Using Obituaries, Primers, Mencken, and Oz to Teach History Methods

Stephen Engle

Of all the courses taught by historians, none can be as challenging as those related to methodology or historiography, particularly at the graduate level. For years, I have taught the undergraduate and graduate level course for our department, and in that time, I have attempted to use creative approaches to get students to think about what historians do. I start from the basic premise that--in the words of a colleague--there are three kinds of history: what actually happens, what we are told happens, and what we come to believe happens.

W.W. Denslow's illustration of a scene from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Courtesy Miriam and Ira D. Wallace Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

Throughout the semester I employ a number of strategies to get students to appreciate what I mean about the three kinds of history and organize the seminar around the areas of research, analysis, interpretation, and presentation. Although I draw upon a variety of wonderfully conceptualized texts geared to historical methodology, I have stepped outside the box and attempted to be innovative in teaching this seminar. I have students keep a semester-long journal, and in the end I have them write their own obituary, and I have them react to the New England Primer and to Henry L. Mencken's essay "Sahara of the Bozart." Finally, I draw on Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to bring closure to the semester and to the seminar's theme.

I have students keep a journal during the semester and require them to make daily entries, no matter how long or short those entries may be. I remind them of how important journal entries are in drawing conclusions about people, issues, and events. I also emphasize the absence of entries as evidence for historians to use in drawing conclusions, as well as the significance regarding the difference in entries involving witnesses of the same events. One of the best examples illustrating different views of the same event can be found in a fishing trip shared by members of the famed Adams family. Brooks Adams, son of Charles Francis Adams, kept a diary as a youth and, after returning from a fishing trip with his father, wrote: "Went fishing with my father today, the most glorious day of my life." Years later, Brooks remembered that his father Charles had also kept a diary and he compared his entry regarding the same fishing trip with that of his father's. His father's entry cast new light on that fishing trip as his entry read: "Went fishing with my son, a day wasted."

At the end of the semester, I have the students write their own obituary. As morbid as it may seem, the obituary serves a dual purpose: first, students need to know who will write their obituary--a historical record which essentially reduces their lives in print to something rather insignificant, and second, students need to come to grips with how the next generation will recount their lives between the born-died dash, if few written records are left behind as evidence. Thus, students come to learn something about the importance regarding the enormity of what goes unwritten and what we come to believe based on what is written by those who follow in the future.

In an attempt to get students to analyze historical documents and draw some conclusions about society, I employ the New England Primer--a set of pictures and rhymes used in the colonial period for teaching children the alphabet and how to read. Elementary though it might seem, the primer combines pictures and rhymes to enforce moral codes in puritan society. Because few, if any, college students recognize the primer, particularly in a historical context, I have students discuss the relationship between pictures and symbols as historical evidence in creating morals and manners in a society, and ask them to create a society from the images and themes portrayed in the document. Students often conclude that the people who created and used the document must have been of medieval times, fatalistic, spiritually driven, and great followers of the stars. Thus, their embarrassment is all the more relevant as they come to learn that this was the document used to teach children the alphabet in colonial New England. The assignment becomes more pertinent as they come to appreciate the difficulty in attempting to create the past as it actually was.

As a way to engage them in the intellectual debates of the early twentieth century regarding what Americans had been told about the American South and what Americans had come to believe about the region, I give them an unidentified copy of Henry L. Mencken's 1917 essay "Sahara of the Bozart." Students are broken into small groups and asked to locate the essay in the period's intellectual battles. In the next week, students are required to determine independently (through research from a bibliography of articles that I give them) if their initial reactions to the essay as a group fit with what they have determined on their own after research. The assignment emphasizes the difference between what they come to believe about the South based on Mencken's assessment and what historians tell them about the American South in this period.

And finally, to bring closure to the semester and to illustrate that there are indeed three kinds of history, I have the students research both The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book (1900) and the movie (1939). Specifically, I have them locate reviews of the novel and the film. Their assignment is to determine whether or not the allegorical nature of the story (created much later) fits with Frank Baum's original intentions, or if, in fact, the allegorical hysteria began after the movie appeared in 1939 or in the 1960s when historians, economists, psychologists, social critics, and others told audiences that they needed to believe these were Baum's intentions. In other words, students have to analyze what Baum actually intended, what audiences have been told he had intended, and finally, what these audiences have come to believe about The Wizard of Oz. In the end, the assignment ruins the movie because what the students come to learn about the story complicates many of their childhood memories about the Tinman, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy. This, of course, is the main reason for having my students tackle this assignment. Indeed, as one student remarked, "the allegorical interpretations of the book have apparently taken on a life of their own and that those who continue to promulgate it, show increasing disregard to historical evidence." As this student concluded, one is tempted to remind those who ignore the historical evidence Baum himself left behind (albeit not much), of the words of another children's writer, Dr. Seuss, in Horton Hatches an Egg, "I said what I meant and I meant what I said."

My approach may seem somewhat pedestrian in getting students to think about the significance of the past. But in addition to the serious side of the seminar, there are interesting ways to remind students that the old Soviet joke which says, "the future is certain, it is only the past that is unpredictable," is as much a reality as we have come to believe. Thus, while we may never know what actually happened, it is the job of the historian to create as accurate a past as possible so future generations will actually come to believe what they are told by those who construct history.

Stephen Engle is a professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.