Teaching Historical Causality, Analyzing Similarities and Differences

-->As history teachers we are always trying to help students engage with history.  One of the basic ways we do this is by connecting the past to the present, either through analyzing causality – how past events shaped their own world – or through examining similarities between past worlds and their own experience.

These can grow into quite sophisticated forms of thinking.  Regarding historical causality, the main task is to help students gain more complex understandings of the causes of historical events.  Most high school students I’ve worked with have a tendency to say, “this caused that”: to look for a single causal factor for an event.  When I’ve worked with sixth graders, whenever we look at an important event I give them three causes to find, and then ask which are the most important.  (The major difficulty is that textbooks usually don't make the multiple causes of historical events clear enough to actually analyze, so I've often written my own material.) If sixth graders do a few rounds of looking for multiple causes, they stop assuming that historical events have one cause and they automatically look for multiple causes.  Additional layers of complexity can be added over time, such as increasing the level of abstraction, starting with the causes of events and moving to the causes of ideas, beliefs, and emotions; and incorporating the analysis of evidence: which causes can we be the most sure about?  By the time students get to high school, their ability to analyze historical causality should be fairly complex.

Recognizing similarity is also a very sophisticated task, because similarity is not sameness: rather, an analysis of similarity will entail understanding differences, and vice-versa.  I watch adults mistake cross-cultural similarities for sameness all the time: noticing a similarity, they often end up reading their own culture onto someone elses, failing to notice subtle but important differences.  Different cultures that students examine in history class will have similar notions, for example, of freedom or of justice and injustice, but they will never be quite the same.  Sometimes radical differences get misinterpreted as similarites.  For example, earlier today I was reading about how Zen became popular in the west partly because westerners understood the radical autonomy, anti-authoritarian behavior, and complete self-assuredness of Zen monks as the epitome of freedom.  However, the similarity was based on western notions of freedom that didn’t exist in Japan, where deference and freedom were linked in ways that alluded western perception.  Knowing nothing of Japanese notions of freedom, westerners unknowlingly read their own ideas onto another culture and created their own idea of Zen.  Ultimately, an analysis of what freedom would mean to a westerner versus a zen monk would entail a sophisticated ability to think about the forces that shape culture and about the ways that cultures interpret one another.  When we think of analyzing similarity and difference in this light, it becomes clear that at more sophisticated levels, there are many skills involved, and that these skills provide great cultural insight... including insight into ones own culture, and thus ones own self. 

As with similarity, when people see difference they often only see difference.  But a sophisticated way of perceiving difference entails understanding similarity.  These skills are enormously important, because if we see only one or the other, we become involved in stereotypic or even prejudicial thinking.  The analysis of similarity and difference is thus a form of critical thinking that reduces stereotypic thought and facilitates empathy.

Part of our task as history teachers involves creating lessons that help our students gain more sophisticated ways of analyzing historical causality and examining similarities and differences.  This requires understanding what these skills look like at higher and lower levels of sophistication.  If I begin the year with a group of sixth graders by teaching them to always look for multiple causes of historical events, and they quickly learn this basic habit, what next?  Where should they be by the end of the year?  By the end of the year after that?  

I was thinking about all this because last night I began writing a post on the foundations of the ancient Egyptian state and its accompanying mythology.  The post is actually my first step in writing a sixth grade unit on ancient Egypt.  Halfway through writing the post, I found myself thinking of the skills I wanted the unit to facilitate, and so ended up writing this instead :)

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.