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Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 21, No 2
April 2007

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

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Of all the courses taught by historians, none can be as challenging as those related to methodology or historiography, particularly at the undergraduate level. For years I have taught the undergraduate level course for our department and in that time I have attempted to use creative approaches to get students to think about and appreciate, to some degree, what historians do. I start from the basic premise that there are three kinds of history and I use three 4" x 6" note cards that have the following phrases written on them: "history = what actually happens," "history = what we are told happens," and "history = what we come to believe happens." Then I ask them individually to choose from these cards the most important kind of history, to which a majority respond "history = what we come to believe happens" as the most important history of all. Therefore, it is my expectation that by the end of the seminar these students see the relationship between "what actually happens," and "what we come to believe happens" and why their role in reconstructing and disseminating knowledge of the past is the most vital role in the entire enterprise when it comes to educating the masses about history.

Throughout the semester I employ a number of strategies to get students to really understand what I mean about the three kinds of history and organize the seminar around the areas of research, analysis, interpretation, and presentation. And 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, 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 they 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 other words, historians are left with only scant pieces of evidence with which to construct the history of an event or a person's entire life.

In an attempt to get students to analyze historical documents and draw some conclusions about society, I employ the New England Primer, which is 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, particular 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 society that created and used the document must be 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 relevant 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 a particular place and time, in this case 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 are asked to locate the essay in the intellectual battles of the American past. In the next week, students are required to determine independently (through research from a bibliography of articles 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. Then they are required to make a case for what they believe to be true about the region.

And finally, to bring closure to the semester and to the fact that there are indeed three kinds of history, I have the students research The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book (1900) and the movie (1939). I have them locate reviews of the 1900 book and the 1939 movie. Their assignment is to determine whether or not the allegorical nature of the story (created much later) fits with Frank Baum's original intentions when he first wrote the book, or if, in fact, the allegorical hysteria began after the movie appeared which highlighted some themes in the book that historians, economists, psychologists, social critics, and others told audiences they needed to believe about these allegorical intentions when Baum first wrote the book. If the book and the movie were intended to be allegorical in nature about the waning days of the Populist movement, as my students conclude, contemporaries largely failed to pick up on these implications. Fortunately, the students conclude that several years later in the 1960s, historians, psychotherapists, and literary critics created the allegorical connections in getting audiences to believe Baum had actually intended this in his book. Still, students have to distinguish between 1900, 1939, and the 1960s and 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 child-hood memories about the Tinman, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy. This of course is the main reason for my having 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 whom ignore the historical evidence Baum himself left behind, (albeit not much) of the words of another children's writer, Dr. Seuss' in Horton Hatches the Egg, "I said what I meant and I meant what I said."

In summation, my approach may seem somewhat pedestrian in getting students to think about the significance of the three kinds of history and their role in making themselves credible storytellers 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 it is. Thus, while we may never know what actually happened (or in Leopold von Ranke's words "wie es eigentlich gewesen" which translated means "as it actually was"), it is the job of the historian to create as accurate a past as possible so the future will actually come to believe what they are told by those who distinguish themselves as credible to construct history in the present. •

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Steve Engle is professor and chair of the history department at Florida Atlantic University. His teaching and research interests focus on the American Civil War, in particular the ethnic, military, and, most recently, political considerations of the conflict. Author of several books, including, most recently, Struggle for the Heartland (2001), and a former Fulbright scholar to Germany, he is currently engaged in research for a book entitled Fathers' Abraham: Lincoln, His Governors, and the Negotiations of Power, which explores the relationship between Lincoln and the northern war governors during the Civil War.