Recently, I had lunch with a group of friends. While we were waiting for our orders, one of my friends, the most apolitical person I know, said that he had seen “Young Washington.” He thought it was an excellent movie because it showed him George Washington’s life before everyone knew about him. He said it was fascinating and he had had no idea of the complexity of Washington’s life. He certainly didn’t remember anything he saw in the movie being discussed in his history classes in school. He’s in his late 60s, and his field of work was managing the audio and video data for a PBS station (he retired before its funding dried up), so it’s not surprising that he didn’t remember much from history in school.
As a former history teacher, I can’t tell you the number of times people have sighed or actively worked to keep from rolling their eyes when I say what I did. I completely understand the feeling. I felt exactly the same way about math. Anything above basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division was boring to me. “But math is needed every day to solve problems!” my math friends wail at me. There is a t-shirt I’ve seen that says "Math and Science can tell you how to clone a T-Rex. History can tell you why this is a bad idea," complete with a T-Rex chasing someone.
Any history class can be dry and boring, especially if the person teaching the class is dry and boring. I love history. I love teaching history. And yet, I’ve been to seminars and conferences on history that bored me! Not just me — the entire room of historians and teachers was bored. To bore a room full of people who love the subject takes a strong negative talent. That talent, or lack thereof, is something I always kept in mind when I was in the classroom. Simply because your students are a captive audience doesn’t mean you have the right to put them to sleep.
I told my students that history is the world’s greatest soap opera, but no one is paying attention. Then I gave them an example. I usually use Henry VIII because he’s someone that almost everyone knows. I was doing this before Game of Thrones was even thought of as a TV show. My example is this: You have a king who needs a male heir to carry on his bloodline. He marries six women, but only one produces a boy, who dies as a teenager. He divorces the first, beheads the second, the third dies, divorces the fourth, beheads the fifth, and the sixth outlives him. Doesn’t that sound like the plot of a movie? Or a TV show? Who am I talking about?
Most of my students knew I was talking about Henry VIII, and most agreed that yes, my summation sounded like a movie or TV show plot. Currently, there is a musical in London titled SIX that is a modern-day retelling of Henry VIII’s wives. Further back in time, there was a 1973 an album about the six wives of Henry VIII. History provides a lot of source material.
I taught U.S. History, the basic survey course for college freshmen, from the Bering Land Bridge to Columbus, up through the Civil War as one section, and the Civil War through The Gilded Age and up to the present time. Sometimes I had 16 weeks, sometimes I had eight weeks, and once, I had four weeks. Cramming everything into four weeks was not one of the better ideas of the community college where I worked. I will say that my students did rise to the challenge.
Teaching those classes taught me a lot. I learned how to lead with something interesting to get the class involved. When discussing how World War I had started and how each country in Europe was pulled into the war because of entangled alliances, the very thing George Washington warned the U.S. against in his farewell speech, one of my students held up his hand and asked, “So, it was like a bar fight?” I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. I nodded, and we continued our discussion. When looking at President Theodore Roosevelt, I told my students that President Trump shares some qualities with President Roosevelt. What did the class think they were? It was actually a good discussion. I don’t know if I could have the same discussion now. When I made history approachable, my students were able to learn more, remember more, and write more meaningful answers when presented with essay questions.
That there were some answers that couldn't be repeated in polite company was to be expected. One test question asked: Could the American Revolution have been prevented? There were some very thoughtful answers, very detailed and informative. Then there was, “The colonies could have told Great Britain to f**k off.” After that, the student explained what he meant in his essay. Once I stopped laughing, he received a decent grade but was warned to never again use profanity in a test answer.
There is so much misinformation out there about U.S. history that there are more than a few books about all the misinformation. One book is “Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History” by Richard Shenkman, the editor and founder of the History News Network which speaks to the fact that George Washington fell in love with his best friend’s wife and that Pilgrims did not live in log cabins. A series that looks at the misinformation on a variety of subjects is the Politically Incorrect Guide, aka the P.I.G. series. For U.S. history, there is the P.I.G. to the founding fathers by Brion McClanahan, Ph.D. The book starts by discussing the myths that surround the founding fathers of the U.S. such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and others. There is also the P.I.G. to American history and the P.I.G. to the Constitution. All of these books make history come alive and make it approachable. Once you know the actual story, you can look at the myth and see why it was created.
When we discussed the Boston Massacre, we talked about what happened but we also looked at the event from the point of view of the British soldiers and why they did what they did. Looking at it from a different angle gave my students another way to see things, besides the rote version that they had been given in their high school textbooks. We looked at a reproduction of the engraving made by Paul Revere showing the massacre and discussed which side looked worse and why. What was Paul Revere’s intention in making the engraving?
After that, Revere was no longer a person in a textbook. He was no longer the guy galloping through the countryside in the dead of night crying out that the British were coming! (He didn’t actually say that, since he was British.) Instead, he was an engraver who did not like the actions of the British army and was actively working against them. He was a real person.
We looked at John Adams at the start of his legal career and how he all but destroyed that career by defending Captain Thomas Preston, the leader of the soldiers, during a trial for his actions during the Boston Massacre. Adams knew that by defending Preston, he would not be a popular person and that his law practice would most definitely suffer. But he believed that the British soldiers, including Captain Preston, deserved a fair trial in Massachusetts. “Every citizen is entitled to a proper defense,” Adams is quoted as saying. Preston was found not guilty. I asked my students how many of them would be willing to do what Adams did. I didn't get too many hands.
Recommended: Second Verse, Same as the First: Progressivism and Socialism
I have plenty of examples I could share. What I tried to do in every class was make history approachable, make it interesting and different from what was usual. I think it worked. At the end of a history exam, one of my students wrote at the end of the paper, “Wow, who would have thought it? History made fun.”
There is a reason why historical movies tend to do well. Unless the story is totally mucked with, people enjoy learning something new without being lectured. (Are you listening, Hollywood?) Just as the new Odyssey movie is sending people to find and read the original story, movies like Young Washington send people to find out more about the founders of the United States, people viewers thought they knew. However awful the new version of the Odyssey might be, if it gets people to read Homer’s original story, that’s a great thing. If Young Washington encourages people to learn more about George Washington and see that he was just a man in an extraordinary time, that is wonderful.
If more people tune into the world’s greatest soap opera, that is a great and wonderful thing. People who know the actual story are less likely to believe whatever nonsense the media comes up with. An informed society is less likely to do stupid things.
Here’s one last bit of information from the American Revolution: One of the most successful generals in the American Revolution was a Quaker, Nathaniel Greene, known as the Fighting Quaker. Where do you think he got that nickname?
