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Lesson Plan
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Introduction
One premise underlying the American studies approach to teaching American literature and history is that literature enhances the study of history and history enhances the study of literature. The perfect book for this process is the novel or play that engages students, while allowing them to experience a particular place and time in U.S. history. The elements of a good story—character, conflict, suspense—compel the students to read, and in the process they learn about historical events, ideas, movements, and the lives of diverse people. The literature that we work with is classroom-tested for teachers of history and social studies who are looking for texts that will involve students more deeply in an understanding and appreciation of the American past. At Lebanon High School, where I teach, American studies is a required course for all sophomores. One section is reserved for honors students, a second section for less skilled and interested students, and the rest of the sections have students of mixed skill levels. Team taught by an English teacher and a social studies teacher during a double-period block of time, each section of the course covers American history chronologically from Columbus to Carter, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. Among the literary works we have chosen to teach in conjunction with the historical periods and topics we cover are: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973). My Antonia, by Willa Cather, may be the best work of literature in the course for putting a human face on the trends and issues of an era. In particular, Books I and II of the novel contain a variety of compelling events involving the two main characters: Jim Burden, a Virginian, and Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant, both of whom migrate to the Nebraska frontier in the 1880s. The novel portrays conflicts and friendships, affections and disaffections, prejudices, dangers, and deaths that engage our students and help us interest them in Cather’s historically accurate details of agriculture, society, commerce, the arts, transportation, religion, and culture. The exercise that seems to engage our students most in historical discovery is what we call “The Dating Game.” The object of The Dating Game is very simple: to determine, based on historical details in the novel, the year in which the young Jim Burden arrived in Nebraska. Cather supplies dozens of datable details but no actual dates, and the novel—as far as we have been able to determine—contains no anachronisms. If students compile a record of the items in the novel and use them all to zero in on the date, they not only arrive at a reliable date, but also get a much fuller sense of life on the farms and in the small towns of the plains, plus a few details about national events and trends in the 1880s. Time Frame The regular and honors sections of our course use My Antonia as part of a three-week “Heritage Unit,” in which we study immigration and issues of acculturation, assimilation, prejudice, and adaptation. Students complete the unit by writing a paper on their “Old Country” heritage. The following exercise takes three, fifty-minute class periods. Objectives
Procedure We place students in small research teams under the following categories: transportation, farm technology, home technology, mining, education, religion, journalism, postal service, retail sales, immigration, and entertainment. The first task of each team is to record the datable details for its area of inquiry as found in the novel (mostly Books I and II). Then we head to the library to find the dates of the various inventions, movements, businesses, and cultural events mentioned in the novel. We complete a couple of examples together before we go to the library. We know, for instance, that Jim traveled to Nebraska by train. In what year, then, was train travel first possible to Nebraska? Our history text tells us the “wedding of the rails” took place in Promontory Point, Utah in 1869; thus, the rails must have reached Nebraska not long before that. In Books I and II, there is no mention of the automobile. When might cars have first appeared in towns like Black Hawk (Red Cloud) and Lincoln? Cather writes in Book V that Antonia’s daughter and her husband “have a Ford now,” but that is many years after Jim arrived in Nebraska. Fords started rolling off the assembly line in 1914, so we are focusing on a date sometime between 1869 and 1914. Utilizing library resources, we can learn when rail service came to Nebraska on lines such as the Burlington and Missouri, and to Red Cloud on the Republican Valley Railroad. Most of the students can use their history text (America, by Andrew Cayton, et al.) as a starting point. In the library, they are able to find the information they need in standard works of history and reference, such as the Time-Life series The Old West, and biographical references such as Notable American Women. Histories of farming, communication, transportation, mining, and immigration are also useful. The only handout for the exercise is a partially completed chart with examples of the relationship between the students’ topics and the relevant page references in the novel. In the process of their research, individual teams make interesting discoveries and penetrate the textbook surface of the history narrative. They discover when common items like the piano, roller skates, and electric batteries were invented. They learn about John Deere’s “plow that broke the plains” and the steam-powered thresher. They locate the short-lived existence of the Pony Express and the introduction of rural free delivery. They get a sense of the different waves of immigration to and migration within the nation. The migration team often examines the absence of Native Americans in the novel. They learn something of the push and pull factors that made people leave the Old Country, as the Shimerdas did, or move west from places like Virginia, as Cather and Jim Burden did. Two clues in the novel allow students to hit the date exactly. “Mary Anderson was having a great success in A Winter’s Tale in London,” Jim recalls (1), and later in Book IV he learns that Tiny Soderball had “reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians came into the settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek” (2). Those two dates can be specified, and a little arithmetic allows us to count back to the date when Jim, at age ten, arrived in Nebraska. In the library, we watch over the mining and entertainment groups to be sure they find the clues and the historical dates, but with the contributions of every group we arrive at about the same date even without our two best clues. Returning to the classroom, we put a long timeline on the board, hear reports from every group, and gradually zero in on the date. Our best guess: 1884, the same year Cather herself arrived in Nebraska. Assessment Students usually receive a group grade for the cooperative learning exercise, based on the notes and facts they record in their library research. We require that the group’s folder contain notes in the handwriting of each member to show some individual accountability. We encourage students to include all information found, even “dead ends,” as proof of their diligence and the wide range of their inquiries. When it goes well, the project is fun detective work. Everyone can contribute a piece to the puzzle; each group probes an aspect of history; and we pool our knowledge for a common purpose. Students learn in the final session, during which all the teams report, how the various aspects of life on the plains contributed to individual and collective welfare and survival. Endnotes 1. Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988), 118. 2. Cather, My Antonia, 193. Bibliography Brown, Dee. Hear That Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977. Cayton, Andrew, et al. America: Pathways to the Present. Needham, Mass.: Prentice-Hall, 1995. Conrat, Maisie and Richard Conrat. The American Farm: A Photographic History. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977. James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: 1607-1950. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971. The Old West. New York: Time-Life Books, 1976. My Antonia
Page Historical Change Years Jim takes train (ten years old) 5 “Wedding of the Rails” 1869 Ogden, Utah “...have a Ford now.” 228 Ford assembly line 1914 John Deere’s steel plow 1837 Mining Home Technology “only wooden house 11 west of Black Hawk” Education Jim attends University of Book Nebraska (age eighteen?) III Religion Journalism Postal Service Retail Sales -companies -toys, gadgets Immigration Entertainment -Reading -Theater Dan Swainbank teaches English and American studies at Lebanon High School, in Lebanon, New Hampshire. |