1. Procedure Practice You need to use the restroom during lecture
You come into class
You need to turn in an assignment
You were absent the previous day
You want to sit on your phone

2. Spotlight Photo

3. History
Hint: These will be a part of notes checked on your first test date
Complete the activities in here, don’t necessarily need to write everything else

4. First: How do you brainstorm?
Brainstorm in your notes: What is history?
“History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” - David C. McCullough
“History is philosophy teaching by examples.” ~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
“Historians are gossips who tease the dead.” ~Voltaire, Scribbling Books

5. Definition “The study of past events considered together.”
What are some questions unsatisfied by this definition?
Is it the people?
What about the place?
Who writes it? Is it flawed? Can it be trusted?

6. First
You have five silent minutes to write the history of the last 5 years
What did you write about?
Should be different; some personal, others political, some global, local, state etc.
Are only one of these considered history?
What you wrote is what you chose to be history. Out of all of these things to choose from how do you pick?
The idea is that there is so much that has happened we have to be mindful that we are studying only a fraction of what is out there.
We continuously do history a disservice.

7. Who Writes History? Be Skeptical!
What is the difference between:
“The French were defeated by Haitian slaves in the revolution”
“Haitians won the revolution against France”
“Columbus discovered the New World.”
Only new from a European perspective; had been inhabited for thousands of years
What is a potential issue with the passage below?
“The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations,”
-on a textbook section titled “Patterns of Immigration”
Undermines the horror of the forcible capture and enslavement of Africans

8. Write your reaction to the photo

9. Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History”
“An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”

10. Reaction and Questions
We are the angel of history constantly caught between the catastrophe of the past and the hope of the future
The storm come from “paradise”; Things promising progress are not always good. Fascists promised paradise but their “progress” towards this only left catastrophe
We are pulled by happiness but pushed by despair, creating this never ending cycle
The angel wants to stop and piece it all together to figure out what happened and learn, but cannot as it is ceaselessly born ahead

11. Brainstorm: Why Do We Study History?
Afghanistan and Hitler
Can instruct how to do and not do something
Tells us how things came to be and generally makes us smarter.
Why do we care?
Learning the structure informs us of how our present came to be
Knowing how we got here guides us to where we go from here
Not just big picture, think personally:
How you got to this classroom influences and helps determine what you will do in this classroom.
Understand your history to understand where you are at