Humanizing History: Helping Students to See the People Who Write the Past

As part of our theme of encountering, or as we put in our first post of the school year, “Prepared to be Nowhere Else,” I wanted to share the ways I am pushing students in my history classes to know and encounter the historians they read. Doing so is part of my larger goal for the year under the title of “Humanizing History.” At our school, teachers write their goals in the form of a question, making them something we can come back to, reflect on, and re-ask again and again. My question for this year goes: 

“How might I humanize the practice and writing of history in order to help students understand what it means to be a historian (and that it is normal humans who do this work!)?”

I landed at this question because I can see how easy it is from the student perspective to take the history textbook as knowledge given to an omniscient writer. History is easy to look at as a list of things in the past that just are there. With my goal, I’m hoping to share with students what the practice of history really is–not a list of names and dates but rather conversations and arguments between people about the past.  

Last year in one of my U.S. History classes, for example, my students and I were discussing their reading from the night before. The passage read, “Orange County, California, many of whose residents had recently arrived from the Midwest and worked in defense-related industries, became a nationally known center of grassroots conservatism.” I paused, letting my students know, “I read the ten books on the topic of Sunbelt Conservatism in grad school that eventually led to the inclusion of this sentence in the newest version of the textbook. Isn’t that wild?” “Ten books?!?!” They looked at me, aghast. 

So many humans behind this bookshelf

Had I been on my game, I would have gone further–talking about the approaches and questions of some of these historians. Historians build on past work to create new understandings of the past. Let me explain this idea in the context of the sentence from the textbook above. The people writing about the history of conservative politics in the United States before the early 2000s mostly focused their studies on the South. What changed between 2000 and 2015 was new people asking new questions and doing new research to revise our understanding of the history of the conservative movement. For example, Lisa McGirr, in her book Suburban Warriors, chronicles the everyday organizing actions of middle-class men and women in Orange County, California that eventually propelled Ronald Reagan into office. And Ellie Tandy Shermer, in her book Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape, looks at how Phoenix became a key city in the regeneration of the Republican party in the 1950s and 1960s. Both of these historians had research questions that could not be answered with the existing work on conservatism. So these people, these humans, asked new kinds of questions about conservatism that eventually came to be synthesized into the sentence that we had just reread. But alas, I was not on my game that day, so this imaginary extension activity did not happen. 

Even so, this example illustrates a larger theme I try to bring into my classes–that humans write history. Textbooks and articles are not some foreordained sources, sent to students from all-knowing beings. In the example above, a textbook from fifteen years ago would not have had this sentence because the scholarship on this issue was just coming out. What we call history is constructed from people pulling together different pieces of evidence and making arguments. Although academic articles and textbooks look polished, they are a product of people, meaning they can be messy, confusing, complicated, or wrong. Ok, maybe wrong is a bit of a stretch, but at least something you can argue against.

Even though I missed that opportunity, I have illustrated the humanity of history by bringing in examples of my own historical writing. In a U.S. Women’s History course I teach, I use the first two paragraphs of an article I wrote, asking students to look at the footnotes for an activity where they practice differentiating primary and secondary sources as well as how to properly cite material in Chicago style. At the end of the activity, I ask them why they think I had them read this random article about food welfare in the 1960s, and they come up with smart ways to connect this information to women’s history. Then, I reveal that I, a woman, wrote the article… and by extension formatted the footnotes. 

Caitlin's piece in Salon!

Another way I work to help students see history as written by people happens on a class day where I am returning feedback on student writing. I start class with an excerpt of the reader report for that same article. Reader reports are an integral part of the peer review process, and are necessary to ensure the academic integrity of what gets published in journals, but sometimes can be HARSH (I’m looking at you, reviewer #2). The first page of the report summarizes my article and its strengths, but then I get to the good stuff and project this on the screen for my class:

What follows this is a two-page takedown of why this article is lacking in important areas and why it is not a good fit for the journal I submitted it to. But then I get to tell my students I revised this article, resubmitted, AND got it published in this journal. 

At this point, I ask students, “Why am I showing you this feedback, and why today?” To which they figure out, oh! We are getting feedback today. I am modeling for them, from my real life, what a growth-mindset around writing looks like. I received what I saw as tough feedback and then used that to improve the article and my writing. 

I hope that with these activities in class I am making a small impact in students’ brains, getting them to think differently about what the study of history is. History is NOT a list of dates that everyone should know, but is instead the piecing together of evidence by people to tell a story. And the people on the other end, aka readers, have opinions about the way certain histories are constructed, like the reviewer did of my article. 

I think I’m also trying to model vulnerability. Writing can be scary, especially in the context of school where you put ideas on the page and are then assessed with subjective criteria as to the ‘goodness’ of this work. What I hope students take away is that even though academic writing looks polished, behind the curtain is the same process of people being brave and putting their ideas on the line. 

Moving forward, I think my goal to humanize history for my students has value beyond modeling vulnerability, and can remind students to think about the humans (or potentially AI bots) behind the information that they encounter, in particular on the internet. In today’s age of different realities and competing ‘truths’ online, it is more important than ever to reflect on who (or what) has thought about and written the information you are consuming. Rachel Davies in her recent post on AI spoke to a similar desire to find the human ‘mess’ in a world of AI, remarking: 

For a paper to be not just clean but thoughtful when handed to a teacher, somewhere in the writer’s life there is an annotated book, a mind map, a friend who listens to the wandering muddy version, a murder-board of quasi-conspiracies tracing an image, a scribbled work page, a flawed code, a rough draft with all the missing apostrophes circled, a jumbled mind that spirals and chews as you fall asleep or shower or go for a run, a thesis draft that uses every boring verb and prepositional phrase under the sun slouching towards a thought.

Ensuring students have the tools set to separate fact from fiction, identify a human writer’s intentions and argument, or realize the author is not human at all, are essential skills as we continue on into this brave new world. 

Caitlin Rathe is currently working to get many ducks in a row while chasing a toddler.