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Home > Features > The Lessons of History
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The Lessons of History
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by Lawrence , Charap
Head of History and Social Sciences Content Development Group
The College Board
Providence, Rhode Island
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| | The following article was published in November 2002.
An Abundance of "Teachable Moments"
For better or worse, the past few years have given AP U.S. History teachers no shortage of "teachable moments" that show how history can have an impact on current events. I suspect that I am not alone in discovering that Andrew Johnson's impeachment in 1868, or the disputed Tilden-Hayes election of 1876, are events that seem to have caught students' imaginations in the past few years much more effectively than was the case not so long ago. If history teachers are used to warning students against "presentism" -- the danger of approaching the past with the assumptions of the present -- we also know how well current events can enliven any classroom discussion of the past.
If the nation's op-ed pages are to be believed, the prospect of an American war with Iraq within the next six months has similarly led to a recent surge in public interest in history. Partisans both for and against an American preemptive strike against Saddam Hussein invoke the lessons of history in making their cases; discussions on forums from talk radio to chat rooms on Salon.com feature passionate warnings against another "Munich" or "Vietnam."
The arguments are no less fervent among professional historians, with scholars of the Cold War, the Middle East, and American foreign policy squaring off over how past geopolitical successes and failures should guide today's strategy. This public debate presents history teachers with a second type of teaching opportunity: explaining the meaning of "primary" sources and their function in the arguments of "secondary" sources. In addition to asking students to compare the present situation with those of the past, teachers can use such articles as examples of how historical evidence can be used to construct a viable argument.
Exploring the Iraq Situation in the Classroom
What are some ways that the Iraq situation can be meaningfully explored in the AP U.S. History classroom? Classes meeting now, in the fall months of the school year, will most likely be focused on the early nineteenth century -- a period when the United States was first attempting to assert itself as a world power. Many AP teachers will be exploring themes of American nationalism, manifest destiny, and westward expansion, surveying events that might prefigure or influence later American actions on the world stage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Many traditional accounts stress the ambivalence of Americans toward what George Washington termed European "engagements" and view the United States in the early national period as focused on internal development. A recent work that challenges this view, and has important implications for discussions of Iraq, is journalist Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the American Rise to Power. In contrast to those who argue that the United States has traditionally refused to launch a preemptive war or fight in situations without a direct national interest, Boot points out that between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines were sent onto foreign soil over 180 times. The "small wars" Boot surveys, from the fight against the Barbary nations in 1801-1805, to American intervention in China's Boxer Rebellion in 1900, to President Reagan's Grenada invasion in 1983, were often launched with little public debate in the U.S. and in pursuit of goals that hardly seemed to be compelling national interests.
Such events, Boot suggests, provide us with a key to understanding why American foreign policy has often been successful in crises much like the one America faces in Iraq. Boot made the comparison to the current situation explicit in an October 4, 2002, op-ed piece in the New York Times, "Who Says We Never Strike First?" (Links to all articles mentioned in this feature are provided below in "See also." A free registration is required to view this article on the New York Times Web site.) To his list of American interventions, Boot adds the near-invasion of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when an American president "did not stand idly by waiting" while confronted with the possibility of weapons of mass destruction being deployed against the United States. In contrast, Boot demands, "[W]ho today thinks it was wise of Britain and France to stay their hands in the 1930s when they could have thwarted Hitler's ambitions early on?" To Boot, a survey of both American and world history prevents a student of history from ruling out the occasional need for preemptive military assaults.
A contrary perspective can be found online at the History News Network, from Manchester Guardian writer Matthew Engel. In "Enough with the Hitler Analogies," Engel lampoons current comparisons of both Saddam Hussein and George Bush to Hitler and Nazism and wonders whether Americans' lack of historical knowledge has encouraged a form of "intellectual dishones[ty]" with such caricatures. The real lesson of history, Engel argues, "is that politicians who try to cut-and-paste past events into their understanding of current situations are prone to lead their countries to disaster" -- a conclusion that is well worth exploring in AP U.S. History classroom discussions.
Another historical flashpoint in the debate over Iraq is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Speaking to the nation on October 8, 2002, President George W. Bush quoted John F. Kennedy's words in imposing a blockade on Cuba in October 1962: "We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril." Critics, however, including Senator Edward Kennedy, point to JFK's reluctance to order preemptive military strikes on Cuba as proof that patience and diplomacy, not a military invasion, can best defeat Iraq. A useful survey of how the Cuban Missile Crisis has been used by partisans on both sides is provided by Todd S. Purdum in "The Missiles of 1962 Haunt the Iraq Debate" from the October 13 issue of the New York Times. Purdum points out that for all of the similarities between October 1962 and October 2002, the complex (and poorly understood) actual conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis makes it extremely difficult to use as any sort of guide for how Americans can succeed in international conflicts.
Contextualizing the Conflict
American history teachers will probably want to follow the lead of Purdum's article and contextualize the Iraq crisis in the light of America's Cold War experience. Fortunately, a number of recent articles do just that, providing useful discussions that both students and teachers can use in fashioning their arguments. For example, the October 1, 2002, issue of the Atlantic Online contains a valuable archive of the Atlantic's coverage of Iraqi issues from 1958 to the present in "Iraq Considered," with articles that can be accessed independently and printed out for student discussion. The earliest pieces explain how Western geopolitical strategists defined the need for Iraqi oil as a vital American interest in the 1950s and 1960s. More recent articles exploring the causes and effects of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 could be used to provide students with background on a recent event whose significance is largely unknown to them (and that is unlikely to be adequately covered in a history survey course!).
Several historians have recently criticized the administration's actions in Iraq in the context of the Cold War's multilateralism. Writing in the September 21, 2002, New York Review of Books, Cold War specialist Frances FitzGerald contrasts the recent unilateralist rhetoric of many current administration officials with the emphasis on close cooperation with American allies that characterized the approaches of Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush in "George Bush & the World." A similar analysis is offered by Professor G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University in the September/October 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs. Ikenberry depicts the current administration's policies as designed to undo the international order created after 1945 in the name of a naked American neoimperialism. "[I]f history is a guide," Ikenberry concludes, American neoimperialism "will trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and divided world." Such pieces might be too specialized to give to AP students in other than small doses (although excerpts can easily be downloaded and printed out), but teachers can benefit from their careful analysis of how the current crisis looks in the light of Cold War geopolitical patterns.
Finally, as useful as editorial or scholarly articles can be, teachers might also want some suggestions for student activities on the Iraq situation. The Choices for the 21st Century Education Program at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies has already assembled a lesson plan that includes suggestions for student debate centering around three policy options toward Iraq. (A link to the lesson plan is below in "See also.") It also includes links to full-scale curriculum units developed by the program addressing the history of the U.S. role in the world and the Middle East in the twentieth century.
Such exercises help to make what is perhaps the most crucial point in any discussion of how the "lessons of history" should guide our approach to current issues: the actors we study in a history course did not have a crystal ball to see into the future. Experiencing the same uncertainty that we encounter today about the best course of action regarding Iraq, past American leaders had to perform their own investigations into the "lessons of history" when faced with tough decisions. AP teachers will want to stress how hard it is to choose among these rival "lessons" -- and how such difficult choices have helped determine the complicated world we face today.
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