In the Classroom

“We” the People

Every year, I begin the Cold War unit of my Modern World History class with a conversation about the use of the pronoun “we” in discussing American history.

A professor once pointed out to me that when American students explain events in American history, they often say “we wanted independence” or “we wanted progress for society.” However, none of us were there. Why do we have this habit of using “we” when we talk about American history? Why is it so common for us to project ourselves into the past and what does this say about how schools have approached teaching this subject?

When I ask students to ponder these questions and brainstorm possible explanations, they talk about the value of patriotism, a sense of identifying with our fellow Americans, and the importance of empathy in studying history. The conversation then tends to open up as I invite students to think critically about this use of “we”. Students ask whether we would also use “we” in describing events such as the Trail of Tears and point out that “we” rarely includes all of us.

I introduce the quotation,“The past is a foreign country,” and we talk about striving to balance a recognition of the vast distance between lives in the past and our lives today and our connection to the range of human experience. This discussion starts with some straightforward questions but students quickly take it to profound depths, and it sets the tone for the types of explorations we are going to be embarking on and challenges an "us vs. them" approach to the Cold War.

A Time Capsule from the Future

What if, instead of burying a time capsule for future generations, we could send a time capsule into the past?

How could we use our knowledge of that time period to try to explain the future as represented by our lives today? For my youth history seminar, juniors and seniors imagine building a time capsule to be sent to high school students a century ago. Using principles of design thinking, they collaborate in groups and discuss their goals for the capsule, what items to include, and how to help the recipients interpret the capsule’s contents.

What would have been on young people’s minds in 1921? Maybe we could send inspiring feminist messages about what women will achieve in the next century to female students who will soon have the right to vote. Maybe we could show them how the extracurricular activities that they created have become central to high school culture (and to college applications). This project draws on students’ creativity and knowledge of the past by calling on them to empathize with their counterparts from one hundred years ago.

Reading Between the Lines

One challenge in teaching history is getting students to read primary sources creatively – getting them to go beyond the surface of the words to the meaning and significance of them.

In my US History course, as we talk about the growth of enslavement in colonial America, we talk about the Stono Rebellion of 1739, which took place in South Carolina and was the largest uprising of enslaved people in the colonial era. For a primary source, I have students read excerpts of the resulting "slave codes," state legislation passed in 1740 to prevent any future rebellions by further restricting enslaved people’s activities and “restraining [the] cruelty” of their enslavers.

Students quickly see through the claim that these regulations would improve the conditions of enslavement as they read rule after rule limiting what enslaved people can do and promising harsh punishments if a rule is not followed. Reviewing the ways the law tried to prevent enslaved people from gathering in groups, from learning to read and write, from sabotaging harvests, and from handling firearms, students form a picture of the institutional nature of slavery. Yet, I also ask my students to consider what picture emerges if we read between the lines.

We begin with the question of how the legislators decided what to include in the law and what to leave out. If legislators based these rules on what enslaved people actually did, what would that tell us? Enslaved people were intelligent in their strategy, creative in their approach, and determined in their resistance. They gathered in groups to make plans, and they sought literacy to gain information and write permits for themselves to move around and handle firearms. I aim for my students to recognize that, even as these "slave codes" enshrine white supremacy, they are also a record of Black agency.