Should You Go to Graduate School in the Humanities?

No.

At least this is the view of Thomas Hart Benton in his most recent column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here is Benton on why undergraduates think they want to go to graduate school:

They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.)

They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated.

They are emerging from 16 years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening.

With the prospect of an unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars.

They can't find a position anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things that don't interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help.

They think that graduate school is a good place to hide from the recession. They'll spend a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and then, if academe doesn't seem appealing or open to them, they will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And, you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.

He goes on to offer "a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities":

You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.


You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.

You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.


You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

Much of what Benton says here is worth thinking about, especially his remarks about the ever-tightening job market. It is hard to argue with any of these points. But in my view he is way too pessimistic and bitter. Perhaps he is tainted by his own negative experience searching for an academic job. He also presumes that undergraduates are shallow, really uninterested in their subjects, and afraid of the real world.

I don't know what kind of students Benton teaches at Hope College, but I encounter many history students with a deep and abiding interest in their subjects. They are not afraid of the real world. They want to pursue an academic vocation because they are called to a life of the mind. Such a calling sometimes transcends economic considerations.

Of course potential graduate students need to know that graduate school can be a long haul with no guarantee of a job at the other end. I keep this lecture in my back pocket and I pull it out whenever a student comes to my office to talk about graduate school. But if I sense that a student has a passion for the subject and is aware of the risk, I have no problem encouraging them to pursue an advance degree in the humanities.

I believe our friend Philip Vickers Fithian had something to say about this. Here is an excerpt from p. 61 of the Way of Improvement Leads Home:

Cohansey's middling farmers believed that they were living happy lives because they owned farms and had accumulated a modicum of wealth through their participation in the ever-stable Philadelphia grain market. They lived, after all, in the "best poor man's country in the world." If Philip were to turn his back on the relative prosperity associated with this way of life, he would need to redefine the pursuit of happiness in a noneconomic way. In a statement that would be the envy of any twenty-first-century college professor who has tried to explain to a student why a major in a humanities discipline was a good idea, Philip favored the love of liberal learning over the quest for personal wealth or comfort: "I hold a free Education in so great Esteem, that I should choose for my Lot, to live in the World in low Condition, if Providence thought it necessary, as to Wealth and all outward Greatness, under the Frown of Fortune, & be blest with Learning, rather than possess the most ample Estate, & be blind with Ignorance." He requested that his "whole Patrimony . . . be applied to help in finishing my Education, even if it should be expended."

Spring 09 Courses

The Spring semester at Messiah College begins on Monday. I have spent most of the last month writing, reading, blogging, and coaching girls basketball and, while I will continue to do these things, it is time for teaching to begin again.

This semester I will be teaching three courses:

HIS 399: Religion and the American Founding
This course explores the role of religion in revolutionary America and the debate over whether or not America was founded as a "Christian nation."
Texts include Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States; Mason Locke Weems George Washington: A Life; Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory; Mark Noll, et.al, The Search for Christian America; David Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers; and Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution.

HIS 323: Civil War America
A general overview of American history from 1848-1877. Texts include James McPherson, Battle Cry for Freedom; Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: A Short History; and Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic.

IDCR 151: Created and Called for Community
This course is required of all Messiah College first-year students. It is an interdisciplinary seminar that focuses on the reading of primary texts. Authors include Madeline L'Engle, J.R. Tolkien, Henry Nouwen, Martin Luther King, James Weldon Johnson, St. Matthew, Ernest Boyer, Robert Putnam, St. Paul, Frederick Buechner, Albert Schweitzer, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Wang Anyi, St. Francis of Assissi, and John Paul II.

I am sure I will be doing some posts related to these course as the semester unfolds.

The Journal of Presbyterian History

I just received the Fall/Winter 2008 edition of The Journal of Presbyterian History. (It is not yet available on-line). The volume is devoted to Presbyterians in the wake of conflict and schism. Here is an abstract of my lead article: "In Search of Unity: Presbyterians in the Wake of the First Great Awakening."

This article explores the Presbyterian Church in the wake of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival commonly referred to as the First Great Awakening. This revival badly divided the Presbyterian Church into Old Side and New Side factions and tore at the very fabric of local Presbyterian communities. In the decades following the Awakening, Presbyterians embraced Enlightenment views of morality and order to help them in their efforts to heal the revival wounds and restore unity to the church. Some of the most divisive evangelical Presbyterians during the 1740s repented of their schismatic practices, and Presbyterian communities experienced local awakenings stemming from a renewed sense of harmony and peace. By the 1760s, a strong and reunified Presbyterian denomination was ready to make a significant contribution to a revolutionary age.

The essay draws on some early fruits from my research into Christianity and the American Revolution.

The other articles in the volume are:

D.G. Hart, "After the Breakup, Heartbreak: Conservative Presbyterians without a Common Foe."

James H. Moorhead, "Mainstream Presbyterians: Putting the Pieces Together Again after the Fundamentalist Controversy."

Leading Lives That Matter

My series of posts on William James's "What Makes a Life Significant" was inspired by the essay's inclusion in a relatively new anthology, edited by Mark Schwehn and Dorothy Bass of Valparaiso University, entitled Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be. Schwehn and Bass have chosen readings centered around themes such as authenticity, virtue, vocation, work, the "balanced life," and personal identity. The authors include James, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Taylor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Aristotle, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Day, Dorothy Sayers, H.G. Wells, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Jane Addams, Martha Nussbaum, St. Matthew, Immanuel Kant, Amy Tan, Malcolm X, Willa Cather, Thomas Merton, and John Steinbeck.

I am slowly working my way through this book and may, on occasion, blog about some of the material that Schwehn and Bass have gathered.

You can find an interview with Schwehn and Bass here.

What Makes a Life Significant?: Part Four

We come to our fourth and final installment on William James's 1900 lecture to college students, "What Makes a Life Significant?" After discussing the virtue of a working class life and the need for cultivating "ideals" to live by, James brings things to a conclusion:

The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty...

But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then Tolstoï and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend singly to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.

Culture and refinement. Pluck and will. A significant life is a life that brings these virtues into some sort of "fusion." James continues: "The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place."

He closes with an illustration:

Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying bands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.

James is tapping into an enduring tension in American life. Those who pursue ideals, he argues, must be grounded in real communities and the day to day rhythms of life and labor. This is what some have called rooted cosmopolitanism or, as I prefer, cosmopolitan rootedness. Whether one wants to connect it to a sort of working-class intellectualism or the Jeffersonian vision of the educated yeoman, James is arguing that true significance in life comes when we use both our minds and our bodies in the way that they were intended to be used. Ideals are only worthwhile when they function in real places among real people doing real things.

I was drawn to this essay because it reflects the primary message of The Way of Improvement Leads Home. For James, like Philip Vickers Fithian, "rural Enlightenment" was not an oxymoron.

100-0

Check this out: A girls high school basketball team in Texas defeated their opponents 100-0 the other day. The coach of the winning team was fired for running up the score. With a 59-0 lead at halftime, the coach did not back off. His team continued to full court press and shoot 3-point shots throughout the second half in an attempt to reach 100 points.

The link includes some video analysis from ESPN's Mike and Mike.

George Marsden on the History of American Evangelicalism

Brad Hart at American Creation has posted a lecture on American evangelicalism by George Marsden. It was a talk he gave at the 2007 meeting of the Organization of American Historians.

What Makes a Life Significant? Part Three

We continue our thoughts on William James's 1900 essay, "What Makes a Life Significant?" Up until this point in the essay, James has suggested that a significant life is found by cultivating the virtues common among the laboring classes--hard work, duty, suffering, loyalty. But as the essay continues he suggests that these virtues are not enough. In order to live a significant life one must be motivated by "ideals." James writes:

And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer pleasures? Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,-read the records of missionary devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then, taken by itself,-no, nor all of them together,-that make such a life undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures. Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.

If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,—that their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner ideal, while their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name.

And what exactly does James mean by an "ideal." He continues:

Can we give no definite account of such a word? To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we 'have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal,-novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.

James suggests that education--that entrance point into a middle-class life--is the best means of "multiplying our ideals." Education exposes us to ideas which, in turn, are turned into "ideals," which in turn provides us with purpose and a moral compass for life. James sums up:

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured-for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be out conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none.

James has now painted two pictures of virtue for us: the working class life and the educated idealist. Can these two worlds be brought together to produce a "significant life?" We will find out in the next post.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:

James A.K. Smith on the fate of the religious college.

Robert Darnton delivers a "jeremianic- utopian" reflection on Google books.

Jill Lepore on the day the newspaper died.

John Schmalzbauer reflects on the inauguration.

Another review of Ira Stoll's Samuel Adams. This one is by David Waldstreicher. (See my review here).

The "Inspiration Awards" are spreading: here and here and here and here, to name only a few.

Nice piece on Benjamin Carp's work on the Boston Tea Party. (HT: Boston 1775).

Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen

Ronald White on Obama's use of Lincoln's Bible.

Ulysses S. Grant papers move from Southern Illinois University to Mississippi State.

Can Barack Obama end the culture wars? Os Guinness hopes he can.

Indian Valley Public Library

This afternoon I drove to Telford, PA to do a book talk at the Indian Valley Public Library. The crowd was small, but very engaged. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are taken by Philip Vickers Fithian's story. Thanks to Deborah Falkner for inviting me to speak in their "Learn Something New About Something Old" history lecture series.

After the talk I had a great dinner with some close friends and their family. Thanks Ted and Wanda for the invite. Thanks to Fern and John for the hospitality. We need to do this more often.

What Makes a Life Significant? Part Two

We continue our thoughts on William James's 1900 essay, "What Makes a Life Significant?" Following James's trip to the middle-class oasis of Chautauqua, New York, he finds himself on a train to Buffalo. (The picture below is the 1900 Buffalo Labor Day Parade). He looks out the window and sees a world quite different from the one he just left. His reaction is worth quoting at length.

I was speeding with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattleyards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain.

As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I., these our sustainers, these the very parents of our life.

James recalls Leo Tolstoy's defense of the Russian peasant. These peasants, Tolstoy writes, "labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity." By entering into their life and experience, Tolstoy realized that "all our actions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light."

At first glance, James seems quite nostalgic for this masculine working-class heroism. Do these workers themselves see their own heroism? Probably not. Perhaps many of them would rather be in Chautauqua. But the reality is that they are not in Chautauqua. They are not members of the upper-middle class world in which James belongs. James can only truly see them through the eyes of an education professional.

Yet I cannot help but think that James is on to something here. Perhaps working people know something about life that we academics, professionals, intellectuals, and educated people do not. There is much we can learn from them about how to live meaningful lives. They understand community, loyalty, commitment, and suffering much, much better than we do. I think often about the heroism of firefighters, cops, and rescue workers in the days following September 11, 2001. These men and women were driven by a sense of duty, responsibility, and vocation that most middle-class professionals have a hard time understanding. To celebrate them is not to be overly nostalgic. They exist. They may be hard to track down in a university faculty lounge or your local country-club, but they are real human beings. They have dignity.

OK--I will now stop this little sermon. James, after all, is not done. As we will see in the next post, there is also something that the Buffalo laborer might learn from the white collar worker who vacations each summer in Chautauqua. Stay tuned.

What Makes a Life Significant?

This afternoon I read William James's lecture to college students, "What Makes a Life Significant?" Since I often talk with students about this very issue, I thought I would revisit it to see if the remarks James made in 1900 have any relevance for today's college student. I think I will spend a few posts working through this essay.

James begins the essay describing a trip to Chautauqua, NY--the nineteenth-century middle-class center for arts and education in upstate, New York. He is quite taken by this place--the music, athletics, religious services, soda fountains, lack of poverty, drunkenness, and crime. James spends a week in Chautauqua, but no more. He realizes that this lakeside paradise, for all its security, intelligence, humanity and order, is missing something. He finally realizes what it is:

But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still-this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field. Such absence of human nature in extremis anywhere seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.

But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale.

Here is the beginning of James's critique of upper middle class life at the turn of the twentieth century and his championing of what might be called the tragic dimensions of everyday life in this period. How does this all relate to his theme of what makes a life significant? Stay tuned.

We Are Inspiring!!!!

We won! We won! That's right--Historiann has bestowed us with a 2009 Inspiration Award! It is good to know that this blog is inspiring someone!

As part of the award, I need to call your attention to 5-7 other blogs that have provided some inspiring reading of late. Here goes:

Religion and American History: I am proud to be RAH's first "contributing editor." I thus owe whatever blogging career I have to Paul Harvey, the blogmeister or all blogmeisters! If you are interested in the intersection of religion and American history you must read this award-winning blog. Harvey has assembled a formidable group of scholars in American religious history.

Historiann: Let me return the favor. Historiann pulls no punches when it comes to gender politics, the profession, and early American history. She has a very active group of correspondents and regular posters who keep the conversation moving. My daughters like her posts on dolls.

American Creation: Was America founded as a Christian nation? American Creation has become a one-stop shop for the study of religion and the revolutionary era.

Bald Blogging: Phil, a University of Houston graduate student and high school history teacher offers insights at the intersection of religion, history, and African-American studies. Check out his series of posts on "Christmas with DuBois." I only wish he would blog more!

Boston 1775: J.L. Bell offers a morning devotional in revolutionary-era Boston history.

Jesus Creed: Theologian Scot McKnight on all things evangelical.

OK--If you choose to accept this award:

• Please put the logo of the award (left) on your blog if you can make it work with your format.


• Link to the person from whom you received the award.


• Nominate 5-7 other blogs.


• Put the links of those blogs on your blog.
  

The Obama Assault on Individualism

On Tuesday I suggested that Barack Obama's inaugural address draws deeply from the historical well of the civic humanist or republican tradition in America. (And I am not alone). His emphasis on duty and the dangers of self-interest sound a lot like some of our so-called Founding Fathers.

Though he does not use the term "civic humanism," E.J. Dionne offers a similar interpretation of Obama's speech, focusing particularly on the president's assault on two varieties of individualism. He writes:

What makes Obama a radical, albeit of the careful and deliberate variety, is his effort to reverse the two kinds of extreme individualism that have permeated the American political soul for perhaps four decades.

He sets his face against the expressive individualism of the 1960s that defined "do your own thing" as the highest form of freedom. On the contrary, Obama speaks of responsibilities, of doing things for others, even of that classic bourgeois obligation, "a parent's willingness to nurture a child."

But he also rejects the economic individualism that took root in the 1980s. He specifically listed "the greed and irresponsibility on the part of some" as a cause for our economic distress. He discounted "the pleasures of riches and fame." He spoke of Americans not as consumers but as citizens. His references to freedom were glowing, but he emphasized our "duties" to preserve it far more than the rights it conveys.

Obama's rhetoric will confuse both sides of the political spectrum. This is a clear sign that he is on the right track.

UPDATE: See Robert Bellah's thoughts on some of these issues here. (HT: Art Remillard at Religion and American History).

Change Starts Today!

Or does it?

Obama Inaugural: Paine, not Washington

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

Two things about this quote:

First, there seems to be some confusion about its use. These were not the words of George Washington. They were the words of Thomas Paine in The Crisis. Obama never says that it was Paine. He only says that "the father of our nation ordered these words to be read."

Here is the extended quote from The Crisis (December 23, 1776).

Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but “show your faith by your works,” that God may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

If this is indeed a reference to Washington's troops on the Delaware in December 1776, then I am confused about the reference to "the capital" and its abandonment. While New York City had been abandoned by the Continental Army the previous month, one would be hard pressed to call New York "the capital." If we could call any city a "capital" it would have to be Philadelphia, the place where the Second Continental Congress was sitting. Philadelphia would eventually be abandoned by Congress, but not until September 1777.

What am I missing here?

UPDATE: In the comments section Benjamin Carp of Publick Occurrences reminds me that the Continental Congress left Philadelphia for a brief period in December 1776. This clears things up. Thanks!

The Obama Inaugural: The Renewal of Civic Humanism

Today Obama made an appeal to our "better angels." Hope over fear. Unity over discourse. He reminded us that we are "bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction." He challenged us to face our difficulties and stop avoiding all of those "unpleasant decisions" we need to make. He urged us to embrace the virtues of hard-work, loyalty, courage, humility. He warned against the self-interest that comes with unrestrained markets.

Like FDR he reminded us of our economic difficulties, proposed infrastructure development, and instilled confidence. Like Jimmy Carter he asked us to sacrifice for the common good. Like George W. Bush he emphasized the power of freedom in the world. Like Abraham Lincoln he called for a remaking of America. He made an appeal to the ideals of the nation--ideals for which Americans were willing to die. Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy, Khe Sahn.

This speech was the culmination of a message that Obama has been preaching since he first started his run for president. The call for sacrifice and virtue and the common good draws directly from the very old American tradition of civic humanism. For the American Republic to survive in a time of crisis, the Founders believed, the American people must be willing to put the interests of the nation over their own interests. This is the "promise of citizenship."

There is a great paradox in Obama's vision. He wants us to turn backward in order to move forward. He is deeply committed, like most liberals are, to a belief in human progress. He believes in America's unlimited potential. But at the same time he believes that the best way to achieve this kind of progress is to be humble and show restraint. In order to move forward Americans must return to ideas rooted in the founding. The very survival and future of this free and liberty-loving republic depends on virtues that may require us to sacrifice for others. I am not sure if Obama has ever read JGA Pocock or Gordon Wood, but he has certainly revived the republican tradition that these historians write about.

The Obama Inaugural: The FDR Comparison

As many historians have argued, the presidential inaugural address is a sort of national sermon. I think most would agree that early this afternoon Obama inspired the faithful. I will spend the next few blog posts this afternoon and evening offering some commentary.

The start of Obama's speech echoed FDR's first inaugural. Both addressed a nation in a time of economic crisis.

Here is FDR's first inaugural address (1933):
In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Here is Obama:
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

Thoughts on Rick Warren's Prayer

Like the rest of the country, I spent the noon hour riveted to the television set. Since I knew I would be contacted by a few media outlets immediately after the speech I was diligently taking notes on the prayers and Obama's address.

Let's start with Rick Warren. After all of the controversy surrounding his choice to deliver this prayer I thought Warren did everything he could to take the attention off of himself. It was classic Warren. He tried to be as inclusive as possible, stressing themes of compassion, care for the planet, justice, and God's love for everyone. He even quoted from the Qur'an. ("You are the compassionate, the merciful one...").

Of course many who opposed Proposition 8 (which Warren supported) will perceive some of these words as shallow, but I do think they represented Warren and his ministry. The prayer separated Warren from the leaders of the Christian Right and reflected the values of a younger generation of evangelical Christians. Moreover, they echoed, at least in a general and abstract sense, the major themes of Obama's faith-based initiatives and how the new president thinks about the relationship between faith and policy.

There was also a part of this prayer that called to mind eighteenth-century fast days during the American Revolution. Warren asked God to forgive the people of the country for its selfishness and consumerism. Many Christian republicans such as John Witherspoon, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, and Philip Vickers Fithian (yes, Fithian!) believed that national confession might save the republic from its difficulties.

This was the first time in history that an inaugural prayer ended with the Lord's Prayer. I found this interesting for a few reasons.

First, it made the prayer an explicitly Christian one. This, of course, was reinforced by his choice to pray in the name of Jesus. There was some controversy about his decision to pray in the name of Jesus, but by doing so he did not depart from the way most inaugural prayers have ended.

Second, for Christians it turned the prayer from a civic one to a spiritual one. The Lord's Prayer, of course, transcends the nation. It brings those who recite it into a global community of Christians praying in the way in which Jesus taught them to pray.

Third, Warren's use of the Lord's Prayer was particularly fascinating when one thinks about the context in which Jesus first uttered it in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 6 Jesus is rebuking the Jewish teachers of the law for praying in public so that they could be seen by others and draw attention to themselves. What is an inaugural prayer if not a public prayer to be seen by others? Warren knows that this is not how Jesus taught Christians to pray. Instead, Jesus tells Christians to go into their closet and pray. And instead of babbling "like the pagans do," they should pray the prayer that the early Church would come to call the "Our Father." Warren may not have been in the closet, but by reciting the Lord's Prayer he made the best of the public role in which he found himself. He reminded Christians how to pray and diffused any attempts to politicize his words.

Finally, there were some evangelical themes in Warren's prayer. His reference to Jesus "who changed my life" was reminiscent of George W. Bush's remark about why Jesus was his favorite philosopher. The reference to all people being held accountable before God for their actions reflected common evangelical beliefs about God's judgment.

Stay tuned--some thoughts on Obama's speech are coming right up.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Part XIII

This will be our final post on Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. (I have decided not to blog on chapters related to assessment and memory, but I encourage you to read them). I hope you have gleaned something about historical thinking and history teaching from this series and I would encourage you, if you have not done so already, to buy Wineburg's book. During the course of the series I received many nice notes from secondary and college teachers, including Wineburg himself, who seemed to thoroughly enjoy the posts.

I will close our series with Chapter 9: "Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom."

In this chapter we meet Richard Stinson, the chair of the Social Studies department at his high school and a teacher with seventeen years of experience. Richard is a very creative teacher. He uses a variety of means to teach his students about the making of the United States Constitution (including an exercise with a badminton racket, a nerfball, ping pong balls, and a Frisbee).

Stinson wants his students to reflect morally on the meaning of the Constitution. He asks his students if "there is any authority that transcends the Constitution?" When the students look down and begin to fidget Stinson asks another question: "What about moral authority or religious authority?"

Stinson pushes. He asks his students what they would do if they were a guard at a concentration camp during World War II and were ordered to exterminate Jews. Would they obey the government's orders or obey a higher order, even if that meant that they would lose their own life as a punishment for their disobedience. Several of the outspoken students in the class said that they would save their own hides and obey the order to kill. He asks them a similar question about the My Lai incident. Would they kill innocent villagers in Vietnam? Again, the answer was yes. They would obey such an order.

What should we do when a student says something like this with very little reflection? Stinson, as a human being with a moral conscience, is bothered by his students' response and he tells them so. He tries to stay objective, but on an issue like this he just cannot do it.

Did Stinson overstep his bounds by inserting his moral voice into the conversation? Does he cease being a historian/history teacher by taking the course in this direction in the first place? Some would say yes. Wineburg, however, thinks what Stinson's approach is appropriate. I would have to agree.

Though sharing a fifty-minute format with the geometry or chemistry classroom down the hall, the history classroom differs in profound ways. While discussions on solving equations with two unknowns or the foundations of the Avogado's number may provoke teachers to ask themselves deep questions about learning and pedagogy, they rarely raise questions about what it means to be human, what it means to answer to powers that dwarf the self...Stinson's classroom show us that when history is approached courageously and at its deepest levels, no new curriculum is needed to engage enduring questions of values. In classroom like his, history cannot avoid issues of character.

Wineburg is taking a legitimate and clean shot at those who demand that history education must always justify itself amidst calls to teach character education.

Why do we need some special curriculum on character education when we already have history education?

The past does not offer, as Wineburg calls it, "some formula" that exists "for teaching young people how to make meaning from the past and live their lives with a sense of decency." But the history classroom does provide a space where conversations that trigger our moral sensibilities can take place.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:

Louis P. Masur reviews Simon Schama's The American Future: A History.

Ted Widmer on what inaugural addresses tell us about America.

Nice piece on the Library of Congress reading room.

Check out everything in the new Common-Place.

Jon Wiener on "Rick Warren's clout."

Inaugurations' greatest hits.

A redeeming quality of the Bush administration.

Alan Brinkley on George W. Bush's failure to be pragmatic. Brinkley also reviews four books about the rise of Obama.

Historic White House floor plans.

Alan Wolfe on Obama's attempt to reach out to conservatives.

Do we need a U.S. minister of culture?

David Brooks on the flaws in the free market.

John Thompson III, Georgetown basketball coach, is planning to walk 3.5 miles to the inauguration.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Part XII

In our last post on Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts we met Elizabeth, "the invisible teacher." Today we meet John, "the visible teacher." While Elizabeth liked to sit in the back of the room and watch her students debate, John never stops talking. He is constantly moving around the room firing questions at his students. His students respond with one or two word answers and then he expounds on their answers. He leads them in intense and passionate discussions of primary documents.

At first glance, John may appear to preside over a teacher-dominated classroom in which students are generally passive, but there is more going on here. As Wineburg describes it:

The air is electric, students lean over in their seats, ask thoughtful and stimulating questions, and stay in the room to continue discussions after the bell has rung. John is pure energy--laughing, pacing, bantering with students, gesturing excitedly. No ordinary teacher, John is a master performer who has seized the collective imagination of thirty-five adolescents and has led them on an expedition into the past.

John has a two-fold goal for his history classes. He wants to get his students excited about the content of the past while teaching them how this content was discovered. If Wineburg's description is accurate, it is clear that he does both very well. Though John is more hands-on than Elizabeth, he is still leading his students in a reconstruction of the past. His dramatic and dynamic style breathes life into historical actors who are long dead.

Elizabeth and John: Two very different styles--two very effective history teachers.

Are you an Elizabeth or a John?

2 Weeks

After a morning of coaching second and fifth grade girls basketball, I got some good news from Penn Press. It seems that the paperback version of The Way of Improvement Leads Home has moved up in the queue. It will be available in less than two weeks. I also learned that there are still a few dozen hardbacks left.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Part XI

In Chapter 7 of Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past he starts off with a quote from the 1987 National Assessment of Educational Progress Report. In that report, Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn describe the "typical history classroom as one in which students...

listen to the teacher explain the day's lesson, use the textbook, and take tests. Occasionally they watch a movie. Sometimes they memorize information or read stories about events and people. They seldom work with other students, use original documents, write term papers, or discuss the significance of what they are studying.

As most of us know, history teaching is more than mastering factual knowledge. Wineburg introduces us to two teachers who bring the past to life in their classrooms.

Wineburg describes Elizabeth as the "invisible teacher." And no, this is not an oxymoron. Elizabeth sits in the back of the room taking notes as her students conduct a debate over the legitimacy of British taxation on the American colonies. Her students are passionate. They shout at each other. They are deeply engaged in reconstructing the past. For three days there are no lectures, no quizzes, and no worksheets. There is some chaos in the classroom, but Elizabeth restrains herself from interfering. Elizabeth knows that "the making of history is a dynamic process. What happened in the past wasn't fated or meant to be. It occurred because human actors shaped their destinies by the choices they made, just as people today shape their futures by the choices they make."

Elizabeth prepares her class for this debate by having them read primary documents in small groups. She calls these "research days." She provides guidance as the students engage with these sources in their groups.

This particular debate in Elizabeth's class ends with a verdict in favor of the Loyalists. Wineburg writes:

Elizabeth's...classroom is an anomaly. The textbook does not drive instruction; teacher talk does not drown out student talk...Students behave in a powerful intellectual process in which they embrace beliefs not their own and argue them with zest. By re-creating history rather than just reading about it, students learn that Tories were not the villains depicted in textbooks, but ordinary people who saw their world differently from their rebel neighbors.

I hear about these kinds of classrooms all the time and I have always written them off as being too impractical. AP teachers tell me that they would like to do more hands-on history like this, but it takes too much time. And I can't imagine something like this happening in a college classroom. Nevertheless, after reading about Elizabeth I am convinced that something is going on here. Her students are understanding how to think about the past in the right way. She is a successful teacher.

I wonder about Elizabeth's students, especially the ones who have been inspired by her to become history majors. They leave their high school classroom--a place where they have been trained to reconstruct and recreate the past--and come to a college lecture hall where they listen to lectures. Something about this does not seems right.

In the next post we will meet John, the "visible teacher."

The View from Kankakee

I am not a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's "The Daily Dish," but I do always enjoy when he posts pictures taken from the windows of his readers.

I just got this from Karl in Kankakee. It was taken this morning. If you have similar pictures send them along!

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts--Part X

We continue with Chapter Six of Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past: "Peering at History Through Difference Lenses." In the last post we met four novice teachers: Cathy, Bill, Jane, and Fred. You can get up to speed here.

Wineburg's argument in this chapter is that not all students trained in Social Studies certification programs are equipped to teach history. Social Studies, of course, attracts students from a host of disciplines: history, civics/politics, geography, anthropology, economics, and even psychology.

Let's meet these students again and see how their disciplinary perspectives have prepared them to teach history.

Cathy (anthropology and archaeology major): She does not see history as something to be "endlessly pondered over in some kind of pageant of competing interpretations. Cause could be determined authoritatively by probing the interrelationships among the land, the climate, and human development." Wineburg refers to her as an "environmental determinist." Everything in her courses can be explained by climate and geography. She teaches about countries and nations as if they exist in a "temporal vacuum, decontextualized in relation to the past and responding lockstep to a generic set of geographical and geological imperatives."

Fred (politics/international relations major): Like Cathy, he was also ill-equipped to teach history. In a lesson on the Industrial Revolution Fred did a decent job of discussing economic developments, but mentioned nothing about the social dimensions of the shift from the cottage system to the factory system. There was little factual information in his presentation. In fact, Fred was more interested in comparing the Industrial Revolution to other revolutions such as the American Revolution or the French Revolution. As Wineburg notes: "Lacking the knowledge of the contextual factors that make these events more different than similar, Fred presented all revolutions as close cousins." Fred, like Cathy, believed that his students had learned history when they had memorized dates and facts. (Remember, he was the teacher who thought that historians deal with facts and political scientists deal with interpretations!). He did not have the training to teach history as competing perceptions of the past. He was concerned with citizenship education more than historical thinking.

Jane (American history major): Unlike Cathy and Fred, Jane understood causation as a "problem to pondered, studied, argued, and advocated, but never to be known with certainty." Her lesson on the "Roaring Twenties" dealt with a host of social, cultural, economic, and political issues. She used music (jazz), images, dance, and fiction to "breathe life into the facts of history." Jane's goal was to reconstruct a lost world for her students and she seemed to do it well.

Bill (American studies major): Bill, like Jane, understood that historical causation was a "messy" issue. When asked to discuss the causes of the Great Depression, he responded that "there is never one cause." Like Fred, Bill seemed only concerned with economic and political issues in the past and how they related to the present. He began each class with a discussion of current events. (Fred did the same thing). In the end, Bill focused solely on politics and economic issues, but he did so through competing interpretations and a much deeper historical sensibility than Cathy or Fred.

Both Jane and Bill got nervous when they had to teach parts of American history that were not part of their undergraduate training. They worried that they did not know the facts. Yet, Wineburg notes, they were equipped with skills that enabled them to handle any period or era in history. They knew how to think about the past and they knew how to get their students to do the same. To paraphrase Nicolec, one of the commentators on a previous post, they knew that they were not there to parrot what was in the text book. They were not there to read a timeline. They were there to get their students to think like historians.

So what can we learn by studying these four approaches to teaching the past? Wineburg wants us to see that not all majors that fall under the larger umbrella of "Social Studies" equip teachers to teach historical thinking. "Social Studies" or "Citizenship" education are fields largely concerned with the present. For the advocates of Social Studies, the past is prologue. Teaching the past is necessary to provide some necessary background to preparing responsible citizens. This reminds me of the "world cultures" class in which the teacher begins with a few weeks on the history of China so that they can use the rest of the semester to talk about food, religion, traditions, culture etc... The goal, of course, is to create global citizens. Here's a thought: why not teach a Chinese history course where the students get a rich and complex understanding of the way Chinese culture developed over time? Could this achieve the same goal of creating cosmopolitan citizens? I think so.

At Messiah College our Social Studies certification students are housed in the history department. They thus graduate with teacher certification and a full history major. Perhaps our greatest difficulty is getting our education department, the faculty who teach them how to write lesson plans, to understand the differences between the way historians think and the way practitioners of "Social Studies" think. Recently one of our majors complained that one of his education instructors critiqued his lesson on the Cold War by telling him that he should instead focus his unit on "cold wars." If our student followed this suggestion, he would have to neglect everything he has learned as a history major about context, chronology, causation, and the fact that not all "cold wars" were the same. As this student rightfully complained: "I am not writing a lesson about 'cold wars,' I am writing about the Cold War."

Wineburg's chapter should help us see that teaching history and teaching social studies requires a very different way of thinking.

Obama's Dinner With Conservatives

A little politics this morning. As some of you may have heard, Barack Obama had dinner the other night with conservative columnists at the Maryland home of George Will. The guest list included Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and Peggy Noonan, and William Kristol.

I was going to write up my take on this meeting, but then I realized that my thoughts seemed to be summed up best by E.J. Dionne in an interview he did last night with Keith Olbermann. So here it is: (If the video is not appearing on your screen, you can watch it here).

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I also found this video by Noam Scheiber of the New Republic to be informative.



I will say here what I said recently about Richard John Neuhaus. I do not always agree with the conservative columnists who Obama met with the other night, but I do not always disagree either. I especially find Brooks worth reading on a regular basis. Some of these columnists offer commentary that is insightful and intellectually stimulating. I am glad to see Obama reaching across the aisle this way and I hope this will foster more civil dialogue. (I think Scheiber makes a great point about why Obama chose to meet with these conservatives and not people like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly). BTW: If you watch the Dionne interview you will know that Obama met with liberal columnists the next day.

What is Obama Reading?

Yesterday's NPR "Morning Edition" did an interesting piece on Barack Obama's reading habits and his impact on the publishing industry. It is up on the NPR website today. Like his predecessor George W. Bush, he seems to like presidential history. But he also reads classics (Moby Dick is on his reading list), poetry, and fiction (Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead). When Obama is seen with a book, sales of that book go through the roof. He is the new Oprah!

Now all we need to do is get him a copy of The Way of Improvement Leads Home--if we can find one.

The Way of Improvement Leads Home in Paperback: Sit Tight!

The folks at Penn Press just informed me that the paperback version of The Way of Improvement Leads Home, which was scheduled to appear on January 15th, will now be delayed anywhere from 6-8 weeks. In other words, for the next month or two it is going to be difficult to get a copy of the book. The hardback is sold out, but you can still get a copy at Amazon or at a bookstore.

I am doing my best to exercise the virtue of patience.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts--Part IX

In Chapter Six of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Sam Wineburg, with the aid of Suzanne M. Wilson, "peer at history through different lenses." The chapter focuses on four new teachers. All of them were trained in the same teacher education program, but not all of them majored in history. Wineburg examines how they think about teaching history, focusing on how they perceive "the role of factual knowledge," "the place of interpretation," "the significance of chronology and continuity," and the "meaning of causation."

The teachers of record were Fred, a political science and international relations major; Cathy, an anthropology major; Bill, an American studies major; and Jane, an American history major. Here is how these teachers responded to Wineburg's categories:

Factual Knowledge: Fred was not a fan of factual knowledge. He preferred larger themes and general principles. Bill suggested that facts were important building blocks in a history classroom, but interpretation was more important. Jane thought facts were essential to history teaching, but they "should be woven together by themes and questions, and, most important, embedded in a context that lends meaning and purpose."

Interpretation and Evidence: Cathy wanted to talk about interpretation, but could not fathom interpreting the past without hard evidence. As an anthropology major with an archaeology minor, she wanted certainty. She believed the truth needed to be "unearthed." The work of the historian was thus gathering this evidence and explaining it. Jane, on the other hand, thought interpretation was not about certainty, but about uncertainty. She wanted her students to learn about the past, but she also wanted them to see how historians reconstruct it. Fred argued that history was about communicating facts. Interpretation was important, but this was more the job of political scientists. Political science, he said, "takes history and sees what kinds of causes were behind the event, not just the facts." (I imagine most historians are seething after reading Fred's take on the discipline).

Chronology and Continuity: Cathy believed that "history was chronology." For Bill and Jane, history was done by interweaving "chronology and continuity." As Wineburg writes: "Chronology, for both Jane and Bill, underlies continuity--the way in which the present connects with to the past and moves, in Jane's words, 'forward into the future.'"

As you can clearly see, these four students tend to approach the teaching of the past differently. They have been shaped by their given field of study--all fields that fall under the "Social Studies" umbrella.

We will see how this develops, and how these teachers understand "causation," tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Scholarly Location and the Writing of American Religious History

I was planning to blog on this essay by Christopher Grasso when I read it this morning, but both Paul Harvey at Religion and American History and his student Brad Hart at American Creation beat me to it. I encourage you to check out their thoughts.

Having said that, I can't help but say a few words:

Grasso has a great project here. To put it simply, he wants to bring religious skepticism more fully into the narrative of early nineteenth-century American religion. I am eager to see what he comes up with. So far he has offered an excellent piece on deism in the Journal of American History.

But even more interesting, at least to me, is Grasso's personal reflections about how he came to this topic. Ironically, he became more sensitive to the place of religion in American life (and the role of faith in scholarship) while studying with religious mentors in graduate school and more sensitive to the place of religious skepticism in America while teaching at a church-related college in the Midwest.

He writes:

...No research is completely unconnected to personal experience. That doesn't mean religious history, any more than other kinds of history, entails one of those confessional prefaces in which the author discloses his or her personal relationship to the faith tradition being examined. Perry Miller's atheism and George Marsden's evangelicalism no doubt influenced each man's studies of the Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards, but the evaluation of their books should aim at the cogency of their interpretive arguments in relation to the available evidence rather than at the scholars' biographies. The historian's own religious belief or doubt is one of many factors shaping his or her particular perspective, a point of view that provides moments of both blindness and insight when trying to imagine the past. My own perspective as this project developed has been at least as powerfully shaped by my understanding of the disciplinary field I entered and the communities in which I learned and taught.

In graduate school I became convinced that the history I had learned previously had too blithely ignored the religious issues and experiences that were so vital to so many people in the American past. I imagined myself going off to teach in a public university, and in my own courses and scholarship, at least, doing something to rectify that imbalance. Instead, my first teaching job was at a small midwestern college that was committed at once to the liberal arts, a global and multicultural perspective, and to being "a school of the Church." Faculty didn't have to sign a confession of faith but were asked on job interviews about their view of the school's religious mission; faculty meetings began with a prayer and teachers were encouraged (though not required) to attend daily chapel. The most ardent supporters of the college's religious identity manifested an ecumenical tolerance toward diverse religious points of view but a subtle—and at times not so subtle—unfriendliness to secular humanism. Just as working with religiously committed scholars in graduate school had deepened my appreciation for the intellectual depth of perspectives rooted in faith, my experience at that Christian college helped me more easily imagine the closeted lives of skeptics in the early republic. I hope these experiences help me to write sympathetically and critically about religious skeptics and people of faith.

This piece got me thinking about how my work at a church-related college has shaped my scholarship and if my work would be any different if I taught at a secular university. I am not sure I have answers yet, but I am grateful that Grasso is willing to reflect on these questions.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts--Part VIII

In Chapter Five of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Sam Wineburg addresses the role of "cultural assumptions in the learning of history."

Several studies have shown that boys are superior to girls in historical knowledge. Why? Part of the reason, Wineburg argues, is because textbooks pay little attention to the lives of women. This makes perfect sense. But while there have been several attempts by school districts and states to integrate women into the story of American history, Wineburg wonders if this is really changing our students' views of the past.

To see how gender shapes students' understanding of American history, Wineburg took a group of students, ranging from 5th to 8th grade, and asked them to draw a picture of a "pilgrim," a "western settler," and a "hippie." All of these figures are usually portrayed as male in American culture. Wineburg wanted to see if the female students would portray themselves in the pictures or portray the figures as male. (The experiment was much more complicated than this--I would encourage you to read the book).

In the end, nearly all of the boys drew male figures. Over 75% of the girls drew male figures. (Again, read the book for the complexity of this study. I cannot do justice to it here). Wineburg responded: "We are concerned about girl's tendency...to depict a past inhabited by fewer women than men. But we are equally concerned about boys' tendency to depict a past inhabited almost exclusively by men."

How do we change this? Wineburg is skeptical about things like Women's History Month or filling a classroom with posters of prominent women to balance a "male dominated curriculum." Too many of our textbooks cover women with side bars and short biographies that are separate from the narrative, a pattern that Gilda Lerner calls "contributory history." (Women are only important when they "contribute" to what men do).

Wineburg's solution to this problem is to get our students to write their own history:

It is not enough to expose students to alternative visions of the past. already digested and interpreted by others. The only way we can come to understand the past's multiplicity is by the direct experience of having to tell it, of having to sort through the welter of the past's conflicting visions and produce a story written by our own hand. We have in mind here a vision of history classrooms where students learn the subject by rewriting it...This vision of history instruction transforms a school subject from a fixed story, with questions of significance and importance sewn up, to an array of stories that invites students to consider the fullness of human experience.

Wineburg seems on the mark here. (See his thoughts about Ellen--blogged about here). The way girls experience American history should disturb us. The way boys experience American history, with women virtually invisible, is perhaps more disturbing. But as Wineburg concludes, "on educational grounds" these problems should pose a "challenge" for us.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts--Part VII

I still use Edmund Morgan's American Slavery-American Freedom in my colonial America course. Morgan's book is still, in my opinion, the best historical narrative of early Virginia. (The students love it!) I also like Morgan because he offers my students a great lesson in contextualization, especially in regards to race. Morgan teaches us that "racism" is not a timeless idea. It does not look the same in every historical era, but has been constructed differently in particular times and places, such as seventeenth-century Virginia.

This is the lesson of Sam Wineburg's fourth chapter of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Wineburg builds the chapter around Abraham Lincoln's remarks on the inferiority of the "black races." To the twenty-first century reader, Lincoln's words are hard to swallow:

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality...I am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.

There are many who have used these words of Lincoln's as evidence that he was a "racist." But Wineburg asks us, as any good historian might, to consider the context in which they were uttered before passing judgment. These remarks were delivered in the midst of the 1858 Illinois senate campaign. They were said at Ottawa, a "hotbed of antiblack sentiment" in Illinois. They were uttered before a crowd that strongly supported Lincoln's opponent, Stephen Douglas. They were delivered in the context of a political campaign where "courting votes" was the ultimate goal.

So was Lincoln a racist? Is this something that historians should decide? Wineburg quotes Donald Fehrenbacher on this point. ("Only His Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro," Civil War History 20 [1974]). The quotation is worth repeating here in full:

Anyone who sets out conscientiously to answer [whether Lincoln was a racist] will soon find himself deep in complexity and confronting some of the fundamental problems of historical investigation. In one category are various questions about the historian's relation to the past: Is his [sic] task properly one of careful reconstruction, or are there more important purposes to be served? Does his responsibility include rendering moral judgments? If so, using what standards--those of his own time or those of the period under study? Then there are all the complications encountered in any effort to read the mind of a man, especially a politician, from the surviving record of his words and actions. For instance, what he openly affirmed as a youth may have been silently discarded in maturity; what he believed on a certain subject may be less significant than the intensity of his belief; and what he said on a certain occasion may have been largely determined by the immediate historical context, including the composition of the audience.

Wineburg's goal is not to decide whether or not Lincoln was a racist. Rather, it is to show that when we use twenty-first century categories to interpret nineteenth-century language we are in danger of the historian's greatest sin: presentism. The primary goal of the historian is to challenge her readers and students to think how Lincoln's words might have been understood in their context. And this should be done before making moral judgments. Our natural inclination is to lash out at Lincoln for his supposed "racism," but historical thinking, as Wineburg reminds us over and over again, is an unnatural act.

Once again Wineburg calls our attention to the strangeness of the past and the dangers of bringing our own supposedly timeless notions of race (or any other category) to bear on an era different from our own. Doing this teaches us empathy--a virtue that all of us need.

Wineburg concludes:

Historical thinking of the type described here, and in particular the disposition to think about the past by recognizing the inadequacy of one's own conceptual apparatus, is essential in teaching people how to understand others different than themselves. If we never recognize that our individual experience is limited, what hope is there of understanding people whose logic defies our own, whose choices and beliefs appear inscrutable when judged against our own standards?

Did Washington Say "So Help Me God?"

So what exactly did George Washington say at his inauguration when he completed the oath of office? With the Obama inauguration upon us there is currently a debate raging over this question. Boston 1775 offers some much needed historical perspective.


Boston 1775 references this informative article on the topic by Peter Henriques.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:

Do you have "unblocked writers syndrome?"

Amy Frykholm calls our attention to Better World Books.

Mark Bauerlein makes sense here.

Stanley Fish invokes St. Augustine on the Blagojevich-Burris mess.

Damon Linker, the former editor of First Things, reflects on the death of Richard John Neuhaus.

Mark Altschuler reviews Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer

Colbert I. King reflects on his role in the Eisenhower inauguration parade.

Who checks the spell-checkers?

Is Obama the next Cicero?

Marcus Rediker accepts the George Washington Prize for The Slave Ship: A Human History.

Are the The Founding Fathers to blame for the Bush presidency?

Is he back?

Patrick Allitt on tithing.

Eric Foner on the Obama-Lincoln comparison and Ronald White on what Lincoln would say to Obama as he prepares for his inauguration.

Sanford Levinson responds to William Hogeland's essay on the National Constitution Center.

Hendrik Hertzberg on his visit to Covenant College.

Interesting essay on H.F. DuPont's Winterthur.