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Public History in the AP U.S. History Classroom
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by J.D. Bowers
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Illinois
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| | Encouraging Students to Become Historical Practitioners
Public history, what Lois Silverman has dubbed "citizens' encounters with history," presents one of the most exciting, accessible, and engaging avenues to teaching history. 1 By integrating public history into the classroom and our lessons, we can help our students to become historical practitioners in meaningful, and everyday, ways.
Much has been written about the need to engage students in the study of history, to provide them with elements of the past that speak to their personal status or position, and to give them a reason to love the discipline of history as much as those of us who instruct them. Integrating public history venues -- historic sites, public celebrations, and even everyday elements of life -- presents an effective and efficient means to accomplish such objectives. This is especially true when one considers the objectives and means used to teach the history of the United States in a survey format, which is typically used in both AP and college-level introductory courses.
Public history venues have the potential for broad application in the history classroom given the scope of their subjects, eras, and meanings. An examination of recent National Council on Public History conference programs provides an extensive and varied list of topics that, when considered through a public history lens, will allow all students of history to find some connection to the past.
Field Trips and Beyond
There are many ways for a teacher to "do" public history with his or her students. The most common way is a field trip to an important historical site. Once on site a teacher can get the students to walk in the footsteps of those who traveled the ground before them, identify the subtle meanings in a statue, or touch the objects of the past. Even better than a single field trip is a comparative field trip; I used to take my students to Gunston Hall (the home of George Mason) and the Claude Moore Colonial Farm at Turkey Run (a recreated, living history of a yeoman farmer's home) on the same day and ask them to seek out the commonalities and differences of eighteenth-century life. I also asked them to explore why Gunston Hall has been preserved over time in almost perfect condition and Claude Moore had to be entirely recreated.
But public history can be done from anywhere and does not require a field trip, allowing teachers in areas that are precluded from traveling with their students to still accomplish their learning goals. Access to such sites as Valley of the Shadow can allow students to travel to two different communities during the Civil War and decipher how each region felt about certain facets of the conflict. Even the virtual resources of the Library of Congress and the National Park Service allow students to explore the variety of our nation's public past. Students could be asked, quite easily, to compare the memorials for WWII, Korea, and Vietnam on the National Mall in order to develop a sense of each war, how it is regarded by Americans, and the legacy with which we have been left. Getting students to learn the underlying issues behind each memorial would sharpen their understanding of the wars and our national anxieties over military conflicts. Students could then be asked to think about what kind of memorial will be built for the current conflict in Iraq.
Even closer to home, perhaps, is the use of local festivals and celebrations. Some, such as Philadelphia's Mummers Day Parade, have become national in scope and attention, while others, like Northumberland, Pennsylvania's annual Pineknotter Days, quietly celebrate the heritage of a town and its people. Whole neighborhoods in Chicago gather for celebrations of Mexican independence, while the rural city of DeKalb celebrates Cornfest. The local statue or cannon from World War I in the park, or even the portrait in the foyer of the school, are also public history venues. Every year I design assignments that ask my students to reflect on some local, nearby event and find the ties to the national historical framework. The assignment asks them to reflect not only on why the two, national and local, share similarities, but how the local has developed its own, independent meanings as well. One assignment I give to my current students is to send them across the street from campus to look at a nineteenth-century barn located in the back of the Burger King parking lot. Students are asked to make sense of how a modern fast-food restaurant can be adjacent to the barn where barbed-wire was invented in 1874. They not only learn about this history of the Glidden Homestead but also the process of American economic development. Almost any town in America will have similar kinds of juxtaposed sites. These kinds of lessons are equally centered on the past and the present, thus ensuring a connection between the history and its students. The possibilities are endless.
Broader Historical Understanding
These elements of public history are not new to any of us; they have been in use among history teachers for a long time. What is new is the way that we can get students to think of these venues and their own personal association with them. Public history allows us to teach students that they play a direct and immediate role in defining the past, determining the course of a town's history, and as actors on the historical stage. We can use public history to allow them to see how history is built, created, and set forth in the textbooks. These are vital components in an era when history has become a commodity. Students are led to believe that they have to go somewhere glamorous or important in order to see history at work. In an age where history is presented to students on TV, at Disney World, in Colonial Williamsburg, or even at their local mall that is constructed to evoke images of the past, it falls to history teachers to help students discern the historic from the fabricated, the educational from the entertainment, and the unassuming from the exaggerated.
At the beginning of each semester I reread and share with my students an opinion piece published in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Lawrence Biemiller. 2 In "Bringing the Past to Light," Biemiller argues that we can find the past in the everyday things that we are often too busy to see -- from the closing of a local grocery store to the life story of an elderly woman walking down the street. It is true, we can find our history lessons in the venues of public life, not just the lives of great men who lived more than a century ago, and give our students a connection to the past.
Footnotes
1 Lois Silverman, "Making Meaning Together: Lessons from the Field of American History," in Gail Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2004, 1993), 233.
2 Lawrence Biemiller, "Bringing the Past to Light: Decrepit Buildings, Rust Stains, and Lives of Ordinary People," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 1998, B8.
J.D. Bowers is an assistant professor of public history and secondary history education at Northern Illinois University.
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