Well, that’s a wrap for day one of The Historian’s Craft at Temple University.
I’ve tried more ambitious first day’s in the past and perhaps will again in the future, but today I had just two main goals: get students talking to each other and get them oriented to the class.
I admit it: for an ice-breaker I had them travel to the spring of 1889, to a certain town on the Austrian-German border, to a certain house in which resided a couple by the names of Klara and Alois. This couple trustingly asked them to babysit their infant son Adolphus.
What would you do with baby Hitler? (This thought experiment was an unnecessary risk for opening day, potentially offensive on a number of levels, and I don’t recommend it!)
Some students indeed wanted to kill baby Hitler. Some wanted to kidnap him and take him as far from Germany as possible. Some decided to babysit him like any other baby and dutifully return him to his parents. Some wanted to surround him with good art and art instruction.
Seriously, though, some students framed their answers from the get-go in terms of real historical questions of contingency and causation. Some believed killing Hitler wouldn’t make a difference, which suggests a certain perspective on the relationship between the individual and larger forces. Those who wanted to expose Hitler to a lot of art seem to have confidence in the pliability of human personality. And so on.
Really, it was just a chance for them to talk to each other. But we could claim some historical thinking took place as well.
The more substantive exercise concerned how they have learned history. What has influenced their view of the past? Here are their responses (lots of these were cited by more than one person):
Independent research
Wikipedia
School
Magic Tree House
Tv
Historical fiction
Museums
Music (Billy Joel – we didn’t start the fire)
Video games (Call of duty)
Family (history phd in the family!)
Oral history
Listening to others
History channel
Weather channel
NPR
Social media
Traveling
Pop culture (comics)
Memes
Word of mouth
Talking with family; family stories
Dad [interesting to note that some people nearly always say Dad but rarely say Mom]
Documentaries
Festivals
High school teacher
American girl doll
Colonial Williamsburg
Museums and monuments
Dance
History textbooks
Historic sites (one room school house)
Landscapes
Quaker meeting houses
Battlefields
Traveling and seeing other country’s point of view
I asked them what we might infer from this list. They said things like:
–History is all around us.
–We learn it in popular forms.
–It’s hard to know where the information is coming from or whether it’s reliable.
Most academic historians are likely to immediately note that nearly all the items on this list are “public history” or not even a direct form of history at all. Not surprisingly, not a single student said that academic monographs were important to how they have learned history. This need not be depressing to us, but it’s definitely important!
My example of how I learned history was church attendance as a child. There I received very powerful (though often implicit) lessons about what history was and what it meant.
My takeaway was that we are all engaging with the past constantly, and often unconsciously. Part of the point of this semester is to become conscious. If we are fated to remember, why not endeavor to do so consciously, and do it well?
Colorblind Christians 