Was the American Revolution a Mistake?: Reaching Students & Reinforcing Patriotism Through Teaching History as Choice

By Burton Weltman

Why was George Washington dismayed by the outcome of the American Revolution?

Would slavery still exist if the South had not seceded from the Union in 1861?

Might socialists rule America today if Teddy Roosevelt had not run for President and lost in 1912?

History is full of contingencies. People confront problems and debate options for solving them. Then they make a choice and face the consequences of their choice. Often they wonder if a different choice might have been better. Was the American Revolution a mistake? Was racial segregation inevitable? Was the Cold War necessary? Americans have repeatedly asked these sorts of questions as they examined the consequences of their choices.

This is a book about revisiting crucial choices people made in history and examining the consequences of those choices for them and for us. It demonstrates a method of teaching history that recreates events as people experienced them, and asks important questions that troubled them but that rarely appear in conventional textbooks. Unlike conventional methods that often reduce history to names, dates and factoids for students to memorize, it is a method that brings past debates to life, the losers' as well as the winners' points of view, and makes the subject exciting.

In studying history as choice, students examine the problems people faced, their options for solving them, their decision-making processes, and the choices they made. Then students evaluate the consequences of those choices both for people in the past and us today. They explore what might have happened if different choices had been made. Finally, students relate the consequences of those past choices to problems we face today and the choices we need to make.

History as choice is a practical and practicable method. It has been designed to satisfy the curriculum goals of the National Council for the Social Studies, and the book explains how it can be used to satisfy any state or local curriculum standards. The book also identifies and illustrates resources that can be used with this method -- from data bases to popular music -- and explains how teachers can gradually integrate it into their courses.

In the first part of the book, the method of history as choice is explained using the question of whether the American Revolution was a mistake as a case in point. The second part of the book explores thirteen other questions about significant issues and events in American history as additional examples of how one might teach history as choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481758185

Burton Weltman

Burton Weltman has taught history for over forty-five years and has taught history education for more than twenty years. He has worked in and with a wide range of schools. These have included inner city and suburban schools; elementary, middle, and high schools; and, undergraduate and graduate college programs. He has taught prospective and practicing teachers at a wide range of colleges, including Essex Community College, Rutgers University, Teachers College/Columbia University, and William Paterson University, from which he recently retired as a social studies education professor. Professor Weltman has also worked as a lawyer, serving as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of New Jersey and in a variety of policy-making and administrative positions for the City of New York and the State of New Jersey. He grew up in Chicago and has been a life-long Cubs fan. This experience helps explain his interest in lost causes and in reconsidering the viewpoints of the losers in history, a key element in the method of teaching history as choice that he explains in this book. As a child, Professor Weltman hated school, was terminally bored by his classes and frequently played hooky. He was drawn toward teaching by a desire to help save future children from the misery he had experienced in school. He was attracted to history by an unconventional high school teacher who made history interesting and relevant to his students by relating the choices and actions of people in the past to present-day problems, another key aspect of the method Professor Weltman demonstrates in this book. Professor Weltman has an M.A. degree in American history, a J.D. degree, and an Ed.D. degree in social studies education. He is married with two children and a grandchild. He lives in New Jersey.

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© 2013 Burton Weltman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse: 08/24/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5819-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5818-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909686

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

A.   The Presenting Problem and a Proposed Solution.

B.   What This Book Is About and What It Is Not.

1.   History as Choice as an Intellectual Orientation.

2.   The Practicality of Teaching History as Choice

3.   The Organization of the Book

4.   Annotations and Citations/Sources and Resources

Part I.   A Rationale for Teaching History as Choice

Chapter 1.   Choosing to Teach History as Choice: Once Upon a Time…

A.   Teaching History as Choice as an Antidote to Moral Nihilism.

B.   Teaching History as Choice as Immunization Against Freshman’s Disease.

C. Teaching History as Choice for Civic Engagement.

Chapter 2.   Was the American Revolution a Mistake?

A.   Conventional Narrative.

B.   Background Circumstances.

C.   Mainstream Alternatives.

D.   The Choice.

E. Consequences: Was the Revolution a Mistake?

F.   Thematic Questions.

Chapter 3.   A History-as-Choice Curriculum.

A.   Teaching with Themes: Making History Meaningful, Memorable, and Manageable.

(1)   Teaching Controversial Topics without Becoming the Center of Controversy.

(2)   Relating the Past to the Present without Falling Prey to Presentism.

B.   Teaching Issues in History: Finding the Mainstream of Debate.

(1)   Structuring the Debate: Who’s In It and Who’s Out of It.

(2)   Teaching History as a Skill: Good Guessing as the Goal.

C.   Teaching about Turning Points in History: What if a different choice had been made?

(1)   Turning Points: Choices that Really Made a Difference.

(2)   Returning Points: What if Questions.

(3)   Turning Points of American History in a Global Context.

D.   Making Historical and Moral Judgments: Can we condemn people from the past?

(1)   Hoisting Them on Their Own Petards.

(2)   Clay-footed Heroes and Gilded Villains.

E.   Choosing a Dramatic Form: Melodrama, Comedy, and Tragedy.

(1)   Melodrama: This means war…

(2)   Comedy: Don’t be a fool…

(3)   Tragedy: The road to hell is paved with good intentions…

(4)   Dramatic Forms in Teaching History.

F.   Choosing a Point of View: Teaching History from the Bottom-up and the Top-down.

Chapter 4   History-as-Choice Teaching Methods.

A.   Making the Best of Best Practices.

(1)   Modes of Teaching: Common Schooling versus Best Practices.

(2)   Teaching History as Useful Skills.

(3)   Teaching Bloom’s Taxonomy from the Top-Down instead of the Bottom-Up.

B.   Teaching with a Textbook without Teaching to the Textbook: Analyzing Sources.

(1)   Primary Sources: Debates in History.

(2)   Secondary Sources: Debates about History.

(3)   Tertiary Sources: Debating the Textbook.

(4)   Teaching with a Textbook and Beyond.

C.   Using Children’s Literature: What to do about the Big Bad Wolf?

(1)   The Three Little Pigs.

(2)   Trying to Tame the Wolf.

(3)   Pigs, Wolves, Cows, and History.

(4)   The Struggle to Mold Young Minds: Walt Disney versus Dr. Seuss.

(5)   Kiddie-Lit and History as Choice.

D.   Teaching with Music, Art, Poetry, and Other Cultural Artifacts.

E.   Scaffolding and Spiraling Lessons and Units.

(1)   Scaffolding and Spiraling Units: Not the Navigation Acts again?!!

(2)   Scaffolding and Spiraling Lessons: A Model Lesson Plan.

F.   Using Authentic Forms of Evaluation.

(1)   Authentic versus Artificial Assignments.

(2)   A Sample Research Project.

(3)   Authentic versus Artificial Assessments.

(4)   A Sample Rubric for Evaluating a Research Project.

G.   Teaching with Civic Action.

(1)   Establishing a Benchmark: Playing the Utopia Game.

(2)   The Whos, Whats, and Wherefores of Representation in America.

(3)   The Whos, Whats and Wherefores of Racial, Religious and Ethnic Profiling.

Part II.   Teaching American History as Choice

Disclaimer:   The Question’s the Thing.

Choice #1.   English Settlement of North America in the 1600’s: Why Conquest?

Choice #2.   African Settlement in English North America in the 1600’s: Why Slavery?

Choice #3.   Economics during the 1700’s: Does Private Vice Bring Public Virtue?

Choice #4.   Defining an American Empire in the 1780’s: Why not a New Rome?

Choice #5.   Perfecting a Government for an Imperfect Society in the 1780’s — 1790’s: Was the Constitution a Mistake?

Choice #6.   The Expansion of Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: Did the Missouri Compromise Cause the Civil War?

Choice #7.   The Golden Age of American Utopianism, 1820’s to 1850’s: Why Not Perfection?

Choice #8.   General Incorporation Laws, 1830’s to 1880’s: Was the Corporate Revolution Necessary and Proper?

Choice #9.   The Coming of the Civil War: Why Didn’t the North Secede and Why Did the South?

Choice #10.   Segregation Becomes the Law of the Land, 1880’s — 1900’s: Who is Separate and What is Equal?

Choice #11.   Defining American Politics in the Election of 1912: Why is there no Socialism in the United States?

Choice #12.   The Great Depression of the 1930’s: What Should Be the Role of Government in the Economy?

Choice #13.   An Era of Fear and Loathing from the 1940’s to the 1990’s: Was the Cold War Necessary?

Conclusion:   Making History.

Dedication

To my wife Gerrie, who has supported me in writing this book and in everything else in my life.

To my daughter Anna, my son Eric and my grandson Zach, who inspired me to want to write this book.

To my mentor Jack Nelson, my colleagues Eugene Lieber and the late Paul Lyons, and my students, who are largely responsible for whatever makes sense in this book but not for what doesn’t.

Introduction

A.   The Presenting Problem and a Proposed Solution.

In the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s song No Surrender, which was written in the long-ago days of vinyl records, the narrator says of himself and his classmates that at the end of each school day, We busted out of class to get away from those fools; we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.¹ Springsteen poses a problem in this song that is faced by most teachers, and especially those of us who are history teachers: how to compete with popular culture for the attention and respect of students and how to avoid being scorned by them as boring and irrelevant fools.

Popular culture succeeds with young people because it both entertains them and teaches them, not always things that their parents and teachers would like them to learn, but things that concern them and that they want to know. Our problem as teachers is that few of us can be as entertaining as a rock band, and even if we succeed in amusing our students, we may still be rejected for trying to foist on them things they don’t want to learn. The challenge Springsteen poses is to be interesting and educational at the same time.

It is a daunting challenge but the song seems to hint at what could be a successful response by teachers. No Surrender voices a longing that is common among teenagers — a desire to gain control over their lives, make their own choices, have an impact on the world, and avoid becoming just another old fool mired in stodgy conformity and meaningless mediocrity. In the song, the narrator mourns the loss of his youthful enthusiasm and idealism, and bemoans the fact that although he and his teenage friends had made a vow of No retreat, no surrender to what they saw as the ineffectuality of their elders, they had, nonetheless, succumbed to just that fate.

In this admission of failure, the narrator seems to imply that while popular culture can generate enthusiasms of the sort entertained by him as a youth, it cannot by itself sustain them over the long run. That message represents an opportunity for us teachers. If we can convince our students that history can help them to understand the world, make their own choices, and sustain their youthful enthusiasms, we may gain their interest and respect. Then, rather than seeing us as their enemy or as the fools in Springsteen’s song, they may see us as allies in their pursuit of a life with liberty and happiness, and without retreat or surrender.

That is, if we can avoid being our own worst enemy. There is a famous Pogo comic strip from the early 1970’s in which Pogo Possum sums up the results of his search for the source of the world’s problems. He says: We have met the enemy and he is us.² I think that Pogo’s conclusion may apply to the problems of history teaching. It has been my observation and experience, based on over forty years of teaching history and teaching others how to teach history, that the chief problem with history teaching is that it is done by people like me and possibly like you too.

Since you are reading this book, you are probably, like me, a history nerd. We history nerds love history and can’t understand why others don’t. History is so fascinating. There are so many interesting people in the past, and they did so many interesting things, and it’s so interesting to see how one event connects with another event. Personally, I love history so much that I can even sit down and go through a history textbook as pleasure reading, something that most people would probably consider an unnatural act.

As a history nerd, I find it difficult— as you probably do as well — to understand why history is the least liked subject in the middle school and high school curriculum,³is considered by students to be their most irrelevant subject,⁴and has been held in such low esteem for many decades.⁵ The facts are, nonetheless, the facts. And as erstwhile historians, we must face them squarely and ask why it is that most middle school and high school students don’t like history? The answer, I think and as Springsteen implies, lies not in our students or in our subject but in ourselves.

Most of us became history majors in college and history teachers thereafter because we liked the way the subject was taught in high school. In most middle school and high school classes, history is taught through a chronological narrative that emphasizes chains of facts (such as the Stamp Act of 1763 followed by the Quartering Act of 1765 followed by the Townshend Acts of 1767 followed by other acts and actions, leading eventually to the American Revolution), and chains of causation that link these facts (such as the eight or ten or whatever number of causes that ostensibly led to the American Revolution). Learning is then measured by an evaluation scheme that requires students to memorize the chains of facts and causation.⁶ Because we liked and excelled at all of this fact collecting and memorizing, we chose history as our subject and our career. And then most of us set out to teach history in the same way we were taught.

Most teachers teach the way they were taught. That is understandable, but it does not always make for happy students or happy teachers. Most students do not like memorizing names, dates, and chains of causation. For them, collecting facts is no more meaningful than collecting bottle caps – good if you’re a bottle cap nerd but of no inherent interest or redeeming social value if you’re not. So, if we teach history the way most of us were taught, the way that led many of us to become teachers in the first place, we are likely to end up reaching only that small percentage of our students who are history nerds like us, and we will very likely alienate the rest who are not. Some of these disaffected students may use their short-term memories to do well enough on our examinations to pass our courses, but then they will bust out of our classes and rush off to their pop music, video games, and electronic communications, which they find much more enjoyable, meaningful, and memorable.

We history nerds are therefore, in my opinion, the presenting problem with history teaching. But we can also be the solution. We are the masters of a subject that should and could be considered by most students as the most meaningful and memorable subject in the curriculum. It is the key to the understanding that most young people seek. And we have the means of making history an exciting, creative, and useful activity for students, more so than listening to rock bands, playing computer games, or participating in other modes of popular culture. We can do this if we can break the cycle of teaching history the way it has always been taught, and instead of focusing on chains of historical facts and causation, we focus on people making choices.

Most young people love the excitement of popular culture. They enthuse over music, movies, computer games, and reality shows that put them in the place of people who are in perilous situations, facing life and death choices, and having to deal with the consequences of their decisions. This sort of excitement that can also be generated by teaching history as choice. Better than a computer game, movie, or television show, history is the scene of real life dramatic debates and important decisions. It is the story of people confronting difficult circumstances, having to evaluate the range of options they have, debating with others and themselves about what would be the best option, and, finally, making a choice. Then they have to confront the consequences of that choice, which become the circumstances in which they have to make their next choice. This sets off a series of choices and consequences that come down to us as the circumstances which we face today and the range of options from which we must make our own choices. Then they have to confront the consequences of that choice, which become the circumstances in which they have to make their next choice, setting off a series of choices and consequences that come down to us as the circumstances which we face today and the range of options from which we must make our own choices. Teaching history in this way lets students experience the perilous circumstances, choices, and consequences of the past, and to see how the controversies of the past contribute to the controversies of the present. That can be very exciting.

Young people also love the creativity of popular culture, such as rap music and computer graphics, which can be vehicles for expressing themselves in ways that are meaningful to them. Learning history as people making choices can be at least as good as popular culture for giving students the materials, the medium, and a method for meaningful self-expression. When history is taught as choice, debates in history become debates about history, debates in which students can participate and can, thereby, participate in the making of history. While the stuff of history is made by people acting in the past, the meaning of history is made by people thinking in the present, people like us and our students who take that stuff and mold it into an explanation of the past. In teaching history as choice, we can highlight both the choices people made in the past as to what they were going to do, and the choices we make in the present as to how we are going to study and interpret what they did. Teaching and learning history becomes a wonderfully creative activity.

Conventional chronological history, in which one thing leads with seeming inexorability to the next, tends to portray history as a finite set of facts and chains of causation in which what the textbook says happened is all there is to the past. The impression is that history is facts to be learned and that is all there is to it.⁷ But this is a false impression. The past is infinite, and no one can see or study or understand all of it. We have to make choices about what we will study, and we do this by asking questions of history that are important to us. The questions we ask determine our fact-finding. We then take the facts we have been able to gather, make them into something we can understand, and generate conclusions about them, conclusions that will help us understand how we have become what we are and what we may become in the future.⁸

Since there are an endless number of questions we can ask of history, the possibilities for historical interpretation are endless but not limitless. Not all interpretations are equally good. Our interpretations must always be controlled, supported and limited by the available facts. The interpretation that is best supported by the facts must be deemed the best interpretation, and interpretations that are not supported by facts must be considered just plain wrong. History is not a free for all. You can’t just make up facts to fit your preconceptions. You must make something meaningful out of the available evidence. That is what makes history such an inherently creative process.⁹

History can also be a most useful subject for students. Most adolescents want most to understand what is going on in the world and what they can do to influence things in ways they desire. In the parlance of the present-day, they want to be empowered. Studying history as choice can be a means of understanding the present by discovering its origins in the past, and can help empower our students to preserve those things in the present they like while changing those things they don’t like. Through teaching history as choice, we can examine present-day social problems of interest to our students as those problems emerged from the choices that people made in the past. We can also evaluate the efforts of people who dealt in the past with problems similar to ours in the present, and draw upon their experiences. Then we can relate the choices made by those people to the problems and options that we and our students face today. Through studying history in this way, says the historian John Lewis Gaddis, we can interpret the past for purposes of the present with a view to managing the future.¹⁰ Better than a rap or rock song, history can help our students understand the world in which they live, and help them make their way without retreating into conformity or surrendering to futility.

In sum, if we enable our students to see that studying history can interest, entertain, and empower them, we can hook them on history. This book is an attempt to describe an effective way — teaching history as choice — that I have found to do this. I make no claim that this is the only way to teach history effectively, just that it is a way that has worked for me and for scores of teachers with whom I have worked. It is not an approach that is uniquely of my own invention,¹¹ but one that I have gleaned from some of my own best teachers, from observing master teachers, and from the writings of history teachers and historians.¹² It is the underlying method, sometimes explicit, sometimes only implicit, of most of the best historians, and it undergirds the structure of most of the best scholarly historical works, including those cited in the course of this book.¹³ While I by no means reject the use of chronology and causation in trying to understand and teach history, the main thesis of this book is that history is taught best when it focuses on people making choices, choices that were controversial in the past and that relate to controversies in the present. This approach, I contend, makes for better history and better pedagogy. In the following pages, I describe ways this can be done.

B.   What This Book Is About and What It Is Not.

This is a book about teaching in a way that differs in both its approach to history and its pedagogical methods from the ways history is usually taught. Since the book challenges much of the conventional wisdom about teaching history, I think it is necessary to comment on the intellectual orientation of the book and the practicality of the method I am promoting.

1.   History as Choice as an Intellectual Orientation.

The intellectual or curricular approach of this book is based on asking historiographical questions that are controversial and may seem iconoclastic. They call into question things that are assumed in most textbooks to be the best of all possible results in the best of all possible American histories. The questions raise the possibility that some of these results were not inevitable and were not for the best. While this may superficially seem like muckraking history or anti-American history, my questions merely mirror questions that were widely raised by Americans at the time the events being discussed took place. In asking these questions, I am trying to recover the options that Americans had and the debates that took place about those options. And I am deliberately using as a foil the conventional version of events which is contained in most textbooks and with which you, as a teacher, and your students are likely to be familiar.

Most conventional textbooks and history courses take an all’s well that ends well approach to American history and present a winners view of the past. They start with the fact that the United States today is the richest, the most powerful, and one of the freest countries in the world, and they set out to describe the chain of events that led to this result. They assume that since the result was good, every event in the chain that led to that result was necessary and proper. In turn, they generally portray the debates in history, and the decisions Americans made, from the point of view of the winners in those debates, focusing, for example, on Tom Paine’s argument in favor of the American Revolution in Common Sense while ignoring former Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s detailed rebuttal of that argument.

I start with the premise that things might have been different, for better and for worse, and that exploring those past possibilities might help us make things even better in the present. For example, I want students to explore the arguments of those who opposed the Revolution along with those who supported it, Hutchinson along with Paine. I want students to examine the plausible options from which people had to choose in the course of American history, and the possible outcomes of different options. And I want students to explore alternative conclusions about important events in history, what the losers said after the fact and what might have happened if they had won. Finally, I want students to relate those historical choices and outcomes to debates and options we have today.

In sum, I want to interest students in history by having them act as historians, recreating and reconsidering important debates in the past. The questions that I ask in this book are intended to set up a debate with the version of history that is presented in most conventional textbooks. The questions are based on the assumption that you and your students are familiar with the conventional textbook version of history, which is generally the winners’ side of any given historical debate. My emphasis is on presenting alternative arguments, the losers’ arguments, to challenge the conventional wisdom.

The purpose and the likely effect of asking such questions is neither to trash the United States nor to entice students into changing their opinions or beliefs about the United States and American history. To question choices that were made by people in the course of American history, and to join in the debates that contemporaries had about those choices, is not to dishonor those who made the choices or to reject their core values and beliefs. To question a belief is not to reject it. Rather, it is by questioning beliefs that we can deepen and strengthen them. Recreating the options and debates that Americans have had over the years, and questioning the outcomes of those debates, can strengthen our values and goals as a nation. It can reinforce democracy and promote genuine patriotism — love of country sufficient to want to make it better.

Take, for example, the title question of this book: Was the American Revolution a mistake? Even if you were to conclude that the American Revolution was somehow or in some ways a mistake, you could not and should not conclude thereby that the founding of the United States was a mistake or that the values and goals of the Founders were mistaken. In fact, most of the Americans who opposed the Revolution shared the same values and goals as the revolutionary leaders. They just thought that a revolution in the circumstances of the 1770’s was unwise and unnecessary. The question that they asked, and that I have asked, is whether it was wise to make a revolution in the 1770’s, not whether it was wise for the United States eventually to become an independent country or for Americans to defend their liberties.

Most importantly, no matter how you answer this question about the Revolution, asking it should force you to deepen your understanding of the values and goals of the Founders. It might lead you to elevate your faith in those values and goals from the naive and simple state of belief that the American philosopher William James called once born — a superficial belief based on habit and unquestioned obeisance to custom or authority — to the more complex and sophisticated state of belief that he described as twice born — a belief based on deep reflection and conviction.¹⁴ And the same goes for the other questions, issues, and events discussed in this book.

What makes people such as the Founders worthy of honor is the principles for which they stood and the efforts they made to fulfill those principles. What makes them worth studying is the ways and the extent to which they succeeded in fulfilling those principles, and the ways and the extent to which they did not. From both their successes and their failures, we can learn how to further those principles and, thereby, fulfill the purpose of studying history — that is, to figure out how to preserve the things in our society that we like and change those that we don’t like.¹⁵

To put this in another way, in addition to teaching, I worked for many years as a lawyer. The means and methods of lawyers and teachers are similar in many respects, although different in their goals. As a lawyer, my main goal was to have judges and juries listen to me and then say to themselves Yes, that’s what I’ve always thought. As a history teacher, one of my main goals was to have students listen to me and then say to themselves Ah, I never thought of that. That is, as a lawyer, I wanted people to agree with what I said. As a teacher, I wanted students to think about what I said. Different goals but similar methods. As a lawyer, I found that one of the best ways to prepare my side of the argument in a case was to be able to argue the other side’s position. It was, in fact, my aim to be able to argue my opponent’s position better than he or she could. That was the best way to see the strengths of my opponent’s argument and the weaknesses in my own, so that I could correct any mistakes I had made and strengthen mine. This is also the method that I use in my history teaching and that is embodied in this book.

2.   The Practicality of Teaching History as Choice

Teaching history as choice is eminently practicable. It is commonplace for defenders of conventional approaches to teaching history to deride any newly proposed method as the ivory tower theory of some college professor who doesn’t know the practical realities of middle school and high school teaching or has long since forgotten them. You couldn’t do that with my students, is the standard response. Or, That would take forever to do. With respect to teaching history as choice, this is just not so.

Teaching history as choice does not require your students to be academic high achievers. To the contrary, it is an effective way of engaging lower achieving students who don’t respond well to conventional methods. As long as a student is capable of engaging his or her peers in debates about sports, music, clothes, or any of the other things that adolescents like to argue about, then the student is capable of learning through debates in history and debates about history, debates that have at least as much relevance to the student’s life as debates about popular culture. But this learning will happen only if history is presented in a way that helps the student to see the relevance. And that can be done by teaching history as choice.

Teaching history as choice allows you to use the same basic approach to history and the same basic methods with both academically more advanced and academically less advanced students, albeit with some difference in the degree you can expect students to work on their own. The main difference is that you can ask more advanced students to do more things for themselves and by themselves, whereas you have to provide more help to less advanced students. That is, for more advanced students, you can make broader statements and give more open-ended assignments, and then let the students figure the specifics out by and for themselves. With less advanced students, you have to cut things into smaller pieces, breaking down broad statements into a series of smaller statements that will lead to a big conclusion, and breaking up big assignments into a series of smaller steps that will lead to a big result. The key to effectively teaching less academically advanced students is to make the subjects and the assignments simpler without making them simplistic. Teaching history as choice enables you to do this, to maintain the integrity of the subject matter while gearing the assignments to the academic level of your students.

And teaching history as choice does not require teachers to have Ph.D.’s in history. To the contrary, it is a way for teachers, especially new teachers who are likely to have a lot to learn about history, to develop their knowledge of history while teaching the subject. For teachers who rely on a textbook in their classes, the proposal I am making does not require you to abandon the textbook. It is, instead, a way to use the textbook as a foundation upon which to scaffold your teaching to higher levels. For teachers who work in states or school districts with history curriculum standards, teaching history as choice does not require you to deviate from those standards. It is, rather, an approach that enables you to cover all of the subjects you are required to cover during the school year, and still be able to teach about the recent past and reach the present day by the end of the school year, something that most teachers of conventional history are rarely able to do.

Finally, the proposal I am making does not require you to abandon everything you have been doing, adopt whole-cloth a radically new method, and immediately and completely change the way you teach. Most of you are probably already doing some of what I call teaching history as choice, and your most successful teaching is probably consistent with that method. In any case, teaching history as choice is an approach that can be adopted piece-meal and implemented gradually in stages, lesson by lesson, or unit by unit, over the course of as many years as you want. At the same time, to the extent that you adopt the approach, I believe that the positive results will be immediate and will encourage you toward further and fuller implementation of the approach.

3.   The Organization of the Book

In the first part of the book, I explain what I mean by teaching history as choice and describe the benefits of teaching this way, using the question of whether the American Revolution was a mistake as a recurring example. This section includes chapters on how teaching history as choice can enrich your curriculum and enhance your teaching techniques, with a series of subsections in each chapter.

In the second part of the book, I offer a chronological series of thirteen examples of how one might approach selected critical issues and events in American history by focusing on people making choices. These examples are by no means intended as a complete history of the United States, and by no means exhaust the issues and events that might be treated in this way. Although the examples are taken from American history, the methods I am promoting can be used as well with other areas of history. The examples are merely illustrative of what one might do. The goal of this book is for teachers and students to develop issues and events on their own to investigate in this way.

4.   Annotations and Citations/Sources and Resources

I have annotated the book with a mix of scholarly monographs, compilations of primary sources, computer data bases, internet sites, and other teaching materials with which I intend to demonstrate the feasibility of teaching history as choice.

In the course of the book, I have repeatedly cited a standard United States history textbook, the two volume The American Republic to 1877 and The American Republic Since 1877 by Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, Albert Broussard, James McPherson, and Donald Ritchie, as a foil for the approach that I am recommending herein.¹⁶ The American Republic is a widely used textbook that was assigned to students in a high school with which I have recently worked. I have chosen this book because it has been written for average students, and the approach that it takes is typical of conventional textbooks. It is authored by a distinguished group of historians in conjunction with the National Geographic Society and a set of academic consultants and teacher reviewers. As a student of history, I have a high regard for the scholarship of the authors and my comments about the textbook are directed at the nature of conventional history textbooks, not at these scholars. In evaluating my comments, you will have to consider how similar and different this textbook is to the one you may be using.

I have cited the textbook for two purposes. The first is to compare and contrast the curricular consequences of teaching history in conventional ways and teaching history as choice. Concentrating in the first part of my book on the example of the American Revolution, and continuing in the second part of the book with thirteen other examples, I first summarize the approach taken by the textbook to key events in American history and then present an alternative approach based on teaching history as choice.

The second reason I have cited the textbook is to compare and contrast the pedagogical consequences of teaching history in conventional ways and teaching history as choice. The textbook incorporates a variety of innovative pedagogical features that are intended to make history more interesting, more stimulating, and a vehicle for critical thinking. These features include Themes for each chapter section, What if questions, History through Art pictures, Primary Source excerpts, and other sidebar items. I will examine a sample of these features to explain how and why, because of the book’s conventional approach to history, they do not achieve their intended purposes. I will also explain how a conventional textbook such as this could be supplemented with primary and secondary sources and used as a foundation for teaching history as choice, which would make history more interesting, stimulating, and a vehicle for critical thinking.

Toward this end, I have cited secondary sources for ideas and evidence that I have used in developing the questions I have raised. They are books and articles by well-known historians and are for the most part easily accessible. Some of them are recent. Others are things that I read long ago when I was a student. They include the books that provoked me to ask the questions I am asking. The books and teachers of our youth are often the ones that stay longest and strongest in our thoughts. That’s one of the things that keeps those of us who teach young people going. We hope to plant seeds of thoughtfulness that may not germinate until later. You may have read books or had teachers that have had a similar effect on you, and that may provoke questions that you could explore with your students.

My purpose in citing these secondary sources is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate that the questions I am raising are legitimate, that is, that they can be supported by scholarly arguments and evidence. Second, I want to demonstrate that there are sufficient resources available to teachers and students to entertain questions of this sort, and not merely the questions that I have raised but questions that you and your students might want to raise. The citations are not intended to provide conclusive proof of the ideas or definitive answers to the questions I am asking. I have deliberately limited the number of sources, and relied heavily on a relatively few sources, to demonstrate that you can come up with useful material without having to read everything in a university library. A relatively few good sources will do. And they don’t have to be the ones that I have cited. My intent is to demonstrate that the sorts of ideas I am proposing are not esoteric, and that sources for these ideas are readily obtainable by teachers and students.

I have, in addition, cited primary sources for statements by people who were involved in the historical debates that I have highlighted in the book and who represent major points of view in the debates. Primary sources such as these are available through many easily accessible media, and I have included sources that are available on the internet. There are many useful websites maintained by universities, federal government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. I have also included citations to computer data bases, such as ABC-CLIO and Facts on File, that are available to teachers in many schools. And I have cited books of primary sources, such as Great Issues in American History, a book that was compiled first during the 1950’s by the historian Richard Hofstadter and is still in print and useful today.¹⁷

Finally, I have included facts and quotes that I have garnered from a variety of idiosyncratic sources over the years and that I have tried to incorporate into my teaching. Probably like you, I suffer from a history curse and I tend to see everything I encounter in terms of history. As part of my obsession with history, I frequently jot down little notes of things I have read that interest me and that I think I might someday be able to weave into my history courses. Some of these notes and quotes are included in my discussion of the issues in this book. They are intended as examples from my reading of how we teachers can make use of almost anything in our teaching. You may have different and better examples from your reading.¹⁸

In my footnotes, I have highlighted as Primary Source those resources that seem to be good statements of the arguments that were being made by important figures in the historical debates under discussion, and that I think could be read by students as homework or in class. I have highlighted as Secondary Source selected historical monographs that I think are good examples of the debates among historians on the subjects under discussion, and that might be useful to you in preparing to teach the subjects. These could also be read by your students in whole or in excerpted part.

In citing and discussing these various sources and resources, I hope to exemplify the difference between merely illustrating history with supplemental materials and using them to participate in history. In conventional history teaching, a primary document might be introduced as an example of what people thought at the time, or a scholarly tract might be examined as an example of what historians think about the historic events. Used in this way, the resources might help illuminate the subject for students, and that is a good thing. But in teaching history as choice, such resources should not merely illustrate the subject but, more importantly, should exemplify debates about the subject and be a means of engaging students in those debates. The goal is for students not merely to observe and absorb history but to help make it.

Part I.   A Rationale for Teaching History as Choice

Chapter 1.   Choosing to Teach History as Choice: Once Upon a Time…

History, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is a chronological story of significant events, a series of happenings that a historian has put into narrative form.¹⁹ Since more events occur at any given time than could ever fit into a single narrative, historians, including history teachers and their students, must choose which events to include in a history and include only those they deem the most significant. Likewise, since there are many ways of telling a story, historians must choose an appropriate narrative form for relating those events. Most discussions of history and debates among historians focus on the significance of the events in a narrative. But the narrative form of a history is equally important to its meaning, and can affect both the choice and the significance of the events it includes.

Irrespective of the subject matter, and despite a historian’s intentions, the narrative form of a history can significantly influence an audience’s understanding of the events.²⁰ Histories with essentially the same subject matter and ideological intent can have very different moral, social, and political messages, depending on their narrative structures.²¹ What is intended as a morally uplifting history, for example, can be a downer, or what is intended as a liberating moral can be demoralizing, depending on the structure of the story.²² The importance for teachers of choosing an appropriate narrative form in teaching history is the main theme of this book. Suggesting practical guidelines for choosing an appropriate narrative form and practicable methods for implementing that choice is its substance.

A historical narrative moves in time from its beginning to its end. Like other stories, a history invariably begins with some kind of Once upon a time scenario, that is, a dynamic situation from which the narrative unfolds and events gain significance as they relate to each other in the passage of time. But time can take on very different meanings depending on a story’s narrative form, and especially on whether events are portrayed as flowing randomly as a function of chance, predetermined as a result of causation, or determined freely as a consequence of people’s choices. One of the most important pedagogical choices that a history teacher can make is whether to narrate historical events as a function of chance, causation, or choice.

Chance is luck, something that happens unpredictably without discernable human intention or observable cause, so that history as chance is a story of happenstance that people can neither predict nor control.²³ History as chance is seemingly arbitrary and unfathomable. Causation is inexorable, with consequences flowing inevitably from circumstances, so that history taught as causation appears to be a chain of cause-and-effect that people may be able to predict but cannot control.²⁴ History as causation seems the product of abstract forces and factors that control events behind our backs and despite our intentions. The underlying message of both history as chance and history as causation is that history is beyond human control. This can make history seem irrelevant and can be demoralizing to students who want to know how to control their own lives and make their freely chosen ways in the world.²⁵

Unlike chance and causation, choice is deliberate, so that history as choice is a story of people making decisions in the face of circumstances they may not entirely be able to control, but in the belief that they can freely choose among plausible options and reasonably predict what might be the consequences of their actions.²⁶ History as choice seems realistic and reasonable. It is the way we experience life as people debating and choosing among options within prescribed circumstances. And it portrays the past in ways that students can identify as similar to the situations they face. If history is a matter of choices, then time is a medium of opportunity and not futility, and not merely a matter of waiting for arbitrary or inevitable things to happen.

While almost all human events are likely to stem from a mix of chance, causation, and choice, most events can be explained as primarily a consequence of either chance, causation, or choice. As a result, we history teachers usually have the option of approaching historical events as primarily the consequence of chance, causation, or choice. It’s our choice, and the approach that we take will significantly affect the meaning of the history being taught and the likely response of our students to the story being told. Our narrative choice can substantially determine whether or not we will reach students and effectively teach them.

Teaching history as chance turns the subject into one seemingly fortuitous or unfortunate event after another. Teaching history as causation turns the subject into one seemingly inevitable and unavoidable event after the other, a stream of causes that produce effects that produce causes that produce effects, on and on. In both history as chance and history as causation, the subject is largely drained of human interest or drama. History becomes for the most part a series of factoids that need only be memorized to be mastered, and there is very little for students to identify with or relate to their lives. Taught this way, the subject is deadening to almost all but history nerds, and it bores most students.

By contrast, history as choice comes alive because it requires students to put themselves in the shoes of people in the past and try to relive their lives. Like a computer video game, only for real, history as choice enables students to visualize and conceptualize the circumstances in which people lived, the range of options from which they had to choose, the reasons they made the choices they did, and the consequences of their choices. And those consequences can be related to the circumstances and choices that students face today. The subject becomes inherently interesting, meaningful, and memorable.

Most conventional history textbooks and courses portray history primarily as causation, occasionally punctuated by chance occurrences or choices that mainly reinforce the causal course of events. In The American Republic to 1877, for example, the chapter on the coming of the American Revolution is titled the Road to Independence. A road is a prearranged, preordained pathway for people to follow. The implication of the chapter’s title is that the Revolution was an inevitable outcome of the way that things were going, and that is the gist of the narrative in the chapter. The chapter opens with a summary of some of the measures that the British government took in 1763 following the end of the French and Indian War. The book claims that