Questioning History: 16 Essential Questions That Will Deepen Your Understanding of the Past

Chapter 1

Introduction

Carol Highsmith Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

LC-DIG-highsm-08336

What are history’s essential questions?

The place is Ocala located in central Florida and the date is Sunday, July 12, 2015. Thousands of people are attending a rally in support of flying the Confederate battle flag. Police estimated that 2,000 vehicles, most of them motorcycles and trucks adorned with the Civil War-era flag, took part in the gathering. The event was being held to back a decision by Marion County to return the Confederate battle flag to a display outside of its government complex. This in turn, was a response to the decision made just days before by the South Carolina state government to remove the Confederate battle flag from that state’s capitol grounds. This decision had been prompted by the deadly shooting that had occurred just a couple of weeks before at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina when 21 year old Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans in a racially motivated shooting spree. 

This chain of events brought to the surface an issue that has been imbedded in American history for the last 150 years: what was the real cause of the Civil War? The Lost Cause myth, which had flourished from the days of Reconstruction up until recent times, held that the South had seceded over the issue of states rights and had fought valiantly for the same kind of freedom that had been sought by George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1776. This view, which was reinforced in films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, had dominated people’s thinking for close to a century, and was part of the decision to fly the Confederate stars and bars on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol. After all, if states rights and patriotism were the real motives behind the Civil War, it became easier for the South to take pride in its Confederate heritage.

The same debate has recently surfaced in my hometown of St. Louis over whether to keep the Confederate Memorial located in Forest Park. The inscription on the back, written by Robert Catlett Cave reads:

To the Memory of the Soldiers and Sailors of the Southern Confederacy who fought to uphold the right declared by the pen of Jefferson and achieved by the sword of Washington. With sublime self sacrifice they battled to preserve the independence of the states which was won from Great Britain, and to perpetuate the constitutional government which was established by the fathers.

Actuated by the purest patriotism they performed deeds of prowess such as thrilled the heart of mankind with admiration. Full in the front of war they stood and displayed a courage so superb that they gave a new and brighter luster to the annals of valor. History contains no chronicle more illustrious than the story of their achievements; and although worn out by ceaseless conflict and overwhelmed by numbers, they were finally forced to yield, their glory, on brightest pages penned by poets and by sages shall go sounding down the ages.

Nowhere on the monument is the word slavery. That is the main reason why the Lost Cause Myth is a myth. By not acknowledging slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, this vitally important chapter in our nation’s history is significantly distorted. The North may have first gone to war to preserve the Union, and many Southerners may have spent the next 150 years trying to convince themselves the conflict was over states’ rights. However, the consensus of most historians today is that slavery was the primary reason why the Civil War was fought. This is clearly seen in the document issued to justify Mississippi’s secession from the Union entitled, A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union. In describing the "prominent reasons that have induced our course, the document goes on to say that our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest in the world. Its labor supplies the product that constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun."

The slavery position won the day when South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed the legislation to remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol grounds. It is a shame it took a deadly shooting to revive this debate, although many would say the end result brought us closer to the truth about this important issue from our past. Meanwhile, counter demonstrations continue to take place in Ocala, Florida and the debate goes on.

Just five years earlier, Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed House Bill 2281 into law. This legislation targeted public school districts’ ethnic studies programs. Arizona School Superintendent Tom Horne, a primary supporter of the bill, claimed the law was necessary because Tucson, Arizona’s Mexican American, African American and Native American courses teach students that they are oppressed, encourage resentment toward white people, and promote "ethnic chauvinism and ethnic solidarity" instead of treating people as individuals. Of course, Arizona belonged to Mexico until the mid 1800s when it was taken away as a result of a war, and many of its citizens today are the descendants of the Mexicans that once populated the area. The prejudice directed toward Mexican Americans and other minorities in Arizona has played a significant role in Arizona’s history. Should this all be part of the history curriculum in Arizona? Determining what belongs in the secondary history program of any public school classroom is directly connected to determining the truth about the past. The politicians of Arizona and other states may love to argue about what should or should not be taught in the classroom, but part of the problem lies in the ambiguities of history as an academic subject. Whether we acknowledge them or not, history is littered with these types of contentious issues. It is what makes history such a fascinating subject to learn. It also quite possibly makes history the hardest academic discipline to teach.

Why? First, most other subjects are built around a set of indisputable facts. Science teachers love to conduct experiments so that students will learn the value of the scientific method, and there is no denying that this process of developing and testing a hypothesis has value. But much of their curriculum is also built around facts that originated from the scientific method. In other words, the facts taught in chemistry or physics originated from experiments conducted to prove a particular hypothesis. If there is any question about the results, other scientists can replicate the same experiment; and if the same results occur again, the hypothesis is transformed into a scientific fact. The historian, on the other hand, cannot venture back into the past to conduct an experiment. Knowledge about the past can come only from the close examination of the primary source record, and this is often incomplete. In fact, if something important happened in the past, and there are no primary sources available to confirm that it actually occurred, it is not even part of the history curriculum.

The second problem with teaching history is that different historians who look at the same primary sources frequently reach different conclusions. If one historian happened to campaign in 2008 for Mitt Romney while another was an avid supporter of Barak Obama, these two historians living at the same time and in the same city may very well come to significantly different conclusions regarding the truth about the past. On a larger scale, entire societies that possess a different set of values may reach different conclusions from examining the same exact evidence. Imagine how many different ways the Second World War is taught depending on whether the history class is located in Italy, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Russia or the United States.

To teach this point to my students, I do a quick lesson that begins by dividing the class into two parts. Each is told that a man named Franklin Roosevelt served longer than any other president; this is a historical fact. I then raise the question, was FDR a good president? One half of the class is given a copy of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and told to look for information that will help answer this question. The other half is given the same task, but they have to examine a copy of A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Patrick Allen. After given enough time to formulate a good response supported by excerpts from their respective books, the students’ discussion continues. As might be expected, the two halves of the class provide very different answers to the question about how good a president was FDR. A little further digging will show that the two books used in this exercise were written with a substantial amount of political bias. In fact, Howard Zinn was considered such a liberal that Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a conservative Republican, once tried to keep Zinn’s work out of the hands of K-12 students throughout the state. On the flip side, Schweikart and Allen fall far on the politically right side of the liberal-conservative spectrum. So what’s the truth about FDR and the role he played in America’s past? Widely respected historians wrote both of the books used in this exercise and both are available in virtually any bookstore in the nation. If nothing else, this activity demonstrates how relative the truth must be in a history class.

A third reason why history is such a challenging subject to teach involves the traditional history textbook. When asked, millions of adults today who say they hated history in school because it was so boring will frequently point their fingers of blame at the textbook. Not only are the books long, heavy and dull, they also tend to teach about the past as though the information was set in stone. As a result, students who study the past as a set of irrelevant time lines and facts transmitted in these textbooks miss out on the best part of history as an academic discipline. Instead of learning that history is really a dynamic examination and debate over different perspectives and interpretations, they are force-fed a dreary litany of facts.

It is for this reason that I have turned to James Loewen’s 1995 treatise, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. For many years now, this book has been assigned as summer reading to my honors and AP classes. Unlike the traditional and massive textbooks, Loewen does not focus on a chronological core set of facts. Instead, he takes the curriculum taught in these books and explains how much of it has evolved into America’s own mythology. Loewen’s book does a thorough job of dispelling the myths built around Columbus, the first Thanksgiving and the role in history played by Native Americans. However, there are three other provocative examples that my students are particularly encouraged to note.

The first was John Brown, the radical abolitionist. What I find most intriguing is how the historical view of Brown has varied so much since the Civil War. Those with southern sympathies not only viewed John Brown as a villain who encouraged others to murder people in cold blood, but also saw him as completely insane. However, according to Loewen, more recent accounts of John Brown have suggested that the man with an almost biblical appearance knew exactly what he was doing. There is no denying that John Brown’s men killed five proslavery inhabitants at Potawatomie Creek in Kansas or that he attempted to start a violent insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. If his motives were purely aimed at eliminating the evils of slavery, do these actions make him insane? Perhaps there is a more important question that should be addressed; perhaps what should be analyzed in the teaching of John Brown is the question of when do the ends justify the means?

The second example is the truth about Helen Keller. Anyone who has seen The Miracle Worker, the story of how Annie Sullivan displayed incredible fortitude in her quest to break through and reach Helen Keller, knows that both of the main characters are most deserving of our utmost respect. After all, Helen Keller had lost all ability to see and hear, and was completely and hopelessly trapped inside her body. Along came Sullivan and in the film’s final scene (spoiler alert), when Helen finally realizes the letters W-A-T-E-R Annie is spelling into her hand represent the fluid being pumped out of the well, many in the audience have been reduced to tears. Clearly, we should all see Sullivan and Keller as representing the kinds of heroes we want our children to emulate, right? Not so quick, according to James Loewen. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, we learn that as an adult, Helen Keller not only grew up to become a brilliant writer, but was also a radical socialist who sang the praises of the Russian Revolution. Whether this fact is good or bad is open to debate, but the point is that it hardly fits the image that most people, particularly those who have seen The Miracle Worker, hold of Helen Keller. People are never as simple as they are portrayed in the movies or as they are taught in our history books.

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

LC-USZ62-78983

The final example from Lies My Teacher Told Me involved the man who had been my favorite president growing up: Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s idealism expressed in his Progressive reforms, his Fourteen Points and especially his dream of creating the League of Nations, reflected the same positive outlook I held, or least wanted to hold: through the pursuit of dreams, the world could be made a better place. When I first saw Wilson’s grave in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., it was almost a religious experience. Nevertheless, like many other mythological narratives that he dispelled in Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen burst my bubble when he discussed Wilson’s extreme racism. The same president who had created the Federal Reserve System to regulate the nation’s banks also used his executive powers to racially segregate the federal government. The same president who pushed to protect American consumers by creating the Federal Trade Commission also stood in the way of providing women the right to vote. Furthermore, the same man who wanted the United States to enter World War One in order "to make the world safe for democracy" also ordered American military forces to invade Mexico and to take over Haiti. Once again, the same questions about truth can be raised, and once again, maybe it would be best to focus on a larger question. In this case, maybe the complexities of history should be explored by focusing on the question of what standards should be used to best evaluate political leadership.

President Wilson and his wife

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

LC-USZ62-101446

With all of these considerations in mind, what is the most effective way to teach history? After doing the best I could to teach history year in and year out for over three decades, I have finally come to realize that maybe the problem lies in our focus. Yes, to better understand history, people need to become at least somewhat familiar with the chronological events that led us to the present. And yes, when properly taught, people can learn just as much from the compelling historical stories that reflect the human condition as they can from the classics taught in any literature class. But since so many of these facts in history are open to debate, maybe the focus needs to be on the questions, not the answers.   

Years ago, like many secondary teachers, I became familiar with the concept of essential questions. The lexicon of educational jargon is so filled with useless vocabulary that comes from the latest passing fad that it might be easy to dismiss this as another one of those expressions.  However, the term essential question seems to have stood up to the test of time; and on a personal level, essential questions have become an integral part of my teaching. If essential questions could lead my students to develop a deeper understanding of the past, could they do the same for everyone else?

So what is an essential question? According to Grant Wiggins, a respected expert in the area of educational reform, in his book, Understanding By Design, a question is essential when it:

Generates meaningful inquiry into the big ideas and the core curriculum.

Causes deep thought, engaged discussion, ongoing inquiry, and new understanding as well as generating more questions.

Requires students to improve their decision-making skills by carefully considering the alternatives, weighing the evidence and supporting their idea.

Provokes a constant reexamination of traditionally accepted ideas, beliefs and values.

Ignites meaningful links between prior learning and current experiences.

Encourages the transfer of ideas to new situations and subjects.

In order to apply essential questions to the social studies classroom, I would add the following three standards:

Incorporate important historical themes and concepts. Since a focus on broad themes and concepts by itself will deepen the understanding of history, it only makes sense to connect them with essential questions.

Not have right or wrong answers. As established earlier, the subject of history is dynamic and subject to changing perspectives. The deeper understanding is best reached through the process of inquiry and debate, so a question with a specific correct answer will be of little use.

Be timeless. This means the question must be applicable to a variety of times and places. In this way, the question will link different periods of history. By using specific facts from various times to develop an answer to an essential question, the broad idea contained within the question will take priority over the minute trivia that typically dominates the history curriculum of most classrooms.

If these standards are used to develop an essential question that can be plugged into a unit on the Civil War, the best question might be when, if ever, should a nation go to war? As seen in the discussion of this essential question in chapter 12, the first step in fomenting an answer is to explore the real reason(s) why the Civil War was fought. For over 150 years, those with a predisposition to be more sympathetic to the former Confederacy have argued the war was more about liberty and states rights. Understanding that the purpose of history is to pursue and find the truth about the past, other historians have recently argued that slavery was at the heart of why the Civil War was fought. Like any endeavor, it is impossible to make good decisions without access to the truth. Properly taught, students can be educated to find this truth in their history classes and to then use the information to answer essential questions. The need to find accurate information in order to answer essential questions can provide a new and more meaningful purpose to the primary and secondary sources typically used in a history class. By examining the issue of slavery and its expansion, as well as other factors such as states rights and preserving the union, students can decide if the deaths of over 600,000 Americans in the Civil War were justified. This in turn can be used to help them answer the essential question regarding other wars that have yet to occur. In the near future, it might also help them to better determine who is most deserving from the past to be honored and even what flags should be flown over our state capitol buildings.

In addition, essential questions can be a powerful tool in the classroom. Most history teachers have probably asked their students about the reasons why the United States has engaged in wars from the American Revolution through the recent actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, in all likelihood, these conversations have focused on the particular war being studied and there was probably little effort to link the discussion to the present or the future. On the other hand, a Socratic seminar lesson focused on the question, "when, if ever, should a nation go to war", enables students to transfer their response from one situation to another. In addition, there is no limit to the time frame for curriculum built around essential questions. An inquiry approach to teaching and learning can use essential questions as the foundation for multi-week units or even the entire course. Over the years, I have used essential questions as the focus of many classroom activities, including structured debates, mock trials, mock Supreme Court hearings, simulations, field experiences and a host of other activities designed to engage students in higher level thinking.

What follows in this book are chapters built around 16 essential questions that have served me well over my 37-year teaching career. They have played a vital role in my curriculum and will serve you well in your efforts to teach or learn history. The questions are linked to particular historical themes or concepts and are then analyzed in great detail by using specific facts from different time periods to support various answers to the question. By the end, the effort to examine the questions and to formulate answers will lead the reader to a deeper understanding of history.

Suggested Reading:

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union. The Avalon Project. Accessed March 31, 2016.

http://www.avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp.

Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, editors.  The Myth of the Lost Cause.  Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Loewen, James W.  Lies My Teacher Told Me:  Everything Your American History. Textbook Got Wrong.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Schweikart, Larry and Michael Patrick Allen.  A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement. New York: Sentinel, 2004.

Wiggins, Grant J. and Jay McTighe.  Understanding by Design.  Virginia:  Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005.

Zinn, Howard.  A People’s History of the United States.  New York:  Harper Collins. Publishers, 1980.

Chapter 2

An existential seesaw

John T. Scopes

Courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2898289055

What is the ideal balance between faith and reason?

The place is Dayton, Tennessee and the year is 1925. A trial is about to begin that many have called the "Trial of the Century." A little known biology teacher named John Scopes is about to be brought to justice for violating a recently enacted state law forbidding the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution. Most of the nation is captivated by this legal clash, partially because it pits two well-known personalities against each other; the oft-times presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, assisting the prosecution, versus Clarence Darrow, the legal titan sent down to Tennessee by the newly formed American Civil Liberties Union. Millions of Americans are listening to the trial on their recently acquired radios complements of WGN operating out of Chicago.

When Darrow attempted to bring in expert witnesses to scientifically prove the theory of evolution, his effort was thwarted by defense objections over their relevance to a trial that was only supposed to focus on whether Scopes had broken the law. The turning point of the entire trial then occurred when Darrow was granted permission to question his opponent, Bryan, who was considered to be an expert on biblical creation. Most observers believed that Darrow destroyed his opponent and left him in a deep state of humiliation. Technically, the trial ended with a legal victory for the prosecution and Scopes was given a fine of one hundred dollars (which was later overturned on appeal). However, in the eyes of much of the world that had been following the trial, the prosecution’s case had been thoroughly discredited and the real victor was modern science.

In 1925, roughly half the U.S. population still lived on farms or in small towns while the other half had moved to the nation’s growing cities. A dichotomy that had been building since America’s earliest days detonated in the mid nineteen twenties like an erupting volcano. While there were plenty of exceptions, the rural areas still represented the religious fundamentalism whose roots ran all of the way back to the establishment of Boston by the Puritans in 1631. Meanwhile, cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis had become epicenters of growing modernism that was characterized by the intellectual principles of reason and science that dated back to the Enlightenment of the 18th century. These significant differences in how Americans viewed their existence had been lurking beneath the surface for over 200 years, but the intellectual explosion that occurred in Dayton in 1925 is still seething today in the minds of millions of Americans.

Meanwhile, the evolution versus biblical creation debate has continued right up to the present. According to the Gallup’s Values and Beliefs survey conducted in 2014, more than 4 in 10 Americans continue to believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago. The percentage of the U.S. population choosing the creationist perspective as the closest to their own view has fluctuated in a narrow range between 40% and 47% since the survey’s inception in 1982. As recently as 2008, the Louisiana Legislature passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, a controversial decree signed into law by Governor Bobby Jindal. This piece of legislation allowed public school teachers to use supplemental materials in the science classroom that are critical of established science on such topics as the theory of evolution. While proponents of the law state that it is meant to promote critical thinking and improve education, scientific societies collectively representing millions of scientists have opposed the law. The controversy over the origins of human life has continued right up to the present and beneath the surface lurks the deeper clash in fundamental values between faith and reason.

Why has the issue over human origins continued to be so contentious? Like most essential questions, this one has a right answer in the minds of each and every individual, but there is nothing that resembles consensus in the collective minds of the American public. When the subject has been raised in my classes each year, most students first appear to be perplexed. It is obvious that except for a few parents or ministers, no one has ever asked them this question before, and clearly, it has never been raised for discussion in any of their public school classrooms. A few have chosen to dismiss the question by saying it has no real bearing on their present or future lives. However, most students have acknowledged that how they choose to answer the question over humanity’s origins will significantly reflect how they view most of the other issues life has in store for them. There is an enormous difference between tracing our roots to Australopithecus versus Adam and Eve, and how one chooses between the two speaks volumes about how he or she would approach other fundamental questions such as the belief in a supreme creator or what happens when one dies.

Regardless of how we began, humans have been attempting to answer those other two questions from the very start. The first issue was not so much over the existence of God, but whether God should be referred to in the singular. Prior to the birth of modern science, there were simply too many questions that could only be answered by giving credit to a deity or a set of deities. Why does the sun rise and set every day? How do you explain the movement of the constellations at night? How do men and women create newborn life? Questions that are easily answered today in a middle school science class could not be answered three thousand years ago except through faith in the ideas provided by an organized religion. Galileo and Newton would change everything, but they did not come along until the 16th and 17th centuries.

For many, the question of an afterlife might be even more fundamental than the existence of God. What happens when we die? Has there ever been a more universally asked question? It has always been the great unknown. Many who are not so certain envy those with complete faith in the existence of heaven or some other kind of eternity after death. Deep inside, just about every person who has walked on this planet has been tormented by this question. Even if one has faith in the answer, there have remained other questions over the requirements necessary to achieve lasting immortality. Is there a connection between the moral acts in this world and the payoff in the next? Can salvation be achieved through individual acts or is the intercession of other people part of the equation? And of course, there has always been the question of what the afterlife will be like. Throughout history, different cultures and societies have wrestled with these questions, and the dichotomy between faith and reason has always provided a foundation for the ongoing discussion.

History is filled with efforts to address these questions. The official state religions in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China involved multiple gods, an accepted set of creation myths, and elaborate beliefs about the afterlife. Although their ideas may not have been codified in writing, the same can be said about the cultures that existed thousands of years ago in North America, South America, Africa and Australia. This pattern was substantially altered about five thousand years ago with the rise of the Hebrews along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Most people today are familiar with names like Abraham, Noah and Moses as well as the stories about how the one true God provided them with commandments that should guide their lives. From Judaism, the faith of the Hebrews evolved into two other major monotheistic religions: Christianity and Islam. All three religions preach the existence of one true God, the belief that God was the creator of the universe and the conviction God provided the laws that will lead to eternal life after death. The number of adherents today is hardly even; there are over two billion Christians, one and half billion Muslims and fewer than 15 millions Jews; but the similarities between the world’s three monotheistic religions far outnumber their differences. In fact, when one studies the number of times that wars have been fought between these three faiths, it is hard to remember how much they share in common.

A similar review of Hinduism, Buddhism and other eastern religions would reveal that these organized faiths also provide answers to the universal questions about human origins, the role of God(s) and the existence of an afterlife. What needs to be remembered, however, is that these answers are believed largely through faith. Is there any hard evidence to support the existence of God or to resolve the