Historical Thinking and Historical Empathy

Historical Thinking is... Not –Recall –Mere reenactment –Mere process or method with no facts Instead it is –Question-driven –Analytical –Applied knowledge –Evidence-based interpretation

To quote Bruce Lesh: History is about the debate between competing interpretations of events, individuals, and ideas of the past based on the utilization of historical evidence. –Bruce Lesh, “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer? Teaching Historical Thinking Grades 7-12 (Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2011), 4.

Essential Skills Posing historical questions/framing historical problems Establishing significance Correlation from disparate sources Sourcing Contextualization Citing—supporting claims with evidence Critical engagement with “the other side” Recognizing limitations to knowledge

Historical Empathy is NOT Putting students in positions where they will have the same beliefs or experience the same emotions experienced by people living in the past. An exercise in imagination over –Being (“imagine you are an Apache warrior”) –Identification (“identify with Adolf Hitler”) –Sympathy (“sympathize with victims of slavery”) Being the person in the past

Historical Empathy IS Understanding the past as making sense in light of the way people saw things. Asking “why did an individual or group of people, given a set of circumstances, act in a certain way?” Judging past actors in their own historically situated context and on its terms. Cultivated as an observer of the past, not as an actor in the past. An exercise in a specific type of imagination—Historical imagination.

Historical Imagination is... Not –Fictional or fantasy—making up information –Detached from evidence or context –Imagining myself in the past as I think today Instead, it is –Rooted in students’ understanding of context and their analysis of evidence –An intellectual leap between information in historical sources and gaps within the evidence trail.

Asking Questions and Framing Problems An “unnatural act” Moving beyond the facts to significance “Six honest serving men” –Who –What –When –Where –Why –How

Establishing Significance What is the historian’s purpose in investigating a given event? Was the event a catalyst for great, enduring change? Can the event or figure be linked to larger processes to –Illuminate some aspect of past experience poorly understood –Illustrate the impact of larger events

Correlation Identifying key information in multiple sources Supplementing information from one source with additional information from another Corroborating claims in one source with additional supporting assertions from another document

Source Criticism Identifying the source –What kind of source (e.g. letter, diary, military order, official record) –Who, when, where, why, how produced? Adjusting for bias –What evidence of bias is present (in purpose of document, internal vocabulary or tone? –What information may be gleaned from the bias? –How can the bias be corrected (e.g. correlation with other sources, “reading against the grain”)

Contextualization Identifying time of production Recognizing the social and cultural setting in which the document was produced –Evaluating the document’s information, claims, and biases with reference to its cultural context Purpose: to understand Not to give a moral pass Not to impose present values and prejudices

Citing Linking a historian’s claims with the primary evidence supporting those claims Footnotes with information allowing others to find and check the source The historian’s equivalent of scientific repetition of experimentation

Critical Engagement with “the Other Side” Identifying the range of rival interpretations of a historical event Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of rival arguments Positioning one’s own argument within the range of rivals and explaining its advantages over rival arguments.

Recognizing Limits to Knowledge Acknowledging the silences in the sources –No comprehensive records of the past –Some information lost –Some information inadvertently omitted –Some information deliberately suppressed Acknowledging imperfect understanding of context Acknowledging inaccessibility of some information (e.g. psychological motives)