Historically Thinking

We've just begun a unique experiment, creating a year long series devoted to explain what historical thinking is, why it's important, and how to do it. The series kicked off this week with a conversation I had with Daniel Willingham about "comprehension", the first necessary skill for historical thinking–without understanding what we read, it's very hard to think about the past. When we're done, there will be twelve monthly conversations, eleven devoted solely to one skill. (The twelfth, in case you're wondering, will wrap it up in a bow and put it by the tree, which is an apt metaphor because it will come in December.) Additionally there will be other conversations (most of them short ones, we hope) that you can find on the Historically Thinking website, three or more devoted to each of the skills. It will be we hope an unparalleled resource for students, teachers, and anyone who's interested in history. So it seems useful to moment to bring a golden oldie up out of the archives, a conversation with my friend Lendol Calder in which we discuss the skills of historical thinking. Note that the list could be shorter; it could be longer. But this is a list that he likes, and that I like, and it's what we're sticking with. As I wrote way back when this was the thirty-ninth episode of the podcast, there are few better to discuss history and how to think historically than Lendol Calder, my onetime colleague in Augustana College's department of history, and a recognized authority in the scholarship of teaching and learning. A Carnegie Scholar, and the 2010 Illinois Professor of the Year, Calder shares these insights with history teachers around the country. Today, we're delighted to have him share them with us. An eminent historian once wrote to me "Lendol Calder has done more than anybody else to teach us about what history teaching is, or should be." So give Calder a listen; he has a right to his opinion. For Further Investigation Lendol Calder, "But What is Our Story?" (teachinghistory.org) Sam Wineburg, "Reading Abraham Lincoln: An expert/expert study in the interpretation of historical texts." Cognitive Science, Volume 22, Issue 3, Pages 319-346. –Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of the Teaching of the Past (Temple University Press, 2011. Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin, and Chauncey Monte-Sano, Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms Paperback (Teachers College Press, 2012).

When I used to grade historical essays, I would provide students with a rubric that I stole from Lendol Calder, and which allowed them to understand how they were being evaluated, and for what. The very first item on the rubric reads as follows: Comprehension:  What do the documents say/mean?  Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents.  No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored. Comprehension is not something I had ever given a lot of thought to, until I began to teach. I think that was a mistake, because the more I taught, the more I realized that comprehension was first on that rubric for a reason. Indeed, I have a hypothesis that most academic problems begin with a problem in comprehension–perhaps rooted in the mistaken belief that just because we've read something we have comprehended it. Without appreciating comprehension and how it works it's impossible to teach reading; and without good reading, there is no historical thinking. But historians don't think a lot about comprehension. That's not our fault, it's not something that we should study. We should leave that to those who study the mind and how it works, and that's why in this conversation I talk with Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Dan's research is focused upon the application of cognitive psychol0gy to K-16 education. Today’s conversation is based around the arguments of his book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Works. You'll hear us talk about why reading is like cooking Chicken Milanese; what task analysis is, and how it can help us break down the act of reading; why background knowledge is indispensable for reading; and why digital devices are not the problem they're often made out to be.

On December 2, 2020, the University of Vermont announced that it would be eliminating the geology, religion, and classics departments, and also eliminating majors in Asian Studies, German, and Italian as part of cuts to programs in the College of Arts and Sciences with less than 25 or fewer students enrolled, or fewer than five graduates per year. The Academic Socal Internet (or at least its humanities sector) predictably exploded, along lines which are pretty familiar by now to those who follow such things, with anger at neo-liberal corporatism, American anti-intellectualism, and so on. Those who mustered a defense did so by proclaiming that the arts and humanities foster necessary critical thinking skills; or that these were necessary parts of general education at the University of Vermont; that the liberal arts are devalued. Incredibly enough, many of these points repeat those made for over a hundred years, as Eric Adler explains in his illuminating book The Battle for the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debates Can Save the Humanities Today. While the book centers upon intellectual debates in late 19th and early 20th century America, it ranges as far back as Marcus Tullius Cicero, and is as contemporary as the news from Vermont of December 2, 2020. Dr. Eric Adler is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. His scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities.   For Further Investigation Charles Francis Adams, Jr. 1884. A College Fetich: An Address Delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, June 28, 1883, 3rd edition. Boston: Lee and Shepard. Irving Babbitt. 1986. Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities. Washington, DC: National Humanities Institute. Originally published in 1908. Charles W. Eliot. 1969. A Turning Point in Higher Education: The Inaugural Address of Charles William Eliot as President of Harvard College, October 19, 1869. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Roger L. Geiger. 2015. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Robert E. Proctor. 1998. Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools, 2nd edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

During the American Revolution just about everyone in the thirteen colonies—or, after July 2, 1776,  the new United States—could be justly termed a traitor. For rebellious colonists prior to 1776, it was Parliament who had betrayed the English constitution. For royal officials, resistance and then rebellion was treason to the monarch. After independence, those who Americans identified numerous traitors in their midst—not only those who remained loyal to the old order of things, but even those who persisted a little too long in neutrality, or pacifism. As a legal issue, treason was in practice connected to numerous other things—to the power to arrest and detain; to the authority of the American  military; to the composition of juries; and to the meaning of citizenship. With me to discuss the legal history of treason in the American Revolution is Carlton F.W. Larson, author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. It is a legal history, but also a social history of how treason was defined, prosecuted, and adjudicated in the colony, and then the commonwealth, of Pennsylvania. Carlton Larson is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the Davis School of Law at the University of California Davis. A leading expert on the laws of treason, he has also just published On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law.

Here's a little lagniappe, a conversation with frequent guest Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit on higher ed headlines of December 2020, and some speculation about the year in higher ed to come. Also contains news you can use!

In the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart began making his plans, Germany’s Operation Michael was threatening to break the western front open before American troops arrived in full strength. Lockhart thought that he could bring Russia back into the war that it had abandoned the year before. He would do this by killing Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, overthrowing the Bolshevik government, and installing a new regime that would attack Germany and reestablish an eastern front. This plot, and the extraordinary personalities and stakes involved in it, are recounted in Jonathan Schneer’s new book The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia, which among other things demonstrates the truth of the moldy old cliché that fact is stranger than fiction. Jonathan Schneer is Professor of Emeritus of History at Georgia Tech in the School of History and Sociology. A specialist in the history of modern Britain, his books include London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis, The Thames: England’s River, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet, 1940-45, and The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict, which won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award.  He is currently working on a book about the British General Strike of 1926.

Anyone who has been in a classroom in the last 25 years has heard someone—perhaps themselves—worry about the effects of “digital distraction” on students’ attention span–perhaps even on their minds. In the 90's there were arguments about whether professors should allow laptops for note-taking, which now seems very quaint. Now we’re wondering if Zoom turns us into Zombies. (Or should that be Zoombies?) My guest Jim Lang has written a book that takes that fretful conversation in a different direction. Rather than worrying about distraction, he argues that we should be increasing our students’ (and children’s) ability to properly attend to things. James M. Lang is Professor of English and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts . Among is previous books is Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. His most recent book is Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It.

In 1775 Johannes Papunhunk died in a Moravian village in Ohio. He was not a Moravian, or any other kind of European, but a member of the Munsee tribe who had been born some seventy years before. In his long life he had been a prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat, dedicated to finding a home where his people could live in peace. As Richard Pointer observes, Papunhunk bewilders us because he breaks apart our categories. He was a prophet who inspired peacemaking not war; a nativist reformer who embraced Christianity; a critic of white practices admired by leading Pennsylvanians; a war refugee, protected by some whites against other whites.  Papunhunk refuses to be who we think he ought to be. In his complicated life, we can find a different way of seeing early America. Dr. Richard Pointer is Emeritus Professor of History at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He has previously written Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion and Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity.

In 1709, one of the great European technological achievements of the 18th century was realized—the reverse engineering of a formula for porcelain that the Chinese had used for almost two millennia. That this recipe was recreated in Saxony, in the heart of middle Europe, meant that porcelain would have a special place not merely in the technology, business, industry, and culture of the German states, but at the center of their political economy and in their relation to an ever-globalizing capitalist economy. With me to discuss this fascinating history is Suzanne L. Marchand. She is Boyd Professor of History at Louisana State University, with a particular focus on European intellectual history, and the history of the humanities in modern Europe. But her most recent book is Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, western culture became increasingly interested in regulating society through the precise, accurate measurement of time. “By the late fourteenth century,” writes my guest Ken Mondschein in his new book On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping, “mechanical clocks controlled the bells in medieval towns…These regular bells arguably produced a change in time consciousness at a general level: a device for measuring abstract time began to be used to regulate both personal and public activities.” Ultimately, Mondschein argues, without clocks the western world as we know it would not exist. Ken Mondschein is a historian of the middle ages, with a particular interest in technology and the arts of warfare. He is also credentialed as a master of historical fencing by the United States Fencing Coaches' Organization, and is the translator of several historical fencing treatises.