The school year in my district really began yesterday. I'm teaching in a hybrid model and I spent the day meeting with all six of my classes online. Besides the challenges that Covid-19 poses, history teachers are also facing a new war over what should be taught in the public schools. Earlier this week, the president told schools in California that funding may be withheld for teaching lessons related to the 1619 Project. A panel in Washington DC made recommendations about renaming buildings and parks with ties to slavery last week. Certainly an interesting environment to begin teaching US History to high school students.
It's an interesting choice teachers have to make on where to start a history course. The South Carolina state standards directs teachers to begin with colonial regions. It's fairly sanitized with a focus on the economy, religion and political institutions of New England, Middle and Southern colonies. It assumes that students have some prior knowledge about settlement---particularly in relation to indigenous peoples and slavery. These Truths provides a comprehensive look at the initial contact between American peoples and Europeans. What I appreciate about Jill Lapore's approach in her narrative comes from the introduction. She says "There is, to be sure, a great deal of anguish in American history and more hypocrisy. No nation and no people are relieved of these. But there is also, in the American past, an extraordinary amount of decency and hope." She also says "History isn't only a subject; it's also a method. My method is, generally to let the dead speak for themselves." Those are pretty solid tenants to stick to in building a curriculum. The first activity of this week started with European settlement of the Americas and letting those voices from the past tell the story. As the introduction to colonial regions, students read documents referenced in These Truths, including the Spanish Requerimiento (1513), Richard Haklyut's Discourse of Western Planting (1584) and Metacom's complaints about the English from John Easton's A Narrative of the Causes which Led to King Philip's War. This was followed by a discussion about perspectives of "the other" and how each group justified control of the land. Some students argued that a religious hierarchy was constructed by the Spanish and the English that placed them above indigenous peoples and justified their land claims. Another student suggested that Haklyut wanted to enslave people, but promised the English would be nicer than the Spanish. The same student remarked that "nice" treatment of indigenous people in 1584 had already collapsed by 1675. Reading a section of the source that described how Metacom's father had generously given the English settlers land, a student noted how unjust the world had become for the Wampanoag. I closed the discussion by emphasizing their conclusions about what influenced the settlement of the Americas: the role of religion, new social and political hierarchies and injustice. I've added the links to these documents to this post if you are interested in them or you want to share them with your students. Next week, the topic shifts to political ideas and the colonies. I am confident that the the current debate will continue about what students should be taught in history classes. Following Lepore's lead---I'll let the dead do the talking. The Requerimiento (1513) Discourse of Western Planting (1584) Metacom Relates Indian Complaints about the English Settlers (1675)
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AuthorMarc Turner teaches US History and Government in Columbia, South Carolina. Archives
May 2021
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