Historical Thinking
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I can’t remember where I got this phrase, but the link is now dead or hidden behind the AHA paywall (November 26, 2014). ↩︎
The AHA’s members and their colleagues teach students how to think, not what to think. Preparing future generations to read, think, and analyze provides a much stronger foundation for informed patriotism and civic participation. This executive order does just the opposite, providing a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy.…
– James Grossman, “On the K–12 Education Executive Order,” American Historical Association.
It’s one thing to criticize presentist thinking and optimistic notions of human progress that don’t comport with professional historiography. It’s quite another to be punched in the face repeatedly by the reality of historical contingency in our national experience these past few decades.
Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books
On August 27th, I posted a mid-to-late 1940s photo of two Black sailors browsing books in a library section marked “Negro Books." In response, a couple people on my socials expressed outrage or sadness over the segregation they thought they were seeing. That makes sense if one doesn’t consider the book titles I mentioned or the link to a related post here titled Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation.
Thing is, though, books could be powerful wherever librarians made them available in their collections and discoverable by their readers. That’s why I see in the image two sailors browsing books in a thematic library display that highlighted a selection of books of probable interest to Black people. The photo’s provenance also suggests as much: the U.S. Navy Department’s Office of Public Relations produced it, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture preserved it. What’s more, there is the photo’s suggestive chronological proximity to the end of the war and to Harry S. Truman’s desegregation order for the U.S military in 1948. Yes, the photo was taken in a broader context of prejudice and segregation, even atrocity, but the story does not end there.
We can’t allow our knowledge of historical and present-day racism to blind us to signs in the image of people with agency who worked toward a more just world. Someone in the navy’s PR office decided or was ordered to take and distribute such a photo, or have this done. One or more people in a navy library ordered and displayed the books that caught the photographer’s eye, perhaps owing to the cataloging innovations of Dorothy B. Porter. Moreover, someone shaped the command climate in which these things transpired.
Whatever led to these particular sailors posing for this picture, the camera recorded two young black men doing something about their present and future. We see them serving their country. We see them acquiring knowledge about it that had emancipatory potential.
Of course, nothing in this kind of framing can negate the history of racism in this country. What thinking about individual agency can do is open our eyes to the humanity and strength of the people who endured and made lives for themselves despite the oppression. The books on the shelves written by Black authors were also evidence of such spirit. And the unknown characters behind the making of this photograph? It is productive to think of them as individuals who made choices within a specific institutional, social, and cultural matrix. Human agency matters.
A Hard Thing to Teach
What was once seen as standing ‘outside’ history, demanding silent contemplation but resisting explanation or contextualisation, has now been firmly historicised. Comparative genocide studies, histories of colonialism and genocidal violence, studies of western penal practice and more besides have demonstrated that the processes which led to the Holocaust were integral to modern history, not an aberration from it.
Neil Gregor, “‘To Think is to Compare’: Walther Rathenau, Trump and Hitler,” History Today, February 20, 2017.
Terence Zuber, Military History, and Culture
Officers, some on horseback, at a Kaiser Maneuver in 1898. Source: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.
I recently noticed that the English translation of Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente, edited by Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard P. Groß, is now available from the University Press of Kentucky under the title The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I. Interestingly, Terence Zuber, who sparked much of the debate on German war planning prior to the Great War, declined to allow his chapter from the German original to be included in this English translation.1 It wasn't his best piece anyway, far more peevish than usual, and there is plenty of his work on the supposedly nonexistent Schlieffen Plan already available in English. Be that as it may, if Zuber's thesis about Schlieffen's war planning has been conclusively disproven, the assumptions underlying his work have received less attention.2 That matters because his work on Schlieffen continues to be widely read and discussed, having made a big splash when it first came out. Moreover, he continues to write and publish books on German military history.
Consumption History Again
Park & Shop Shopping Center, Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC, via Library of Congress.
Yesterday I asked how I could integrate the consumption history I’m learning into my teaching, and I pointed to a couple examples where it’s already there. But I missed a glaringly obvious one: the Great War.
Consumption is a vital part of the story in Gerald Feldman’s classic Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914—1918 (1966), insofar as the purchasing power of labor was inextricably linked to Germany’s social and political stability and, therefore, the country’s ability to produce sufficient armaments to continue fighting. The point is more accessible in Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914—1918 (1998 and 2004), which I have used in a course on the Great War and will use again next fall in one on modern Germany. There is also Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000), which I will be using in a graduate course on war and society this summer.
I also usually bring up a much earlier aspect of consumption history when I address the Enlightenment and the public sphere: coffee houses. To make this point, there is a delightful reading from before the Enlightenment on the Internet Modern History Sourcebook: “The First English Coffee-Houses, c. 1670—1675.”
Of course, none of this is informed by a specific historiography of consumption history, but it does point out how this topic is already in my teaching. But there’s a difference between including a topic and addressing it systematically. To think about war and society in Europe, I can at least draw on the periodizing nomenclature of “cabinet war,” “people’s war,” and “total war” to help describe the level of societal involvement in interstate conflicts over the past few centuries (Stig Förster et al.). If such language and periodization exists for understanding consumption history, I have not yet learned it.
Perhaps the main point is to recognize modern consumer societies as having a history in the first place, instead of taking them as a direct reflection of human nature and, hence, rendering them ahistorical, as too often happens in simplistic political rhetoric that opposes capitalism and communism—rhetoric that invariably finds its way into student spoken and written comments. I sometimes try to do this with economic thought in the early modern period, but historicizing capitalism should be a central historiographical problem for the modern era, too.
Contemporary Political Rhetoric and Teaching History
Earlier this month I did a post on my Hist 100 blog that might be of some interest to readers here [on Clio and Me], "Contemporary Politics and History." My audience was primarily freshmen in their first semester at university, most of them too young to have voted in the last election.
I have said this in class, but it needs repeating here: Our contemporary American political discourse about socialism and nazism has absolutely nothing to do with those terms and phenomena in actual history. While we are not in class to talk about American politics, I want to point out how language and history are being abused for political purposes. I am not doing this to undermine the stances of politicians who use hyperbole to make their points. There are perfectly good ideological and policy reasons that one can bring to either side of the health care debate, the energy policy debate, environmental policy debates, and so on. But none of these reasons has anything to do with Hitler, nazism, communism, or socialism—not if we are being honest, and as long as we are willing to see the slippery slope argument for what it is, a logical fallacy.
This abuse of history used to just offend me as a citizen who knew something about history, but addressing the abuse became part of my teaching job this summer when I had a student try to explain Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government." That is when I realized that not only was history being abused for political purposes, but our contemporary political discourse was getting in the way of students understanding the past. That's why I wrote a blog post on my own history blog sarcastically entitled, "What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom."
I could follow the logic of the student who described Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government," if I were willing to understand the past in terms of this country's contemporary self-image, but I am not. We need to take the past on its own terms and try to understand it in some detail before we attempt easy analogies. In other words, my concern relates to historical thinking, that is, that thing I began teaching you with the reading assignments from August 31st, including Gerald Schlabach's "A Sense of History."
What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom
I am probably not alone when I say that I have a hard time taking GOP “socialism” rhetoric seriously. The same goes for right-wing attempts to equate Obama with Hitler. Apparently, however, I need to keep this rhetoric in mind when planning my classes for it has entered my classroom in an unexpected way. In a blue book essay about totalitarianism this summer, one student explained nazism in terms of “socialism” and “big government.” There was no political intent behind these statements. The student simply drew on the language of everyday life, as students are wont to do.
This is a sad commentary on what rhetorical excess on the right is doing to our everyday vocabulary, but it also presents an opportunity. Without engaging in politicking, I can use this apparent linguistic and cultural deficit not only as motivation to be more thorough about how I teach socialism, nazism, and other modern political ideologies and systems, but also as an example for historical thinking. My instinct here is to talk about the use and abuse of history, which is probably what I will do. On the other hand, however, some of those who throw around the “s” word really believe that socialism is on the march in the United States. If I were to take such fears seriously, I would also use them to teach my students about how the meaning of language shifts and even mutates over time, sometimes meaning different things to different groups of people. This too would be a worthwhile lesson, although it would bring me closer to something that some students might perceive as politicking. I should probably take that chance.
Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences
Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.
What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.
Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.
Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rBarack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences
Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.
What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.
Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.
Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rhetoric.hetoric.
Fostering Historical Thinking with Brecht’s Galileo
Spring is almost here, which means its time to order books for the summer term. Summer in DC gets hot, and the summer terms are short, so I usually try to assign things that are both reasonably entertaining and not too long for the general audience I get in my introductory survey courses that are mandatory requirements for all majors. Besides covering a variety of themes and genres, I often try to pick one book that will jump-start historical thinking. I want a book that will make students more aware of how much "the past is like a foreign country" that we will not understand, if we do not try to fathom the conditions and assumptions of the time without letting our contemporary worldview get in our way.
Last year I tried Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, which I had first experienced as a TA for Sandra Horvath-Peterson at Georgetown University back in the 1990s. Of course, Brecht adapts Galileo's story to his own purposes, but it provides a useful point of departure for a discussion about the Scientific Revolution. It also forces students to come to terms with the limits of historical fiction.
It usually goes pretty well, though the first section I did it in was a little rocky, partly because not enough students had done the reading, but also because I was surprised that so few people had any general knowledge of fascism. The paperback edition we used, translated by Eric Bently, contains some excellent material on Brecht's prejudices, but it spends too much time on material more of interest to specialists in drama. Some students read the first part of it, but most gave up and went straight to the play. So I integrated a mini talk of Brecht's time into the discussions and got them to reason out how the problems of the nineteen thirties and forties had manifested themselves in a play Brecht had set in the seventeenth century. I also assigned sources from 1615 and 1633, so that they could get a sense of the issues from Galileo's own time.
One point I tried to make clear was that science was only then beginning to manifest itself as an independent discourse, that it was perfectly natural for the Church to be interested in science at the time and even claim authority on the matter. Of course, I'm no specialist on the matter, but it seems to me that this basic point is worth making. Most students seemed to get it too. Indeed, I felt like cheering when one woman near the end of a class wondered aloud what people would think about our own world in another few hundred years. Sound trivial? Maybe to historians and those for whom historical thinking comes naturally. In our presentist society and with this presentist generation, I think the question was excellent. This student and her classmates were thinking historically.
The success of this discussion was also due in part to another issue. I have begun to “legitimate confusion” for my students,1 that is, I have begun to cultivate an awareness in them of just how hard historical interpretation can be and how important learning how to ask questions can be. With this attitude, students can explore sources and ideas honestly and thoughtfully without fear of getting it wrong and looking bad. With such an awareness, students were willing to attempt the leaps of imagination necessary to navigate among three different time periods, the early twenty-first century, the nineteen thirties and forties, and the first few decades of the seventeenth century.
I might try this book again, though I could also do with a change. Perhaps some of you have some ideas?
Across Generations
When I went to the student coffee shop on Friday, the student at the cash register guessed my order before I could tell him what I wanted. I remarked that I had had similar experiences with regulars when I worked at a Dunkin' Donuts over twenty years ago. His response: “They had Dunkin' Donuts back then?”
For me there has always been a Dunkin' Donuts. Indeed, according to Wikipedia and the corporate website of Dunkin' Donuts, the first store opened in 1950, which is close enough to “always” for someone born in the early 1960s. So why did the student think Dunkin' Donuts was new? His own answer was eminently practical: “I haven’t even been alive for twenty years.” Still, his underlying assumption that so much of the world around him was new took me aback.
Maybe I should not have been surprised by his presentism. After all, the current generation of students has grown up hearing that they live in a completely different world than the one into which I was born. They have heard from their parents and teachers about a bygone world in the midst of a Cold War without personal computing, the internet, cell phones, iPods, and global warming. And then there are the many students who have grown up in new subdivisions, schools and strip malls.
What do these thoughts have to do with me and Clio? One of my main goals in undergraduate survey courses is to teach historical thinking, which in part entails helping students appreciate not only that the world has a past, but that the people in that past saw that world through different eyes. But it is not enough for me to ask them to see how the world looks when it is filtered through the experiences of earlier generations. In order to do my job, I find it helps if I meet them halfway and try to understand how the world looks when filtered through their experiences. Of course, I usually end up looking uncool in the process, but as the father of a teenager I am used to that.