National History Day and American educational reform

‘Tis the season for National History Day. As with Christmas, National History Day (NHD or simply History Day) refers more to a span of weeks than to a particular calendar date; much as when one speaks of “the playoffs” in sports, NHD names a series of events. As you read this piece, over half a million secondary school students in thousands of schools across the country are writing essays, editing documentaries, performing skits, launching Websites, and mounting table-top exhibitions. Students will gather for regional competitions, typically held in late March. Winners will advance to the state level later this spring. And a lucky few will get the chance to go to the national contest in mid-June. While many of their peers will be enduring long lectures or rote skill-and-drill instruction of the kind engendered by standardized tests, these kids will actually be doing history. And what better way to learn than to do? In some cases, they will be doing while enduring those lectures and taking those tests, testifying to their commitment to what my colleague Andy Meyers, a longtime fixture of the NHD scene, has dubbed “varsity academics.”

National History Day was the brainchild of Case Western University professor David Van Tassel (1928-2000), a pioneer in the field of public history. An intellectual historian also known in the academy for his work in the field of aging, he became interested in history as practiced outside the academy. And this interest, in turn, led to a desire to bring the knowledge and talents of local amateur historians to larger audiences. To achieve this, Van Tassel developed a series of projects, among them an encyclopedia of Cleveland. But Van Tassel was not satisfied with simply unearthing little recognized historical talent. He believed the nation had a responsibility to foster historical interest and that it should begin doing so in the public school system. Rather than simply try to reshape existing curricula, Van Tassel enlisted some colleagues, recruited some teachers, and started National History Day in 1974. The program was modeled on already wildly popular state and national science fairs and by 1980 had achieved national recognition. Today the NHD program is based at the University of Maryland at College Park, with a staff of six that works with regional coordinators and volunteer judges around the country. Currently the national office is funded by nongovernment sponsors such as the History Channel, but the program is actively seeking federal funding.

Each year, National History Day events are organized around a central theme. In 2007, it was “Triumph and Tragedy”; this year, “Conflict and Compromise.” These themes are elastic enough to accommodate any number of topics, yet they encourage students to conceptualize their projects through an interpretive lens. The national organization publishes a rulebook as well as a glossy manual that describes the program, offers sample topics, and provides lesson plans and research documents for grades six through ten. But much of the charm of the event lies in its local character.

At my school, the annual History Day process begins in early fall when we distribute the assignment and support materials to all tenth-grade students who are taking the required U.S. history survey (any student can enter in any specialty, but we build the program into the standard tenth-grade curriculum). Students may work alone or in teams and can choose any number of media options. In all cases, particular emphasis is given to the use of primary sources. For example, students designing table-top exhibitions are limited to five hundred of their own words, though they may quote documents as fully as they like (advised, however, that a wall of type is not particularly inviting—storytelling in this particular medium is best done with photographs, maps, or other kinds of visual sources). All projects must include annotated bibliographies. And particular emphasis is placed not simply on offering a thesis but on explicitly framing a question of which the thesis is in effect the answer (in some of these and other parameters, we depart from the official national rules). Final drafts of the projects are due in December; in early January, faculty members gather and collaboratively assess the projects, using official contest worksheets to provide feedback.

In February, we set up a gallery in our school cafeteria—rows of video monitors, laptops for Websites or Power Point presentations, banquet tables for exhibitions, etc.—which parents can view during what we call the “History Fair,” an event that coincides with an information session on the next year’s electives. This festive event becomes a kind of community celebration, with students serving as interlocutors for the adults as they view displays on the Salem witch trials, the Seneca Falls declaration, the Massachusetts 54th regiment, as well as more contemporary topics (some of us limit projects to those covering the period prior to 1860). It is also an occasion for the relevant faculty to review all the projects on display and select those entrants we believe are most likely to fare well in the regional competition.

The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has been hosting a regional History Day competition since 1990, supported with funding from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History and the F.A.O. Schwartz Foundation, among others. The museum hosts a series of workshops for students and teachers over the course of the fall, a recruiting tool particularly directed toward under-resourced schools. According to coordinator Joanna Steinberg, about three hundred students from forty city public, private, and parochial schools participated at MCNY last year. “What I like most about National History Day is what it does for a sense of community,” she says, emphasizing the sense of family involvement the event fosters.

The event itself has the feel of a track meet. Contestants convene at different sites around the museum, appearing before judges (typically faculty at local colleges and universities) who query them on the origins and implications of their projects. Other entrants wait in the wings—an Abraham Lincoln rehearsing his justification for the suspension of habeas corpus here, a nervous student fretting over a yellow—journalism exhibition there-or chat anxiously about common friends at different schools. At the end of the day the participants gather for the awards ceremony, where the profusion of categories, levels, and special citations serves to distribute the glory widely. But first- and second-place winners in each major category also get the chance to move on to the next level.

Participation in National History Day at the state level varies widely. With the addition of Montana last year, all fifty states (and Guam as well) now compete. In New York, which has a program with a $150,000 budget, participation is growing rapidly: last year there were 25 percent more participants and a 60 percent jump in the number of schools involved, according to state coordinator Tobi Voigt. “Everybody is talking about testing, testing, testing,” she says, lamenting the overall state of history education nationally. “I’m really excited to get students involved in an academic program that favors interpretation over repetition.” New York’s competition takes place in historically rich Cooperstown. Last year for the first time, Voigt says, all the hotels were sold out. Throngs gathered at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum, and other sites around town before convening at a local high school for the awards ceremony. The surge in participation has raised the overall level of play. In years past, my school, something of a regional power, could routinely expect to send a handful of kids to the national level. Last year, we didn’t send any.

The annual competition culminates each June in College Park, where last year there were about 2400 registrants, according to Noah Shaw, technology and public affairs assistant for National History Day. In addition to a vigorous program of presentations and evaluations, the annual gathering honors outstanding educators. The event also features appearances by eminences like Ken Burns and Richard Dreyfuss, both of whom attended the 2007 event. Prizes include cash awards as well as partial scholarships to a number of universities; a full scholarship to Case Western in honor of Van Tassel is also awarded.

By this point in the program, National History Day has drifted far from its local roots. High travel costs as well as the substantial financial investment in many of the finalists’ projects give the national competition a seemingly inescapable element of class and racial bias, though it should be said that the national organization makes considerable efforts to combat the structural inequities of the U.S. education system by using state coordinators to recruit under-resourced schools, defraying the travel expenses of participants in need, and looking beyond the bells and whistles that sometimes adorn projects. Despite these efforts, however, the very degree to which the apt term “varsity academics” captures the spirit of History Day also suggests a sense of competition, even exclusion. And the spirit of competition, however laudable in some respects, does raise questions about the utility, even possibility, of establishing objective parameters for historical excellence.

Yet to dismiss History Day as a mere educational gimmick would be a mistake. As with any decent varsity athletic program, an imperative of participation coexists alongside one of competition. At its best, History Day is genuinely inclusive. In October, I attended a reception at MCNY for last year’s winners and listened to a student panel of remarkable diversity describe the role the program had played in their lives. One student spoke of the sheer thrill of going to a museum for the regional event, her excitement finally conquering the powerful anxiety that accompanied her all day. Another described conversations about history that strayed far beyond the task at hand as she and her collaborators worked on their project after school (in this regard, she was reminiscent of a student of mine, whose exhibit on the presidential election of 1876 became a vehicle for what he jocularly termed “male bonding” during the elaborate construction of the exhibit). A third spoke of meeting up with his teacher on weekends, his scholastic experience spilling beyond the confines of his school and workweek. That teacher, who had addressed the audience earlier in the event, described her own excitement as she told her department chair she was going to attend an organizational meeting for History Day, departing hastily before there could be any effort to stop her.

Other students related research discoveries—and the discovery that research itself could be gratifying. In 2007, one student at my school won first place in individual documentary for his film on the Negro Baseball leagues (the triumph was integration; the tragedy was the collapse of an entrepreneurial African American sporting culture and the eventual disappearance of African Americans themselves as players and fans of the game). He began his research for the film, not surprisingly, at the New York Public Library. Before long, however, he gravitated toward the Schomburg Library in Harlem, a journey to another world that led him to a treasure trove of images, music, and words. Like many students, he had a fair amount of technical savvy. Being able to tap such skills, or to leverage alternative learning styles, is one of the great strengths of the program.

Cathy Gorn, a former student of David Van Tassel and current director of National History Day, emphasizes the degree to which the program fosters good pedagogical practice. As she explained in a 1998 piece in The History Teacher, “NHD is not a secondary school version of Trivial Pursuit. It is not a ‘bee’ type of competition in which students memorize information that they regurgitate in response to questions. Rather, it requires that they thoroughly and deliberately examine the world of the past through direct contact with original materials including documents, photographs, films, historical buildings, newspapers, and oral history interviews with those who experienced history firsthand. In the process, students study—not memorize—a topic in depth.” One of the more impressive dimensions of the process is the judging; both students and judges often acquit themselves with great insight and sensitivity, with a spirit of exchange that resembles a good orals examination or dissertation defense.

Yet for precisely these reasons—the demand for substantial personal assessment and the fostering of critical skills that can’t necessarily be quantified—National History Day is unlikely to displace standard history curricula or the skill-and-drill mentality that has only intensified in the age of No Child Left Behind. Still, those of us who participate in NHD know: this works. And despite the manifold obstacles that get thrown in their way, thousands of teachers in schools around the country manage to find a way to squeeze it in. And if, for whatever reason, things don’t work out now, well, I’ll say what I always say at the end of the baseball or football season: there’s always next year.

For more information on National History Day, see the organization’s Website.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, where he serves on the board of trustees. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003) and Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumphs, recently published by Palgrave Macmillan, among other books.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

In 1795, fourteen years after Catalonian and Spanish Franciscans founded Mission San Gabriel, Toypurina, a sorceress who had remained outside the mission system, led the Gabrieleños (as the Spanish came to call the Indian peoples in and near the mission) against the Spanish soldiers and priests. At the inquest after her capture, Toypurina stated that she commanded a chief to attack, “for I hate the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil . . . for trespassing on the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains.”  The inquest said that Nicolas José, the neophyte within the mission who convinced Toypurina of the necessity of killing the interlopers, desired the extinction of the padres and Corporal Verdugo because they disallowed him his “heathen dances and abuses.”  During the night of October 25, 1785, a band of Indians from six local villages entered the compound, but failed in their mission because Toypurina’s special powers failed to kill the padres as planned.  Corporal Verdugo of the command discovered the plot; Governor Pedro Fages dispatched in irons the Indian headmen and Nicolas José to the presidio at San Diego and released the others with twenty lashes; and Toypurina suffered banishment to Mission San Carlos in the north.

Events like these shook the missionaries’ faith in the Indians’ ability to fulfill their grand aspiration of communal society based on faith in the One True God. There were usually two soldiers stationed at the mission for protection, but they didn’t make matters easier for the padres. Some soldiers virtuously married Indian women, but the father president of the missions, Junípero Serra, remonstrated to the first governor, Felipe de Neve, in 1780:  “We have positive proof that their (the San Gabriel mission Indian) alcalde, Nicolás, was supplying women to as many soldiers as asked for them.” These soldiers carried venereal diseases. The spread of the disease throughout the Indian population produced the physical and spiritual degeneration of the mission neophytes. The situation of “so many sick Indians,” as Padre Zalvidea of San Gabriel put it to the governor in 1832, was no less than utterly tragic. Prefect Mariano Payeras, described the situation in 1819:

The Missions of San Gabriel, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Rey have built chapels in their hospitals, in order to administer the sacraments there to the sick more conveniently. I say hospitals, because, as the Fathers observed that the majority of the Indians were dying exceedingly fast from dysentery and the ‘gálico,’ they took energetic steps to arrest the rapid spread of such a pernicious malady by erecting in many of them (missions) said hospitals in proportion to their knowledge and means, and also by procuring such alleviation as was available. In spite of all this, we see with sorrow that the fruit does not correspond to our hopes.

The Spanish priests, moreover, had not figured any way to deal with all the fleas.

It wasn’t just that the soldiers corrupted the priests’ earnest efforts, but the reluctance of the natives to give up their life ways–the fact that they were not blank slates upon which to inscribe the Word of God–doomed the missions. Along the few rivers running through the great basin that would become Los Angeles lived the Tongva, the Shoshonean-speaking, native people. Their largest rancherías–most provided home to fifty to one hundred people–grouped along what the Spanish first called el Río de los Temblores (the River of the Earthquakes), while numerous others lived scattered from the mountains to the sea. To eat they gathered acorns and grasshoppers and snared small animals with superb dexterity. They moved, from the valleys to foothills as the weather suggested, and as they departed they torched their round huts, which inevitably became infested with fleas. They fought a lot too, with each other and with their neighbors, the Chumash, who lived north of Topa-nga, and the Ajachmen to the south. What little we know of these peoples’ lives has come in the form of the artifacts that bulldozers have uncovered in the great metropolis’s implacable building of freeways, houses, and offices.

Almost impossible to exhume is what was most important to them–the Tongva spirit world. One spirit predominated, known as both Chinigchinich and Qua-o-ar, but many smaller spirits, unique to the place, animated the material world and were associated with the weather, animals, plants, and locales. The peoples’ shamans could journey into that spirit world to heal afflictions of the body and soul, but so too could everyday people when they powdered and drank the root of the wicked and transcendent jimson weed.

While intrepid Spanish explorers (Juan Cabrillo in 1542 and Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602-03) had audaciously claimed all of Alta California for the Crown, it was not until 1771 that storms that had brewed in far away places would descend on the people of such villages as Yang-na, Cahueg-na, and Asucsag-na. From the College of San Fernando near Mexico City would come priests carrying the Word of that awesome and jealous God first to the natives way to the south, then to the Kumeyaay in 1769 (San Diego), and two years later to the Tongva at the river to which the friars would give the same name as the mission the friars would establish there,San Gabriel. Padre Junípero Serra, the first and most famous of the father presidents of the California missions, brought the Word from Catalan-speaking Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. He envisioned that from these people whom he called salvages could be created a most perfect society. Once rid of their devilish heathenism, and compelled–by the whip, if necessary–to confine sex to Christian marriage and labor to European-style farming, the newly Christianized natives would unite as one body in the church: imagine God as the head, the church as the torso, and the newly illuminated believers as the legs and arms, and then how all would be joined via the sacred ritual of Holy Communion.

Father Jose Maria Zalvidea, the outstanding priest at San Gabriel, built San Gabriel into what was called from that time on “the Pride of the Missions.” Father Zalvidea was so earnest a fisherman of souls that he learned the Gabrieleño language and crossed mountains to visit their villages.  In a brief diary of 1806 he related one such trip to “the village of Talihuilimit where I baptized 3 old women, the1st of sixty years (and) who had lost the use of one of her legs.” Father Zalvidea had compassion for her and believed in the equality of souls: “To her I gave the name María Magdalena.” The complexity of this priest, though, emerges in the recollection of an Indian, Julio César, who “served him as a chorister.” He told how he “was a very good man, but was . . . very ill . . . He struggled constantly with the devil, whom he accused of threatening him.  In order to overcome the devil he constantly flogged himself, wore hair-cloth, drove nails into his feet, and, in short, tormented himself in the cruelest manner.” Such physical penance, understood in part as sharing the Savior’s pain upon the cross, was not uncommon amongst the devout. Padre Serra chastised himself with a whip, too.

While Franciscan priests struggled to Christianize the native people at the San Gabriel mission, a competing idea of civil society–that people could unite through bonds of property, law, and citizenship–came to southern California in the baggage of the first two governors, Felipe de Neve (1775-82) and the former military comandante Pedro Fages (1782-91). These forceful men feuded incessantly with Padre Serra and then the later Franciscan leaders. In part their conflicts derived over who should control the newfound bounty of Alta California and in part over these great ideas of what should organize society and what the future of New Spain (Mexico and the former provinces in the present-day United States) should look like: religious communities or secular, civil towns. To further his conception Neve ordered the founding of two pueblos, one at San Jose in 1777 and the other in 1781 along the Río Porciúncula, where the old village of Yanga-na had been, nuestra Señora de los Angeles. The Mission Road (paved today and tenanted with mostly Asian shopettes) connected the pueblo named for the Queen of the Angels with the mission named for the archangel who bore the good news to Mary that she would bear the Son of God. The rancor would increase between those associated with the vision of a civil and secular Los Angeles and those who would see its future in terms of spiritual utopia.

Indeed, it was as if proponents of these two great ideas–of the spiritual and secular societies–had found a barren place where their visions could be played out and the aboriginals’ nondescript existence could be replaced with something sublime. On the side of civil society Governor Neve issued a reglamento in 1779 directing the founding of pueblos (towns). In it he codified the proper ordering of a town regarding house lots, pasturage, a proper plaza, and how “the settlers shall nominate by and from themselves the public officials that shall have been arranged for.” It was with these ideas in mind that Pedro Fages suggested that the area along the Río Porciúncula “offers a hospitable place for some Spanish families to join together as neighbors.” Eleven families who had journeyed from the interior of Mexico marched from the Mission San Gabriel on September 4, 1781, to the site the governor had selected. There are divergent stories of the ceremony which Neve conducted, but we do know that the mission fathers blessed the new pobladores and that they were a mix of mestizos, mulattos, and Indians, though one claimed to be Spanish. With pasturage, cows, and seed they were to be independent economically and politically. Indeed each patriarch described himself in the town records as “queda avezindado en el Pueblo.”  Avecindarse means “to join as neighbors,” and this is the word that helps us understand the fundamental social relation in the new pueblo de los Angeles. And there the settlers proceeded to do with the Indians as the rest of Spanish America so famously did–they worked them, corrupted them, and married with them.

In 1784, the Rosas brothers of el pueblo de los Angeles, Carlos and Máximo who were of Indian and mulatto descent, both married gentile Indian women (who had to be baptized for the occasion.) The two women of Yanga-na and Jajambit rancheras were both probably familiar with pueblo life. In 1796 another Rosas married a neophyte from San Gabriel, as had a number of other pobladores. Those few soldiers from Santa Barbara and San Juan Capistrano who married Indian women, as Spanish policy encouraged, mostly moved to Los Angeles before the turn of the century. After forty years of missionization, a very few Indians were selected to leave, marry other “nuevos cristianos,” and join the pueblo.

On and on went the diatribes of the friars about “the residents [who] are a group of laggards . . . in those pueblos without priests.” Imagine the righteous indignation when Dona Eulalia Callis, the wife of the archenemy of the missions, Governor Pedro Fages, furiously and publicly sued her husband for divorce, charging in 1785 “that I found my husband physically on top of one his servants, a Yuma Indian girl,” an event known to have been common for the governor, pobladores, and soldiers. As Padre Zalvidea fumed from San Gabriel about Los Angeles in 1816, “That [pursuit] to which everyone dedicates himself is to go about on horseback, put in grapevines, hiring a few gentiles for this purpose, teach them to get drunk, and then take jars of aguardiente [“firewater” or brandy] to Christian Indians.”

We see emerging in Los Angeles what happened to so many Indians who did not die or whom Europeanization did not sweep into the dustbin of history. They became Mexican culture. Their children would be essentially Hispano-Americano, neither Indian nor Iberian in culture but a hybrid, a mestizo. This was the great idea that, out of the wreckage of Spanish imperialism to which the Catholic Church had attached itself, came from the variously sanctified and base mixings of the Americas: the stunning idea that people were not one thing or the other, nor even some cross between two civilizations, but some new mestizaje, some new way of being altogether. This mixture has been one of the great tensions–sometimes creative, sometimes confusing–in Los Angeles and the other great Latin American cities of the New World.

This now-great metropolitan center of Los Angeles has its genesis in the religious and the civil, the sacred and the profane, but its growth and troubles and strengths have been about the issues associated with mixing. In this place where God and Church once dictated authority in the mission and Holy Communion bound neophyte and Christian together, where neighbors (vecinos) had voluntarily entered into a civil arrangement in the cause of settling the place for the Crown and for production of subsistence, there has been at once conflict and accommodation, and separation and mixing. Thus it was that along one river did the vision of a society united by the One True God in the Mission San Gabriel contend with the town only a few leagues distant along another river, one motivated by the vision of an enlightened civil society. Some readers might want to know that, while the two rivers flow separately to the sea, the two places quickly and unalterably mixed into a world famous city, the very one that arguably portends our urban future.

Further Reading:  Because Los Angeles history has always been so fractious–a historiography that reflects the controversies over its founding within the Spanish Empire–the secondary sources are stunningly varied in their points of view, choices of documents, and agendas. Pro-church scholars have blamed Fages and the soldiers for the failure of the missions and the iniquity at the pueblos. Others, often for genealogical purposes, have celebrated the first “pioneers.” More recently, scholars have emphasized the victimization of the Indians by the soldiers, settlers, and the church. I will somewhat ungraciously suggest my own book, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), for a more balanced view of the Mission San Gabriel and the founding and evolution of Los Angeles, and enthusiastically recommend the wonderful collection of documents that Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Sankewicz have edited, Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (Berkeley, 2001). Each has a strong bibliography.  

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Douglas Monroy is professor of history at The Colorado College and the author of Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley, 1990), and Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley, 1999), both from the University of California Press. He is presently finishing a book called In the Footsteps of Father Serra: Essays on California, Mexico, and America.

My question was whether slavery really disappeared from national politics between the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 and the Missouri Crisis beginning in 1819.  The common wisdom was that the partisan and international fury surrounding Jefferson’s Embargo on foreign trade and the War of 1812 took slavery off the table in national politics.  I thought this national newspaper in particular would be a good place to inquire as to the truth of that historiographical consensus.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Matthew Mason is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (UNC Press, 2008).

That is the question

In 1961, when I entered junior high school in the New York City Public Schools, I was introduced to the “Do Now” activity–an individual, pencil-and-paper exercise (the sort of thing that might otherwise be done at home) at the beginning of each math class–which continued as long as I took mathematics courses. The intent was to ensure that students understood the previous lesson, correct any student misunderstandings, and remedy any deficiencies. It would also help students who had been absent and (hopefully) serve as a motivation for the class.

Today, the “Do Now” has become almost universal across the secondary school curriculum. Walk into a United States history class and you are likely to witness the class period beginning with the teacher calling students’ attention to the daily “Do Now” inscribed on the blackboard. Usually, this entails a brief reading assignment followed by several questions introducing the day’s lesson. Many teachers believe this opening activity starts the lesson off in an orderly, efficient, and productive manner, improving classroom management in the process. 

Unfortunately, the “Do Now” has been corrupted: it has been drastically altered from an effective review technique for the drill required in mathematics instruction to an introductory device that is usually, at best, an ineffective waste of instructional time. Well-meaning educators are often unwittingly sabotaging their lessons before they have a chance to get them off of the ground. Even teacher educators, supervisors, teachers’ unions, and professional organizations often embrace the “Do Now” as the gold standard for inclusion in a lesson plan.

A typical “Do Now” assigned to a heterogeneously grouped United States history class might be the following:

Answer the following questions based on the political cartoon that appears below and your knowledge of United States history.

1. Describe in detail what you see in the political cartoon.
2. Why is the turtle in the cartoon named “Ograbme?”
3. How does the political cartoon reflect the way the cartoonist feels about Thomas Jefferson’s trade policy?

The questions incorporated in this activity elicit conclusions about the cartoonist’s message. Note that the first question merely asks students to pull information from the cartoon, while the second and third questions require higher levels of thought. These three questions could ultimately lead to further questions such as:

“How does the cartoonist feel that the Jefferson embargo is affecting New England and the United States?” 

“What specific evidence in the cartoon leads you to an understanding of the opinion of the cartoonist?”

“Why do you think the Jefferson embargo became so controversial?”

“What constitutional alternatives might you use if you were a dissatisfied citizen wishing to oppose the Jefferson embargo?”

The richness of the lesson points to the problem that the history educator faces when employing a non-mathematical “Do Now” commencement activity. Because the elements of good questioning are already evident in the above referenced “Do Now,” one might wonder why these questions necessitate an opening activity at all. Most teachers assign homework in advance of the lesson. Some of these questions (question number one in particular) would be better addressed in a homework assignment, thus saving classroom time for more productive and more interactive discussion.

There are also psychological problems created with the incorporation of “Do Now” exercises. The completion of the above assignment, particularly in a heterogeneous situation, may extend far beyond the five minutes of a mathematics drill activity and could vary from five minutes for stronger students to fifteen minutes for the weakest. Weaker students may have difficulty identifying finer details in the cartoon and may become frustrated with the remaining two questions. The unintended message if the teacher then “cuts” the activity off before students have completed the task may well be that the work is really not that important (particularly if it is not being collected and graded). This, in turn, might encourage students to begin arriving late for class (when, in their view, the “real work” begins). Or it might compel them to “stretch” the activity to as great a length of time as possible or to simply (either covertly or blatantly) avoid the “Do Now” exercise entirely.

A stronger instructional opening would focus student attention upon the instructor rather than desk activity. Effective commencement activities might include a discussion of an upcoming homework assignment, a reminder about a future examination, the progress of an assigned project, or perhaps the discussion of a significant news development related to the course of study. The message given to all students is that the teacher has started the serious instruction from the opening bell (i.e., he or she is speaking) and the class must be engaged. The advantage that this practice also creates is that through a discussion clarifying class work or dealing with a contemporary situation, a dialogue is easily created where students are encouraged to participate. The discussion that begins with this opening segment will often carry over to the remainder of the period, as students have now already been engaged in conversing with the teacher (and each other) prior to the start of the formal lesson.

Students in today’s technological age require stimulation. It is, therefore, essential to follow this initial discussion with some motivation prior to the beginning of the informational portion of the lesson. A “Do Now” activity subtracts from the time needed to properly stimulate a class and adds the drawback of “dulling” the instruction by encompassing a drill that, by its very nature, is perceived as “drudge work,” done in isolation at the student’s desk.

The natural discussion that would be generated from the snapping turtle depicted in the cartoon would be sufficient to stimulate most classes through immediate discussion. With proper instructional guidance and effective questioning techniques, it offers the opportunity to get students to speak to each other. (How often do we complain that our students don’t want to participate?) The “Do Now” described earlier usually leads to a very dull reading of individual answers rather than engaging dialogue.

This is not to say, however, that there should be a complete removal of any hands-on activity during the lesson. If any new material, such as a primary document, were to be introduced as a portion of the lesson, it certainly would be desirable to give students time to read, examine, and digest the information, especially with one or two thought-provoking questions to consider. If such questions could be developed within the framework of the lesson, the teacher would be more likely to succeed. With the students now more engaged by the subject matter, they will also be more inclined to take seriously a short task over very limited time (which the teacher will now have more power to control).

The elimination of a formal, daily “Do Now” activity, in sum, opens the lesson to far greater potential for effective motivation and classroom management. It will additionally allow for a more effective placement of hands-on instruction at an appropriate point in the lesson time frame.

It is ultimately the teacher who must break out of the box and incorporate a varied yet structured approach to accomplish effective teaching in United States history. By liberating students from the tyranny of the “Do Now,” the history educator will thereby be free to create well-structured, rich lessons containing depth and meaning.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Stephen A. Shultz is the coordinator of social studies with the Rocky Point Public Schools in New York. He has authored teacher manuals in both United States and global history and has contributed to several textbooks and sourcebooks.

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to read it. As the wired world celebrates Twitter revolutions and the cultural power of the 140-character microblog, we citizens of Facebook nation have come to suspect that books will soon be a thing of the past. At a time when the concept of an author’s words sandwiched between two covers seems a little quaint, we might finally be ready to rediscover what a really powerful book can do. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that sort of book, and if Reynolds’s study of it convinces readers of anything, it will be that they have somehow underrated the cultural importance of a novel that many already believe launched America’s bloodiest war. First printed in serialized form in issues of The National Era in 1851 and 1852, UTC was quickly published as a bestselling anti-slavery novel. It has been in print ever since—outlasting slavery, its author, and any number of supposedly earth-shattering novels that are now long forgotten.

More important than its life in print, though, is how from its first appearance the novel thoroughly permeated the culture that created it. Within months of its publication it was already being adapted to the stage, and its dramatic productions, as Reynolds points out, would for many decades reach far more Americans than Stowe’s novel could. Almost instantly, its compelling characters became the subjects of everything from figurines to children’s games. Tom Mania spanned the Atlantic, surging into Britain, the Continent, and even Tsarist Russia, and the story brought a huge number of international readers to sympathetic tears. It did not, however, have the same effect on white Southerners. Rather, its most immediate result was increasing the already heightened sense of sectional divisiveness that defined the last antebellum decade in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and its strengthened Fugitive Slave Law. As more and more Northerners began to regard the actuality of American slavery through the lens of Stowe’s fiction, slaveholders and their supporters dug in their heels and clamored in protest. As the war of words heated up, it would bring new and bloody violence to Western territories and the floors of Congress, and help make the Civil War irrepressible. Stowe’s novel had attempted to fight with weapons of the heart and had not called for a war to liberate Uncle Tom and his fellow slaves. Her book helped bring on the Civil War only through a complex chain of powerful responses and reactions that the author herself could hardly have predicted, and which would continue to ripple through the postwar years right up to the present day.

By tabulating complex influences and diverse responses—from Tom shows and white supremacist narratives, to Hollywood films and televised miniseries—[Reynolds] offers readers a richly informative and entertaining work of scholarship, a generation-spanning account of American race relations, and a testament to the power of a book to change history.

This is the story Reynolds wants to tell, and he is not interested in offering merely a new literary interpretation or a sense of historical context. These are small fry; the big fish he is angling for is indicated in his rather grandiose title. He is seeking an understanding of how Stowe’s pen came to be mightier than the sword—or at least came to be the sort of pen that makes swords necessary. As he traces the cultural developments preceding, surrounding, and emanating from one of the most historically significant novels ever written, he is also explaining how literature achieves cultural power. By tabulating complex influences and diverse responses—from Tom shows and white supremacist narratives, to Hollywood films and televised miniseries—he offers readers a richly informative and entertaining work of scholarship, a generation-spanning account of American race relations, and a testament to the power of a book to change history. His book should be of special interest to scholars working in American studies and nineteenth-century literature, but its sparkling and sprawling narrative should also appeal to general readers.

Reynolds’s historical descriptions and close readings are engrossing in their own right, but they also support a thesis that helps organize and connect the book’s first and second halves. The first three chapters—on antebellum religion, popular culture, and antislavery rhetoric—address Stowe’s influences and how UTC managed to weave together many important strands of antebellum culture into a uniquely powerful novel. The second half tries to demonstrate the book’s monumental impact in three chapters that explore a wide array of adaptations, refutations, and passing references that extend into the twentieth century and beyond.

Although it may not become fully clear until nearly the book’s midpoint, Reynolds believes that the two sides of this story are indelibly connected: he argues that Stowe’s original synthesis of innumerable cultural forces led to the novel’s broad and longstanding influence. The first few chapters describe a dizzying variety of occasionally contradictory elements that Reynolds finds shaping the novel’s construction. Yet just as readers are ready to assume this cacophony of contradictory impulses have snuck in while Reynolds wasn’t looking, he gathers the squawking brood under his authorial wing. “[T]here is no single source,” Reynolds insists. “All kinds of cultural phenomena—visionary fiction, biblical narratives, pro- and anti-Catholicism, gender issues, temperance, moral reform, minstrelsy—contributed to the novel” (87-88). This range of influences, according to Reynolds, helps explain Uncle Tom‘s later significance. Although many have sought the single “key” to Uncle Tom‘s construction, Reynolds believes that “to isolate individual sources strips the novel of suggestiveness and diminishes what may be called its distributive power: its capacity for generating varied responses in different contexts” (188).

Reynolds’s resistance to root causes or uniform effects means, in practical terms, that he can range widely in both sections of the book. Influences proliferate, effects expand to include distant times and lands, and the reader gets to enjoy a decidedly lively literary history. Reynolds’s determination to emphasize the novel’s capacious dimensions also allows him to take a fuller measure of the cultural complexity that produced it. In the first of the influence chapters, for example, Reynolds focuses on religion but wisely avoids trying to wrangle the complicated spiritual shifts of the antebellum period into a pat set of categories. Thus he portrays strains of religious thought and feeling that are more varied, convoluted, and dynamic than the reader might expect. The dominant Christianity of Stowe’s time and place, Reynolds tells us, was in the midst of a profound transition away from traditional Calvinism and into new engagements with broader social activism and humanitarian passions. Because no family in America seems to have been more embroiled in this religious ferment than the Beechers, it is no surprise that the spiritual voice of UTC captures the tone, if not the content, of a surprising combination of half-abandoned orthodoxies. Reynolds shows how the disciples of a new “religion of love” dug the Puritan tradition out of its grounding in Calvinism and redirected its reformist energies toward fresh social causes. While the pragmatic social reform of the sort pursued by Harriet’s father, Lyman Beecher, is still hard at work in her novel, it competes with the passionate appeal represented by her brother, Henry, and the era’s sentimental preference for the heart rather than the head. In this unruly chapter, a range of reinterpreted dogmas and unexpected interests dishevels the image of the author of UTCas a straight-laced Christian crusader. Stowe’s staunch scriptural faith is complicated by flirtations with spiritualism and trance writing. The novel’s sense of ecstatic vision turns out to be Roman Catholic, but it arrives yoked to the distrust of religious authority that energized the anti-Catholicism of nativists and know-nothings. If this seems contradictory, so be it; as Walt Whitman, another of Reynolds’s antebellum subjects, once proclaimed, we are large, and contain multitudes.

Reynolds’s refusal to apply modern categories to the messiness of nineteenth-century culture can sometimes yield what seem like excuses for prejudice and oppression, and some readers may be bothered by his tendency to judge works according to the moral standards of their times rather than our own. But that same resistance to contemporary standards also allows him to share some rich connections that otherwise might be difficult to recognize. In a chapter on popular culture, for instance, he refuses to describe the novel’s representation of women as either subversive or conservative, but that refusal is no mere shrug. Rather, Reynolds argues that Stowe was intentionally staking out a “middle ground” between available positions on women’s roles, while arguing that she did so in Uncle Tom in order to deliver “daring ideas and images in conventional wrapping” to a mainstream audience (45). But Reynolds also points out that Stowe derived this strategy from a whole range of nineteenth-century popular literatures that profited by presenting subversive material under the mantle of respectable conventions. Reynolds catalogs titillating antebellum accounts of vice that appeared in print as crusades to reform drunkenness, crime, and Catholicism; these, he suggests, served as models for Stowe’s muted but still sensational descriptions of slavery and the treatment of women in UTC.

After the first half of his study, Reynolds moves from an effort to identify Stowe’s precedents to a celebration of the novel as an unprecedented phenomenon. The chapters on “Igniting the War,” “Tom Everywhere,” and “Tom in Modern Times” offer deep analyses of some of the more obvious and important responses to Stowe—the move toward war being chief among them. Yet there are more surprising outcomes here as well, as Reynolds traces the novel’s role as a reference point and argument partner for a vast array of cultural productions. Already in the first chapter on the novel’s results, UTCseems to have inspired the modern play, the interracial working class, Leaves of Grass, “Benito Cereno,” and (I’m fairly sure) vaudeville. While most readers would assume that the novel inspired anti-slavery agitators and Southern apologists alike in the antebellum period, later responses to the novel in the penultimate chapter figure largely in the “mammoth contests over versions of American history” that David W. Blight has found at the heart of postbellum nationalism. Later still, the book becomes a pivot point in the emergence of the American century and the Jim Crow era, and a catalyst for a slew of major national and international events including the Russian Revolution. True, when Reynolds asks the rhetorical question, “Did Uncle Tom’s Cabin save Lenin’s life?” readers will likely respond with a fairly unanimous “no” (225). Nevertheless, even such relatively unconvincing claims are suggested by fascinating evidence. Lenin’s Eliza-like escape across breaking ice to Finland was clearly too sumptuous not to include, and Reynolds’s reading of this dramatic flight may be somewhat tongue in cheek. Furthermore, the author more often than not is able to make a surprising connection stick. Reynolds copiously documents communist revolutionaries’ attachments to UTC, and finds similarly striking ties to the early leaders of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.

By the time readers reach the era in which the “Uncle Tom” epithet has become more familiar than Stowe’s character, they may be wondering whether they are still dealing in any substantial way with an antebellum novel’s influence. Is Uncle Tom merely marching in a grand cultural parade or is he leading the band? And is it still Stowe’s Uncle Tom, or someone who only happens to share his name? That question about the degree of literary influence may be only mildly disconcerting when the book arrives at Birth of a Nation in 1915, but it becomes more urgent when Tom still seems to be hovering over the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. How much, the reader may wonder, does this really have to do with Stowe’s book? Reynolds wonders about this, too, but the fact that the same question has been asked almost without ceasing since 1851 reinforces his point about UTC‘s importance. Ever since its first serialized publication, the novel has encouraged serious reflection on literature’s historical effects, a scholarly activity that, as Reynolds’s enriching explorations demonstrate once again, is worth pursuing even if the quest turns out to be endless.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

Samuel Graber is an assistant professor of Humanities and Literature in Christ College, the interdisciplinary honors college of Valparaiso University. His articles have appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and American Nineteenth Century History. He is currently revising a book about transatlantic influences on the representation and remembrance of the American Civil War.

On a chilly evening in early December 1795, seven members of New York City’s Friendly Club convened at William Dunlap’s lodging for their weekly meeting. Dunlap opened the proceedings with a reading from Helen Maria Williams’s recent publication, Letters from France, and for nearly five hours, the attendees discussed literary works and debated current issues. Satisfied that the meeting had generated a stimulating conversation, Elihu Hubbard Smith recorded in his diary that “[t]his evening has been better spent, than usual.”

In Men of Letters in the Early Republic, Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan examines why Smith, along with many other young men residing in the Northeast, attached great importance to intellectual labor and exchange. These aspiring literati, Kaplan observes, perceived that belletristic endeavors were necessary for maintaining a healthy and harmonious society. Their vision of a national community bound by practices of sociability, sensibility, and learning constituted a radical critique to the notion that formal political participation defined citizenship, and this vision offered a welcome alternative to the intense personal and ideological partisanship of post-Revolutionary America.

In her investigation of how “men of letters” articulated a civic role for themselves and whether there was “a place and a use in the new United States for these men and their different kind of citizenship” (12), the author focuses on three sets of individuals and their affiliated literary networks: Elihu Hubbard Smith and the Friendly Club in New York; Joseph Dennie of Walpole, New Hampshire, and later Philadelphia; and the trio of William Smith Shaw, Arthur Maynard Walter, and Joseph Stephens Buckminster, who formed the core of the Boston-based Anthology Society and founded the Boston Athenaeum. Kaplan notes that these groups exhibited several shared traits, most notably adherence to social elitism, masculine identity, and transatlantic modes of polite culture. Even so, she goes on to show that they each formulated different models for social and political improvement.

For Smith, a physician and prolific author of prose and poetry, the accumulation and dissemination of all types of knowledge in a convivial setting was the means by which individuals effected change and “created harmony and pursued justice” (7). The aptly named Friendly Club provided a space where Smith could collaborate with others on projects of self- and social reform. Here he could converse with colleagues of various vocations—the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, the jurist James Kent, and the dramatist William Dunlap—about the progress of the local manumission society to which they belonged, discuss Brown’s latest novel or Dunlap’s latest play, or go over innumerable other topics. Friendly Club meetings, however, were only one of many literary venues available to Smith. As Kaplan surmises, “Rather than a self-sustaining circle, the Friendly Club was a node in a network of linked and interdependent groups” (43). Smith’s involvement with the Medical Repository and his frequent conversation and correspondence with women literati further demonstrate that the network contained overlapping realms of oral, manuscript, and print communications.

Like Smith, Joseph Dennie, a reluctant lawyer, created an active literary network, producing three periodicals with varied success—the Tablet in Boston, the Farmer’s Weekly Museum in Walpole, and the Port Folio in Philadelphia—and participating in Philadelphia’s Tuesday Club. Kaplan attributes the longevity and popularity of Dennie’s Walpole paper to his ability to create a geographically extensive network of “all those who read, wrote for, found subscriptions for, extracted, or even quoted the Museum” (122). To solidify his readers as a distinct community, Dennie employed an editorial style based on intimacy and humor. Although he lambasted overt partisanship, his writings nonetheless imparted Federalist sympathies. Moreover, unlike Smith, Dennie favored “ephemeral wit” over “empirical information” as a means of exposing truth (9).

For Bostonians Joseph Stephens Buckminster, a Unitarian minister, Arthur Maynard Walter, a lawyer, and William Smith Shaw, the clerk of the District Court of Massachusetts, belles lettres provided a refuge from the mundane and at times maddening world of “commerce and politics” (11). In contrast to Smith and Dennie, these men did not pursue a national framework for their reforming efforts, developing in its stead “a more parochial vision of cultural community” (189). Relying on an impressive literary network that spanned Boston and Cambridge, the Anthology Society revived the Monthly Anthology, a local periodical, and formed the Athenaeum, a private reading room that served Boston’s mercantile elite.

Kaplan concludes that although Smith, Dennie, and the Anthologists established “lasting forums and institutions,” such as the Medical Repository, the Port Folio, and the Boston Athenaeum, they nonetheless failed in their quest to transform notions of American citizenship (231). Even if their literary endeavors did not reconstitute civil society throughout the fledgling United States, the evidence presented in Men of Letters suggests that these belletrists did shape emergent cultures in local and regional spaces. As Trish Loughran has recently claimed in The Republic in Print (New York, 2007), transportation and communication deficiencies precluded the possibility of a viable national public in print. Kaplan’s examination similarly forces us to move beyond a national framework and to foreground the local and regional networks at work in the post-Revolutionary era.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Robb K. Haberman is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation is entitled, “Periodical Publics: Magazines and Literary Networks in Post-Revolutionary America.”

Once marginalized in a male-dominated profession, insights from the study of women’s history are coming to reshape the entire discipline, even in such seemingly unlikely specialties as foreign policy and political history. Similarly, attention to race has spread beyond the study of African American social history. Historians increasingly recognize the influence of gender and race on virtually all aspects of American life, both among women and among men.

In Reforming Men and Women, historian Bruce Dorsey now draws together ideas from a wide range of recent studies in gender and racial history. He builds on the insights of such scholars as Gail Bederman, David Roediger, and Anthony Rotundo (who provide flattering blurbs on the dust jacket), and applies their ideas in an intricate reinterpretation of antebellum reform. Dorsey proposes to create “a holistic history of gender and reform by documenting and exploring the life experiences of both men and women reformers, and the contested meanings of manhood and womanhood among urban Americans, both black and white, working class and middle class, in the antebellum North. More than simply bridging the gap between two phases of the historical literature on reform, [Dorsey] offer[s] a different perspective on this history of topics–antislavery, temperance, poor relief, and nativism–that have produced a trail of historical interpretations.” In so doing, he contributes to a larger “intellectual quest to engender all of American history”(4).

The city of Philadelphia (with its early working-class suburbs) is the setting for most of the events discussed in this book, but Dorsey places greater emphasis on the national context. He begins by examining women’s activism within the public sphere of the early republic. Differing from earlier work by Linda Kerber, he suggests that early reformers did not present themselves as republican mothers whose public speech was an extension of their maternal duties. Instead, free African American women, unmarried Quaker women, and others found alternative strategies in defending their right to speak on public issues–including appropriating “a set of widely accepted masculine symbols, masculine language, and in some cases a masculine persona” (30). Like men, they defined their benevolent activity in opposition to selfish luxury, and presented themselves as fully capable of independence and civic virtue.

In his chapter on poor relief in the early nineteenth century, Dorsey examines a growing Northern contempt for the poor. “In the eyes of the middle class, a poor person had changed from a neighbor into a stranger,” partly because the classes were indeed more spatially separated (60). Male-led societies soon embraced the idea that the poor were to blame for their poverty, and sought to put them to work in a “house of industry” that was little more than a sweatshop. Women reformers were more hesitant to blame the poor. The divergent responses of male and female reformers, Dorsey suggests, may have reinforced a middle-class male perception that compassion was a sign of feminine weakness. But as reformers of both genders accepted a view that poverty was the result of sin, women retained an important niche in benevolent work based on what was believed to be their special “influence” over the souls of others.

Just as poverty was believed to be the fault of improvident males (while exploited female workers faded into invisibility), so did drunkenness come to be seen as a problem mainly of young men–a crisis of young manhood vaguely associated with the pursuit of self-interest in Jacksonian America. Drink was not seen as a problem limited to any class. In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men. It also involved, significantly, a conflict within the middle class over rival forms of masculinity”(107). Working-class white and African American reformers also used temperance to explore the meanings of manhood–respectively seeing sobriety as a marker of whiteness and of freedom from the slavery of drink.

Dorsey’s chapter on antislavery examines the centrality of masculinity in the African colonization movement. Colonizationists portrayed African American men as having been emasculated by slavery and white prejudice, and thus in need of emigration to Africa in order to regain their manly independence. White fears of black men’s social and sexual engagement with white women contributed to denunciations of abolitionism and to the notorious burning of the abolitionist Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. Blacks also drew on the language of manhood in their debates over emigration. White abolitionist women linked the plight of women to the plight of the slaves, and thus attacked both forms of oppression together.

In conflicts over Irish immigration, a tangle of ideas about white manhood shaped the discourse of natives and newcomers alike. Native white men doubted the manly independence of the supposedly priest-ridden Irish. Native women launched what the author calls “the first political newspaper in the republic operated exclusively by women,” in order to slander the Irish and promote Anglo-American women’s patriotism (213). The editors defended their entrance into the public sphere by asserting that Irish Catholic immigration threatened values dear to women, particularly the religious instruction of children in the public schools. Irish immigrants also developed a complicated, gendered discourse about their place in the United States. They divided among themselves over the manliness of drinking; their effort to claim the rights of white Americans contributed to their growing racism, even in the face of Irish nationalists’ call for racial unity.

Dorsey’s argument is far too complex to adequately summarize in a brief review. Each page introduces new insights–most of them not wholly original to Dorsey, but woven by him into a coherent whole. As the author moves methodically from topic to topic, examining the thoughts and actions of people in various social categories, historians will be impressed by the breadth of his research in primary and secondary sources. Readers outside the profession may be discouraged by the plodding prose, but those who persist will see a solid synthesis, and application, of insights from recent gender and racial history.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Peter C. Baldwin is assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and author of Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus, 1999). He is currently researching the social history of night in American cities.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Dave Neumann is director of the History Project at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), a K-16 collaborative project dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in history and social science education. A former high-school history instructor, he also teaches pre-service elementary and secondary credential students at CSULB.

Dave Neumann
The National History Education Clearinghouse
http://teachinghistory.org/

At a recent gathering of history-education advocates in California, I chaired a committee of college faculty attempting to suggest opportunities for colleges and universities to support K-12 education. I grimaced—hopefully only internally—as one committee member suggested that we create a list of Websites that would be useful for K-12 teachers. I suggested as diplomatically as I could that we consider other projects, as many such lists already exist, some far better than we could create. A recent examination of the “National History Education Clearinghouse” (NHEC) Website confirmed my suggestion. As the name implies, the site provides a clear, user-friendly clearinghouse of links to some of the best online history education resources—not only history content and lesson plans but materials on historical thinking and research as well. Indeed, though the site seems to be in the developmental stage with room for the inclusion of far more material, it nonetheless exemplifies the most fruitful results of the type of K-12/university collaboration advocated by the American Historical Association, itself a partner in the production of the Website, in its Benchmarks for Professional Development in Teaching of History as a Discipline. Given Common-place‘s mission of “embracing new scholarship, teaching, and exhibits that explore all aspects of America’s past and its many peoples,” NHEC should be of great interest to readers.

The “National History Education Clearinghouse” is a product of the federally funded Teaching American History (TAH) grant program, which has distributed more than 800 million dollars to K-12 schools and offices of education nationwide to support professional development in history education in collaboration with colleges and universities. The Website “builds on and disseminates the valuable lessons learned by more than 800 TAH projects designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge and understanding of traditional U.S. history.” (References to “traditional U.S. history” show up repeatedly in TAH programs, as they come straight from the federal grant application.) It was jointly created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the Stanford University History Education Group. This is a compelling partnership indeed. The CHNM at George Mason University is one of the pioneers in digitizing history content and is cosponsor of History Matters, an excellent source for U.S. history content on the Web. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg, executive producer and senior scholar of NHEC, has done groundbreaking work with teachers and students on learning and teaching history. Together, they represent some of the best thinking and materials available to history educators at all levels. The creators explain that they “aim to bring together the many communities involved in improving history education and professional development for history teachers, allowing practitioners, historians, administrators, and history educators to present multiple perspectives, debate current issues, and work together to improve history teaching in classrooms throughout the United States.” It is refreshing to see that the site includes testimonials from scholars like USC historian Karen Haltunnen, who acknowledge that their work with K-12 teachers has enriched their own professional work. Such testimonials help to keep K-12/university partnerships alive and healthy.

The site is organized with six tabs across the top: “History Content,” “Best Practices,” “Teaching Materials,” “Issues & Research,” “TAH Grants,” and “Professional Development.” Each tabbed area has a separate search engine to aid users. The first four tabs are most likely to be of interest to the readers of Common-place. “History Content” provides links to history Websites and online primary-source collections, national history centers like the Smithsonian, electronic fieldtrips, and Website reviews. Two hundred and fifty-four sites are evaluated (unfortunately, Common-place is not one of them). Each evaluation includes a one-paragraph description of the site, the site’s producers, and keywords for site content. As a test case of this section’s search engine, I decided to look for materials related to Lyman Beecher, who was featured in an article in the October 2008 issue of Common-place. Typing Lyman Beecher into the search engine yielded some results for sites that were really about Harriet Beecher Stowe or Henry Ward Beecher. Within the first twenty hits, however, were the following: Lincoln/NET, Northern Illinois University Library’s Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project (reviewed in the January 2008 issue of Common-place), where a one-thousand-word essay places Beecher in the context of antebellum social reform movements and provides a brief bibliography; the Cornell University Library’s Making of America site, which includes digitized facsimiles of two book reviews of Beecher’s autobiography; and a classroom activity on religion and social reform from the University of Houston’s Digital History site, which includes excerpts from ten primary sources on reform, including one by Beecher.

The most interesting link on the first tab is “Ask a Historian.” When I viewed the site, one of the top questions was, “Was there an African-American President before Barack Obama?” The anonymous reply, presumably by a historian, explains how this rumor may have developed over confusion about John Hanson, president of the Continental Congress, whose great-uncle is labeled a freedman in extant records. The thoughtful reply then continues by offering a reflection on the nature of certainty in history and concludes with a bibliography.

The second tab, “Best Practices,” is much thinner, likely reflecting the relative infancy of the field rather than oversight on the part of the site designers. This area provides links to applications of some of the most interesting work on history cognition, reflecting the best nexus of scholarly research and practical classroom implementation. Given Wineburg’s role in the development of this site, it is not surprising that his work is prominently represented. But other links are provided as well, including linguist Mary Schleppegrell’s application of functional grammar approaches to the reading of textbooks. Schleppegrell has worked extensively with the UC Davis site of the California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP), a California statewide collaborative project for K-12 history professional development, and this article reflects her work with CHSSP staff and Davis-area teachers.

The fourth tab, “Issues and Research,” seems to overlap with the “Best Practices” section, making the distinction between them unclear. Only six “Research Briefs” are provided, including articles by Peter Lee and Bob Bain, and all six involved the application of theory to classroom practice. The paucity of resources in this section is also a puzzle, as there is a substantial body of work by historians like Lee, Bain, Rosalyn Ashby, Gaea Leinhardt, Peter Seixas, Bruce VanSledright, to name a few, who might also have been included here.

“Teaching Materials” provides a gateway to online history lesson plans and a link to state history content standards. It also offers a section entitled “Ask a Master Teacher,” which parallels the “Ask a Historian” section in the first tabbed area and features questions on topics such as the use of primary sources in a classroom with second-language learners. It also provides its own review of lesson plans, though at present there are only ten reviews. The reviews include a helpful lesson-plan rubric designed by NHEC staff, which considers issues like analytic thinking and scaffolding. As a test case, I examined a review of a lesson on antislavery posters (the closest topic to Lyman Beecher included in the ten reviews) from the Gilder-Lerhman Institute’s History Now journal. The lesson receives the following comments for analytic thinking:

The Poster Inquiry Sheet provides students with a method for identifying and interpreting historical facts.

During the modeling and the group work, students [sic] learn and practice close reading of primary sources.

An evaluation of the use of scaffolding indicates that the lesson is appropriate for its stated audience because, while the “language used in the posters may be difficult for some students…teachers can choose to highlight sections of text to reduce the amount or difficulty of necessary reading.”

One might wonder whether a site generated by TAH K-12/university collaboration would provide a search engine that filters out useless results and returns useful hits on high-quality lesson plans. The answer, in general, is “yes.” While a search for “Lyman Beecher” returned hits for a book review and a College Board introduction to the Advanced Placement U.S. history course, use of more mainstream keywords antebellum reform yielded useful returns. Several hits represented effective lessons with primary sources, sponsored by groups like the Organization of American Historians or the National Center for History in the Schools.

The last two sections, “TAH Grants” and “Professional Development,” are likely to be of more limited interest to many Common-place readers. The “TAH Grants” section provides a searchable database of TAH grant awards, a listserv for TAH members, and links to twenty-one articles on “Lessons Learned” by TAH participants that might assist current and future TAH project administrators and teacher leaders. Finally, the “Professional Development” area offers a calendar of professional development opportunities nationwide as well as a search engine for locating training in or near one’s own community.

Apart from the overlap of the “Best Practices” and “Issues and Research” tabs and the thinness of some categories, the site works well. It is clearly organized, intuitive, and easily navigated. Most helpfully for a clearinghouse, it provides an informative synopsis of all major links, so that users can determine the possible usefulness of a linked site right from the NHEC, rather than constantly linking back and forth. Not only does the site provide access to a wealth of primary and secondary sources, but it also provides links to high-quality lesson plans and important scholarship on teaching and learning. All in all, this site fulfills its creators’ goals of providing an excellent clearinghouse or starting point for both K-12 educators and university faculty.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Patricia Cleary teaches in the department of history, California State University, Long Beach. She is the director of the Website, The Elizabeth Murray Project: A Resource Site for Early American History.

Patricia Cleary
Instructions for the Young: Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/n/nietz/

The April 2009 special issue of Common-place, “Who Reads an Early American Book?,” prompted a search of Websites devoted to nineteenth-century texts directed at youthful readers. Among a number of valuable sites, one that stands out as of potential interest to scholars and K-12 teachers alike is the University of Pittsburgh’s Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks, part of its Digital Research Library. Based on the “Nietz Old Texbook Collection” of sixteen thousand volumes, the online archive contains page images and searchable text for 140 schoolbooks. John Nietz, a professor of education at University of Pittsburgh and student of John Dewey at University of Chicago, began the collection by donating nine thousand volumes of early primary and secondary texts at his retirement in the late 1950s.

Although the quantity of material available online is just a small portion of the print Nietz collection, the multiple means of searching the digitized texts make this site user-friendly. Options include standard subject-title-author and publication-date searches, Boolean and proximity searches, and book browsing.

Typing Phillis Wheatley into the search engine generates just one result: a brief biography from an 1872 work, A manual of American literature: a text-book for schools and colleges. Slavery turns up 445 hits. Pursuing Crispus Attucks leads to William Holmes McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader (1879)—one of several McGuffey readers on the site—which offers a gripping take on the Boston Massacre, one that can be instructively compared with Samuel G. Goodrich’s 1843 version in A pictorial history of the United States: with notices of other portions of America. Although searching for specific topics generates interesting results, perhaps more fascinating are the insights to be found from browsing through texts, such as Thomas Kimber’s 1815 The American class book, or, A collection of instructive readings lessons: adapted to the use of schools: selected from Blair’s class book, etc. In addition to sections on natural history and religion, the text ranges across such subjects as “Of Fire and Its Application to the Preparation of Food,” the speech of Seneca, the cultivation of taste, and the “Phenomena of Winter in the Polar Regions.”

A bibliography of secondary materials on textbooks, how to read them, and how the practitioners of various disciplines have analyzed them is included. Although it contains no works published after 1999, the bibliographic coverage of twentieth-century scholarship and brief abstracts would nonetheless make it a useful starting point for working with the collection. Similarly helpful for more sustained research is the overview of library collections, microfilm, and Web resources, which directs visitors’ attention to notable collections holding tens of thousands of volumes relevant to the history of education. Also included are two comprehensive surveys by Nietz, available and searchable in full online: Old Textbooks and The Evolution of American Secondary School Textbooks, both covering the evolution of texts at both the primary and secondary levels in multiple disciplines up to 1900. As the online archive does not offer introductory remarks for each work, these two volumes provide welcome context for the evolution of subjects treated in the textbooks.

In short, this straightforward site possesses a clearly defined focus, a useful archive of nineteenth-century sources on education, a good survey of secondary and archival materials, and an effective set of search tools, rendering it helpful to scholars, teachers, and students interested in investigating how subjects from spelling, rhetoric, and penmanship to American history, geography, and art were presented in the past.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Digital History and Civil War Commemoration

I saw Emilie Davis’s diaries years ago—three leather-bound volumes, small enough to fit comfortably in a pocket, no bigger than a smart phone. I thought then that I would get back to them some day, when other deadlines had been met. I thought again about Emilie in 2011, after listening to an inspiring talk by Jill Lepore about Jane Franklin, a story that Lepore pieced together with small scraps of evidence—such as the diary Franklin kept of the births and deaths of (all but one of) her twelve children and the surviving letters she exchanged with her brother Ben—and a good deal of imagination. In Lepore’s hands, Jane Franklin came alive, as did her era. Audience members imagined a middle-aged woman picking up a pen and sitting down to record her own thoughts, to enjoy the life of the mind that her brother had lived for decades and that Jane was now tasting for the first time. Seeing the joyful loops that formed the “J” and the “a” in her name, I remembered that Emilie also carefully wrote her name on the blank first page of her 1863 diary in big open letters, looping each end of the “E” and dotting the “i” with a flourish (fig. 1). She wrote her name on subsequent pages, too, though not with the exuberance implied in the series of loops and the long diagonal mark over the “i.” Opening the book and writing her name in it the first time was an act of becoming.

In her diaries, Emilie—a young free black woman living in Philadelphia during the Civil War—remarks on the progress of her education and reflects on the challenges of living as a half-citizen of a slave nation. We do not have much to remind us that women like Emilie and Jane Franklin existed. But we do have their names written carefully on the inside covers of their diaries, laying claim to pen and book, and the thoughts expressed in them. Beginning in January 2012, I began transcribing and annotating the diaries with a talented and energetic group of graduate students—namely, Rebecca Capobianco, Ruby Johnson, Thomas Foley, Jessica Maiberger, and Theresa Altieri. We learned that doing so would make it possible to tell a new story about the Civil War. Emilie’s diaries, available in transcriptions and original text on the Memorable Days Website, offer fresh perspective on the arrival in Philadelphia of black refugees from south-central Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg campaign (June 27-29, 1863), jubilant celebrations in black churches accompanying the news of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (January 1-3, 1863), and the deep anxieties that free blacks like Emilie felt when Union advances nearly became reverses (April 13-15, 1865). Over the next year and a half, we explored the meetings Emilie attended, the street fights she witnessed, the anxieties and personal tragedies she experienced. We saw the Civil War through her eyes.

Digital history offers opportunities to democratize access to the past and to invite users into the research process

In building this Website we learned about the process of recovering and telling the story of women of color who left behind a deafening evidentiary silence, and the joys that can come in working collaboratively. Because it requires various levels of comfort with Wikis, blogs, html, tags, and social networking, creating an open-access research site is intensely collaborative and vastly more rewarding than the history we make alone. We were surprised and delighted to see how digital history has the potential to transform texts like a letter book or a diary, by revealing subtle contours and hidden patterns. When we began to encounter audiences and Website users, we realized that perhaps the most important thing we were doing was providing a new point of access for the creation of Civil War history.

Digital history offers opportunities to democratize access to the past and to invite users into the research process. “Digital history,” William G. Thomas III explained in a special issue of the Journal of American History, “possesses a crucial set of common components—the capacity for play, manipulation, participation, and investigation by the reader.” We saw our collaboration grow in concentric circles, beginning with me and a small group of graduate students at Villanova (“Team Emilie”); then a team of digital librarians and a web designer; students in undergraduate, middle school, and high school classes; and finally Website users and audiences at commemorative events. Instead of working for years on a project before “releasing” it to the public, much of the work was done in public, as we invited students to take a stab at transcription and to identify points at which the diary should be annotated. The collaboration continues on our site, where users participate and join in the investigation.

The site launched just after midnight on January 1, 2013, marking the day 150 years ago when Emilie began the diary, with the words, “Today has been a memorable day,” in reference to the Emancipation Proclamation. Very soon after we began receiving comments from users offering commentary and advice and sometimes suggesting leads on unidentified people in the diary. Because the site features our transcription alongside each original diary page, readers tell us what words we misidentified or offer us clues on those that we have not transcribed. “The word for the empty brackets seems to be ‘reading,'” a user explained about Emilie’s January 2, 1863, entry. Of Emilie’s entry for March 14, 1863, a reader who had done his or her own research suggested that “Lizzie” might be “Elizabeth White (born about 1840), the younger sister of Emilie’s future husband, George Bustill White.” Additionally, we have received a number of inquiries about the woman Emilie refers to as “Nel” or “Nellie” in the diary—Emilie’s closest confidante, who as yet remains unidentified. This summer, a Website user helped us to solve the mystery of what became of Emilie’s nine-year-old nephew, Frank, when his mother died while his father was serving in the U.S. Navy. Little Frank, whom we had hoped had gone to live with his uncle, turned up in the files of a Quaker orphanage (December 6-8, 1863). Welcoming Website users into the process of discovery has expanded our knowledge of Emilie’s life and her family connections.

The project’s success, therefore, relies on our ability to get the word out about the site and its subject, drawing in potential users. This approach gives us the chance to combine the tools of academic history with those of digital history to reach new publics. We turned to both social media (namely, Facebook and Twitter) and “old” media, such as radio and television interviews, public talks, and classroom lessons, to bring teachers, students, and amateur historians into the project. We found in both of these contexts opportunities for impromptu, unfiltered comments, for play and manipulation. For example, middle school students responded to the diary entries in a series of blogs; our favorites were the eighth-grader who defended Emilie’s idiosyncratic spelling (“I am not very good at spelling either, but that doesn’t mean I am not smart”) and the kid who worried that Emilie was “stalking” Vincent, her love interest. High school students “tweeted” responses to the entries—on small scraps of paper, no bigger than the diary pages. “President Lincoln is re-elected,” wrote one high school sophomore: “#EmancipationProclamation #happy” (fig. 2). “@EmilieDavis I wld be extremely scared if my dad was close to the war,” tweeted another, “#staystrong” followed by a symbol of a gun and an “x.” As we “played” on the site with students, we found new ways to think about Emilie, her classmates, and her friends.

Online discussions also took a more serious turn. In a series of early Facebook comments, two Website users engaged in a brief debate about racial identity, asking whether a white professor and a group of white graduate students could handle the job of reading and interpreting Emilie’s diaries as well as a person of color. Here was a discussion about identity politics that we might have in our college classrooms, played out in social media.

As we interacted with teachers, students, and various author audiences, we began to see that the site was bridging the gap between Civil War history and African American history. This point was brought home to us in February 2013 when we attended a daylong event celebrating the beginning of Black History Month. Depending on how you count it, we have had nearly five years of the Civil War sesquicentennial—this if you count from 2009, the year of the Lincoln bicentennial and the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry—but in many places black history remains a month. In a YMCA gym serving several black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, we crowded in with more than 300 attendees to cheer community activists, scholarship recipients, and local ministers for leadership in their communities. We took turns reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; afterwards, people stayed around to hear us introduce them to Emilie Davis and her generation. After we shared several pages of Emilie’s diary, in which she described her fears for her father’s safety when rebel slave raiders were sighted near his home in south-central Pennsylvania in June 1863 (June 23, June 29, June 30, and July 9, 1863), attendees commented on the need to remain vigilant and active in promoting and protecting civil rights, lest the progress made by one generation be lost by another. These thoughts and comments seemed as apt for understanding Emilie’s fear that her father—a free black man living in a state that had outlawed slavery—would (once again?) be a slave as they were for thinking about the context of the August 2012 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision upholding the state’s new voter identification law, a measure that aimed to restrict the voting power of immigrants, the poor, and people of color.

We learned a lot spending the day with teachers, students, and community leaders, and we have continued to talk about Emilie’s diaries with the participants in this meeting. In the summer of 2013, I received a letter from a woman wanting to lay claim to a Civil War ancestor; she had heard about our genealogical work on Emilie Davis and her family. “My paternal grandmother’s mother’s father was a ‘boy slave,'” eighty-five-year-old Lillian Loatmen Boggs wrote, “he rose to become a principal of a one-room school house.” When I told her I might have found a man named “Loatman,” who shared her maiden name (but with a different spelling) and who was drafted in Baltimore in September 1864 into the First Regiment, United States Colored Troops, Lillian wrote back to say she thought it was the right guy because, like herself and others in her family, Edward was short, or as she put it, “vertically challenged.” Edward’s draft record indicates that at age thirty-five, he stood five feet, three and a half inches tall.

The First Regiment served in the Petersburg Campaign and charged into the confusion after the explosion of the Union mine under the Confederate works on July 30, 1864—the Battle of the Crater. The following January, Loatman was with the regiment when the men helped capture Fort Fisher, North Carolina. He died in March 1865, before he could witness the surrender of Confederate forces in North Carolina and the final collapse of the Confederacy. Edward Loatman’s enlistment records indicate that his name is included on the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I am guessing that, like other African Americans of her generation, Lillian Boggs has not traveled to Civil War battlefields or other sites where she might recognize a name or identify with a description. As the historian Tiya Miles explained at a conference at Gettysburg in March 2013, her grandparents packed their car with food and blankets before going on road trips in anticipation of not finding a hotel that would take them. They would not have planned a family trip to a national park then—and those fears survived until at least the next generation. Additionally, in an era of shrinking school budgets, fewer school-aged children will visit Civil War sites today, although the National Park Service has never been more committed to telling an inclusive story of the war. Digital projects such as Memorable Days, on the other hand, have the capacity to bring Civil War history home to people like Lillian Boggs, and this is one of the things we hoped to achieve in researching Emilie Davis’s diaries.

Lillian Boggs’s typewritten letters to us highlight the distance between historians who sigh about the challenges of wrangling the “infinite archive” that digital history has produced and, well, most other folks, particularly those who see in this explosion of information new opportunities to answer questions about family history. Stricken by a case of “Roots envy,” as Henry Louis Gates has called it, African Americans have become avid genealogists in the past three decades, turning eagerly to Ancestry.com and DNA testing in an effort to fill in the gaping holes that slavery left in their family trees. I am not sure Mrs. Boggs knows that we have created and maintain a Website tracing one black family’s move from slavery to freedom, but she hoped that I might be able to help her solve some mysteries about her own family. “[D]o you know if there is a list, (or place),” she wrote, “where I could find out if I had an ancestor in the Civil War?” While no one comprehensive list exists, we now have many new digital sources, like the University of Virginia’s Geography of Slavery site that uses information from runaway slave ads to map the suspected trajectories of fugitives’ flights, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s ambitious digitization of William Still’s massive list of fugitives who passed through Philadelphia.

Another as-yet untapped source for similar information is the potential of digitizing the hundreds of “Information Wanted” ads that appeared in black newspapers during and after the war. According to my count, nearly 1,900 such missing persons ads were printed in Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder—a newspaper published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church—between 1866 and 1890: mothers looking for children, husbands looking for wives, and children looking for parents. The ads began as early as 1863 and continued for years after many others had likely given up hope of finding families separated or lost in slavery, escape, or wartime dislocation. By digitizing these ads, we may be able to fill in some of the holes that slavery has left in the genealogical records of African Americans.

While we figure out how to make all of these new digital tools talk to one another and to us so that we can unlock the mysteries of families separated in slavery, we ought to stay alert for opportunities to engage audiences in schools, churches, and gyms and invite people like Lillian Boggs into the process, and to bring multiple experiences together. Historians have never been so keen or better equipped to integrate the fields of women’s, African American, and Civil War history. Digital history produces new points of entry for people to lay claim to—and to make—Civil War history, engaging and interacting with sources that challenge avid genealogists to look beyond their own family tree to explore the environment in which it grew.

While we were annotating Emilie’s diaries, we discovered all sorts of new ways the Civil War was experienced in Philadelphia, the city where Lillian Boggs has spent nearly her whole life (she now lives just north of downtown). In 1860, the city was home to 13,008 “free colored women” and 9,177 men, who supported a web of religious, cultural, and political institutions. Emilie’s attendance at the Institute for Colored Youth, the premier school for black youth, and her affiliation with several black churches, indicated that she was part of a politically active community in an exciting time. Reading her diary allowed us to imagine her excitement (mixed with regret) when she helped send off a regiment of young black volunteers (June 15-17, 1863) who signed up to help drive the Confederate army out of the state—before the state was ready to accept their assistance. We could also see why she might attend lectures delivered by the former slave and fiery Baptist minister, Reverend James Sella Martin (January 25, 1865), Frederick Douglass (February 16, 1865), the poet and former slave Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (February 27, 1865), but decline to go the last lecture in the series, delivered by William D. Kelley, a Pennsylvania Congressman (March 22, 1865). At the time, Kelley was enthusiastically campaigning for a bill enfranchising black men in Washington, D.C. While Emilie might have been interested in the issue, Kelley was known for giving long orations on the history of suffrage rights in the state—perhaps not an appealing way to spend the evening. Although she could not vote—nor could the black men in her life—Emilie liked to predict the outcome of elections (November 8-10, 1864). Notably, Emilie took care not to go out on Election Day, for there was always trouble in the streets (October 13-15, 1863). There was trouble on other days too, like on September 24, 1864, when Emilie noted “excitement this afternoon mr. green was molested and defended himself” (September 24-26, 1864). Green’s “molesters” surely regretted their act, for Alfred Green, Sergeant Major in the 127th USCT, fended off the men first by pistol-whipping them and then by shooting one of them in the leg.

And we learned a great deal about cultural life in Civil War Philadelphia, discovering a cast of characters who made the city and time come alive. Emilie attended concerts, learned to play the guitar, and frequented performances by celebrities who we were delighted to meet. On May 11, 1864, Emilie noted that, “Nellie did not come up as i expected this evening a Miss Greenfeilds concertcomes off to night.” Upon further investigation, we learned that Emilie attended a concert performed by Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, a former slave from Natchez, Mississippi, known as the “Black Swan.” Some time before the war, Greenfield moved from Mississippi to Philadelphia, where she was freed and raised by Quakers. Greenfield was well known for her enchanting voice and classical repertoire, and she became a favorite in particular of Frederick Douglass. Indeed, she regularly opened for Douglass, warming up the audience with her music before Douglass took the stage. If Edward Loatman had come to Philadelphia in the spring of 1864, he too might have bought a ticket to see the Black Swan.

Through Emilie we were also introduced to Blind Tom. In September 1865, Emilie attended a performance given by Thomas Wiggins, a former slave who toured concert halls performing musical numbers he learned from memory. A complicated figure, Blind Tom inspired awe with his talent—performing two different songs on different pianos, while singing a third song—but he frustrated critics with his deep loyalty to his former master, who controlled all the proceeds of Tom’s popular shows. Emilie declared herself “much Pleased with the performance excepting we had to sit up stairs wich made me furious” (September 14, 1865). To have to shuffle up to the balcony at the same venue where she had attended lectures by Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was too much for Emilie who, by late in 1865, expected more from white Philadelphians than a segregated performance venue. “The prejudice against blacks extends to every class,” an 1860 article about Philadelphia in Douglass’ Monthly explained, “and may be remarked in pleasure and in business. At theatres and concerts, lectures and churches, the negro is restricted to a remote gallery.” Emilie was well positioned to remark on the changes the war wrought on Philadelphia and its inhabitants—and what had stubbornly remained the same. Engaging in digital history opened our eyes to these lived realities of urban life in the North during the Civil War.

And then there was the ice cream. In the process of building the Website, we tagged each entry in order to populate the word cloud that appears at the bottom of the page; this process revealed things that we had not even thought to look for. Like keyword searching in period newspapers, digitizing a source like a diary can help to uncover hidden patterns, preferences, and even unspoken thoughts. Tagging Emilie’s complaints about foul weather allowed us to think about how her movement around the city became circumscribed, how outbreaks of illnesses increased in the winter, and how fighting in the eastern theater stalled in the midst of nor’easters. Had we not been tagging, we would likely never have discovered that Emilie liked ice cream. Indeed, during a time of intense worry, loss, and fear, Emilie recorded going out for ice cream on four separate occasions. Emilie enjoyed ice cream at a “saloon” with her friends after a particularly “dull day” working as a domestic (May 13, 1864), then again the next week after a children’s concert (May 19-20, 1864), on an unseasonably cool day in August (August 27, 1863), and even after a crowded church choir concert in February (February 16, 1863). Admittedly, this is a slim evidentiary basis from which to make any assumption about Emilie—and also, who doesn’t like ice cream? But Philadelphians of color did not generally take such luxuries for granted. In the summer of 1857, for example, Charlotte Forten and a friend were refused service at three Philadelphia ice cream parlors before they gave up. Emilie’s regular enjoyment of the cold treat in 1863-1864 stood as evidence of the expanding space that black Philadelphians inhabited during the Civil War. Pushed to make our academic research meet the structural requirements of digital history, we saw something new in the diary every time we looked. Working together to transcribe and annotate Emilie Davis’ three slim diaries, and to build the Memorable Days Website, allowed us to see fluctuations in morale in the Civil War North, to witness through her eyes events of enormous political significance, and to enjoy the small victories war made possible—writing your name in a diary, for instance, and going out for ice cream with a friend.

Digital tools are rapidly making possible the integration of African American and Civil War history, as they allow users to search for bits and pieces of information buried under—and preserved within—the mountains of paper produced during the Civil War. In addition to the admittedly few diaries written by African Americans during the Civil War, there are traces of lives left behind in the census, enlistment rolls, and the fugitive slave and information wanted advertisements. Through online transcription and annotation—and the dissemination of these sources—digital tools are allowing historians to write new chapters in the history of the Civil War. Freed from the restraints of institutional memory, digital history sites are particularly well equipped to commemorate the Civil War as an important period in African American history.

Further Reading:

Emilie Davis’s original diaries are located at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The online transcription with contextual annotations can be found at the Memorable Days Website:http://davisdiaries.villanova.edu. Mrs. Lillian (Loatmen) Boggs’ letters (May 23, 2013 and September 25, 2013) are in the author’s collection. The Information Wanted advertisements in The Christian Recorder are digitized as part of Accessible Preservatives’ African American Newspapers, but they do not retain their original format. The Recorder is available on microfilm at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The University of Virginia’s Geography of Slavery tracks fugitives through runaway slave ads. And the Historical Society of Pennsylvania has digitized William Still’s list of fugitives who passed through Philadelphia.

On digital history, see the essays in the special issue, “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History 95:2 (September 2008).

Edward Loatman’s enlistment records are available on Ancestry.com, U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1861-1865 (Provo, Utah, Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2007; by subscription). The 1st Regiment USCT’s history of Civil War combat is available at this National Park Service site (accessed 09/15/2013). On the history of U.S. colored troops, see William Dobak’s Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (Center for Military History, 2011). For more information on the speakers and entertainers whom Emilie saw in person, see The Black Swan at Home and Abroad; Or, a Biographical Sketch of Miss Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the American Vocalist (Philadelphia, 1855); The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York, 1988).

Henry Louis Gates describes “‘Roots’ envy” in “My Yiddishe Mama,” The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 1, 2006). Jill Lepore’s new book on Jane Franklin is Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York, 2013).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

Judith Giesberg is professor of history and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Villanova University. She is editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) and author of Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009).