Posts com a Tag ‘Teaching History – A Journal of Methods (TH-JM)’
Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History – BLAUFAB; CLARKE (TH-JM)
Liz Clarke Foto: NewHouseSports /
Fueled by the success of Trevor Getz’s award-winning Abina and the Important Men, Oxford University Press has signaled its commitment to the genre of “graphic history” by publishing six works in the series bearing that name. In Inhuman Traffick, the eminent French revolutionary and Atlantic historian, Rafe Blaufarb, teamed with the talented illustrator, Liz Clarke, to produce a remarkable example of how graphic history can engage students by combining the undeniable power of images as a form of storytelling with traditional components of a valuable pedagogical tool.
Inhuman Traffick revolves around the Neirsée incident in 1828-29, a complex tale hitherto unknown before Blaufarb’s skillful archival research. A slaving vessel of indeterminate nationality, the Neirsée was captured off the African coast as part of the British Navy’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. After retaking the ship, slavers sailed it to the Caribbean islands where they released Europeans at British Dominica and sold African passengers into slavery at French Guadeloupe. Because the latter group included not only the 280 survivors among the 309 original slaves but also several African Krumen (Royal Navy personnel) and Sierra Leoneans (British subjects), authorities in the UK demanded from French officials the freedom of its British African subjects. In return, the French objected to both British violation of French territory on Guadeloupe and the original confiscation of the Neirsée, which (falsely) flew under the French flag and was theoretically off limits to searches by British warships. Thus, the Neirsée incident precipitated a diplomatic imbroglio in 1829. Leia Mais
Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall – WILNER (TH-JM)
WILNER, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. 391p. Resenha de: SHIELDS, Trevor. Teaching History – A Journal of Methods, v.45, n.2, p.55-57, 2020.
On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy, on a visit to West Berlin, eloquently lamented, “The [Berlin] Wall is…an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to join together.” All too often, the humanity of those impacted by the events of the Cold War gets lost in the background of the larger narrative of communism versus democracy—the Soviet Union versus the United States. Nina Willner’s work, Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall (2016), successfully and vividly injects much needed humanity into the Cold War.
Written as primarily a family memoir, Forty Autumns tells the story of just one of the families divided by the Berlin Wall. Willner’s book chronicles the life of her mother, Hanna, and grandparents, Erna and Karl (Willner regularly only refers to Erna and Karl as Oma and Opa, or Grandma and Grandpa.) The book, which is divided into roughly four sections, begins with several maps of Europe during the Cold War. From there, one of the greatest features of the book appears, a family and historical chronology as Willner pairs the events of the Cold War physically right alongside their impact on her family. Seeing the history of the Cold War linked to the impacts of particular historical events on real people makes the vivid narrative of Forty Autumns difficult to put down. In 1946 the Soviets occupied East Germany and imposed Soviet law. That same year, Opa, who fought for the Germans during WWII, was forced to begin teaching Soviet doctrine to his many students in East Germany.
The Cold War had more physically terrifying consequences on the people of East Germany than being forced to learn and love communism. Not wanting to take any chances of people inciting dissent, many East Germans were thrown into prison with little idea why they had been arrested. The Hoheneck Castle, which was known around the world for its Gothic and Renaissance architecture, was converted to house women. In eloquent yet terrifying prose, Willner paints the picture: “There, skin to skin, in total darkness, with no room to sit, they were made to stand in knee-deep freezing water for days on end in dank, poorly ventilated chambers until they simply passed out” (72). The inhumanity of what happened at Hoheneck Castle, although known to historians, is often missing from more traditional narratives. Since Forty Autumns was written in such an accessible way, more people today will understand the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain.
Willner’s book could be used in the classroom in a variety of ways. The most obvious, though, would be to use the story of her family to both introduce and to potentially teach the entirety of the Cold War. This would be particularly doable since Willner interjected the major events of the Cold War throughout the many pages of Forty Autumns. On the family level, for example, East German authorities harassed Opa at the same time the Warsaw Pact was being formed and dissent was being silenced. Forty Autumns definitely brings to life the impact of many Cold War developments on both individuals and Germany as a whole.
While not all of Millner’s family lived to see Germany reunified in 1990, all the individuals discussed helped make true a few of President Ronald Reagan’s words: “What is right will always triumph” (324). Although much of Forty Autumns detailed the horrors of life under communism in East Germany, it ended on a positive note, with Willner’s extended family reuniting in a united Germany in 2013. Anyone interested in learning more about the Cold War or about one family’s brave attempt at enduring the unthinkable should give Forty Autumns a read. Beyond that, in a more contemporary moment where construction of a wall is regularly discussed as a way to make life better for so many, the history within Forty Autumns should be seen as a foreboding tale.
Trevor Shields – Minooka High School.
[IF]Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation – BLIGHT; DOWNS (TH-JM)
BLIGHT, David W.; DOWNS, Jim. eds. Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2017. 190p. Resenha de: GIFFORD, Ron. Teaching History – A Journal of Methods, v.45, n.2, p.57-60, 2020.
Students of Emancipation need no better reason to pick up Beyond Freedom than it emerged from a 2011 conference held at the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, of which David Blight is now the director, and has chapters by a veritable who’s who in Emancipation Studies. It is also a thoughtful reminder that historians are continually grappling with what freedom was in the nineteenth century, who defined it, and whether it was enough to make a difference in African Americans’ lives.
The title might seem misleading to many readers, as the book is entirely about emancipation; however, the subtitle clarifies that historians are trying to disrupt the “freedom paradigm,” which focused on freedom in zero sum fashion, by emphasizing the painful process of emancipation, and in the process abandoning the traditional periodization and adopting different lenses to analyze the citizen’s relationship to the state. In sum, the authors remind us, emancipation was messy, it was never preordained to end in perfect freedom, and Black voices, freed and enslaved, still offer the best avenue to revise our understanding of emancipation, its promises, and its limits.
The collection is organized in three parts, though one could argue there should only be two: those pieces written in a traditional academic format and those written as ruminations on how historians have failed to adequately interrogate the sources, at best, or have ignored or misused the terror and suffering Black people faced in the nineteenth century. Parts one and two, “From Slavery to Freedom” and “The Politics of Freedom,” take the more traditional approach and emphasize a process of emancipation that was not restricted to the period following the Civil War and was anything but progressive. According to Richard Newman, Black emancipation and responses to it during Reconstruction took place in the wake of earlier emancipations, in and beyond the United States. As a result, Black and White Americans alike were familiar with the “grammar” of emancipation and understood this was not a story with a preordained conclusion. As a result, we need to apply different lenses that challenge the when, where, and how emancipation happened. More importantly, we need to recognize Black people—enslaved and free, male or female, adult or child—as “fully realized political people” (27). If we do so, a more complex and less celebratory portrait of emancipation emerges. Part three, “Meditations on the Meaning of Freedom,” deviates from the traditional format, possibly to avoid the lack of “human touch” that may characterize for laymen the problems with academia, but is a welcome glimpse into historians reflecting upon their craft and taking seriously Susan O’Donovan’s claim, “if [B]lack lives matter today, then so should the whole of the [B]lack past”(29). As a result, readers will find greater attention paid to the circumstances and actions of African Americans, specifically women and children, and the political nature of their torture, suffering, and grief.
In general, Beyond Freedom, will be a valuable tool for faculty and graduate students interested in a refresher concerning the state of the conversation concerning emancipation. The books the contributors have produced in the last decade constitute an essential reading list for scholars of the period. At the undergraduate level, this volume would be a good edition to a seminar, in which students fashion independent theses within the context of a larger conversation, employ primary sources in some fashion, and question the epistemological problems associated with a vague concept like freedom. Jim Downs’s focus on “the Ontology of the Freedmen’s Bureau Records” is an apt reminder that sometimes the “records [and historians] assign a particular narrative logic to a process that lacks order and efficiency,” and, as a result, “What freedom meant to freed people has only been partially told” (175). Even in that context, however, the volume will require a skilled teacher, already familiar with the existing historiography, to make sense of it for students. If there is any criticism, it might be the omission of any focus on emancipation beyond the United States, except in the preface by Foner.
As historians come to grips with the suffering, abuse, and terror Blacks faced, emancipation, as Thavolia Glymph notes, has the potential to “break your heart” (132), but this collection may also give students the hope that by abandoning the traditional periodization or models we so often rely upon and pa
Ron Gifford – Illinois State University.
[IF]The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I – DUMENIL (TH-JM)
DUMENIL, Lynn. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 360p. Resenha de: SCREWS, Raymond D. Teaching History – A Journal of Methods, v.45, n.2, p.60-62, 2020.
When considering American women’s role during a large twentieth century war, many do not think of the First World War. Outside of the Red Cross or the YWCA, the story many of us learned about the Great War does not include women. We do not have that powerful image of Rosie the Riveter of World War II to connect us to the strong woman of World War I. But Lynn Dumenil closes that gap of knowledge in her outstanding book, The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I.
Dumenil is careful not to use “American Women in World War I,” (emphasis mine) in the subtitle because she covers so much more than American women in the war. For example, she effectively weaves the women’s suffrage movement into the larger context of the story. Women’s involvement in the war effort was not only beneficial to a country at war, but also impeccably important to women’s suffrage and women’s rights in general, and the image of women in America less than two decades removed from the end of the nineteenth century. Dumenil is masterful in her coverage of the suffrage movement and the Great War in the first chapter. So this book is so much more than a study about American women working in the war industry, although that is a crucial element as well.
In a general sense, Dumenil succeeds in addressing the social and political climate of a century ago in the United States with war as a backdrop while also in the forefront, and how women.
were both plagued by American gender norms in the late teens, and how women shaped the country during a difficult time for them. But she is especially sharp in her coverage of African American women during World War I throughout The Second Line of Defense. Of course, African American women had to fight harder than white women, and organizations such as the YWCA, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, among many others, discriminated against them. Overall, White women were just as prejudiced against African Americans as White men.
The book covers women’s issues, roles, and the war domestically and in Europe. Dumenil also includes the wonderful chapter, “Visual Representations of Women in Popular Culture,” in which she evaluates war posters and the cinema. The book’s epilogue places women’s gains during the war years into the larger context of the 1920s. There is most assuredly something missing, but it does not feel that way. If there is one criticism, it is that Dumenil includes too much. But that is also the book’s strength. She embraces several areas of a complex topic encompassing a number of organizations, characters, and issues, while effortlessly meshing them into a singular story.
Dumenil’s research is broad and inclusive, with many vital primary sources cited including papers from the organizations covered in the book. She also lists a plethora of secondary sources in the bibliography. Those teaching undergraduate and graduate students should find The Second Line of Defense valuable in class, including survey courses. In introductory courses, the book can be used as a valuable tool to explain women’s roles in war, instead of the more traditional World War II studies. But it can also be utilized in American history classes from freshman courses to graduate seminars so students gain a deeper understanding of the women’s suffrage movement during the touchy and sensitive years of the First World War. And, of course, it is valuable as a study about American society during the first twenty years of the twentieth century and how women challenged the status quo in the era of the Great War.
The Second Line of Defense adds to the library of an outstanding scholar, in which she introduces new insights from her impressive use of primary and secondary sources. But it is much more that. Dumenil provides an enriched understanding of what might be considered the beginning of the modern women’s movement. That can be debated, but there is little doubt, as Dumenil so keenly illustrates, that American women during the First World War played a richly crucial role in the war effort and utilized their role to gain the constitutional right to vote.
Raymond D. Screws – Arkansas National Guard Museum.
[IF]They Called Us Enemy – TAKEI (TH-JM)
TAKEI, George et al. They Called Us Enemy. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2019. 205p. Resenha de: HUGHES, Richard. Teaching History – A Journal of Methods, v.45, n.2, p.62-65, 2020.
In 1946, Miné Okubo, a Japanese American from California who spent much of World War II in the Topaz Relocation Center, an internment camp in Utah, published Citizen 13660. An accomplished artist, Okubo included almost 200 black line drawings in her memoir which she described as a rare glimpse of daily life inside an internment camp. Citizen 13660 debuted just 12 months after Japan’s surrender and, while many American readers may not have been ready to face the disturbing realities of American wartime decisions, the book review in the New York Times described the memoir as an “objective and vivid” account of the impact of “hysteria that finally led the Federal Government into acceptance of racial discrimination as an instrument of national policy.”
George Takei, most well-known as an actor on the television show Star Trek, was only four years old when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Seventy-eight years later, Takei, along with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and artist Harmony Becker, provides a comparable visual memoir to Citizen 13660 in the form of a powerful graphic novel entitled, They Called Us Enemy. While Takei struggled as a young man to find any information about Japanese internment in his formal education, much has changed since Okubo’s memoir. The last fifty years have included a growing historiography on internment, the creation of the Japanese American museum in Los Angeles, and the inclusion of the history of Japanese Americans during the war in textbooks, content standards, documentary films, art exhibits, and even children’s literature. In 1988 the same federal government that enforced Executive Order 9066 in 1942 formally apologized for the internment camps through the Civil Liberties Act which included minimal restitution to surviving victims such as Okubo and Takei.
Despite the age of its author during the war, They Called Us Enemy provides a surprisingly comprehensive account of the experiences of Japanese Americans during the period. Takei’s father was an Issei, born in Japan before immigrating to California, while his mother was a Kibei, a Japanese American born in the United States but, in part due to the realities of racial discrimination in California at the time, educated in Japan. Born in Los Angeles, George and his younger brother and most individuals sent to camps were Nisei and therefore American citizens. Takei’s accessible family history takes the reader from life in Los Angeles in the 1930s, a feature often missing from wartime narratives, to temporary housing at a makeshift assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack, where George started first grade in 1942. After a long train ride across the West that thrilled the children while their parents and other adults remained terrified, the Takei family arrived in Camp Rowher in Arkansas only to return to California in 1944 as inmates at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center. Along the way Takei illustrates some of the period’s unique cultural conflicts through families who faced additional challenges because family members taught Japanese language or served as a Buddhist minister.
Two specific aspects of They Called Us Enemy are especially valuable to students in understanding how Japanese Americans navigated the dangers and unknowns of war, race, and persecution. First, George’s parents were labeled “No-Nos” in 1944 because they refused to volunteer for U.S. military service or to renounce any allegiance to the Japanese emperor. This decision led to the family’s forced reassignment to Tule Lake in northern California and a community that included an array of political positions ranging from principled nonviolent resistance in the face of American hypocrisy to the dramatic role of protesters, some of whom completely rejected the United States and Takei describes as “radicals.” Fearful of postwar violence, George’s mother even renounced her American citizenship in the hope of keeping the family relatively safe in the camps and, after deportations started, joined other internment survivors in successfully reversing the decision and reclaiming their American citizenship. All of these and other features of the graphic novel provide students with a more diverse portrait of the many ways Japanese Americans navigated the period.
Second, not unlike Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking graphic novel Maus which explored the history and legacy of the Holocaust, Takei’s family history sheds light on enduring generational conflicts within Japanese American communities. In contrast to many histories that focus exclusively on the war years, Takei’s narrative, not unlike the documentary film Rabbit in the Moon (1999), includes important later discussions between George and his father as the family attempts to deal with the trauma of internment. George’s father dealt with personal guilt over his relative passivity during the ordeal while George used his formative experiences to shape a larger activism that included sharing the stage with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. at a civil rights rally in 1961. George and his family’s struggles with cultural assimilation, identity, and social change in the years after 1945 provide an accessible complement to both Citizen 13660 and many of the issues raised in Greg Robinson’s After Camp: Portrait in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (2012).
Of course, Takei’s memoir is incapable of addressing all the issues that have emerged in the historiography. There is no hint of the important political discussions from California to Washington, D.C. between Pearl Harbor and February 1942, nor does Takei address the significant political divisions associated with the Japanese American Citizens League. Although the graphic novel includes brief references to historic documents such as Executive Order 9066, evacuation posters from California, and the controversial loyalty oath in 1944, failing to fully include these seminal primary sources in the book is a lost opportunity for students and teachers. Elsewhere, readers may find themselves wishing for more historical context in such as areas as the larger history of conscientious objectors or, because They Called Us Enemy includes an intriguing image of African Americans sitting near the railroad tracks in Arkansas, a broader discussion of internment and race that includes the Jim Crow South. Regardless, They Called Us Enemy succeeds in providing a compelling graphic narrative of life in the internment camps and the ongoing journey, of both Takei and his nation, to make sense of the complex intersection of race, public policy, and historical memory.
Richard Hughes – Illinois State University.
[IF]Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) – WINEBURG (TH-JM)
WINEBURG, Sam. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2018. 241p. Resenha de: FISCHER, Fritz. Teaching History – A Journal of Methods, v.45, n.2, p.50-52, 2020.
In discussing the role of his most recent project in history education, Sam Wineburg insists “nor can I say as we approach six million downloads that our work has ‘changed the field”(137). All of us who teach and research in the field of history education would beg to differ. Wineburg’s seminal work on historical thinking over the past three decades has changed how we think about teaching history. Over his lengthy and productive career, Professor Wineburg has changed the field, and for the better.
His most recent book, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on your Phone), provides a “greatest hits” examination of his work. Some chapters rework his previous writings, while others move into new territory. Such an organizational choice results in a choppy structure. While many chapters illustrate Wineburg’s insights, others ironically reflect his weakness as an historian. Despite its flaws, the book provides important new insights in the field of history education.
Wineburg’s discussions of his most recent projects at Stanford are informative and fascinating. He provides thought-provoking ruminations on the valuable websites, “Reading Like a Historian” and “Beyond the Bubble.” His mind-bending analysis of the differences between science and history education posits that the past, unlike science, “bequeaths jagged fragments that thwart most attempts to form a complete picture.” He concludes that “parsimony in historical explanation often flirts with superficial reductionism”(109). Such articulate nuggets, sprinkled throughout Why Learn History, force the reader to put the book down for valuable self-reflection.
Wineburg is at his best when providing windows into new thoughts on teaching and learning in history. One example comes in Wineburg’s examination of newly popular quick-fix courses in media literacy as the antidote to “fake news.” Arguing that such courses are insufficient, Wineburg insists on “a fundamental reorientation of the curriculum.” He then poses a number of brilliant and provocative questions, concluding that if we are to avoid the victory of tyranny, students must have a deep understanding of how to ask and answer historical questions (158). The book’s biggest strength is Wineburg’s ability to push the envelope regarding the purposes and methods of teaching history in the K-12 curriculum.
However, in this book Wineburg acts as a historian and at times falls short. The early chapters recount a variety of battles over history education in the past 30 years, battles in which Wineburg himself has been a consistent historical actor. In discussing the testing and standards movement, Wineburg recounts many of his earlier criticisms to great effect. In his chapter, “Committing Zinns,” Wineburg rightly criticizes Howard Zinn for lack of context, ahistorical cherry picking, and asking “yes-type” questions. My book, The Memory Hole: The U.S. History Curriculum Under Siege (2013), criticizes Zinn for the same failings.
Yet in other chapters Wineburg returns to earlier topics but fails to live up to his own standards. Wineburg commits his own “Zinn” in the chapter on the Teaching American History (TAH) professional development program. Wineburg begins with the supposition that the TAH program failed—a view reflecting his initial opposition to the program due to its political roots in outdated dogmas about learning history. He concludes with the argument that the program had “no national impact” (47).
The formal assessment programs for TAH were a disaster, and some of the programs failed. But Wineburg’s outline is incomplete and inaccurate. In fact, many of the programs moved far beyond the “sit and get” model of historical content knowledge he criticizes. I participated in more than two dozen professional development workshops for the National Council for History Education (NCHE) that went far beyond “putting the knowledge into the heads of teachers who would in turn pour it in the heads of students”(37). Teachers were not typically “left alone to work amongst themselves” (44). They engaged in multiple discussions and interactive activities—often based on Wineburg’s own work. These programs changed the way they taught and the way their students learned. Wineburg knows about these very programs— he was on the Board of NCHE—but neglects to discuss them. Wineburg ignores too much and asks too many “yes-type questions” that support his conclusion that the program was an utter failure.
Wineburg also fails to explore the TAH program’s impact on professional development goals in history education. He rightly commends the work of a committee convened by the American Historical Association in 2002 that crafted the “Benchmarks for Professional Development in History Education“ (48), but does not consider that those who wrote that document (myself included) drew ideas from work in the TAH program.
We also owed our ideas to the work Sam Wineburg. Uneven as it may be, this book provides an invaluable reminder of the value of historical thinking and of the ways in which this thinking might help students navigate a challenging civic landscape. In the end, Wineburg’s work always forces the reader to think and reflect on how to improve the teaching and learning of history. In a world where so much that is written on education is not helpful to teachers, his insights make this book a valuable read.
Fritz Fischer – University of Northern Colorado.
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