Historical Thinking Unnatural Acts - 6Floors · Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts...

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By Sam Wineburg The choice seemed absurd, but it reflected exactly what the debate about national history standards had become. “George Washington or Bart Simpson?” asked Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) during the congres- sional debates. Which figure represents a “more important part of our nation’s history for our children to study?” (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997: 232). To Gorton, the proposed national standards represented a frontal attack on American civilization, an “ideologically driven, anti-Western monument to politically cor- rect caricature” (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997: 234). The Senate, in apparent agreement, rejected the standards by a vote of 99-1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts Debates about national history standards become so fixated on the question of “which history” that a more basic question is neglected: Why study history at all? By Sam Wineburg kappanmagazine.org V92 N4 Kappan 81 SAM WINEBURG is the Margaret Jacks professor of education and a professor of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University, Stan- ford, Calif. This article was originally published as “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” by Sam Wineburg. Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (March 1999): 488-499. KAPPAN digital edition exclusive Kappan Classic Deepen your understanding of this article with questions and activities on page PD 13 of this month’s Kappan Professional Development Discussion Guide by Lois Brown Easton, free to members in the digital edition at kappanmagazine .org. Thinkstock/Stockbyte

Transcript of Historical Thinking Unnatural Acts - 6Floors · Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts...

Page 1: Historical Thinking Unnatural Acts - 6Floors · Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts Debates about national history standards become so fixated on the question of “which

By Sam Wineburg

The choice seemed absurd, but it reflected exactly what the debate about national history standards hadbecome. “George Washington or Bart Simpson?” asked Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) during the congres-sional debates. Which figure represents a “more important part of our nation’s history for our children tostudy?” (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997: 232). To Gorton, the proposed national standards represented afrontal attack on American civilization, an “ideologically driven, anti-Western monument to politically cor-rect caricature” (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997: 234). The Senate, in apparent agreement, rejected thestandards by a vote of 99-1.

Historical Thinkingand OtherUnnatural ActsDebates about national history standards become so fixatedon the question of “which history” that a more basic questionis neglected: Why study history at all?

By Sam Wineburg

kappanmagazine.org V92 N4 Kappan 81

SAM WINEBURG is the Margaret Jacks professor of education and a professor of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University, Stan-

ford, Calif.

This article wasoriginally publishedas “HistoricalThinking and OtherUnnatural Acts,” bySam Wineburg. PhiDelta Kappan 80,no. 7 (March 1999):488-499.

KAPPAN digital edition exclusiveKappan Classic

Deepen yourunderstanding ofthis article withquestions andactivities on pagePD 13 of thismonth’s KappanProfessionalDevelopmentDiscussion Guideby Lois BrownEaston, free tomembers in the digital edition atkappanmagazine.org.

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The architects of the standards did not take thisrejection lying down. Gary Nash, Charlotte Crab-tree, and Ross Dunn, the team largely responsiblefor collating the reports of the many panels and com-mittees, issued a 318-page rebuttal that was packedwith refutations of Gorton; of his chief sponsor,Lynne Cheney; and of their various conservative al-lies, many of them op-ed columnists and radio talk

show hosts. True, Nash and his colleagues admitted,Gorton was right in claiming that no standard ex-plicitly named George Washington as the first Pres-ident. But this was nothing more than a mere tech-nicality. The standards did ask students to “examinemajor issues confronting the young country during[Washington’s] presidency,” and there was more ma-terial on Washington as the “father of our country”in the standards for grades K-4 (Nash, Crabtree, andDunn 1997: 197). To Cheney’s claim that Americanssuch as Robert E. Lee or the Wright brothers wereexpunged because they had the misfortune of beingdead, white, and male, Nash and his colleagues re-sponded by adding up the names of people fittingthis description — 700 plus in all — and announc-ing that this number was “many times the grand to-tal of all women, African Americans, Latinos, and In-dians individually named” (Nash, Crabtree, andDunn 1997: 204).

Similar exercises in tit for tat quickly became thestandard in the debates over standards. But just be-low the surface, name counts took on an even uglierface. Each side felt it necessary to impute to the otherthe basest of motives. So, to Bob Dole, the Repub-lican candidate for President in 1996, the nationalstandards were the handiwork of people “worse thanexternal enemies” (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997:245). In the view of Nash’s team, critics of the stan-

dards were driven by latent fears of a diverse Amer-ica in which the “new faces [that] crowd onto thestage of history ruin the symmetry and security ofolder versions of the past” (Nash, Crabtree, andDunn 1997: 10-11). Put in the barroom terms befit-ting such a brawl, those who wrote the standardswere traitors; those who opposed them, racists.

The rancor of this debate served as rich soil fordichotomous thinking. Take, for example, the forumorganized by American Scholar, the official publica-tion of the national honorary society Phi Beta Kappa(1998). American Scholar asked 11 prominent histo-rians to write a thousand words in response to thequestion “What history should our children learn?”Should children learn “the patriotism, heroism, andideals of the nation” or “the injustices, defeats, andhypocrisies of its leaders and dominant classes”? Incase panelists didn’t get the point, they were furtherasked whether the United States represented “oneof the great historical success stories,” or served as“the story of one opportunity after another lost”?Fortunately, sanity prevailed in this potential parody.Edmund Morgan of Yale University, author of theStamp Act Crisis and thus no newcomer to propa-gandizing, noted that any answer would necessarily“look more like slogans than any reasoned approachto history,” adding wryly that he didn’t need “a thou-sand words to say it.” (1998: 103).

Given the tenor of the debate, it’s a wonder thathistory was ever considered a part of the humanities,one of those disciplines supposed to teach us to spurnsloganeering, tolerate complexity, and cherish nu-ance. Writing before the turn of the century,Woodrow Wilson and the other members of theCommittee of Ten noted that history went well be-yond particular stories and names to achieve its high-est aim by endowing us with “the invaluable mentalpower which we call judgment” (Gagnon 1996: 243).Sadly, the present debate has become so fixated onthe question of “which history” that we have forgot-ten a more basic question: Why study history at all?

The answer to this neglected question is hardlyself-evident. Americans have never been fully con-vinced of history’s place in the curriculum. Historyeducation may be riding a momentary crest of inter-est, but its roots do not run deep. Many states haveminimal requirements for the study of history in thecurriculum. And in schools of education, courses areoffered to future teachers in the teaching of mathe-matics, the teaching of science, and the teaching ofliterature, but we would be hard pressed to find morethan a handful of courses in the entire nation thatare devoted to the teaching of history. To be sure,history is getting a lot of attention in national pol-icy debates. But in the places that matter most — theschools where young people learn and the colleges

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Americans have never been fully convinced of history’s place in the curriculum. History education may

be riding a momentary crest of interest, but its roots do not run deep.

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where teachers are taught — history’s status is any-thing but secure.

In this article, I focus on learning history in a waydifferent from that considered in the national debate.My focus is not on which history is better — that ofthe victors, that of the vanquished, or someSolomonic combination. Instead, I take several stepsback from the current history wars to ponder thesequestions: What is history good for? Why even teachit in schools? In a nutshell my claim is that historyholds the potential, only partially realized, of human-izing us in ways offered by few other areas in theschool curriculum. I make no claim of originality inarguing this point of view. But each generation, I be-lieve, must answer for itself anew why the study ofthe past is important and must remind itself why his-tory can also bring us together rather than — as wehave seen most recently — tear us apart.

THE FAMILIAR VS. THE STRANGE

The argument I make pivots on a tension that un-derlies every encounter with the past: the tension be-tween the familiar and the strange, between feelingsof proximity to and feelings of distance from the peo-ple we seek to understand. Neither of these polesdoes full justice to history’s complexity, and veeringto one side or the other only dulls history’s jaggededges and leaves us with cliché and caricature. Fur-thermore, I claim that the essence of achieving ma-ture historical thought rests precisely on our abilityto navigate the jagged landscape of history, to tra-verse the terrain that lies between the poles of famil-iarity with and distance from the past.

The pole of familiarity pulls most strongly. Thefamiliar past entices us with the promise that we canlocate our own place in the stream of time and so-lidify our identity in the present. By hitching our ownstories to the stories of those who went before us,the past becomes a useful resource in our everydaylives, an endless storehouse of raw materials to beshaped for our present needs. Situating ourselves intime is a basic human need. Indeed, it is impossibleto conceive of life on the planet without doing so.

But in viewing the past as usable, as somethingthat speaks to us without intermediary or translation,we end up turning it into yet another commodity forour instant consumption. We discard or just ignorevast regions of the past that either contradict our cur-rent needs or fail to align easily with them. To besure, the past retains a certain fascination. But it isthe fascination of the flea market, with its endless ar-ray of gaudy trinkets and antique baubles. Becausewe know more or less what we’re looking for beforewe enter this past, our encounter is unlikely tochange us or cause us to rethink who we are. Thepast becomes clay in our hands. We are not called

upon to stretch our understanding in order to learnfrom the past. Instead, we contort the past to fit thepredetermined meaning we have already assigned toit.

The other pole in this tension, the strangeness ofthe past, offers the possibility of surprise and amaze-ment, of encountering people, places, and times thatspur us to reconsider how we see ourselves as humanbeings. An encounter with this past can be mind-ex-panding in the best sense of the term. Yet, taken toextremes, this approach carries its own set of prob-lems. Regarding the past “on its own terms” — de-tached from the circumstances, concerns, and needsof the present — too often results in a kind of eso-

teric exoticism, precisely the conclusion one comesto after a tour through the monographic literaturethat defines contemporary historical practice. Mostof this specialized literature may engage the atten-tion of a small coterie of professionals, but it fails toengage the interest of anyone else (Hamerow 1987).

There is no easy way around the tension betweenthe familiar past, which seems so relevant to our pres-ent needs, and the past whose applicability is not im-mediately manifest. The tension exists because bothaspects of history are essential and irreducible. Onthe one hand, we need to feel kinship with the peo-ple we study, for this is exactly what engages our in-terest and makes us feel connected. We come to seeourselves as inheritors of a tradition that provides asound mooring and some security against the tran-sience of the modern world.

But this is only half of the story. To fully realizehistory’s humanizing qualities, to draw on its abilityto, in the words of Stanford University’s Carl De-gler, “expand our conception and understanding of

kappanmagazine.org V92 N4 Kappan 83

History holds the potential, only partially realized, ofhumanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in

the school curriculum.

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what it means to be human” (1980: 24), we need toencounter the distant past — a past even more dis-tant from us in modes of thought and social organ-ization than in years. It is this past, one that initiallyleaves us befuddled or, worse, just plain bored, thatwe need most if we are to achieve the understandingthat each of us is more than the handful of labels as-cribed to us at birth. The sustained encounter withthis less familiar past teaches us the limitations of ourbrief sojourn on the planet and allows us to takemembership in the entire human race. To this end,paradoxically, the relevance of the past may lie pre-cisely in what strikes us as its initial irrelevance.

I approach these issues not as a historian, some-one who spends time using documents to reconstructthe past, but as a psychologist, someone who designstasks and interviews that shed light on how we cometo know who we are today. Similarly, my data do notcome from archives of the past but are created in thepresent when I sit down to interview people from allwalks of life — teachers, practicing historians, highschool students, and parents. In the following threevignettes, I offer glimpses from this program of re-search. The first comes from a high school student’sencounter with primary documents of the Revolu-tionary War; the second, from an elementary schoolprincipal’s reactions after reading the diary of a mid-wife from the turn of the 19th century; and the third,from a historian’s encounter with documents thatshed light on Abraham Lincoln’s views on race.

In these vignettes, I try to show that historicalthinking, in its deepest forms, is neither a naturalprocess nor something that springs automaticallyfrom psychological development. Its achievement, Iargue, actually goes against the grain of how we or-

dinarily think. This is one of the reasons why it ismuch easier to learn names, dates, and stories thanit is to change the fundamental mental structures thatwe use to grasp the meaning of the past. The oddsof achieving mature historical understanding arestacked against us in a world in which Disney andMTV call the shots. But it is precisely because of theuses to which the past is put that these other aimstake on even greater importance.

LEARNING FROM STUDENTS

Let me begin with Derek, a 17-year-old studentin an Advanced Placement history course (later thesalutatorian of his senior class), who participated inone of my earliest studies. I remember Derek clearly,because it was with him that the questions I take uphere first came into view (Wineburg 1992: 20-24).

Derek participated in a study in which high schoolstudents (as well as professional historians) read a se-ries of primary sources about the Battle of Lexing-ton. Derek read that British forces encountered theminutemen standing in their way on LexingtonGreen. He remarked about the unequal numbers ofthe combatants — the documents say that somethingon the order of hundreds of British regulars opposed70 or so colonists (Wineburg 1991: 73-87). He notedwhat occurred when the encounter was over: Eightcolonists lay dead, with only one casualty on theBritish side. The lack of British casualties suggestedto him that this battle might have been more one-sided than the term “battle” suggests.

All of these were astute observations that reflectedDerek’s keen intelligence and made him stand outamong his peers. However, when asked to select apicture that best reflected the written evidence hehad reviewed, Derek did not choose the picture thatshowed colonists in disarray, which would have beenthe logical choice given his earlier observations. In-stead, he chose the picture that showed the colonistshiding behind walls, reloading their muskets, andtaking aim at the redcoats. Derek believed this de-piction was most accurate because:

It gives [the minutemen] sort of . . . an advantageousposition, where they are sort of on a hill and I pre-sume somewhere over here is a wall, I guess. . . . Theminutemen are going to be all scrambled, going tobe hiding behind the poles and everything, ratherthan staying out here facing [the British]. . . . Youknow there’s got to be like a hill, and they’re think-ing they’ve got to hide behind something, get at aplace where they can’t be shot besides being on lowground, and being ready to kill. Their mentalitieswould be ludicrous if they were going to stand, like,here in [the depiction showing the minutemen indisarray], ready to be shot. (Wineburg 1991: 79)

Judged by conventional definitions of what we

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By hitching our own stories to the stories of those who went before us, the past becomes a useful resource

in our everyday lives, an endless storehouse of rawmaterials to be shaped for our present needs.

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want students to do in history classes, Derek’s read-ing is exemplary. In the words of the Bradley Com-mission, the report that launched the current reformmovement in history education, students should en-ter “into a world of drama — suspending [their]knowledge of the ending in order to gain a sense ofanother era — a sense of empathy that allows the stu-dent to see through the eyes of the people who werethere” (1988: 14). Not only has Derek tried to seethrough others’ eyes, he has attempted to reconstructtheir world views, their “mentalities.” However,Derek’s reconstruction holds true only if these peo-ple shared his own modern notions of battlefield pro-priety: that in the face of a stronger adversary youtake cover behind walls and wage a kind of guerrillawarfare. Derek’s reading poses a striking irony andan intriguing relationship. What seemed to guide hisview of this event is a set of assumptions about hownormal people behave. These assumptions, in turn,overshadowed his very own observations, made dur-ing the review of the written testimony. Ironically,what Derek perceived as natural was perceived asbeastly by the Puritans when they first encounteredthis form of combat.

By the 16th century, European warfare hadevolved into a highly complex form of gentlemanlyencounters, in which it was not unheard of for com-batants to make war during the day and to dine to-gether at night. Battlefield engagements conformedto an elaborate etiquette, in part a result of the cum-bersome sequence of actions — up to 42 separatesteps — involved in firing and reloading a musket(Hirsch 1988: 1187-1212).

The culture of large-scale warfare clashed withthe traditions of warfare among the indigenous peo-ples along the coast of New England. For example,among the Pequots, a military culture of symbolicacts prevailed. The norm was not face-to-face en-counters that resulted in massive bloodshed, butsmall-scale raids that settled feuds by exacting sym-bolic tribute. This clash of traditions led to ruinousends, as when the Puritans encircled an entire Indianvillage on the Mystic River in 1637 and burned it tothe ground. Solomon Stoddard, writing to JosephDudley in 1703, explained:

If the Indians were as other people are, and did man-age their warr fairly after the manner of other na-tions, it might be looked upon as inhumane to per-sue them in a manner contrary to Christian prac-tice. . . . But they are to be looked upon as thievesand murderers . . . they don’t appeare openly in thefield to bid us battle, they use those cruelly that fallinto their hands. . . . They act like wolves and are tobe dealt with as wolves. (Hirsch 1988: 1208)

It’s not that Derek was a careless reader. On thecontrary, his reading was fluent, and his skill at mon-

itoring his own cognition (a process psychologistscall “metacognition”) was enviable. But when all wassaid and done, Derek’s encounter with these 18th-century documents left him unfazed. The colonists’behavior did not cause him to stand back and say,“Wow, what a strange group of people. What onearth would make them act this way?” Such a reac-tion might have led him to contemplate codes of be-havior — duty, honor, and dying for a cause — for-

eign to his world. These documents did not spurDerek to ask himself new questions or to considernew dimensions of human experience. Instead, hisexisting beliefs shaped the information he encoun-tered, so that the new conformed to the shape of thealready known. Derek read these documents, but helearned little from them.

Derek’s reading raises questions that lie at theheart of historical understanding. Given what weknow about the entrenched nature of beliefs, how,exactly, do we bracket what we know in order to un-derstand the thinking of people in the past? This isno easy task. The notion that we can strip ourselvesof what we know, that we can stop the spread of as-sociations set off when we read certain words, recallsAllan Megill’s notion of “hermeneutic naiveté” or thebelief in “immaculate perception” (1989: 632).Among philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer hasbeen the most instructive about the problems thisposition entails. How can we overcome establishedmodes of thought, Gadamer asks, when it is thesemodes that permit understanding in the first place(1979)? We, no less than the people we study, are his-torical beings. Trying to shed what we know toglimpse the “real” past is like trying to examine mi-crobes with the naked eye: The very instruments we

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It is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to change the fundamental mental structures

that we use to grasp the meaning of the past.

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abandon are the ones that enable us to see.This position differs considerably from the clas-

sic historicist stance one finds in R.G. Collingwoodand others. For Collingwood, “all history is the his-tory of thought,” the ability of the historian to puthim- or herself in Julius Caesar’s mind, “envisioning. . . the situation in which Caesar stood, and think-ing for himself what Caesar thought about the situ-ation and the possible ways of dealing with it” (1946:215). Collingwood believed that we can somehow“know Caesar” because human ways of thought, insome deep and essential way, transcend time andspace.

Not so fast, say contemporary historians. Con-sider the words of Carlo Ginzburg, the eminent Ital-ian historian and author of The Cheese and the Worms:

The historian’s task is just the opposite of what mostof us were taught to believe. He must destroy ourfalse sense of proximity to people of the past becausethey come from societies very different from ourown. The more we discover about these people’smental universes, the more we should be shockedby the cultural distance that separates us from them.(Kandell 1991: 47)

Or these words from Robert Darnton, award-winning author of The Great Cat Massacre:

Other people are other. They do not think the waywe do. And if we want to understand their way ofthinking, we should set out with the idea of captur-ing otherness. . . . We constantly need to be shakenout of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to beadministered doses of culture shock. (1985: 4)

Or these from Richard White, historian of theWest:

Any good history begins in strangeness. The pastshould not be comfortable. The past should not bea familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar whyrevisit it? The past should be so strange that youwonder how you and people you know and lovecould come from such a time. (1998: 13)

In coming to understand how we differ from Cae-sar, can we ever “know” him in the way he knew him-self or in the way his contemporaries knew him? Evenif we were convinced of the possibility, how wouldwe know we had succeeded, short of appealing tonecromancy? In other words, the point made bythese contemporary historians seems to be the op-posite of the one cited earlier — that the goal of his-torical understanding should be to “see through theeyes of the people who were there.” If Ginzburg andothers are right, the goal of historical study shouldbe to teach us what we cannot see, to acquaint us withthe congenital blurriness of our vision.

Even the notion that historical knowledge shouldserve as a bank of examples for contemplating pres-ent problems has come under challenge. The morewe know about the past, claimed the philosopher ofhistory Louis Mink, the more cautious we should beabout drawing analogies to it. In Mink’s view, histor-ical knowledge can sometimes sever our connectionto the past, making us see ourselves as discontinuouswith the people we study. John Locke, for example,is no longer our contemporary in his seemingly“modern understanding” of government and humanmotivation. Instead, our awareness of discontinuitywith Locke forces us to reconcile two contradictoryforces: intellectual proximity with the Locke of theSecond Treatise on Government and intellectual es-trangement from the anti-empiricist Locke of therarely read Essay on the Reasonableness of Chris-tianity. In studying the Locke who fits our image aswell as the Locke who complicates it, we can cometo know a more nuanced personality. Locke becomesmore than a projection of our own views. “The newLocke,” writes Mink, “is accessible in his remotenessand strangeness; it is precisely his crotchety Calvin-ism which changes our understanding of all his viewsalthough it destroys the illusion that in political andphilosophical discussion we are communing withLocke as with a contemporary” (1987: 103).

Put differently, when we think about Egyptiandrawing and representation of perspective, we canno longer “assume that the Egyptians saw as we see,but could not draw as we can” (Mink 1987: 103).Rather, we must consider the possibility that theydrew differently because they saw differently andthat there is something about this way of seeing thatis irretrievably lost. Much as we try, then, we cannever fully cross the Rubicon that flows between ourmind and Caesar’s.

CHALLENGING OUR THINKING

How willing, though, are we to press this point?Exactly when in the flow of human experience doeslast month become strange, last year remote? Indeed,when pushed to its extreme, the consequences ofthinking that there is no continuity with the past areas grave as thinking that the past directly mirrors thepresent. David Lowenthal reminds us that the pastis a “foreign country” (1985). A foreign country, nota foreign planet. To replace naive historicism with arigid sense of disconnection is to play mental musi-cal chairs, to give up one reductionism only to adoptanother.

Historical thinking requires us to reconcile twocontradictory positions: first, that our establishedmodes of thinking are an inheritance that cannot besloughed off; second, that if we make no attempt toslough them off, we are doomed to a mind-numb-

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ing presentism that reads the present onto the past.It was precisely this paradox that drew me to A Mid-wife’s Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which tellsthe story of Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived be-tween 1735 and 1812. As Carl Degler wrote in hisreview of the book, Ulrich “unravels the fascinatinglife of a community that is so foreign, and yet so sim-ilar to our own” (Ulrich 1991).

LEARNING HISTORY FROM TEXTBOOKS

About the time I was reading this book, I was askedby a group of educators in Minnesota to develop aworkshop on history as a “way of knowing,” some-thing beyond the compendia of names and dates thatit had become in that state’s affair with “outcome-based education.” In the two days of this workshop,I chose to contrast learning history from books suchas Ulrich’s with the approach most familiar to par-ticipants: learning history from history textbooks.

As vehicles for creating historical understanding,textbooks present intriguing challenges and create aset of problems all their own. Textbooks pivot onwhat Roland Barthes called the “referential illusion,”the notion that the way things are told is simply theway things were (1970: 145-55). To achieve this il-lusion, textbooks exploit various stylistic conven-

tions. First, textbooks eliminate “metadiscourse,” orplaces in the text where the author intrudes to sug-gest judgment, emphasis, or uncertainty. Metadis-course is common in the writing historians do forone another, but it is edited out of the writing theydo for schoolchildren (Crismore 1984: 279-296;Paxton 1997: 235-250). Second, traces of how thetext came to be are hidden or erased: Textbooksrarely cite the documentary record, and — if primarymaterial appears — it is typically set off in “sidebars”so as not to interfere with the main text. Finally, text-books speak in the omniscient third person. Thereis no visible author to confront the reader; instead,a corporate author speaks from a position of tran-scendence, a position of knowing from on high.

I began the Minnesota seminar by giving the 22participants a selection from The Americans,Winthrop Jordan’s widely used U.S. history textbookfor 11th-graders (1985). In describing the nature ofthe Colonial economy during roughly the same pe-riod as Martha Ballard’s diary, Jordan focuses on the“triangular trade,” the nexus of routes between thecolonies, the West Indies, and Africa that involvedthe exchange of slaves, sugar cane, and rum. Thestory is organized under the boldface heading “TheNorth Develops Commerce and Cities — Molassesand Rumbullion,” with women appearing in thestory only under the section headed “Family Farms.”The following paragraph about the role of womenin economic life became our “text” for the next twodays, the touchstone against which we assayed ourown developing understanding and the text that weattempted to rewrite during the final hours of theworkshop.

Anyone who has ever lived on a family farm knowsthat such a life involves long hours and hard workfor everyone. Children worked at least part timefrom the age when they could be shown how to shellpeas, shuck corn, or fetch firewood. Women per-formed an unending round of tasks. They cookedin metal pots that were hung over the open fireplace.They baked in a hollow compartment in the chim-ney that served as an oven. They spun rough clothand sewed it into clothing for the family. Theywashed clothes and bedding in wooden tubs withsoap they made themselves. (Jordan, Greenblatt,and Bowes 1985: 68)

After spending time examining this passage andthe surrounding narrative, we turned to Ulrich’sbook. As a text for exploring historical thinking, thiswork offers multiple points of entry. Each chapterstarts with several pages from Martha’s diary, with18th-century conventions of spelling and grammarleft intact. Only after giving the reader a feeling forthe kinds of evidence she reviewed does Ulrich goon to explore themes and trends that spring from

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In resolving contradictions in Lincoln’swords, we turn him into one of us: Hisgoal is to get elected, and he’s got his

spin doctors to help.

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Martha’s life. The following diary excerpt conveys afeeling for the kinds of materials participants stud-ied:

November 15 6 At Mr Parkers. Mrs Holdman here.Cloudy & Cold. Mrs Holdman here to have a gownmade. Mrs Benjamin to have a Cloak Cut. Polly Rustafter work. I was Calld to Mr Parkers aftern. Mr Bal-lard is better.

17 F At ditoes & Mr Poores. Birth 47th a daughter.At Capt Meloys allso Rainy. I was called from MrParkers at 2 hour morn to Mr Poores. Doct Pagewas Calld before my arival. I Extracted the Child, adagt. He Chose to Close the Loin. I retuned homeat 8 hour morning. Receivd 6/ as a reward. Mr Bal-lard & Ephm attend worship, Dolly & Sally aftern.Charls and John Coks supt here. I was calld to Captmeloys at 11 hour Evening. Raind. Birth Mr Pooresdaughter X X. (Ulrich 1991: 163)

Such excerpts formed one part of our inquiry. Wealso examined tables of delivery data compiled by Ul-rich from Martha’s diary, and we compared these tostatistics from Dr. James Farrington (1824-59), whowas born a generation after Martha, a time whenmidwifery had fallen into disfavor and when doctorshad turned to bloodletting and the use of opium de-rivatives, such as laudanum, during delivery (Ulrich1991: 251). We puzzled over what seemed to be dra-matic changes in how midwives were viewed fromthe turn of the 18th century, when Martha stoodalongside doctors at an autopsy, to less than 20 yearslater, when a Harvard professor wrote that “we can-not instruct women as we do men in the science ofmedicine; we cannot carry them into the dissectingroom . . . without destroying those moral qualitiesof character which are essential to the office” of mid-wife and woman (Ulrich 1991: 251).

Our concerns moved from correcting and ex-panding the initial textbook account to questioningthe rarely articulated assumptions that guide thewriting of textbooks. Such assumptions were throwninto sharp relief when we placed the textbook along-side Ulrich’s narrative. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich ispresent in the story she tells, sharing how she piecedtogether the labyrinthine social relationships ofColonial New England from the haziest of refer-ences; how she immersed herself in the world ofherbal medicine to decode cryptic allusions to tradi-tional remedies; how, in order to understand thework of Martha’s husband, Ephraim, she had to learnabout the working of sawmills in the 18th and 19thcenturies.

As we ventured deeper into Martha’s world andwork, we couldn’t help thinking about the world andwork of the historian. We marveled at the author’ssteely resolve in the face of the persistent question:“When will the book be finished?” (Ulrich 1991: 41).

We found it impossible to learn about Martha Bal-lard without learning about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.We were aided because the historian made no at-tempt to hide. In fact, Ulrich placed herself squarelyin the text, as, for example, when she described howother historians found Martha’s diary “trivial andunimportant.” That such a view could come frommen writing in the last century was, perhaps, under-standable. But when a feminist history written in the1970s characterized the diary as “filled with trivia,”it was just too much for Ulrich.

It is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitiousdailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’sbook lies. To extract the river crossing without not-ing the cold days spent “footing” stockings, to ab-stract the births without recording the long autumnsspent winding quills, pickling meat, and sorting cab-bages, is to destroy the sinews of this earnest, steady,gentle, and courageous record. . . . When [Martha]felt overwhelmed or enlivened by the very “trivia”the historians have dismissed, she said so, not in thesoul-searching manner of a Puritan nor with the lit-erary self-consciousness of a sentimentalist, but ina plain, matter-of-fact, and in the end unforgettablevoice. For more than twenty-seven years, 9,965 daysto be exact, she faithfully kept her record. . . . “Andnow this year is come to a close,” she wrote on De-cember 31, 1800, “and happy is it if we have madea wise improvement of the time.” For her, living wasto be measured in doing. Nothing was trivial. (Ul-rich 1991: 9)

CHANGING NARRATIVES

This short excerpt bears witness to the profoundchanges in historical writing over the last 30 years(Novick 1987). The sweep of the historical narrativeis no longer restricted to great acts of statecraft butnow encompasses everyday acts of childbirth, thedaily routines of ordinary people trying to make endsmeet. While this passage reflects the influence of so-cial history and feminism, it also highlights the new,more active role of the historian in narrating the past— something that distinguished Ulrich’s prose fromthe textbook prose that participants knew best. Ul-rich the storyteller is in the thick of her story, shar-ing her anger at previous historians’ dismissal ofMartha Ballard’s diary, identifying with her protag-onist’s patience and resolve, showing sadness asMartha’s life comes to an end. In revealing Ballardthe midwife, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich reveals herself.From the power of Ulrich’s voice to the power ofBallard’s indomitable spirit, this excerpt, when readaloud, moved several participants to tears.

Colleen was one of them. An elementary schoolprincipal, Colleen had last studied history when shewas a high school student. She signed up for theworkshop because her school was moving toward aninterdisciplinary curriculum and she wanted to un-

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derstand how history might be combined with othersubjects. At the start of the workshop she admittedthat she had a “bad memory,” a statement of defi-ciency in the attribute she thought most importantto historical study. But by the workshop’s end,Colleen was surprised. She was immediately drawninto these documents. She identified easily withMartha’s endless cycle of work, in and out of thehome, and with the competing demands of mother,career woman, wife, and community leader. Thechance to work with original sources was new toColleen, and she found it invigorating. During thetwo days of the workshop, she was among the mostvocal and passionate participants.

At the end of the workshop, we asked the partic-ipants to “rewrite history,” to take what they hadlearned and compose a narrative on the role ofwomen in the economic life of Colonial and post-Revolutionary America. We gave them the option ofamending the section from Jordan’s textbook or put-ting it aside completely and starting from scratch.Colleen chose to put it aside. She took pen in handand wrote furiously, scribbling a few sentences, mut-tering under her breath about how angry she was atthe textbook, crumpling up the paper, and startingagain. She wrote uninterrupted for 35 minutes.

You might predict that Colleen’s essay bore thetraces of this passion, giving voice to the range ofemotions — from identification and recognition toanger and resentment — that she felt as she workedthrough the documents. But this was not the case.Colleen’s detached writing trudged along like thetextbook prose she sought to banish. Narrated in thethird person, Colleen’s account strove for objectivity,or, as she put it later, to “keep my emotions out of it.”Nowhere in her two-page history does she use theword “I.” Absent are indications of emphasis, judg-ment, and doubt. To be sure, the content had shifted.From Colleen, we learn that women such as MarthaBallard contributed to the Colonial economy as mid-wives, by engaging in small-scale textile production,by raising poultry, and by myriad other activities. Thefacts may have changed, but the epistemologicalstance of the text remained firmly intact.

Like Derek before her, Colleen faced a conflictbetween two spheres of experience: her immediateexperience in reading these texts and her prior expe-riences, especially her memories from high school.This tension came to a head when Colleen put pento paper. Her frustration bubbled over when shecould not find a way of resolving the conflict betweenher belief that history had slighted her as a womanand a second, tenaciously held belief that, when writ-ing history, one should be cool, dispassionate, scien-tific, objective. In rewriting history Colleen con-fronted herself, but rather than engage this self andmake it a part of her story, she interpreted her job asone of self-effacement — removing her passion, heranger, and even her own experience as mother fromthe story. As a result, Colleen was nowhere to befound in her creation.

Unrestrained, passion distorts the story we seekto tell. The balancing of perspectives requires us tostep back from our immediate stance and see thingsin other ways, an exceedingly difficult thing to dowhen anger sears in our gut. But Colleen went to theother extreme. Rather than compensate for her sub-jectivity by sharing it with her readers, she tried toconstruct a story without a teller — to deal with herdeep feelings by pretending that they did not exist.In the end, Martha Ballard, a person brought to lifein these primary documents, returned to a still lifein the document Colleen herself composed.

Ironically, then, Colleen’s text bore a closer re-semblance to The Americans than to A Midwife’s Tale.The textbook and all that it symbolized became, forColleen and many other participants in this work-shop, not a single way of transmitting the story ofthe past, but the only way.

THE FAMILIAR VS. THE STRANGE

How might we navigate the tension between the

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The consequences of thinking thatthere is no continuity with the past are

as grave as thinking that the pastdirectly mirrors the present.

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familiar and the strange? How might we embracethat which we share with the past yet remain opento aspects that might startle us into reconsideringwhat it means to be human? The distant past jars uswith its strangeness — the burial practices of AncientEgypt, the medical practices of the Middle Ages, theburning of witches in Salem. But what about themore recent past, a time like our own with TVs, ra-dios, cars, and planes, a time that looks superficiallylike the present except for clothes and hairstyles?How might we approach this past so that it emergesas something more than a faded version of the pres-ent?

These questions came into focus when I visited aSeattle high school to observe a class that had beenwatching the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize.” On theday that I visited, the students had just watched thesegment in which Gov. Ross Barnett physically barsJames Meredith from registering at the Universityof Mississippi. In the ensuing discussion, the teacherasked the students why Barnett objected to Mered-ith’s enrollment. One boy raised his hand and vol-unteered “prejudice.” The teacher nodded and thediscussion moved on.

That simple “prejudice” unsettled me. Four hun-dred years of racial history reduced to a one-wordresponse (Jordan 1968)? This set me to wonderingwhat it would take before we could begin to thinkhistorically about such concepts as prejudice, racism,tolerance, fairness, and equity. At what point do wecome to see these not as transcendent truths soaringabove time and place, but as patterns of thought thattake root in particular historical moments, developand grow, and bear traces of their former selves butemerge as new forms with successive generations? IfGov. Barnett’s problem was that he was “prejudiced,”how would these students and their teachers regardAbraham Lincoln, variously dubbed the “GreatEmancipator” or “White Supremacist,” dependingon social fashion and current need?

To study this question, I put together a series ofdocuments that combined the words of AbrahamLincoln with the voices of some of his contempo-raries: Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent for the1858 race for a seat in the Illinois Senate; John BellRobinson and John Van Evrie, religious racialistswho looked to the Bible for justification of slavery;and William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist whoworked tirelessly for emancipation. In this documentset, I also included three documents from Lincoln,each reflecting his role at a different time in his life:the keen observer traveling up the Mississippi in1841 and seeing slaves chained together “like somany fish upon a trot-line”; the candidate, debatingStephen Douglas before a largely pro-Douglascrowd in Ottawa, Ill.; and the beleaguered, war-

weary President, addressing a group of freed slavesin 1862 about the possibility of a colony in CentralAmerica (Wineburg and Fournier 1994: 285-308).

I presented these documents to a group of collegehistory majors and nonmajors, all of whom were en-rolled in a fifth-year program to become publicschool teachers. I asked them to read through thesedocuments and tell me what light they shed on Lin-coln’s thought. Although there was great variety inthe participants’ responses, two broad trends stoodout.

One group took Lincoln’s words at face value.They saw these words as offering a direct windowinto Lincoln’s mind, unobstructed by either the par-ticular circumstances in which they were uttered orthe passage of time between 1860 and today. Lincolnwas a racist, pure and simple. Other, more careful,readers recognized that they needed a context forthese words. But rather than fashioning a contextfrom the raw materials provided by these documents,they borrowed a context from their contemporarysocial world. For example, a physics major cast Lin-coln as a modern-day Ronald Reagan, massagingwords to fit the needs of his crowd, contradictinghimself to gain votes, and turning to his spin doctorsand handlers for counsel. In this reading, Lincolnbecame for one student

a guy trying to get elected. I’ve kind of got this men-tal picture of a Roger Ailes type, you know the spindoctor who pushes his campaign director, whopushes the media director . . . whispering in his earsaying, “Now this is what you got to say to this crowdto put the right spin on this particular issue.” So it,again, when I’m thinking of Lincoln, I’m viewinghim as a politician in kind of a slimy way. . . . Theysay whatever is convenient to the crowd that’s lis-tening to them, and you never really know whatthey’re thinking. (Wineburg and Fournier 1994:294)

One way to understand this reading is to view itas an example of what Daniel Kahneman and AmosTversky called the “availability heuristic,” that fea-ture of the mind that allows us to solve problems withthe cognitive tools that are most readily accessible(1973: 237-251). Faced with seeming incongruitiesin Lincoln’s position, we have at hand an array ofcontemporary social forms and institutions — pressconferences, spin doctors, response dials — that al-low us to harmonize discrepant information. Even ifwe recognize the vast technological changes in thepolitical process between 1860 and 1990, we oftenperceive a unity in ways of thinking that spans thebreach of time.

In this reading, Lincoln and Douglas become ourcontemporaries in top hats, much like charactersfrom a James Michener novel who happen to dress

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funny but whose behavior and mannerisms are thoseof our next-door neighbors. In other words, “pre-sentism” — the act of viewing the past through thelens of the present — is not some bad habit we’vefallen into. It is, instead, our psychological conditionat rest, a way of thinking that requires little effortand comes quite naturally. If Lincoln seems to besaying two different things, it is because he’s speak-ing to two different audiences, for in our world weknow exactly why Bob Dole would say one thing toKansas wheat farmers and another to New York Citystockbrokers. In resolving contradictions in Lin-coln’s words, we turn him into one of us: His goal isto get elected, and he’s got his spin doctors to help.

I broadened my study by asking several workinghistorians to read these same documents. Some ofthem knew a great deal about Lincoln and had writ-ten books about him; others knew little more thanwhat was required to give a few lectures in an under-graduate survey course.

Bob Alston (a pseudonym), a middle-aged Cau-casian Americanist, fit into the latter group. Likemost members of his department, he taught under-graduate survey courses spanning all of Americanhistory, but the majority of his upper-level and grad-uate courses were in a different specialization. Ingraduate school he had taken examinations that cov-ered the Civil War, but he had not studied this pe-riod extensively since then.

Alston did not have an easy time with the task,and in the beginning his reading is virtually indistin-guishable from those of the stronger college stu-dents. But from the beginning, with Douglas’ open-ing statement at Ottawa, Alston stared his lack ofknowledge in the face.

I don’t know as much about Lincoln’s views as Ithought I did. I mean, as I read it and see Douglasperhaps putting words in Lincoln’s mouth, I’m notquite sure about what I do and don’t know aboutLincoln. Douglas makes it sound as if Lincoln be-lieves they’re equal, blacks and whites, on virtuallyevery level, but I don’t know to what extent Lincolndid or did not believe that. I know that he was verypractically aware of the concerns of bringing themtogether as if they were equal in the same society atthis point, but I don’t know enough about Lincoln’sviews to make some other judgments I’ve been mak-ing.

In the second document, Lincoln’s rebuttal ofDouglas, Lincoln states that he has “no purpose tointroduce political and social equality” between theraces. At this point Alston paused: “Just rereadingthe sentence again. Again trying to think about howDouglas’ statement about Lincoln thinking the twowere equal could have some truth if it falls outsidethe realm of what Lincoln identifies as political and

social equality.” Seven lines later, Alston stoppedagain: “I’m going back and rereading the sentence.These 19th-century orators spoke in more compli-cated sentences. They weren’t used to sound bites.I’m wondering what he means by ‘physical differ-ence.’” Alston continued his analysis.

If blacks have the “natural rights to life, liberty, andthe pursuit of happiness,” one would assume thatliberty and pursuit of happiness would indicate thatthey cannot be slaves at the same time. Similarly, ifblacks have the “right to eat the bread which his ownhand earns,” that they have the right to the productof their labor, that is, the pursuit of happiness or lib-erty, one form or the other, then if that is a naturalright then slavery goes against those natural rights.

When the college students reached this point,they tended to locate this contradiction in Lincoln,or they created multiple Lincolns who said differentthings to different people. But Alston responded bycalling attention to this contradiction, not dissolv-ing it. Over the next five documents, his reading issomething I think of as a prolonged exercise in the“specification of ignorance.” He asks, on average, 4.2questions per document, and he underscores whathe does not know with markers such as “I don’t haveenough to go on” or “This makes no sense to me” atotal of 14 separate times. Only at the end of the taskdoes Alston come up with something resembling aninterpretation. It comes in response to the passagein which John Bell Robinson appeals to God as pro-viding sanction to slavery. At this point Alston makesthe following comments:

Lincoln . . . talks about blacks being endowed withcertain things from God, but “usefulness as slaves”or a status of slaves isn’t one of the things that he

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The goal of historical study should be to teach us what we cannot see, to acquaint us with the

congenital blurriness of our vision.

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mentions. [I’m going to] look at some of the earlier[documents]. What I’m looking for is his discussion[of] the physical difference between the two and hisdiscussion of natural rights [to] see if he links thoseat all to God. * * * [Asterisks indicate that Alstonwent back in the document set to consult earlier doc-uments.] It was Douglas * * * who linked Lincoln tobelieve about the Negro to God and the Declara-tion of Independence. But in this * * * in Lincoln’sreply, he refers — I’m looking here for reference toGod — I’m not finding it but I haven’t finished yet,he refers to the Declaration of Independence.

But in the letter to Mary Speed * * * he did say “howtrue it is that God renders the worst of human con-ditions tolerable.” But God didn’t render slavery acondition that blacks ought to find themselves in,according to Lincoln. Lincoln keeps going out of itin these things, he talks about the Declaration of In-dependence * * * he talks about natural rights — I’mnot sure where these come from in his mind — andhe talks about natural differences. But he does notbring God into it other than to say that God makes,God allows people to make the worst of human con-ditions tolerable. * * * And that’s a form of mercy,not of any kind of restriction on their status or be-havior. (Wineburg 1998: 319-346)

This is a dense excerpt that itself merits interpre-tation. In the full course of this zigzagging commen-tary, Alston refers to the previous documents eightdifferent times. He learns that, while Robinson ap-peals to God to justify slavery as a lower form of man-hood, Lincoln appeals to God to connect the racesin common humanity. Through this intertextualweaving, Alston learns that Lincoln justifies theequality of Africans not by appealing to God, but byappealing to “natural rights,” an interpretation ofLincoln that comes remarkably close to the “argu-ment by definition” interpretation of RichardWeaver (1953). Although Alston starts off the taskconfused and full of questions, he ends up with a nu-anced and sophisticated understanding of Lincoln’sposition.

What Alston does here is misrepresented by no-tions of “placing” or “putting” Lincoln into context,verb forms that conjure up images of jigsaw puzzlesin which pieces are slotted into preexisting frames.Contexts are neither “found” nor “located,” andwords are not “put” into context. Context, from theLatin contexere, means to weave together, to engagein an active process of connecting things in a pat-tern. It is something new here that Alston has made— something that did not exist before he engagedthese documents and confronted his ignorance.

The questions Alston asks are the tools of cre-ation. His questions dwell in the gap between hispresent knowledge and the circumstances of the past.Alston is an expert to be sure, but he is an expert ina very different sense from the way that term is typ-ically used. His expertise lies not in his sweeping

knowledge of this topic but in his ability to pick him-self up after a tumble, to get a fix on what he doesnot know, and to generate a road map to guide hisnew learning. He is an expert at cultivating puzzle-ment. It is Alston’s ability to stand back from firstimpressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, andto keep track of his questions that together point himin the direction of new learning. Such an approachrequires skill, technique, and a great deal of know-how. But mature historical cognition is more: It is anact that engages the heart.

So, for example, when Alston encountered thephrase “we need men capable of thinking as Whitemen” uttered by Lincoln in his address to freed slaves,he was not only confused by the language but alsovisibly shaken by it. But rather than resolve his dis-comfort by concluding that Lincoln was a racist, Al-ston sat with this discomfort over the course of sev-eral documents. When he said, shaking his head, “Idon’t know what Lincoln is saying,” he did not meanthat he was confused by the words on the page. Hemeant something much larger: that he was confused

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Trying to shed what we know toglimpse the “real” past is like trying toexamine microbes with the naked eye:The very instruments we abandon are

the ones that enable us to see.Th

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by the world conjured up by these words, a world inwhich one human being could go to the market tobuy others. What, he wondered, could Lincoln’swords mean in that world (Skinner 1969: 3-53)? Andwhat did he as a modern historian not know that pre-vented him from fully entering Lincoln’s world?

Alston’s reading shows a humility before the nar-rowness of our contemporary experience and anopenness before the expanse of the history of thespecies. It grants people in the past the benefit of thedoubt by casting doubt on our ability to know themas easily as we know ourselves. This does not meanthat we cannot judge the past — we can’t help mak-ing judgments. But it does mean that we must notrush to judgment. Other readers used these docu-ments to confirm their prior beliefs. They encoun-tered the past here and labeled it. Alston encoun-tered the past and learned from it.

NOW, I KNOW

Several years ago I went to see Schindler’s List. Ihad long been acquainted with Steven Spielberg’swork — what parent isn’t? — so I was wary. I wasdrawn into the movie immediately, but what stayswith me years later is what happened after the finalcredits rolled. I watched the man in front of me turnto his wife and say, “I never understood what hap-pened then until now, right now. Now, I know.”

I don’t want to read too much into this comment,other than to note that it was a fragment of the pres-ent, shot on location in Kraków, that gave birth tothis man’s understanding. As I sat in the theater, mythoughts settled on the puzzle of understanding setby the Italian chemist Primo Levi, whose writingson the Holocaust — lyrical and haunting — alwaysoffer insight. “Among the questions that are put tous,” wrote Levi, “one question is never absent; in-deed, as the years go by, it is formulated with everincreasing persistence and with an ever less hiddenaccent of accusation” (Levi 1989: 150-151). Thequestion Levi refers to is actually a three-part ques-tion: 1) Why did you not escape? 2) Why did younot rebel? 3) Why did you not evade capture beforethey got to you?

Levi describes what happened when he spoke toa group of 5th graders in an elementary school:

An alert-looking boy, apparently at the head of theclass, asked me the obligatory question: “But howcome you didn’t escape?” I briefly explained to himwhat I have written here. Not quite convinced, heasked me to draw a sketch of the camp on the black-board indicating the location of the watch towers,the gates, the barbed wire, and the power station. Idid my best, watched by thirty pairs of intent eyes.My interlocutor studied the drawing for a few in-stants, asked me for a few further clarifications, then

he presented to me the plan he had worked out: here,at night, cut the throat of the sentinel; then, put onhis clothes; immediately after this, run over there tothe power station and cut off the electricity, so thesearch lights would go out and the high tensionfence would be deactivated; after that I could leavewithout any trouble. He added seriously: “If itshould happen to you again, do as I told you. You’llsee that you’ll be able to do it.” (Levi 1989: 157)

This boy did everything we want from our stu-dents. He engaged with subject matter, he drew onhis background knowledge, he formulated questions,and he offered solutions. Lest we attribute the boy’squestion to his tender age, we should bear in mindthat these same questions have been posed by peo-ple far older and far more knowledgeable. For thisboy, as for many of us, Levi’s experience inspires in-credulity: This youngster cannot believe that somany could miss what is, in his mind, so very plain.In his response, Primo Levi echoes one of the cen-tral themes that I have explored here: the seductionof coming to know people in the past by relying onthe dimensions of our “lived experience.”

But for Levi the problem is broader than one ofhistorical knowing. Our “inability to perceive the ex-perience of others,” as he put it, applies to the pres-ent no less than to the past. It is for this reason thatthe study of history is so crucial to our present dayand age, when issues of diversity dominate the na-tional agenda. Coming to know others, whether theylive on the other side of the tracks or the other sideof the millennium, requires the education of our sen-sibilities. This is what history, when taught well,gives us practice in doing. Paradoxically, what allowsus to come to know others is our distrust of our ca-pacity to know them, a skepticism toward the ex-traordinary sense-making abilities that allow us toconstruct the world around us.

A skepticism toward the products of mind cansometimes slide into cynicism or solipsism. But thisneed not be the case. The awareness that the con-tradictions we see in others may tell us more aboutourselves is the seed of intellectual charity. It is anunderstanding that counters narcissism, for the nar-cissist sees the world — both the past and the pres-ent — in his own image. Mature historical knowingteaches us to do the opposite: to go beyond our ownimage, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyondthe fleeting moment in human history into whichwe’ve been born. History educates (“leads outward”in the Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects inthe secular curriculum, it does the best in teachingus those virtues once reserved for theology — thevirtue of humility in the face of limits to our knowl-edge and the virtue of awe in the face of the expanseof human history.

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On his journey from China to India, Marco Poloventured into Basman, believed to be Sumatra,where he chanced upon a species he had never be-fore seen: the rhinoceros. But he did not see it thatway. As his diary records, he saw instead:

. . . unicorns, which are scarcely smaller than ele-phants. They have the hair of a buffalo . . . [and] asingle large, black horn in the middle of the fore-head. They do not attack with their horn, but onlywith their tongue and their knees; for their tonguesare furnished with long, sharp spines. . . . They arevery ugly brutes to look at . . . not at all such as wedescribe them when . . . they let themselves be cap-tured by virgins. (Polo 1958: 253)

Our own encounters with history present us witha choice: to learn about rhinoceroses or to learnabout unicorns. We naturally incline toward uni-corns: They’re prettier and tamer. But it is the rhi-noceros that can teach us far more than we couldever imagine. K

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