TPJ, as one of the fellow historians in this conversation group, I concur that some of the most interesting work published in the last 5-10 years is reassessing not just US and North American colonial history (and how I wish people would start paying more attention to Canada in discussion of the era before the invention of the USA), but …
TPJ, as one of the fellow historians in this conversation group, I concur that some of the most interesting work published in the last 5-10 years is reassessing not just US and North American colonial history (and how I wish people would start paying more attention to Canada in discussion of the era before the invention of the USA), but also British and European history. The impact of the Cromwellian Interregnum on the psyches of British people has been understudied. The tactics Cromwell used in Ireland against Catholics served as a blueprint for genocide in the colonies, and the expansion of the plantation system from Ulster to the colonies, with its parallel expansion of the kinds of enslaved and pressed labor developed in order to effect it, has not been discussed sufficiently by either British or US historians.
One of the biggest problems we have is that "American" history has almost always been a closed shop: Historians outside the USA have, until recently, eschewed studying US history. This is changing, but slowly. As a British historian whose background is anything but British, I find I have a different perspective on the history of the British Isles, as I am not particularly influenced by some emotion-driven notion of "patriotism" in the work I do. I am not saying that American-born historians are incapable of being critically engaged--far from it. But we have these jokers whose "education" in US history was probably taught in high school by football coaches (that's who taught US history in my high school and many others) who have absolutely no idea of how to think critically about the past. Unfortunately, they appeal to the basest emotional instincts of the dominant white population in order to demonize everyone else.
And never forget the text books that shaped the curriculum everywhere. If Texas didn’t adopt a text book, it was/is dead on arrival, as the big publishing houses well knew. Authors were carefully edited and teachers required to follow the prescribed program. I published a textbook for junior college communications with a major publisher in 1986. It took my co-author and I four years to respond to all the editing and for the company to bring the book out.
I was a teacher in a very progressive public school later. Happily, in our system teachers were free to dispense with textbooks. It made more work for teachers but such better opportunity to help students of all ages learn research skills, questioning, and discernment.
So I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but I've been thinking about it all day.
When I was in school, there was no Google. Our town, when I was young, had no bookstores: as I mentioned, the closest we had was the Hallmark store, and the "lurid paperback" rack at the supermarket, and of course, the magazine racks, and least half of which were up high with only the top edges showing. My parents got us a World Book Encyclopedia set, twenty-some volumes of the "authoritative history of everything." The county library had what it had, and there was a card catalogue, but its curation was a bit haphazard.
The real Authority was the textbooks we were given in our classes, because it consisted of material we had to memorize and regurgitate, though typically only once. There was no real synthesis of ideas, just discrete sections with discrete globs of things to memorize, regurgitate, and forget. But we all knew that if it was in the Textbook, it was right, and the teacher was wrong.
Now, I can go online and learn how to install and mud drywall (that's been a home project, and we did a good job), gather enough information to write an algorithm for reproducible floating-point sums, get an overview of global warming trends (with data), read three competing histories of the attack on Pearl Harbor, order a book on John Dee's Enochian Magick.... If I can ask the question, I can get answers.
It's like something out of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night.
So how DO you approach the teaching of history? Can it be summarized?
When I taught third grade my class and I researched and wrote and published neighborhood histories. We began with the neighborhood around our school, which included many olh houses as well as the site of the first gristmill in our county. We discussed how we could learn what the neighborhood was like 150 years earlier. We walked downtown to the main branch library and discovered the Sanborne insurance maps as well as old city directories. We found a history of Asheville ( our city) houses. We knocked on doors and interviewed people. Eventually we divided the research into pieces and kids wrote different sections. We invited the man who lived on the gristmill site to talk to us. We had discussions about how you could decide which was the correct answer when one source gave a different date than another. It was a fascinating project for all of us. We integrated language arts, social studies, research, etc. These were 8 and 9 year olds, and at the end of the year we went to a City Council meeting where a few of the kids got up and gave reasons why the neighborhood should be designated a historic district.(It did).
TPJ, as one of the fellow historians in this conversation group, I concur that some of the most interesting work published in the last 5-10 years is reassessing not just US and North American colonial history (and how I wish people would start paying more attention to Canada in discussion of the era before the invention of the USA), but also British and European history. The impact of the Cromwellian Interregnum on the psyches of British people has been understudied. The tactics Cromwell used in Ireland against Catholics served as a blueprint for genocide in the colonies, and the expansion of the plantation system from Ulster to the colonies, with its parallel expansion of the kinds of enslaved and pressed labor developed in order to effect it, has not been discussed sufficiently by either British or US historians.
One of the biggest problems we have is that "American" history has almost always been a closed shop: Historians outside the USA have, until recently, eschewed studying US history. This is changing, but slowly. As a British historian whose background is anything but British, I find I have a different perspective on the history of the British Isles, as I am not particularly influenced by some emotion-driven notion of "patriotism" in the work I do. I am not saying that American-born historians are incapable of being critically engaged--far from it. But we have these jokers whose "education" in US history was probably taught in high school by football coaches (that's who taught US history in my high school and many others) who have absolutely no idea of how to think critically about the past. Unfortunately, they appeal to the basest emotional instincts of the dominant white population in order to demonize everyone else.
And never forget the text books that shaped the curriculum everywhere. If Texas didn’t adopt a text book, it was/is dead on arrival, as the big publishing houses well knew. Authors were carefully edited and teachers required to follow the prescribed program. I published a textbook for junior college communications with a major publisher in 1986. It took my co-author and I four years to respond to all the editing and for the company to bring the book out.
I was a teacher in a very progressive public school later. Happily, in our system teachers were free to dispense with textbooks. It made more work for teachers but such better opportunity to help students of all ages learn research skills, questioning, and discernment.
So I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but I've been thinking about it all day.
When I was in school, there was no Google. Our town, when I was young, had no bookstores: as I mentioned, the closest we had was the Hallmark store, and the "lurid paperback" rack at the supermarket, and of course, the magazine racks, and least half of which were up high with only the top edges showing. My parents got us a World Book Encyclopedia set, twenty-some volumes of the "authoritative history of everything." The county library had what it had, and there was a card catalogue, but its curation was a bit haphazard.
The real Authority was the textbooks we were given in our classes, because it consisted of material we had to memorize and regurgitate, though typically only once. There was no real synthesis of ideas, just discrete sections with discrete globs of things to memorize, regurgitate, and forget. But we all knew that if it was in the Textbook, it was right, and the teacher was wrong.
Now, I can go online and learn how to install and mud drywall (that's been a home project, and we did a good job), gather enough information to write an algorithm for reproducible floating-point sums, get an overview of global warming trends (with data), read three competing histories of the attack on Pearl Harbor, order a book on John Dee's Enochian Magick.... If I can ask the question, I can get answers.
It's like something out of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night.
So how DO you approach the teaching of history? Can it be summarized?
When I taught third grade my class and I researched and wrote and published neighborhood histories. We began with the neighborhood around our school, which included many olh houses as well as the site of the first gristmill in our county. We discussed how we could learn what the neighborhood was like 150 years earlier. We walked downtown to the main branch library and discovered the Sanborne insurance maps as well as old city directories. We found a history of Asheville ( our city) houses. We knocked on doors and interviewed people. Eventually we divided the research into pieces and kids wrote different sections. We invited the man who lived on the gristmill site to talk to us. We had discussions about how you could decide which was the correct answer when one source gave a different date than another. It was a fascinating project for all of us. We integrated language arts, social studies, research, etc. These were 8 and 9 year olds, and at the end of the year we went to a City Council meeting where a few of the kids got up and gave reasons why the neighborhood should be designated a historic district.(It did).
Like that. We are skewed in our objectivity (accuracy) by our emotion-driven notions.
Thanks, Linda. I hadn't considered the take-over of Ireland as prelude to other colonial endeavors. That makes perfect sense to me.