment, Alice had no conviction that there was a universe before she came into it. She had always thought of it as the background of herself: the moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.” Moreover, if her parents, once young and in love, had now grown old and uninteresting, “so she, herself, must pass to such changes, too.”33 Every classroom will beneit from heightened student awareness of time and perspective. Finally, homes contain stuf—heirlooms, toys, newspapers, advertisements, and hobby supplies. Students can identify and write about family heirlooms then come together to discuss why some things are valued over others. For example, hundreds of Civil War oicers’ uniforms have been saved by families whereas private uniforms have largely vanished. Toys document the history of consumerism and illustrate patterns of recurring fashion—as at present when toys from the 1980s are being made into feature ilms and resold to a new generation. Stufed animals connect with a longer history of teddy bears that is documented in online museums and historical scholarship. he advertisements Textbooks and Teaching 1077 34 Mary Johnson outlines several beneits of using material culture. See Johnson, “What’s in a Butterchurn or a Sadiron?”; Miriam Forman-Brunell, “Teaching American History with Teddy’s Bear,” OAH Magazine of History, 15 (Summer 2001), 46–47. See also online museums of toys and bears at Toys from UK Toy Shops, http://www.toy.co.uk/museums/; and he Dorset Teddy Bear Museum, http://www. teddybearmuseum.co.uk. Find Sears and Roebuck catalogs at the Sears Archive, http://www.searsarchives.com/; or http://www.wishbookweb.com/. Find lesson plans using old catalogs at the Oicial State of Michigan Web Site, http://www.michigan.gov/ hal/0,1607,7-160-17451_18670_18793-69361--,00.html; Ohio History Online Portal, http://www.ohiohistory .org/historyworksohio/pdf/victorianvalueslp.pdf; and the Educator’s Reference Desk, http://www.eduref.org/Virtual/ Lessons/Social_Studies/US_History/USH0036.html. 35 David G. Vanderstel, “‘And I hought Historians Only Taught’: Doing History beyond the Classroom,” OAH Magazine of History, 16 (Winter 2002), 5–7; Percoco, Passion for the Past, 47–66; James W. Loewen, Lies across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York, 2000); James A. Percoco, Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments (New York, 2008). 36 Sam Bass Warner, “Listening for the Dead,” Public Historian, 5 (Autumn 1983), 63–70. For ield trip ideas, see Cemetery Studies, http://www.angelire.com/ky2/cemetery/; Education World, http://www .education-world.com/a_lesson/dailylp/dailylp/dailylp097.shtml; Department of Arkansas Heritage, http://www .arkansasheritage.com/in_the_classroom/lesson_plans/ahpp/cemeterylessonplan.pdf; and Wisconsin Historical Society, http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/teachers/lessons/elementary/cemetery.asp. 37 Deborah Welch, “Teaching Public History: Strategies for Undergraduate Program Development,” Public Historian, 25 (Winter 2003), 71–82; Randy K. Mills and John L. Woods, “Ghosts, Legends, and Haunted Houses: Using Colorful Local History Resources in the History Classroom,” OAH Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997), 49–51. 38 Sandra Rof, “Archives, Documents, and Hidden History: A Course to Teach Undergraduates the hrill of Historical Discovery Real and Virtual,” History Teacher, 40 (Aug. 2007), 551–58; Tamar Lewin, “Museums Take heir Lessons to the Schools,” New York Times, April 21, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/ 22ieldtrips.html?th&emc=th. 39 For an example of a classroom partnership with a museum, see John J. Grabowski, “Going Public with Introductory American History,” Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002), 1451–55. he relationship between a library and a literature class is outlined in Linda P. Wood, “he Family in the Fifties: Hope, Fear, and Rock ’n’ Roll,” OAH Magazine of History, 11 (Spring 1997), 36–38. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 that arrive in the morning newspaper can be compared to copies of the Sears and Roebuck catalogs now preserved online. Students who profess no interest in history will be surprised to learn that the things that do interest them—music, teenage resistance to parental control, baseball card collections, sports statistics, and pets—have histories documented within the walls of their homes. Even the home itself can be placed within history— with its eicient and lightweight modern appliances, kitchens and bathrooms incorporated into the footprint of the house instead of in separate buildings, the lack of a parlor, and individual place settings around the dinner table.34 Homes form only part of the wider neighborhood archive. Building styles and materials document change over time in the community. James Percoco took his students to monuments of Abraham Lincoln, and James Loewen suggests that controversial monuments can be found in every community. Students can analyze a single building or monument or they could survey collections of structures.35 Cemeteries provide opportunities to read and touch tombstones, interpret symbols, and write about death in general or one’s own epitaph in particular.36 Material culture can be engaged by attending local reenactments, searching for artifacts at a lea market, or recording and analyzing local legends about town politics, famous local igures, or haunted buildings.37 If, in the past, librarians and archivists bristled at the arrival of the uninformed public, today their professional associations are calling for a “teaching revolution” to bring patrons (and funding) in troubled times.38 here are many models of successful long-term partnerships between classes and institutions.39 Make sure to provide opportunities for students simply 1078 he Journal of American History March 2011 40 Vanderstel, “‘And I hought Historians Only Taught,’”; Beth M. Boland, “Historic Places: Common Ground for Teachers and Historians,” OAH Magazine of History, 16 (Winter 2002), 19–21. 41 Percoco, Passion for the Past, 97–109. Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org at University of Texas at El Paso on March 3, 2011 to browse and touch and smell as well as to learn how professionals preserve, organize, and archive materials from the past.40 hough any of the preceding activities may be undertaken at any relevant time in a course, entire courses may efectively be built around student work in the archive and at the public podium.41 I have taught such a course for college undergraduates in both Indiana and Texas. In Indiana, my students conducted research about deceased town residents that was used by the local historical society to create the script for a successful cemetery walk fundraiser in which volunteer actors portrayed the people studied by the students. In Texas, my students donated their indings to the local history museum where their work was used to create three new exhibits. In both cases, the students hosted a formal ceremony in which they exhibited their work to the public, won prizes donated by local businesses, and deeded their work to the partner institution. Both of those courses had a diferent “feel.” Students displayed a more intense earnestness to do good work, but the anxiety was constructive as it led to deep conversations about history and method and to scrupulous revising and editing—in one instance a student slipped me a new copy of her paper moments before donating it to the museum because she had “found three typos in the other one.” Where in the past students had questioned the need for proper source citation, now it was obvious who would read their papers and what that audience would need. Overshadowing the nerves, however, was a profound sense of excitement—the quiet joy of inding a fat archival folder, the exultation of discovering a treasure trove of photographs after searching in the library for six hours (no small feat for a “digital” native accustomed to instant online searches), the fun of growing nineteenth-century style facial hair to match that of a student’s subject. “I had never really understood how history worked,” one student reported, but “by going out and actually doing the research I enjoyed it.” Said another: “hank you for equipping us with the tools to do some real research. I learned a great deal, and I hope in the future I can sharpen these skills.” We can and must put history teaching back in its place by teaching our students how to work in the archive and present to the public. We cannot settle for photocopies of primary sources when archival sources are so close that our students can touch the past and smell the dust from its pages. Students who present their archival indings to the public will learn to explain not only what they found but also why history matters. By viewing every home as an archive, every student as a temporal being, and every teacher as a link to the archive and the public, we will put history teaching back in its place in classrooms, in curricula, and in American public life.