Sam Wineburg - Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms

Jacob Douglas and Sam Wineburg

Jack Schneider

Jack Schneider

Born in the glorious year of 1776, Gabriel Prosser died an inglorious death. Prosser fomented a slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia, but was apprehended before he could carry it out. On October 31, 1800, his body dangled from Richmonds gallows.

Benjamin Gitlow, born in 1891, edited a newsletter called The Revolutionary Age and wrote a book called The Left Wing Manifesto . In February 1920 Gitlow was convicted under New Yorks Criminal Anarchy Law for advocating the overthrow of the government. He appealed his case to the Supreme Court. He lost.

Unless you have a special interest in foiled slave revolts or socialists of the 1920s, odds are that youve heard of neither Gabriel Prosser nor Benjamin Gitloweven if you teach history. Yet both figures appear among the names, dates, and themes jammed into the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress (The Nations Report Card), a test designed to measure the history deemed essential to all Americans.

For too many of our students, history has become an endless procession of Prossers and Gitlows. Is it any wonder that faced with a term like historical thinking, many scratch their heads, stumped by an alleged connection between history and thinking? And teachers, staggering under standards documents thicker than the Los Angeles phone book, find themselves as frustrated trying to teach all of this information as their students are trying to retain it.

The book you are holding offers an alternative to the vicious cycle of teaching students facts that will soon evaporate into thin air. Facts are crucial to historical understanding, but theres only one way for them to take root in memory: Facts are mastered by engaging students in historical questions that spark their curiosity and make them passionate about seeking answers. Did 10-year-old Matoaka, known to the rest of the world as Pocahontas, save Captain John Smith from mortal danger, or was this a figment of Smiths supple imagination, a spicy tale designed to boost book sales for his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & the Summer Isles ()? Each question sends us back to the original sources to formulate arguments that admit no easy answer. Each question requires us to marshal facts to argue our case. But facts isolated from the questions that give them meaning no more constitute historical understanding than bands of roving teenagers with AK-47s slung around their necks constitute an army.

In an age where I found it on the Internet masquerades as knowledge, history serves as a vital counter-weight to intellectual sloppiness. When a video uploaded from a cell phone in Tehran reaches San Francisco in half a second, history reminds us to start with basic questions: Who sent it? Can it be trusted? What angle did the Flip video miss? In the era of the blogosphere, theres no shortage of forces telling students what to think. Todays students gasp for air beneath mounds of information, and have never been in greater need of ways to make sense of it all. This is where Reading Like a Historian comes in.

At first glance, Reading Like a Historian might seem like a frill when so few students actually go on to become professional historians. But thats precisely the point. Because so few students pursue historical study beyond high school, it is crucial that they learn to read like historians in their middle and high school social studies classes. Historians have developed powerful ways of reading that allow them to see patterns, make sense of contradictions, and formulate reasoned interpretations when others get lost in the forest of detail and throw up their hands in frustration. Researchers of historical thinking have distilled these ways of knowing into practices that can be taught to students at all levels. Were not talking here about some esoteric procedure for working in an archive. Rather, the practices historians have developed can be used to make sense of the conflicting voices that confront us every time we turn on Fox News or MSNBC. Put simply, the skills cultivated by Reading Like a Historian provide essential tools for citizenship.

Consider the differences between how historians and high school students approach primary source documents. Many students, even some of our best readers, start with the first word at the top of a page and end their reading with the last. The attribution at the documents end receives scant attention or is ignored altogether. Historians, on the other hand, begin a document at the end, by sourcing it. They glance at the first couple of words to get their bearings, but then dart immediately to the documents bottom, zooming in on its attribution. Who wrote this source and when? Is it a diary entry? A memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act? A leaked e-mail? Is the author in a position to know first-hand, or is this account based on hearsay? Even before approaching a documents substance, historians have formed a list of questions that create a mental framework to hang the details that follow. Most important, sourcing transforms the act of reading from passive reception to an engaged and passionate interrogation. For historians, the act of reading is not about gathering lifeless information to repeat on a test, but engaging a human source in spirited conversation.

Consider a second pillar of Reading Like a Historian : the practice of contextualization the notion that events must be located in place and time to be properly understood. Faced with Abraham Lincolns statement that he had no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races (), many students shudder in disbelief or conclude that what theyve been taught about the 16th president belongs in the trash with the other lies their teachers told them.