Recently, after a long day of teaching three classes on Reconstruction in a row, I started thinking about my students’ emotional well being. It is not too surprising that I was something of an emotional wreck that day, but what caught my attention was that a few students seemed more dour than usual. Maybe it was me putting thoughts into their heads, as I often do, but I can swear that when they all shuffled out of class a sense of grim foreboding loomed over them—and me.
The next lecture was entitled “Redemption and Jim Crow”: enough said, right? Even though I tried to finish the lecture on a positive note with a tribute to Ida B. Wells, there was something hanging in the air after class that still felt too depressing for a group of 18 year-old freshmen. It was, oddly enough, when I went back to my own work on my book, that I finally realized what was troubling me. It was the narrative trajectories I keep employing. Virtually all of them start on a positive note and end on a somber one.
From lectures about New England and Virginia during the late seventeenth century, through lectures on the American Revolution, to lectures on Redemption and Jim Crow, they all started with opportunities lost and ended with the retrenchment of power structures of one variety or another to the detriment of the majority. The seventeenth century lectures each follow the narrative trajectory of Jill Lepore’s The Name of War and Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, respectively. Each examine midcentury trends towards frustrating the racial divide, only to then have racial categories redrawn and hardened during and as a response to the late century rebellions, King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion, respectively.
My American Revolution lectures follow the trajectory of two books, each in its own way offering a sense of tragedy. Ray Raphael’s The First American Revolution casts the rebellion in the 1774-1775 Massachusetts back country as the height of the people’s revolution, which was then co-opted by the Continental Congress. Meanwhile my Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause-inspired lecture shows how despite serious language regarding human rights that paid tribute to emancipatory causes, the Revolutionary War, as opposed to the American Revolution, continued and reinforced a long American history of race baiting. In short, the new nation was galvanized around white supremacy.
Similarly, my Redemption lecture begins with Populism, suggesting that the 1880s was a decade in which the cause of the South was not yet fully aligned with Redemption. Populism, and the Farmers Alliance before it, redrew the battle lines in the South and in the West in ways that opened up opportunities for cross racial and cross lower-class solidarity. However, those were again shattered by a combination of strategies that included co-optation of the Farmer’s Alliance and the Populist Party by traditional partisan politics, and of course an onslaught of race-baiting.
Looking through my lectures I tried to find different trajectories, and did find a few. It might be my imagination, but I do believe that the students responded well when I opted for more uplifting narratives. The lecture that stood out most in my mind was the lecture about the making of the separate spheres ideology during the antebellum period. I could have taken the classic tragedy route, heeding for instance Rosemarie Zagarri’s great book Revolutionary Backlash, which follows the demise of public women in American society after a brief post-Revolutionary period of empowerment. Instead however, I moved the goal posts a bit; I started with the creation of the separate spheres that limited women’s public influence in the early republic era, but then explain the reform movements of the antebellum period as a savvy move by women to extend their reach into public life under the cover of moral reform. This, I think—or rather hope—led to a sense of satisfaction that reverberated through the class room.
Since in the past we have discussed here on the blog how historians are stuck with the narrative format as our main tool, I figured it might also prove useful to extend such a discussion to thinking how that resonates with our students. I thought to offer my preliminary thoughts in hope of getting some ideas floating. I’d like to open things up to see if others have had similar experiences, and if so what they have come to think about such problems and how to deal with the narrative trajectories they employ.
Fair warning: I have no patience for any attempt to make this a reactionary Gordon Wood-ian type platform that spews tired tropes that question the significance of diversity or that view history classes as a means to cultivate a self-satisfactory feeling of nationalist fuzz. I am also not interested in any reactionary sentiments about how students these days are coddled with trigger warnings. I’m very eager however to hear genuine thoughts about how employing narrative structures intersect with pedagogical goals and how both, in turn, might carry psychological ramifications that we should—or should not—want to take stock of.
3 Thoughts on this Post
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Eran, I love the post, but I am a little surprised at the last paragraph. [Am writing this as a regular commenter, not as blog editor.] I guess there’s nothing wrong with a blogger signaling to readers the direction you hope discussion will / won’t go, or what kind of comments would be most helpful for you in answering the question posed. However [putting my blog editor hat back on for a second], as long as a comment doesn’t violate our comment policy, it’s an acceptable contribution. At the same time, [taking off blog editor hat and putting on my person-perpetually-concerned-about-mutual-respect-and-care hat], if an author has noted, “This is really not the kind of input I’m interested in,” and someone decides to offer that input anyhow, that would be a bit of a chest-thumping move. That said, [back to plain old blog commenter, not making official editorial pronouncements], your comment terms and conditions here at the end read less pre-emptive than provocative. In fairness, we should expect our intentional provocations to engender some response!
In terms of your trajectory issue, I have taught about the separate spheres as you mention above, emphasizing the enlargement of women’s public life through the moral reform movements. (But I teach the moral reform movements as one of a number of responses — alongside utopian communities, millenarianism, etc — to the almost apocalyptic dislocations unleashed by the market revolution and first industrial revolution.) I teach the Second Great Awakening in a sort of Nathan Hatch-esque way, but also as a further development in the long empiricist turn.
Honestly, though, it’s a challenge to teach either to or from Civil War/Reconstruction in Texas without being the bearer of bad news to all of my students in one way or another — either through giving them the straight dope on how it all went down, which they’ve never heard before, or letting them know some of the directions things could have gone, or kept going in, if the political will had moved in different directions.
My overall narrative trajectory for the survey isn’t whiggish, but it isn’t a declension narrative either. I kind of try to emphasize the gulf between stated ideals and actual practice, and treat U.S. history as a call to my students to rise to the occasion, because the future isn’t fixed or predetermined, and if things are going to be different/better, they must throw their weight behind the labor of bringing about change (always being aware that no one can foresee the eventual consequences of current choices).
Not sure that helps. But I do think about not leaving my students at the low point of the story at crucial times. So, for example, it sometimes happens that I teach the Civil War right before Thanksgiving, and Reconstruction afterward. So I end the Civil War with the surrender of Lee — I leave the assassination of Lincoln for after Thanksgiving, because I don’t like to send students to vacation under that additional cloud. (Teaching the Civil War via Lincoln’s farming of it in the Second Inaugural is heavy enough!)
Thanks L.D.,
While this last paragraph might have come off as provocative, I thought it would be legitimate to ensure that no one misunderstands what I’m trying to say here. I thought of it as more of an explicit cue as to what I meant this post to be about. I just really didn’t want to have to deal with that can of worms here. I understand your qualms about it though, especially given the multiplicity of hats you wear! : )
As for the trajectory discussion, I would never really entertain teaching Reconstruction and Redemption as anything other than tragic, especially in the South, but what about teaching the Civil War as an heroic moment? I usually talk about both as a human tragedy and as the successful project of Black folks to free themselves, but I’ve been lately thinking that maybe I should paint it in more positive terms as the culmination of abolitionism and the real American Revolution.
This is great, Eran. I decided to write a response here. It’s long enough that I’ll just provide the link.