A Great Summer for American History

Lee W. Formwalt

This is indeed a great summer for American history, largely due to the Teaching American History (TAH) grant program through the U.S. Department of Education. Across the country, several thousand American history teachers are attending two- or three-week TAH seminars or workshops at 174 different sites in forty-four states and the District of Columbia. In a typical summer workshop, professional historians offer precollegiate teachers what they desperately need--content enrichment. For the minority of teachers who majored in history as undergraduates, this is a review and an update on new developments in the field since they were in college. But for most teachers who took only a handful of college history courses, if that, this is brand new information aimed to help them in teaching a subject for which they have not been fully prepared.

American history teachers are thirsting for this knowledge--but it is not just facts they are after. They want to know how professional historians think and work and to gain through this knowledge a whole new perspective on a subject that many students consider boring because it is presented as "just one damn thing after another"--a series of events and persons to be memorized for a test.

I had the privilege of participating in one the these TAH workshops several weeks ago in Jamestown, New York. I began by talking about my own "education" as a historian--not the formal degree programs I took--but what I learned over my twenty-two years as a historian in the classroom. We then plunged into the nature of history as practiced by professional historians. I noted that far from being a slur, revisionism is at the heart of what we do. OAH Distinguished Lecturer Peter Onuf followed me the next day and reiterated that "history is always changing." For some in the audience this was a new and exciting idea. During my cursory overview of American historiography, pens were flying across notebook pages, and it became very clear that many of the teachers were hearing this information for the first time.

In addition to showing how primary sources of all types, including music, could be used to enliven the discussion of history, I emphasized the importance of using local history to achieve this goal. Immediately afterwards, two local historians showed attendees the rich resources available right there in Jamestown and Chautauqua County that could bring home to their students the importance of such large national events like the Civil War. Sharing the letters written by local boys during that great cataclysm shows students today how that "ancient" war--seemingly so distant in time from them--impacted folks in their own hometown. Many of these soldiers, not much older than today's high school students, had some of the same emotions, desires, and needs as teenagers today. Suddenly, students find these soldiers and the world in which they lived meaningful.

I came away from this experience, as I often do, with great admiration for our colleagues in precollegiate classrooms. Anything that collegiate historians can do to assist them in conveying to their students a deeper understanding of our rich past is most welcome. Jamestown Project Director Paul Benson and the 173 other project directors from Alaska and Hawaii to Vermont and Florida are carrying out one of the most important rescue operations in American history. Their energies are changing the ideas and methods of thousands of teachers who, in turn, will get hundreds of thousands of students to start thinking critically and historically.

Teachers searching for history enrichment are not limited to the TAH summer workshops. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History sponsors over a dozen summer seminars in which teachers spend a week with a master historian and study an important theme or period of American history; National History Day runs its week-long summer institute for teachers this year on the History of the American West; and there are numerous additional opportunities for teachers, like the one in Jackson, Mississippi, that I visit each summer. There, several participants in the 1997 NEH summer institute on Teaching the History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement bring together a number of Mississippi teachers and some of their students. These participants, all college professors from Minnesota, Illinois, and Mississippi, along with colleagues invited from around the country, share with the teachers the various ways that the history of the labor and civil rights movements can be integrated into the precollegiate American history survey course.

Although there may be some hesitation and concern about the motives of the President and Congress in promoting more than ever before the teaching of American history, the good that is coming from these efforts is becoming very clear. Hundreds of professional American historians are assisting thousands of teachers in understanding the nature of the American past and how to convey that to the hundreds of thousands of students that pass through their classrooms each year. I cannot think of a better way to spend federal tax dollars.

Lee W. Formwalt is executive director of OAH.