Going beyond the cemetery, students might select the most important people and ideas that have come from their area, or the most prominent graduates of their high school. In the process, they must ponder such matters as what is “important,” whom history should remember, and why. They might then begin by interviewing the oldest teachers, including retired teachers, and the oldest members of the community. Old high school yearbooks can jog the memories of retired teachers and members of the community. Of course they will search the web, with phrases like “Plainville High School” and “famous” or “distinguished.” They will browse online and printed compendiums of famous people, such as Who’s Who in America and the various regional and occupational guides. In the 1880s, county histories became a profit-making rage among publishers. Typically, these contain boilerplate accounts of the state, several chapters about the county and its larger communities, and then at least a hundred pages of vignettes of community leaders, with marvelous illustrations of each—just what may be needed for a cemetery or “distinguished graduates” project.
In the process of doing history on their own family, school, or community, students will learn that their lives have larger meaning. The stories they uncover and construct will display themes that resonate across our society and over time—immigration, working-class families having a hard time at upward mobility, the costs of war being borne by a few families. Conversely, all major events in national and world history can be seen in their impact on the local community. Doing so brings them alive. Consider the women’s movement of the 1970s (continuing to today, to some degree). It did not just take place in Washington, in the attempt to pass an Equal Rights Amendment for women, or in the sexual desegregation of the army. It is reflected everywhere—in the history of the local Presbyterian church, for instance. In 1950, that church was run by a Board of Elders, all men, and a Board of Deacons, usually all men. It employed a senior minister, always male; perhaps an assistant minister, also male; a minister of music, possibly male; a director of religious education (Sunday school), probably female; a secretary, female; and a janitor, male. By the late 1960s, women were on the Board of Deacons; a few might have been on the Board of Elders as well. By 1995, perhaps most members of both boards and maybe even the senior minister were women. Institutional records provide the number of women and their names. Many of them (and many men) are still alive to talk about the strains and benefits of this transition. A wonderful student paper beckons to be written.
The school and school system also provide likely subjects for good history. Many high schools resulted from the merger of two or more predecessors. In states that had de jure segregation—from Arizona through southern Illinois to Delaware and all points south—today’s high school may result from combining former black and white schools. Students can interview adults who were students at that time. As suburbs or urban attendance zones change in their residential composition, school populations also change. Students might interview the first Asian Americans to attend their high school, the first Jewish students, or refugee students from Hungary (1956), Cuba (1980), or Sudan (2008). In rural areas, today’s consolidated high schools may take in students and teachers from several communities that formerly had their own smaller schools.24
Getting Started
A minimal local history project asks each student to interview one person and record the conversation as fully as possible. Students can take notes and reconstruct the interview immediately afterward or can audiotape or videotape the interview and transcribe it. Most students have never done an interview before, so every step must be discussed beforehand. Ethical issues need to be discussed before “inflicting” students on the community. Would-be subjects must be free to refuse. Students must treat the record of the conversation with professional discretion. The teacher must review the subject areas to be covered. Students should not ask about personal matters that might hurt the interviewee or put him/her at risk, like sexual orientation, possible illegal activities, and the like. In conversation with the student, the teacher will influence whether the interviewee’s name should be kept out of the paper and off the interview summary. In many cases, students should share the transcript or reconstruction of the interview with the subject, for approval. This can lead to another interview that clarifies the first. Then the student writes a paper based on the interview(s), with the interview summary or transcript as its appendix. Like a term paper, this essay tells a story. Most essays will not follow the chronology of the interview at all.
Students might coordinate their interviews. Each student could interview one family member and one “stranger” to learn if and how they were affected by the Korean War—what they thought of it, whether they served in the armed forces or knew people who did, and so on. The best resulting interviews become the appendix, introduced by an overall narrative composed jointly by the class. Interviews of residents of the same nursing home or users of the same senior citizens center can also focus on a common topic. What was everyday life like in a neighborhood that was later altered by urban renewal? Where did people go to have fun? For a date? How did World War II affect the neighborhood?25
I cannot provide a treatise on how to help students become good interviewers here, but the bibliography at the end of this chapter does suggest sources that help. Having taught interviewing to hundreds of undergraduates, however, I can supply a few tips. Most students will choose to record their interviews, but doing so can make the subject feel uncomfortable, casting a chill on the proceedings. Students may decide to turn off the recorder conspicuously at a sticky point in the conversation. They can still take notes, but interviewees may talk more freely when they are not being recorded word for word. Also, transcribing a one-hour interview takes from two to ten hours, and interviews must be transcribed. To avoid fumbling and false starts, students should be completely familiar with their equipment before their first interview. They need to show courtesy: take off their hat or hood, don’t yawn, and so forth. Taking notes while recording expedites transcription, takes the subject’s mind off the recorder, and promotes a thoughtful atmosphere. The student should sit at an angle to the subject, not directly opposite. Open-ended questions are important, and the student needs to pause and let the subject fill the silence. Of course, students need to bring a list of questions to the interview; these should be in the form of abbreviated handwritten notes on the otherwise blank pad of paper used for taking notes. All these things—and more—must be rehearsed in class as students interview one another for practice. Indeed, the teacher might select one student interviewer and adult interviewee who are brave enough to do the interview before the entire class. Afterward, students can critique what went well and not so well.
Besides oral history, many other sources can help students learn about their own community. Students will start with the web, of course. So did I, trying to learn who of historic importance lies buried in Omaha. But they must not stop there. I’ve yet to see a community library with no local history collection.26 Some even boast a local history room. Every library also has its staff member who knows the most about local history, even if they only know a little more than the other librarian. The librarian can also point to the person in the community who is considered the local “expert.” Most towns also have a local museum, even if it is only open one afternoon a week. Members of the local historical society are splendid resources, although sometimes they are overly protective of their community, and hence might not be forthcoming with information on controversial topics. Genealogical societies are usually more candid.
Weekly community newspapers may also self-censor, but students can skim them at a rate of about a year per hour. The daily newspaper in the nearest larger town may be more likely to print real news about the town. City and county records may prove useful, including plat books, city directories, and WPA files from the 1930s. Like the Presbyterian Church, many institutions keep files for years that are useful. School records may be sealed for recent years, but student
s may gain access to older records. They can then study, for example, the racial desegregation of the school district. Or, using information from the manuscript census (see below), students can compare the distribution by race, sex, parental occupation, and parental education of students in “college-track” courses to those in “general” courses.27 Do teachers help girls more than boys? If so, does this favor girls in the long run? Does the school do things that prompt boys to drop out more than girls? I used school yearbooks to learn about the changing social position of Chinese American students in Mississippi. Many yearbooks list organizational memberships opposite each senior’s picture. Over time yearbooks showed Chinese students moving into more important clubs and teams.
U.S. census tables for towns for all years are available online at census. gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/index.htm.28 If information by county or state will do, much easier to use are the census tables at the University of Virginia, at fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census. The “manuscript census”—the raw data from which census tables derive—is on the web through 1930.29 It consists of the actual names as written by enumerators, with age, sex, race, occupation, address, education and literacy, and some other information. With these data, students can do all sorts of things, from tracing the occupations and movements of a family to forming conclusions about an entire town and its changes over time. The website of the National Archives, archives.gov, is more oriented to researchers than teachers, but with encouragement many students can dig around and find documents useful to their topic.
Final Product
When students have finished their papers (or websites or whatever their products), celebrate them. The teacher can start a local history archive in the school library. Copy shops can bind every good local history paper to go into this archive. Then next year’s students can refer to the archive to see what good work looks like. For really good papers—perhaps chosen with input from students themselves—an additional copy should go into the local history collection at the community library. Now the student has created “a book,” complete with call number! Moreover, it may prove priceless to some future researcher. I know, because twice while doing research for Sundown Towns, I came upon local history papers that treated my topic, race relations. I was thrilled; my work benefitted immensely.
If student papers relate to a coordinated class project, they can be bound into one book with a table of contents—perhaps “Plainville Confronts the Korean War” or “Memories of a Lost Neighborhood.” Again, bind an extra copy for the community library. Also, “publish” the collection on the school’s website.
From the outset, students can plan to enter their projects in National History Day. Three of their competitions particularly foster historical research, critical reading, the development of a storyline, and a persuasive presentation. These are the exhibit, paper, and website competitions. All are described at NationalHistoryDay.org.30 In many states, National History Day is not yet well known. There, teachers may have to organize a local competition from scratch, but the national headquarters will help. Of course, the point isn’t whether students win and advance to the state or national level. The point is to have 2 or 20 or 100 students actually learn how to do history and and have a blast. Even teachers who choose not to participate in National History Day can enlist representatives from the local historical society or other appropriate outsiders to judge and comment on their students’ papers or exhibits. The bibliography at the end of the chapter includes student projects that became published books, articles, websites, and videos.
Local history is hardly the only route to success in the National History Day competition. One year when I was judging the national competition, a black 10th grader mounted an exhibit on “Jackie Robinson as Turning Point.” Perhaps to encourage students to have a point of view, every year National History Day assigns a theme like “turning point.” It’s never very restrictive; possibly 75% of all topics can be made to fit. In 1947 Jackie Robinson was a “turning point.” This teen had read the standard juvenile biography of Jackie Robinson, of course. Then, from his home in South Carolina, he had pulled off telephone interviews with Robinson’s widow, two former teammates, and at least one member of the Brooklyn Dodgers front office, and had transcribed them accurately. He had loaded his tape recorder with an interview making a particular point that tied in with his thesis. He knew about the Nadir of race relations (see Chapter 10), so he understood that Robinson was not the first black player in the major leagues, but rather the first in the twentieth century, after the Nadir had set in. He did not walk on water, but our team rated his project the best of the dozen we judged.31
Using the Product
If students researched the most prominent graduates of their high school, then each student might create a plaque listing the accomplishments—positive and negative—of one graduate, with a short biography. These might then line a corridor (a “Wall of Fame”) and comprise a website.
Research by students may unearth history that needs to be remembered more permanently. They might then suggest a new historical marker to remember something that happened or someone who lived in their community. Such a person or event might be uplifting, symbolizing the aspirations of the community at their highest. Some students might choose to bring back to memory a more tragic event, showing divisions that may still reverberate through the community. The challenge is to create a public history that functions for citizens as they go about their business as Americans.
In the fall of 1990, a 6th-grade teacher in Springfield, Illinois, challenged her students to enter a project in National History Day. Two white eleven-year-olds, Lindsay Harney and Amanda Staab, decided to work together. Staab’s great-great grandfather had been a reporter for a Springfield newspaper in 1908, when whites tried to drive the entire black population out of Springfield and turn it into a sundown town. He had left a family memory of the race riot that had reached Amanda’s ears, so the girls decided to make that their topic. They found it quite researchable and wrote a good paper on the riot, eventually winning an “excellent” and advancing to the state meet.
After finishing their research, the girls realized that while Springfield was festooned with historical markers about happier subjects like Abraham Lincoln, its landscape was silent about this seminal event. Most residents in 1990 had never heard of it. So the students got up a petition for the city council, that read in part:
No marker or memorial exists in Springfield to commemorate this historic event. Although the Springfield Race riots of August 1908 were a tragedy for the hometown of the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, they focused national attention on the issue of civil rights and served as the catalyst for the formation of a biracial organization that works for political, social, educational, and economic equality. This organization is the NAACP. We, the undersigned, petition the Springfield City Council to commemorate the Springfield Race Riots of 1908 with a marker or memorial so that we might learn from the past and strive for equality and harmony in our community.
They got 251 of their fellow students to sign and presented the petition to the city council. The eventual result was not one but eight historical markers. It is a “Race Riot Walking Tour,” an apology on the landscape, and a statement of memory. Springfield will never forget this event again, and to make doubly sure, the University of Illinois developed a half-hour documentary, “Springfield Had No Shame,” that became part of the 6th-grade curriculum of the Springfield Public Schools, honoring the age Harney and Staab were when they first rekindled the memory.32
The class who wrote the publisher, which was mentioned in Chapter 1, concerned that their textbook never alluded to slaveowning by U.S. presidents, was similarly trying to correct an omission. Student research can also open a window on social processes that favor certain groups at the expense of others. In 1995, two students at Cass Lake-Bena High School in northern Minnesota began a movement that eventually convinced the Minnesota Legislature to strike the word “squaw” from ge
ographic and place names in the state. Other students have acted to make sure that communities that kept out African Americans (or others) admit doing so in the histories included in their entries on Wikipedia. Acknowledging the past is a first step toward apologizing for such practices and declaring a town now open to all.
When students use their research to try to right wrongs, either individually or collectively, they learn that doing so is fun. As Theodore Roosevelt put it, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing.” Doing so is citizenship in action. After all, we—those of us alive now—get the duty of changing the world. No other job is more exhilarating or important.
Earlier, I suggested that one challenge Americans face is to create a public history that functions for our citizens as they go about their business as Americans. What is their business—our business—as Americans? Surely it is to bring into being the America of the future. What should race relations be like in that America? How should that America handle gays in the military? What about gay marriage? How should that America deal with whatever domestic or foreign policy issues arise next year?
Preparing students to live in that America, making them ready for that important task, is why we teach U.S. history in the first place. Having students do history—not just read it—is the best way to equip them for that crucial responsibility.
FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 15