Biographies of the Nation

The goal of Biographies of the Nation is to provide professional development and teacher education activities with respect to traditional American history. Biographies of the Nation is a three-year professional development program for elementary, middle, and high school teachers in three of Montana’s largest urban school districts--Great Falls, Helena, and Bozeman. We propose to offer a series of intensive colloquia and master-teacher-led book study groups, which focus on how biography can be used to teach history and how history can be taught to better understand the complex decisions that individuals, famous and not-so-famous, have made in circumstances not always of their own choosing. These circumstances involved critical issues, episodes, and turning points in the history of the United States, as well as the struggles that produced the significant documents and institutions that have defined our republic.

(Local Educational Agency) Our LEA (Local Educational Agency) The Great Falls Public School District

Our Partners Department of History and Philosophy Montana Council for History and Civics Education The American Computer Museum Department of History and Philosophy

Why approach American History through Biography? What is the powerful appeal of biography? Good biography is narrative that sets its facts within a compelling and coherent story. These stories have developed characters, burning motivations, daunting decisions, dramatic conflicts, unexpected turning points, and – unlike most historical fiction –sometimes ambiguous resolutions. Biography, unlike isolated facts and even well-wrought interpretations of facts based on models from the natural and social sciences, has the power to cast that spell that lingers in memory. Research suggests that the narrative qualities of biography appeal, in the words of historian David M. Kennedy, to something innate in the human mind that makes the narrative form an especially attractive medium in which to contain, transmit, and remember important information.

History’s Post Holes "Postholing" means an in-depth study of a particular period, or era. The postholing approach is often contrasted with a more traditional teaching approach that attempts to offer students a broad overview of historical knowledge, or "coverage."

History ... Top Down History ... Bottom Up

YEAR ONE: THE EMPIRE OF LIBERTY Fall Colloquium: Roots of Revolution & the Indian War for Independence Winter Colloquium: The Revolution Summer Institute: The Founding of the Republic YEAR TWO: AND THE WAR CAME Fall Colloquium: Slavery and Western Expansion Winter Colloquium: The War Comes Summer Institute: Reconstruction, Reaction, and the Second Reconstruction YEAR THREE: RISE, COLLAPSE, RECOVERY, AND VICTORY Fall Colloquium: Progressivism Winter Colloquium: The Great Depression: Reform, Relief, and Recovery. Summer Institute: W.W. II and its Legacy

Era I: The Empire of Liberty Fall Colloquium: Roots of Revolution & the Indian War for Independence Winter Colloquium: The Revolution Summer Institute: The Founding of the Republic

Thomas Jefferson used a version of this phrase several times: The Empire of Liberty? Thomas Jefferson used a version of this phrase several times: "...we shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace on terms which have been contemplated by some powers we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends." - Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780 "we should then have only to include the North in our confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government." - Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809

Guiding Questions for Era 1 What political, legal, philosophical, cultural, and religious traditions did Americans draw upon for their revolution, for their conceptions and institutions of republicanism and democracy? Who were the leaders who were the followers, who abstained, and what were their contributions, and what political and legal institutions developed? What individuals and groups have been important in maintaining, testing, and changing these institutions?

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