From the Editor

Listening for History

Byrne

The need to bring history alive in our classrooms can be at once a daunting challenge and a source of immense energy. In order to accomplish that goal, should we not use every reasonable teaching tool available to us? Following the lead of guest editor and author Mariana Whitmer, the writers of the thematic articles and teaching resources included in this issue respond with a resounding “Yes!” It is their contention, however, that teachers of history have often failed to use one of the most powerful tools at their disposal—the music played and the songs sung by Americans in the past.

Perhaps you have used a bit of music to enhance your classroom—a snippet of a Civil War song, a bit of Gershwin for the 1920s, or an antiwar anthem from the Vietnam era. As the guest editor and accompanying authors demonstrate, those laudable efforts only scratch the surface of the possibilities. In her main essay on “Songs of Social Significance,” Whitmer herself indicates something of the incredible range of materials that exists, citing lyrics sung by colonial Americans at one point and the heavy metal band Megadeth at another. The music and lyrics have important things to tell us, these essays aver, about the people who sang them and the times in which they appeared. As artifacts of the past, they will help students appreciate those cultures as much as any printed document can.

The music of indigenous North American Indians, of immigrants who arrived from all corners of the globe, and of Africans involuntarily transported to the New World and their descendants—all these sounds are part and parcel of American history. When Antonin Dvořák searched for quintessentially American music, for example, he drew important lessons about the centrality of Native American and African American music, as one article makes clear.

Given the immensely rich nature of American music, the current issue itself can only begin to suggest the possibilities for your classroom. While the emphasis in this issue may fall somewhat more heavily on important musical traditions derived from Euro-American sources, it is clear that future issues of the OAH Magazine of History may profitably focus on the specific influences of black, Latino, and American Indian cultures on this element of history.

To assist you in locating useful music for your classroom, we at the Magazine have undertaken a novel venture. Guest editor Whitmer has assembled more than twenty songs and pieces of music that can help recreate some of the aural dimensions of American history, and we have put them on the CD that accompanies the issue. Each of the songs connects to one or more of the articles and lesson plans, which in turn suggest context for or ways of using the music. No doubt you will find your own uses as you listen and imagine the possibilities for the approaches you take in teaching U.S. history.

One of the tracks, for example, is a selection that was played in the Civil War by William Woodlin and the regimental band of the 8th U.S. Colored Troops, a group similar to the one pictured below. Woodlin’s diary, a document found in the Gilder Lehrman Institute collection in New York, is reproduced in part in this issue, with an introduction that explains his background and the context of his service in the Union army. How might it enhance your coverage of the Civil War, for instance, to relate something about the role of music in that conflict, and to play some of it in your classroom? What if your students also read pages from the diary of this young African American, written as he trained near Philadelphia and then moved with the Union forces to South Carolina and Florida? What issues about African Americans in service to the federal government might this exercise generate? What connections might your students draw between the lyrics of the songs these young men played and the assumptions and feelings of Civil War era Americans? Here, too, the possibilities are numerous.

Listening for history is a skill we should not overlook.