What elements of historical thinking have remained at the heart of history teaching over the decades?

Although different writers have given these elements different names, the process of historical thinking includes:

• Posing a question that serves as a starting point for historical enquiry.
• Gathering and weighing information about the past, distinguishing between primary and secondary sources
• Unearthing and examining as many sources as possible, evaluating them for their time of creation and potential bias
• Recognizing history involves interpretation and evaluation of information to form a narrative account
• Developing historical empathy, the ability to recognize that people living in different eras than our own had different experiences and frames-of-reference than ours.
• Understanding that historical accounts come from multiple sources that may offer contradictory perspectives, and that there often are multiple causes for an individual event. Historians acknowledge this multiplicity in developing a meaningful synthesis in their accounts.

How have history teachers responded to technological change in the 20th and 21st centuries?

Judging from the readings, at the K-12 and introductory college levels, not much has changed in the way history is taught: It still involves a “survey” that focuses on key people, events, and dates, to support “good citizenship” and inculcate social values into students.  The technology of the print textbook is little changed, although today “interactive” ebooks have been introduced that offer the opportunity to link to source documents, videos, simulations, and other materials. However, my experience as a textbook editor is that the interactive features found in these books have not been widely assigned by teachers and therefore not widely used by students.

In the public history sphere, there has been an embrace of digital history, beginning with a large effort by major institutions (such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian) along with universities to digitize their archival collections of historical maps, images, and source documents.  Google Books has digitized thousands of books, and sites like the LOC’s American Memory and commercial providers like newspapers.com have made large archives of historical print accounts available for easy searching.  This has given historians the ability to more quickly amass source materials that in the past.  Various interpretative sites have drawn on these materials, although most are only funded and kept current for a year or so after they are initiated, so there is a wide variety of sophistication and currency of material currently online.  Many teachers have drawn on this material to enhance their teaching and student learning, either through having students do basic archival research or to work with interactives developed by historical societies, museums, and other sources.

How have external expectations constrained teaching and learning in history and how might the digital turn disrupt those constraints?

All the authors note that the general public’s perception of history is that it’s just, in Henry Ford’s words, “just one damn thing after another.”  Rote memorization of names and dates is viewed as the major objective for history students and the advent of curriculum standards and standardized testing has only exacerbated this viewpoint.  Viewing history as an amalgam of “facts” has led to an ongoing public discussion of “who’s history” is valid.  Conservatives push for teaching the “great men” and “key events” that they see as central to American history, and balk at those who even suggest adding a few alternative voices or narratives to augment or enhance the story.  Liberal thinkers suggest that individual histories are all equally valuable, so that teaching any one set of facts over another is necessarily biased and dangerous.  This entire argument, of course, is predicated on the thinking that history is necessarily an exercise in defining national identity through a clear, compelling, and patriotic narrative of facts and events.

Digital resources could help history teachers break their dependence on the standard text.  Instead, they could draw on a much wider palette of source materials and interpretative sites to tell a richer story beyond the confines of a march of names and dates.  Rather than focusing on the ingestion of an approved set of facts, historians could engage students through encouraging them to practice the historical method.  This would include working with digitized primary sources, participating in virtual enactments, using mapping and analysis tools, and other approaches that are facilitated through engagement with the digital world.

Digital Learning Project: Understanding Shuffle Along and Its Times

Topic/Learning Challenges:  The topic of this project is the musical play Shuffle Along which opened in May 1921.  It was the first Broadway production written, scored, produced, choreographed, and acted by an all-Black ensemble.  While it continued to promote certain stereotypical images of Black people—and its starring comedians appeared in blackface—the show depicted a wider range of Black life than any previous one, with characters including Black politicians, store owners, educators, judges, and other middle-class, “educated” people.  The cast appeared in contemporary dress—not in the ragged clothes of minstrelsy—and the production broke new ground in portraying the romance between its lead characters in a straightforward, dramatic way—rather than as a comic subplot.  The music and dance introduced Black rhythms and styles that were truly revolutionary and influenced all of the musicals—Black and white—that followed in the 1920s.  The limitations of the production—due to what was available to an all-Black company—led to new innovations, showing how Black artists have used seeming roadblocks to their advantage and overcoming prejudice through humor and guile.

The learning challenges for students of American theater will focus on interpreting and understanding several elements of the show, including the blackface humor and its use of dialect; understanding the prejudices of both the white and Black audiences of the day; understanding how the actors/creators used these prejudices to their own ends; and evaluating how this production paved the way for more enlightened portrayals of Black life on stage.

Primary Sources:  This site will draw on three sets of primary sources:

1. Production photographs from the original production.
2. Contemporary reviews and commentaries by Black and white critics.
3. Recorded or written oral history interviews and documents created by the show’s creators and performers.

Audience and Engagement:  The primary audience for this project will be high school and college age students studying African-American culture and theater of the early 20^th century.  These students will be engaged through a series of activities asking them to interpret the primary sources using historical procedures: images; written reviews and documents; and recorded oral histories.  They will be asked to evaluate the primary sources for their reliability and accuracy; interpret them as to what they tell us about the theatrical world of their day; and use them to create a set of research questions and preliminary conclusions to better understand the contribution of Black performers to 20^th century American musical theater.

Historical thinking involves more than just learning the “facts” (names, dates, events, what some call the “substantive history”) of the past.  To be a historian involves interpreting these facts by using several different tools (or using the “procedural knowledge” employed by historians).  Historical research begins with posing a question—such as “Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?” or “What made Shuffle Along such an influential Broadway show?”  To answer these questions involves several steps.  Researching primary sources (documents, oral histories, personal writings) is the first step.  Collecting this evidence, evaluating its reliability (does the person who created the document have a particular axe to grind?), and choosing the best sources to address the research question comes next.  Setting each document in its historical context—what did other people write or say in this period; how does this document align with or differ from the general consensus?—helps us better evaluate the reliability of a primary source or at least understand the point-of-view being expressed.  Finally, the historian needs to interpret the evidence to offer a balanced answer to any historical enquiry.  Interpretation involves employing an empathetic understanding of why a person may have written or said what they did, what was the context in which they said it, and what audience were they trying to reach—among other considerations.

I’d like this course to address these questions:

1. Can we tell a historical story accurately if we come from a different period and culture (i.e., for my research, can a white historian today tell the story of African-American theater at the turn of the century?)
2. How should we judge oral histories or personal documents versus “factual” accounts? How do we value an individual’s perceptions of his/her actions versus documentary evidence?
3. How can we judge historical narratives written during the period being studied—that may have privileged one perspective over another—and ensure that we aren’t replicating these same errors in our own interpretations?

Based on the readings, I think some preliminary answers would be:

1. Historians need to bring empathy to their subject matter. Even people of the same ethnicity or social background today will have far different experiences than people of the same backgrounds a hundred years ago.  I strongly believe that we can overcome racial or social prejudices if we use historical methods to build understanding of the cultural norms of a different period and how artists overcame them.
2. While oral histories often have “mistakes” in terms of a person’s recall of exact dates of events (compared to documentary evidence), I do believe they offer considerable value when compared with the “substantive history” and with others’ accounts who also witnessed the particular events. Understanding how a personal viewpoint developed and how that influenced a person’s subsequent actions is an important part of telling any historical story.  Feelings/viewpoints are a part of history as are “facts.”
3. Understanding how previous historians shaped their narratives offers us a window into the cultural thinking of their day. They become, in effect, witnesses to their own time period—even though they may be writing about events that occurred hundreds of years previously.  Interpreting historical narratives as another set of “primary” documents—insofar that they illuminate the cultural prejudices and approaches of their era—is another way to understand an earlier time period.  Understanding how past historians failed to account for alternative narratives should make us humble in drawing our own conclusions and to question carefully whether we’re missing important documentary material that may not be “preserved” in traditional places.  We need to go beyond the standard archives to try to discover evidence that may have eluded past researchers.

I’m Richard Carlin, and I’ve been an editor and writer of books on the arts for over 30 years.  My latest book is Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm, and Race (coauthored with Ken Bloom; Oxford U Press, 2020), and I have published several books on country music and popular music history.

I am interested in oral history, archival research, and understanding the often “hidden” histories that lie behind the names and dates that are just the surface story of an artist’s life.

I hope to continue to hone my digital research skills and my abilities to create compelling digital materials including websites, blogs, and audio histories (podcasts).

I hope that this course will support my professional work as an Acquisitions Editor of academic books on music and the arts.  Increasingly, these books are sold in digital formats and/or accompanied by digital materials.

I have set up an initial exhibit to accompany my podcast, “What Happened to Lottie Gee” in Omeka.

The exhibit is part of my larger website, www.eubieblake.net.  The homepage for the exhibit is here: http://www.eubieblake.net/exhibits/show/what-happened-to-lottie-gee- 

I have made an initial “populated” page for the Introduction of the podcast, featuring the script, images, and one audio file.  It is located here: http://www.eubieblake.net/exhibits/show/what-happened-to-lottie-gee-/introduction

My plan is to continue to populate each section’s page as additional audio files and imagery is collected.  I also plan to add a few additional pages giving Lottie Gee’s full biography and biographies for some of the related figures mentioned in the podcast. In this way, anyone listening to the podcast can see deeper and richer source material.

What Happened to Lottie Gee?  Historic Podcast Proposal

What Happened to Lottie Gee? is a proposed podcast series that will address the career of singer/dancer/actress Carlotta “Lottie” Gee (1886-1973).  The star of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921), Gee had established herself in the teens as a performer on the vaudeville circuit at home and touring Europe with Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra.  Fair skinned, with straight hair, she was the ideal person to play the ingenue role in a production that sought to go beyond typical Black stereotypes to present a realistic love story.  However, after the success of Shuffle Along, Gee’s star faded, so much so that by the end of the 1920s she was struggling to find work.  Never recorded in her heyday, she faded from the scene and today is barely remembered as one of the first stars of the Black theater.

The podcast will address several questions based on Gee’s career:

• How difficult was it for Black creators to get their work mounted in mainstream (white) venues?
• What obstacles did women of color face to establish themselves as actresses? What kinds of sexism and racism did they face?
• Why were some Black performers recorded while others, like Gee, weren’t?
• How did black managers of shows take advantage of their female actors?
• How do these practices continue today? Is the theatrical world a better place for Black performers to work?

What Happened to Lottie Gee? will draw on several historic assets to tell this important story.  These include:

• 78 rpm recordings from the period by Sissle, Blake, and members of the Shuffle Along cast and privately made recordings
• Historic materials from the Eubie Blake Archives at the Maryland Historical Society; and archival materials from the Schomburg Collection (Edith Spencer, Flournoy Miller, and Noble Sissle collections), , Emory University’s Rose Library (Flournoy Miller papers), and private collections.
• Interviews with Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, and others from public and private collections
• New interviews with Black performers, directors, theater historians, and cultural critics
• Historic newspaper reviews and commentary from newspapers.com and the Library of Congress Historic Newspaper collection.
• Performance footage from the Library of Congress Film Archives and other private sources
• Personal papers, diaries, scrapbooks, letters, and other sources

Digital technologies to be used include online databases of recordings, newspapers, books, and journals; archival databases and collections of images and documents; newly recorded digital sound files; MP3 audio files; TIFF and JPEG image files.

The target audience will include:

• Devotees of musical theater
  • According to the Broadway Theater League, 14.8 million people attended Broadway performances in New York alone in the 2018-19 season; 11.64 million attended musicals (78.6%), with the rest attending plays. Of those, 3.8 million were nonwhite (25.6% percent, an all-time high)
  • The average age of a theatergoer was 42.3 years
  • 81% had completed college, with about half of those having a graduate degree
  • The average musical theater fan attends 4 shows a season.[1]
• African-American Women Interested in Their History/Culture
  • African-American women represent 12.9% of the US population; 11.4% hold college or advanced degrees[2]
  • Median age is 36.1 years
  • 27% are heads of their households (more than twice the rate of all women)[3]
  • African-American Women are leaders in their religious and political communities
• Fans of Early Jazz/Blues/African-American Music/Archivists of Recorded Sound
  • A study of record collectors[4] showed that there were predominantly male and in their 40s
  • They shared a passion for sharing knowledge about the records they collected, and were particularly interested in the study of individual performers

[1] https://www.broadwayleague.com/research/statistics-broadway-nyc/

[2] https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-of-color-in-the-united-states/.  Posted Feb. 1, 2021; accessed Feb. 21, 2021

[3] https://blackdemographics.com/population/black-women-statistics/.  Accessed Feb. 21, 2021

[4] Margree, P, MacFarlane, A., Price, L. & Robinson, L. (2014). Information behaviour of music record collectors; Information Research, 19(4), paper 652. Retrieved from http://InformationR.net/ir/19-4/paper652.html (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.Webcitation.org/6UUjqB0d3)

I interviewed three different core users for more project, one in her 20s, one in his 40s, and one is his 60s.  All three were interested in the history of musical theater and African-American culture and all three were podcast listeners.  I was hoping to test some ideas about what would be most appealing to them in a podcast on the history of Shuffle Along.

It was interesting to find that—despite their interest in musical theater—each person interviewed followed different types of podcasts.  The youngest interviewee mostly listened to self-help and interview shows; the 40-year-old subject used podcasts to build his German language skills (listening only to shows in that foreign language); and the 60 plus year old listened to podcasts as they were recommended to him on very specific subjects of interest to him.  The 20 year old primarily listened to podcasts through streams on Spotify while driving or working out; the 40 year listened on his iPod while cooking or by “binge listening” a series like “Dolly Parton’s America”; the 60 plus year old only listened on his computer.

When asked what was most appealing to them, all emphasized that they were interested in learning more about how I had researched the history of Shuffle Along as a point of entry.  There are several popular podcasts that emphasize the process of discovery—how did the narrator uncover a story.  This wasn’t something I initially thought of as an organizing principle, but it does seem to be one that would appeal to my core audience, so I’m now thinking in terms of framing the story as the “hunt” for information about this 100-year-old show.

They all valued hearing original source material—recordings from the period; interviews from the show’s creators—over “talking heads” (current historians) although they emphasized the need for commentary.  They emphasized the importance of “setting up” the historical material so it could be understood in terms of today’s cultural norms.  They also said that the narrator didn’t have to be a “name” person to interest them.

Finally, my interviews convinced me of the need to focus the series on a single theme.  For class, I propose creating a “proof of concept” podcast that would outline the themes, include interviews, recordings, and source materials that would be part of the series, and outline how the theme would be used to shape the content of a 6-8 episode series.