Historical Themes and Questions

This is a resource page for teaching history thematically.  I hope some of you find it useful!  

Knowledge is constructed, or built, and the way that it's built is by fitting all the pieces together, by making connections.  In history, basic day to day connections are made by examining historical causality: rich explanations of why things happen create a story that can be remembered, whereas sheer information is fragmented, difficult to remember, and difficult to discover meaning in.  Causality in history is thus like a kind of glue that holds things together, unfortunately it is notoriously difficult to find texts that are both accessible to teenagers and rich in causal explanations.  In history, analysis of causality constructs knowledge on a day to day basis, but this daily work must be connected to big ideas, themes, and questions.  As the year (and years) progress, these ideas, themes and questions are revisited at higher orders of thinking.  (More on historical causality here.) 

Below are examples of historical themes and questions taken from a few different sources. (For examples of the related topic of teaching for understanding, generative topics, and throughlines/red threads, check out these "pictures of practice".)  

1) One fantastic place to start exploring historical themes is the excellent website Bridging World History, which offers 26 thematic units.  Examples of themes include: human migration, agricultural and urban revolution, connections across land, connections across waters, transmission of traditions, families and households, and land and labor relationships. 

2) In Teaching World History in the 21st Century, a book filled with intelligent and helpful essays, Thomas Mounkhall suggests four "core world history themes": political, economic, cultural, and biological.  His strategy is then to divide each of those up into four smaller themes.  He emphasizes that educators should develop their own themes, to suit their own needs; here are the sub-themes he uses: 

Political: imperialism, self-determination, cross-regional war, and exploration.

Economic: long distance trade, interdependence, multinational corporations, trade diasporas 

Cultural: cultural diffusion, cultural synthesis, technology diffusion, missionary work 

Biological: flora diffusion, fauna diffusion, disease diffusion, migration

The history of the human relationship to environmental change is a major historical field, but a new one.  Teachers interested in learning more about environmental issues and biological diffusion in world history should consult the incredible annotated bibliography at the end of Teaching World History in the 21st Century, or read this issue of World History Connected online. 

3) Chapter 5 of Wiggins and McTighe's essential book on backwards planning, Understanding by Design, is titled "Essential Questions: Doorways to Understandings".  They open with this quote by Jerome Bruner: "Given particular subject matter or a particular concept, it is easy to ask trivial questions.... It is also easy to ask impossibly difficult questions.  The trick is to find the medium questions that can be answered and that can take you somewhere".  A trivial question is one that is quickly answered and then done with.  Like an impossibly difficult question, trivial questions inspire no thought and lead nowhere. 

Wiggins and McTighe emphasize that essential questions allow students to remain focused on big ideas.  Essential questions are not immediately answerable - but they inspire thought, and can be thought about for years, or over the course of a life.  Here are examples from all subject matters:  

• To what extent does art reflect culture or shape it?
• What is a true friend?
• How precise must we be?
• Must a story have a beginning, middle, and an end? 
• Is everything quantifiable?
• To what extent is DNA destiny? 
• In what ways is algebra real and in what ways unreal?
• To what extent is US history a history of progress?  
• What is the difference between a scientific fact, a scientific theory, and a strong opinion? 
• Must heroes be flawless?
• Who is entitled to own what? 

How are such questions meant to be used?  In backwards planning, the goal is to start planning with what you want your students to understand at the end of a week or a unit, to figure out how they can show you their understanding and how you can assess it, and then to plan according to meet those goals.  If one of my big goals for a week was to help students to understand the balance of power amongst the three branches of government, I could start the week off with the question, "How might a government guard against abuses of power?"  The purpose of the question is connective.  As the week progresses and facts accumulate, students can see how the Framers were trying to solve this question and attach the facts back to the question.  Executive branches, checks and balances, and all the rest thus finds meaning and coherence.  At the end of the week, the question is not answered; nor was it meant to be. 

Some questions are great for framing lessons, others for units, some for year long themes.  A question like "what is democracy?" could frame an entire unit; while "How does technology influence culture?" could be a year long theme, revisited at increasingly sophisticated levels, giving students the chance to recall and compare how technology influenced culture in past units.   

4) Linda Levstik and Keith Barton offer this extensive list of themes and questions in their book Doing History. They introduce them as "the enduring themes and questions that humans have struggled with over time", and note that the questions need to be altered according to grade level.  For example, "how has human movement been encouraged or prohibited" can become "why do people move from one place to another?"  They also note that many of these questions can be reworded and asked of ourselves and our society, thereby becoming directly applicable to students lives.  They recommend beginning by framing a question as it applies to students, and then exploring the question historically.   

The Development of Human Societies and Cultures

Why have people developed organized societies and cultures? 

How have environmental factors influenced sociocultural developments? 

How have cultures differed in social, economic, and political organization? 

What elements do societies/cultures have in common? 

How have cultures influenced the way people perceive themselves and others?   

How have continuity and change been reflected in and across cultures over time?  

Movement and Interaction of People, Cultures, and Ideas 

What forces have created, encouraged, or inhibited human movement?

What factors have enhanced and inhibited the spread of ideas, goods, and cultures?  

How has human interaction led to conflict and/or cooperation?  

How has the spread of ideas, goods, and cultures influenced societies? 

Human Interaction With the Environment

Over time, how have human societies viewed their physical environment?  

How have humans changed their environment to suit their needs?  

How have humans adapted over time to meet environmental realities?  

How have decisions about the environment had cumulative and complex effects on societies? 

How have competing interests within a society viewed resource allocation?   

Patterns of Economic and Technological Organization and Change 

Why have different societies and cultures developed different economic systems?  

How and why did some societies develop agricultural economies? 

What factors are critical to the emergence of technologically advanced societies? 

How have societies with different economic systems included or excluded people/groups from decision making and the allocation of benefits?  

How have societies with different economic systems adapted to changing conditions and demands? 

How have scientific developments led to technological and/or developmental change?  

The Relationships Amongst Values, Beliefs, Ideas, and Institutions 

How have religion and philosophy influenced individuals and groups?  

How have these influences been expressed in the arts and in other institutions?  

How have values, beliefs, and ideas shaped culture and social institutions? 

What leads some cultures to influence others?  

How have some cultures imposed their values, beliefs, ideas, and institutions on others?  

How have cultures attempted to maintain their values, beliefs, ideas, and institutions?  

How have values, beliefs, ideas, and institutions come into conflict with each other, and how have these conflicts been expressed? 

How have cultures defined the relationship between the individual and society?   

Favorite Historical Pic(s) of the Day: DuBois in his office

When I taught a semester of American history at Fremont High, I had this picture of W.E.B. DuBois on the wall behind my desk.  DuBois seems calm, but also industrious, working steadily, focused, and at ease.  At least, that's what I liked to imagine and to tell students.  One message I hoped students would take away was that doing good work in this world means doing ones homework.   

Unfortunately, the quality of this image (from Google images) is low.  I had blown up my copy from David Levering Lewis' biography of DuBois, which I have since given to a friend.  I'll try to replace this image soon with a better copy.  

Here's another:

In my classrooms I try to have less portraits of historical characters, and more dynamic pictures that show them involved in their life, pictures that reveal their character and circumstances.  I imagine that these images, by offering a glimpse into Dubois' world, bring DuBois more to life for students than the portraits with inspirational quotes I see in so many classrooms, such as the one below.  Not that that there's anything wrong with inspirational quotes :)

Adolescent Spirituality

I have been deeply moved by the spirituality of adolescents since I began working with them five years ago.  Since that time, I have clearly seen spiritual needs in every single one of the hundreds of teens I have worked with, and have attempted to care for those needs by meeting students fully in the moment and writing curricula for them that supports meaningful intellectual development.    

In this article I'll describe what I mean by spirituality, what I have seen in students that I consider to be spiritual, and how I attempt to care for my students as spiritual beings.  However, I'll begin by reviewing the current state of research on the psychology of adolescent spirituality, as summarized in a fifty page article in the third edition of the influential Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, published in 2009.  The overview makes it clear that there are some inadequacies in the field that are quite important to resolve. 

The psychology of adolescent spirituality, as an academic subject, is only a decade old.  I was thrilled to discover this new field while working on my Master's thesis, and imagined that I was about to encounter a revolutionary treasure trove of insights from neuroscience, sociology, psychology and religious studies that would bring the discourse on spirituality out of its current state of murkiness and grant the subject the sort of newly found academic and public respect that meditation has recently received from neuroscience.  Although I was unconcerned about finding a definition that would suit everyone, I hoped to discover a definition and a discourse that had succeeded in looking beyond cultural assumptions of spirituality, that had developed a sophisticated analysis of the relationship of spirituality and religiosity.  I imagined an academic dialogue that was exploring the physiology of spirituality, the evolutionary reasons why the human animal is spiritual, and what spirituality looked like developmentally. 

Instead, the psychology of adolescent spirituality seemed embarrassingly stuck in some old fashioned Western binaries, as if the postmodern and post-colonial revolutions never happened way back in the 70's.    This was clear to me from the very language of the article, which was filled with Protestant assumptions of the meaning and form of spirituality and religiosity. The authors were aware of the problem:

"Leaders in the field of the psychology of religion [which has deeply informed the field of adolescent spirituality]... have acknowledged that the field has been dominated by a largely Protestant-Christian orientation to date.  What is less acknowledged is that this orientation includes a tacit emphasis on dualistic metaphysics (spirit vs. nature, sacred vs. profane, soul vs. body); theistic conceptions of divinity (God as a Being); singular pathways to spiritual development (e.g., devotion to God); and specific Western cultural issues in the study of religion and spirituality."

So much for an impartial neuroscience of spirituality and looking beyond cultural assumptions...

The definitions at play also carry cultural baggage of a different sort: for example, spirituality is "a personal quest for understanding answers to ultimate questions about life, about meaning, and about relationships to the sacred or transcendent, which may (or may not) lead to or arise from the development of religious rituals and the formation of community".  This definition has benefits: it allows for spirituality to be connected to religiosity and to transcendence, but also simply to meaning.  It doesn't get trapped in the still popular idea that while religion is rooted in groups and institutions, spirituality is an individual experience: it can be either communal or individual, supported by religion or totally secular.  Not blatantly Protestant in its approach, so perhaps a good start...

However, its a rather intellectual and action-oriented understanding of spirituality; a spirituality based on solving questions, discovering meaning, and actively pursuing or questing - particularly after something ultimate, even if that ultimate is of a non-religious nature.  The definition misses something fundamental about spirituality as I understand it: human beings, at all stages of life, simply have spiritual feelings, desires, and experiences. 

Quests, searches, answers and ultimates make up only a fragment of spiritual experience.  I think that what makes most feelings, desires, and experiences spiritual is depth, closeness, and connectedness.  I like to summarize those three words as intimacy.  We experience intimacy not only with others, but with ourselves, and also with the phenomena of the world.  For example, when I was a little boy, I would go for long walks in the hills by myself.  During these walks I would often become deeply contemplative.  Getting to the top of a ridge, I would gaze out over the land, and feel incredibly connected to it.  I became much more aware of the smells around me, of the texture of the wind, of the feel of the sun.  I felt a sense of largeness, inside of me, and out in the world. 

I understand this intimacy with the world as spiritual: it doesn't involve any realization, it doesn't involve a quest, it may even be an everyday experience for kids who are raised walking the hills.  But it is profound.  It is spiritual.   It is part of being the type of animal that we are - a human.  Another example: if I give thanks for food, I realize the depth of the food, realize my intimacy with the complicated chain of biology and human labor leading to the food that keeps me healthy.  And another: if I pause before sipping my tea, I am more likely to notice the weight of the cup in my hand, the warmth of the steam, the subtleties of the taste.  And another important example from my life: if I keep a meditation practice, I will see my students more clearly, and thus more deeply.  If I fail to meditate, I may even lose my perception of the fact that they are spiritual beings, because I need to be calm and grounded if I am to see other beings clearly.  If I lose my own groundedness and self-awareness - my intimacy with myself - I also lose my intimacy with my students.         

Feelings and experiences of depth, closeness, and connectedness often arise through calmness, groundedness, awareness, presence, compassion, and love - all of which can be intentionally cultivated.  And yet, as a society we fail not only to prioritize the cultivation of intimacy, which arguably should be at the core of life, but even to understand that cultivation is possible and rather simple.  I cannot help but feel that this is partly due to the baggage that our understanding of spirituality carries with it - baggage portrayed so well by the definition of spirituality scholars of adolescent psychology are using.  

Perhaps our society is alienated from spirituality by the heavy dedication involved in questing, by the enormity of the concept of transcendence, by the otherness of the sacred.  Such a spirituality is something for the devoted few, and something, frankly, that many good people feel is just unpragmatically abstract, overly theoretical, or based in dogma.  It differs radically from the grounded simplicity of appreciating the clouds, of feeling the breath entering the body, of being mindful of ones words, of cherishing another being.  The frame of spirituality as about questing and transcendence makes it hard to discuss the everydayness of spirituality, of the spirituality of human nature, and of course, of the adolescents whom we attempt to care for.

I believe that our society is also alienated from spirituality because it is so intertwined with religiosity and religious institutions: indeed, much of the research on adolescent spirituality is an examination not of that spirituality in the everyday world, but of how religious institutions support "positive youth development".  There is little that I value more than the opportunity for youth to have meaningful discussions about ethics, to develop networks within a community, to develop intergenerational relationships, and to have spiritual role models.  These are phenomena that religious institutions thankfully provide.  However, it is a shame that they are rarely provided elsewhere, and perhaps if we understood spirituality as more of an everyday, all encompassing human phenomenon, we could begin to provide more of these resources in a non-religious setting, with absolutely no agenda to believe this or that, in a way that many people could feel comfortable engaging in.   

If adults don't help adolescents learn the true means to cultivate spirituality, adolescents will often enter a minefield: not understanding how to pursue the intimacy they so clearly desire, they may pursue depth through the intensity of drugs, closeness through sexual encounters they do not truly desire and are not ready for, connectedness through the brotherhood of gang activity.  They may numb themselves from having to feel the opposite of connection and intimacy - alienation - through playing endless video games. They require our example.  In fact, without our example, it will be quite difficult to gain their trust.  If adolescents do not feel supported in the all important endeavor of pursuing depth, closeness, and connectedness, they have every reason to turn the other way.  The desire for intimacy is at the core of adolescent life.  They are rightly suspicious of adults for having displaced this priority.

I propose to those involved in studying adolescent spirituality that spirituality is much more about the everyday desires and experiences of normal people than our society is used to considering, and that we should take the everyday desires for intimacy and experiences of it as our primary subject of study.  In studying the everyday spiritual feelings, desires, and experiences of adolescents we should: study what leads to spiritual intimacy and what blocks it, how students conceive of that intimacy,  what language they have for it, as well as what confusions, how they strive to satisfy desires for spiritual intimacy - for better or worse, and how we can help adolescents understand and truly fulfill their spiritual needs.   

I would like to close with a few stories of student spirituality.

1) My student Mohammed would lay out his prayer rug twice during the school day to pray.  A religious activity, surely, but also a spiritual one: Mohammed was calmer and more grounded after a few minutes of prayer.  He gained confidence and strength.  His rapid, rambling speech slowed down and he became more insightful.  Mohammed's prayer was a time-tested spiritual technique of stopping ones busy activity and thought, being quiet for a moment in order to check in with the self, and reconnecting with important beliefs and values that all too easily slip away. In addition, it meant a great deal to him that I enjoyed helping him explore his belief in God, and that, although with no belief in God myself, I had considered the matter deeply.  He was not used to teachers valuing that belief, which was at the core of his life. 

2) Students - especially young men lacking strong, positive male role models in their lives - often seek me out after class or school.  I keep a tea set in my classroom, and have converted a few dozen sixteen and seventeen year olds away from soda to herbal tea.  Some have been happy, healthy AP students, and others have been involved in gangs and have been living with terrible amounts of fear suppressed through aggression.  Regardless of their background, they adore the ritual.  They love the chance to slow down and become calm.  As we talk, they benefit immeasurably from getting the chance to contemplate life through our conversation, to take pauses in their thought process, to get help checking in with their emotions, and to discuss ethics.  My gang members in particular often want to discuss honor, humility, and also family.  Many of them suffer because they know they are wounding their mothers and setting a bad example for little brothers or cousins.  They discover that if they slow down and become more present - the ritual of pouring and sipping tea is a technique for doing this - that they can actually voice these emotions and become vulnerable enough to connect with what they really feel. 

3) I wrote the story of the Buddha for a group of sixth graders, and as I read it to them, they became deeply contemplative.  (See that story here).  When I read the lines where Siddhartha contemplates the meaning of death, I felt as if the students were hardly breathing.  And when I taught a lesson on how the Buddha learned to become as calm, loving, and wise as he could possibly become, one student shyly asked me, "do you have to become a Buddhist to do that?"  "No, of course not", I said. "All people can do that, no matter what their religion is.  You don't even need a religion".

To do that, all we need is the spiritual nature that is part of being this human animal.

Favorite historical pic of the day - "Women in German History"

The cover photo of Ute Frevert's book Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation.  

I would love to gather more great pictures of feminism, or of any historical subject for that matter.  If you have any favorite ones, send them my way and I'll try to post them/share them with students :)  

Fantasy Projects: Exploring the True Depths of Ancient Egypt

Jan Assmann may be the most prominent living Egyptologist.  His work shakes the foundations not only of what we think we know about ancient Egypt, but about the history of philosophy and all too easily made distinctions between philosophy and religion. When I first discovered his work during my BA in religious studies, I found it so fascinating that it almost derailed my studies of Indian religion in the colonial and modern era.  During my student teaching, I taught units on ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, I found the textbook lifeless and inaccurate.  I found myself wishing that I could have written the textbook myself, using Assmann's work not only to bring Egypt to magical and startling life, but to explore the truly beautiful, profound philosophy of Egyptian polytheism.

Jan Assman

Assmann's oeuvre provides vast resources: his Mind of Egypt presents the entire span of Egyptian civilization, contextualizing the many shifts in culture, belief systems, arts and ideas that occurred across the long span of many kingdoms, concluding with the dramatic shifts that occurred under Persian and then Greek colonization.  Textbooks I have looked at don't exactly present marvelous depictions of these cultural transitions of the sort that would provide students with opportunities to understand them.  However, the rich contextual shifts of Egyptian life could easily be written for sixth graders. 

His book The Search for God in Ancient Egypt could be used to write curricula that not only would help students actually make sense of Egyptian religion, but overcome stereotypes of polytheism as strange, primitive, or unsophisticated.  While students might marvel at the technical genius of Egyptian architecture, there is little curricula out there that succeeds in helping them understand the genius of Egyptian culture and religion.

We should work hard to change this situation, because it is not simply the understanding of ancient Egypt, but the understanding of - and the judgment of - all ancient civilizations: for all were polytheistic, as were (and are) Native Americans and the tribes and cultures across the earth that did not participate in civilizations or state religions.  We should prioritize helping students make sense of religion, so that they do not grow up judging cultures to be bizarre of inferior.

Perhaps even more than writing curricula, I have a deep desire to write stories - vividly illustrated stories that achieve what I set out for my curricula to accomplish, which is bringing the richness of academic literature to magical life for children, adolescents, and adults.  The story I would like to write more than any other would be a retelling of the story of Osiris, as informed and inspired by Assmann's Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, which offers a profound opportunity to contemplate the complicated relationships humans have to death and notions of soul and afterlife.  

Examining Prejudice in Ancient China

A few months ago I taught a week long lesson on contextualizing prejudice in ancient civilizations, with a focus on ancient China during the Han Dynasty. As part of the lesson, I wrote four character sketches portraying prejudices of rich against poor (rulers against farmers), poor against poor (farmers against mountain dwellers), and powerful against powerful (a Chinese general against his nomadic enemies, and the Xiongnu nomadic federation against the Chinese).  Knowing that students often consider farmers and peasants unintelligent - even while rooting for them - I sought to portray their keen intelligence and agency. 

For the information on the Xiongnu, I used UC Berkeley's world history textbook, "Traditions and Encounters".  Information on the farmers and mountain dwellers comes from James Scott's influential "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia", which has contributed to recent reassessments of how civilization functioned and who participated and why.  For other parts of the lesson I utilized information from the book "Enemies of Civilization", which compares prejudices in ancient China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. 

HAN DYNASTY RULER

Imagine you are one of the rulers of the Han Dynasty…

As a ruler of the Han Dynasty, you need to make sure that enough food is grown to support the cities.  Most people who live in the cities do not grow their own food.  The farms that surround the city must support the merchants, craftsmen, servants, and politicians who live there.  Because most fruits and vegetables will rot quickly, the Chinese, like other civilizations, encourage people to grow grain, which can be stored for a long time. 

Grain is also very important for the army: the army traveled long distances for long periods of time, and fruits and vegetables would rot.  Because of this, the army carried cartloads of grain wherever it went.  As the army went farther from the big cities where grain was stored, they would stop by farms to gather more grain.  When the grain was ready to be harvested, farmers always knew there was a chance of the army stopping by to take it.  This made the farmers angry and scared, but from your perspective, farmers who hid grain from the army were making the Han Dynasty weak.  They were traitors.    

There are even more reasons why, as a ruler, you insist that farmers grow grain: if people grow grain, that means they have large fields to take care of.  Because of this, farmers cannot move around freely.  People who have farms must stay in one place, and so they are easy for the government to keep track of.  If the army needs more recruits, they can always go to the farmers and force their sons into the army.  For this reason, you have people working for you who keep track of how many sons work on the farms.  They also keep track of how much grain is grown, so the government knows how much it can take to be stored in the cities, and how much can be given to the military.   

FARMER/MOUNTAIN DWELLER

Imagine that you were once a farmer in the Han Dynasty.  However, you and your community fled up into the mountains. 

You live in a village high up in the mountains in the Han Dynasty.  Generations ago, your ancestors lived down in the valleys, where the farms are.  Many of the rulers and city dwellers thought the farmers were ignorant – anyone who worked on a farm must not be very smart.   However, they also knew that the farmers were an important part of the Han Dynasty.  Everyone knew that without the farmers, the cities and military could not exist, because they depended on the farmers for food.  Even though the farmers were always afraid that the rulers or army would take away its grain, they were proud that their work made the Han Dynasty strong. 

However, you prefer to not have to worry about the government taking your grain or forcing your young men into the army.  You have chosen to give up growing large fields of crops and to live in the mountains because that way, you cannot be found, and you have freedom.  The Han dynasty cannot send the military to take your rice and your young men, because without fields of crops to care for, you can move and escape.  Also, the mountains are difficult for an army to travel in.  Where you live, there are no roads.  The military needs to follow roads, especially because they have to pull wagons full of food and supplies. 

Of course, you need food.  For tens of thousands of years before civilizations started, people had no problem getting food, and neither do you.  Instead of growing fields of rice, you spread your crops all throughout the forest.  You grow many vegetables that grow underground, such as potatoes and carrots.  These crops cannot be found.  You also hunt and gather just as people in the past did.

Many farmers hate mountain dwellers.  They call people like you uncivilized.  Farmers think that the mountain dwellers are like animals – they don’t eat grain like people should, or dress like people should, or live in the right kind of houses.  They are upset with farmers who escape into the mountains, because they cause the government to be suspicious of farmers.  However, you consider your community to be very smart: it is the farmers who are acting foolishly. 

HAN DYNASTY GENERAL

Imagine you are a general in the Han military… 

As a general, one of your tasks is to protect the Han dynasty’s frontier from invasions.  The largest threat is the nomadic Xiongnu.  Because of their superior horseback riding, they are difficult to catch.  Even worse, however, is that they are nomadic.  This means that they are always on the move.  Because they live by herding sheep over thousands of square miles, you never know where they will be.  Because of this, they are very hard to control: this makes you angry, and causes you to despise them even more. 

The Xiongnu frustrate you.  Like many Chinese of the Han period, you believe they are everything the Chinese are not.  In fact, you think they are like animals: they move about like the animals, going wherever they please.  They do not have permanent homes.  Unlike decent people, they do not farm.  Instead, they mostly eat meat.  They even look like animals because they wear the skins and furs of animals: civilized people like the Chinese wore silk, or if they are poor, clothes made of plant fibers.  Some people even say that they honor only the young strong warriors, and despise their elders who have grown weak.  From your perspective, they are truly uncivilized.

XIONGNU NOMAD 

Imagine you are a member of the Xiongnu…

By the time of the Han Dynasty, your people have been living a nomadic life in central and northern Asia for a thousand years.  This land is known as the steppes – a word that means a dry grassland or prairie.  Because the steppes are difficult to farm on, your culture relies on herding animals across the plains, and on long distance trade.  Many people rely on the Xiongnu and other nomads to bring their trade across the long stretches of dry land in between China and other civilizations.  

Your people have been in conflict with the Chinese since the period of the Warring States, when Chinese states began moving into your steppe land to graze their horses.  They built massive walls to show that it was now their territory.  In response, the many different nomadic tribes became united under the Xiongnu.  Soon, the armies of the Han dynasty could not beat the Xiongnu, and the Chinese were forced to send them gifts of gold, silk, and even Han princesses in order to keep the peace.  Not only this, but the Chinese emperor agreed to recognize the leader of the Xiongnu as his equal – they even called each other “brother.”  Despite the fact that your people are powerful, the Chinese consider you uncivilized.

Fantasy Projects: Writing Curricula Based on the Oxford History of the United States

I have many "fantasy projects" - projects that I would love to engage in given sufficient time and resources.  The first would be re-reading the Oxford History of the United States, and using that resource to write tightly but thoroughly contextualized two page essays on major questions in US history.  The Oxford History, although vast in scope and rigorous in scholarship, is also highly readable, extremely thoughtful, greatly respected... and contains essential contextual information for understanding history that is largely unavailable at the secondary school level.  

In a nutshell, I believe I can take twenty pages of rich contextual information from the Oxford History and re-write it in two enticing pages, at a secondary school level, in a way that few other resources have accomplished. 

I imagine it would take me a month to read and take notes on each volume, and another month to write perhaps twenty two page essays that would help students (and teachers) make sense of history.  Since I have the summer ahead of me, I've decided to test this timetable and to see what product I can create.  I've just started reading Empire of Liberty, and believe I'll be able to start publishing some prototype essays here in mid-July.  

Provocative example questions from the post-revolutionary era that Empire covers include: Why could only men with property vote?  Why did so many founding fathers own slaves?  How did the Revolution weaken slavery, and why was it subsequently reborn with a vengeance?  How could the revolutionaries talk of independence while supporting slavery?  The answers to these questions require analyzing historical contexts in which notions of property and liberty differ dramatically from our own.   Students and adults jump to assumptions about these questions all the time, reading their present understandings of these subjects into the past, in a psychological phenomena known as presentism. (I hope to post an essay on the subject of presentism here soon). 

These essays would be able to stand alone, allowing for easy integration into curricula, but would also link together, creating a cohesive whole.  They would offer the rich scholarship of the Oxford History - lots of contextualization, rich descriptions of causality - and translate that richness into a shortened version accessible to sixteen year old students.

(For a samples of how I've made academic research available in secondary school texts, see my posts Contextualizing the Buddhas Life, and Examining Prejudice in Ancient China, which were written for sixth graders.)  

A Different Take on "People's History"

When someone (at least my age group) first hears that I'm a history teacher, their most common response is, "That's great!  Do you teach a people's history"?  I start by saying, "Oh yes!  Have you also read Zinn?"  But if they really want to chat about it, I give a longer and more critical answer: "I'm deeply committed to helping students understand oppression.  But honestly, I don't use Zinn.  His painting of history is too black and white, and I'm trying to help my students understand complexity.  My take on "people's history" is not Zinn's.  I don't demonize the powerful or romanticize the people like he does.  I help students think about context, which I think is critical for understanding power, in a way that he fails to do.  To me a true peoples history involves helping students understand why all people have thought, felt, and acted as they have, and Howard Zinn doesn't serve this purpose". 

Michael Kazin, a historian of populism and a leftist, writes that Zinn is "bad history... Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable... pitting 99% of the people against a conspiratorial elite of 1% - a premise better suited to a conspiracy mongers website than to a work of scholarship".  A harsh indictment, but the truth is, I agree with Kazin.  I would probably only use Zinn in the same way I use some bad textbooks: I would ask students to compare his version of an event to a more contextualized, less ideologically driven version, ask them to determine which sources are more trustworthy and why, and perhaps have them rewrite some passages.   

Zinn, in seeking to highlight oppression, created a history of good and bad which, in its radical oversimplification and misrepresentation, failed to actually help people understand why oppression existed and how it functioned.  Zinn can tell our students that oppression happened, and that resistance also happened.  But he can't help our students understand what we're trying to help them understand: why and how did historical events occur, including oppression and resistance?  What historical contexts allowed for harmful ethics to evolve?  Where did oppressive ideas come from, and why have they made sense, not only to elites, but to the people as well?  

Zinn's history also homogenizes social groups.  We know from educational psychology that multicultural education for young children leads them to develop stereotypic thinking if the stories they read homogenize groups of people, even if that homogenization is designed to highlight cultural beauty.  Social groups - be they slave owners or abolitionists - need to be portrayed in their complexity not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but for psychological and societal health.  We aren't helping students become good citizens who can meaningfully navigate and contribute to society if they learn to homogenize republicans and democrats, the rich and the poor, or any other group. The stark contrast of good and bad in Zinn is not only bad history, it leads to bad historical thinking, and perhaps even enforces the stereotypic thinking that we're trying to diminish in our students.  

A true peoples history requires rich and realistic portrayals of social heterogeneity rather than homogenization.  It also requires contextualization and providing students with the historical thinking skills to analyze context.  Contextualization is dual: there is the contextualization of the moment - what is happening directly around people that shapes their thoughts and actions - and the deeper contextualization that involves delving into historical causality: what historical contexts have shaped the societies and cultures that produce individuals?  This is the work of historians, but Zinn doesn't provide such work. 

Peter Seixas, a renowned scholar of historical thinking, writes that "Ironically, during the same period of time that Zinn's book went through five printings, academic historiography was undergoing a major shift in North America, to include diverse subaltern populations: women, workers, and ethnic and national minorities".  Academically respected historians today do not write the consensus, nation building history of the 1950's that Zinn heroically and passionately fought to debunk: as Daniel Rodgers writes in his profound Age of Fracture, which documents the radical intellectual shifts during the last quarter of the 20th century, they're more likely to be caught in "the long shadow of Michel Foucault".  (As am I...)

Historians of the United States today routinely write stunning histories of labor.  They write about how historical forces shape sexuality and gender roles.  We have recently seen a revolution on the history of emotion, and of the body.  Since the invasion of Iraq, historians have completely re-evaluated their notions of empire and have reframed the history of the US as one of empire building: this is not the far-leftist work of Hardt and Negri so popular seven years ago, but the trend of scholars at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard.  (See Julian Go's Patterns of Empire; Charles Maier's Among Empires, and the stunning book Comanche Empire, which details the workings of a Native American empire so different from Western empires that until now scholars have had trouble even recognizing it as such).  

As a teacher of history, I am also a student of history.  I am a student of understanding the people - all of them, through a deep analysis of the historical contexts that shaped them.  This is my understanding of a true peoples history, and as a teacher, my task is to provide students with the skills and the content that will allow them to thoughtfully consider the people in their many manifestations.