The Top 8 Mistakes Teachers Make When Teaching the Modern Civil Rights Era

And a Few Suggestions on How to Fix Them

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I am a little concerned that I am biting off more than I can chew with this post, but I feel compelled to address these issues, as I see them often--not just in classrooms that I visit, or stories I hear from kids about what they have learned in their classes, but even in the mainstream media and among adults. 

Jaquelyn Dowd Hall, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote an influential essay in 2005 in The Journal of American History. It is available on Jstor, though you can get the sense of her argument from the second paragraph which I quote below:

Centering on what Bayard Rustin in 1965 called the “classical” phase of the struggle, the dominant narrative chronicles a short civil rights movement that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then comes the decline. After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now.

This is the narrative that many of us teach. And it is not completely wrong. But it is "a" narrative. And, like any narrative, it leaves things out. It hides the nuances and the complications. So I'm going to try to highlight at least 8 of them. (For more on the historiography, you can read this brief article by historian Eric Arnesen, "Reconsidering the Long Civil Rights Movement.")

Mistake #1: Teaching that the Civil Rights Movement Begins in the 1950s

The narrative highlighted above by Hall could not have happened out of the blue. We know this. We are supposed to be teaching cause and effect. So what caused the events of the 1950s--the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the Brown decision? If you teach about Brown v. Board, you have to review Plessy v. Ferguson. If students studied that as part of an earlier unit on Reconstruction or the post-Reconstruction period, then you will likely need to review.

But the bigger issue is presenting the start of the movement when Rosa Parks was too tired to move to the back of the bus (more on Parks in mistake #2). The best "fix" for this problem I have seen is a lesson by Bruce Lesh described in his fantastic book, Why Won't You Just Tell Us the Answer.

The lesson he describes in chapter 7, "Using the Civil Rights Movement to Teach Historical Significance" is worth the price of the book (and is where I was introduced to the Hall essay I mentioned above). In it, he first asks students to consider what makes something significant. By showing images--some really famous, like the ones on the left and others that are less so like the one below. Students were instructed to pick one or two they thought were most associated with African American civil rights. Then you discuss the criteria they used to decide whether something is historically significant or not. Why is it that the rise of the black power movement in the mid-1960s is not as clearly fixed in our minds as a key moment of the civil rights movement as Rosa Parks on the bus? Having students reflect on that is a powerful way to get them to think about history in general and how we choose which stories become a part of our "national story." Lesh's book offers a more complete discussion of how to go about this, so I urge you to check it out. Click here for the slides I created to go with this lesson, though of course you could create your own.

Following the phase above, students examine a list of key events connected to African American civil rights dating back to the first decade of the 20th century and use the information to complete a chart. (I know--I have criticized the use of such things in earlier posts, but this one is for a worthwhile purpose.

It is not about memorizing a bunch of items; they don’t need lots of detail on the chart. The idea is to get a general idea of all the things that happened involving Civil Rights in the period before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, which is when most history books start talking about the Civil Rights Movement. Then they apply the criteria you developed in the first part of the lesson when looking at the pictures to decide which time period could best be described as "the birth" of the Civil Rights movement. here's the chart I used (Lesh has a reproducible one in his book that is longer. I designed mine to be more appropriate for my 8th graders, though it is also usable for high school. There's more to the lesson than that, but that is the main idea. Again, check out Lesh's book. 

And also keep in mind that if you have been teaching important aspects of African African history all along, you are better equipped to avoid the mistake of relegating civil rights to only the 1950s and 1960s. (See my earlier post on Blacks and the Progressive Era and this article I wrote for MiddleWeb about teaching Black history all year and not just in February.)

Mistake #2: Overemphasizing the Role of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King

We have done a very good job of teaching about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. So good that when students were asked in a series of studies who are the most famous Americans other than presidents, of the thousands of names that students listed, King and Parks showed up on a quarter of all lists. (Check out this this article by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano.) But a Civil Rights movement with only Parks and King is a woefully incomplete one. Ava DuVernay, the director of the recent film, Selma, described her focus for the film, "My interest was showing people on the ground in Selma. The band of brothers and sisters who were around King." (quoted here). Her point is well-taken (Though oddly, I'd argue that the film doesn't do that nearly as well as focusing on King. See the segment, "The Man or the Movement?" in the podcast, BackStory: Pop History for a similar view from the historian Brian Balogh.) 

There are plenty of other famous and non-famous folks who made the movement happen. Try this game with fellow history teachers: have them guess who was on the cover of TIME magazine on August 30, 1963 with the banner, "The Negro Revolution to Date." Click here for the answer. 

Surprising isn't it?

Few of our students know about Claudette Colvin, the 15 year old girl who first refused to move to the back of the bus. Focusing on young people can send a powerful message to our students about their ability to effect change. The documentary, Mighty Times: The Children's March, is a good example of this, that works well with students (and is about 40 minutes--good timing.) There is also a wonderful book, Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories, by Ellen Levine that I have used successfully. The excerpt by Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine works especially well to read aloud to middle or high schoolers. Another useful collection of oral histories is Voices of Freedom by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer. You can also find online collections of oral histories from the Library of Congress, Civil Rights Movement Veterans, The Southern Oral History Program, just to name a few.

Mistake #3: Oversimplifying Martin Luther King

When elementary school students listen to the same part of King's "I Have a Dream" speech every year on Martin Luther King Day, it is no wonder that their understanding of King is so narrow. To quote Jacquelyn Dowd Hall again,

Martin Luther King Jr. is this narrative’s defining figure—frozen in 1963, pro-claiming “I have a dream” during the march on the Mall. Endlessly reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose their political bite. We hear little of the King who believed that “the racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem” and who attacked segregation in the urbanNorth. Erased altogether is the King who opposed the Vietnam War and linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism abroad. Gone is King the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People’s Campaign, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike

I can think of no better resource to help remedy this mistake than "The Fierce Urgency of Now" podcast from the 3 historians at Backstory.org. You can listen to the podcast, or read through the transcript from the website. It offers a lot of insight into the March that will change how you and your students think about it. And they offer some excellent additional resources if you need more. Students should understand what the march was supposed to be about and that other folks were there besides King and the masses (show 'em the TIME magazine cover). If you like, you can have students read all or some of the famous speech by Rabbi Joachim Prinz that was delivered just before King's speech. But most importantly students should know that the "I have a dream" speech has more in it than just the "I have a dream part" they hear year after year. Have students read the first half of the speech!

And then you have to make sure that read more of King than just this speech. King's letter from a Birmingham jail is a classic source for good reason. Here are excerpts from that letter with questions that I used with my 8th graders last year. But we also need to use speeches King gave after the successes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. You can look at theKingCenter.org to find some of these speeches. His "Beyond Vietnam" speech given at Riverside Church in April of 1967 is a good example. Read more about the speech in this NPR interview with Tavis Smiley.

Mistake #4: So were JFK and LBJ Good Guys or a Bad Guys? 

I actually had a student ask me that question once about LBJ in connection to Vietnam. He had decided (probably based on my flawed Civil Rights unit) that LBJ was a "good guy" because of his role in the 1964 and 1965 legislation. Then came Vietnam, and, well...that's another narrative for another post. But the question is embedded in the way we teach Civil Rights, too. And not just for Johnson, but also for Kennedy. Kennedy's speech of June 11, 1963 (view here): good guy. But Kennedy before that: not so good. (Read a commentary about this shift from The Atlantic.) And the same for LBJ. Ever the master politician, Johnson seems to flip on issues whenever it is politically expedient to do so. For more on Johnson, check out this Terry Gross's interview on Fresh Air with Todd S. Purdum, the author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Or even better, put Robert Caro's The Passage to Power on your summer reading list. If there are too many other things on your summer list, just check out the chapters that discuss the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

My point is that neither JFK, LBJ or MLK for that matter are flawless heroes. Life is complicated. Politics are complicated. There is good and bad. Our job is to help students understand multiple perspectives and the fuzzy, gray areas.

Mistake #5: Neglecting to Discuss the Civil Rights Movement in the North

I don't know about you, but last year when I was teaching the Civil Rights movement, I looked at the calendar and realized if I wanted to get to Vietnam, I better get moving! Poor planning can lead us to mention a few riots in the North, mumble something about the appeal of Malcolm X to urban blacks, and then give the unit test and push along. But a Civil Rights movement that starts in Montgomery, moves to Little Rock and ends in Selma is woefully incomplete. It suggests to our students that once segregation officially ended, all was well. I suspect that for those of us who live in the urban North, it is unpleasant to admit that racism was alive and well in the North, too, and still is. But with recent events in Baltimore, this is just...well, urban legend.

Because I am in Chicago, I like to teach about King's summer in Chicago in 1966. If you live in or near a different northern city, I would try to find something from your own city. But if not, Chicago is still a great case study, because the movement was not terribly successful there, pointing out the challenges of solving all the racial and underlying economic problems in the North. (On a side note, I often wonder what it must be like to teach U.S. history in the South--the burden of having to teach the Civil War and about things like Birmingham and Selma. The reading that follows on the movement in Chicago should make Southern students feel better that it was hardly just the South that was "the bad guy"in the 1960s).

The first thing I did when I taught this to students was to show them a pile of nine U.S. history textbooks commonly used in middle and high schools--including theirs--and ask them why they thought only one mentioned King's summer in Chicago. That discussion in and of itself was fascinating (and quite revealing about what the assumptions students make about textbooks). But that was just a brief introduction before reading an article about the campaign in Chicago. Students read the article for homework, and prepared discussion questions which they used in class the following day. The article is adapted from a story in the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine. The lesson was made even better by the fact that the assistant principal's mother had grown up in Marquette Park, so she (the assistant principal, not her mother) came in to talk about it. Never pass up an opportunity to make history personal. If you can find a guest speaker, or an article about your own city, go for it.

Mistake #6: Teaching MLK and Malcolm X as Opposites and Teaching them out of Context

Try this experiment. Type "Martin Luther King vs" into your browser. Does your browser automatically suggest "Malcolm X" as what should follow? Yeah, mine too. How little Google knows about Malcolm X!

Pitting the two against each other is done far too often in civil rights curriculum materials and out in the real world, too. While a lesson like this one from Edsitement offers some good materials, it posits a dichotomy that is overly simplistic and misrepresents both King and Malcolm X.

Or take this lesson from the Gilder Lehrman Institute (note, you may have to sign up to be a member in order to view the lesson.) After reading just a few excerpts from one speech each of King's and X's, students are asked to write an essay that addresses the following question:

“Choose the leader whose methods and message you found to be the most convincing.” 

What a student in 2015 thinks is the most convincing message does not address a historic question. Most convincing about what? And to whom? Convincing to a 20 year old black man in Watts circa 1965? Or to a Mississippi woman circa 1963? Or to either in 1968?

For a more thoughtful analysis of these two men check out these lesson plans, originally published in the OAH (Organization of American Historians) Magazine in 2005. While you probably don't have time to use the entire set of lessons, you can easily pick and choose from it. Plus it offers a useful conceptual background for you, the teacher, to help remedy this mistake.

I created this handout to help students see the evolution of Malcolm X's views and how they relate to those of King's. I also have had students watch a section from the Eyes on the Prize series mentioned in the OAH lesson above. It's the episode, "America at the Crossroads, 1964-1966," though they don't watch the entire thing. And these are the discussion questions that I use with/after the film. See this lesson from lesson plans mentioned about. I put the quotations into a simple handout for students here. If you find yourself getting the answers all wrong, you'll know you need to do some background reading!

Another idea: I haven't read everything on this link which is a debate about MLK v. Malcom X from debate.org, but I think you could probably do something interesting with it for high school students. Perhaps having them read some of the entries, commenting on them, thinking about historical inaccuracies....?

Mistake #7: Missing the Opportunity to Connect to the Rest of the World

One of the things that makes teaching the 20th century challenging is the skipping around from domestic to foreign policy to domestic again. I remember the same student who asked me the question about LBJ being kind of amazed by the fact that everything we were talking about in Vietnam was going on at the same time as all the stuff in the previous unit on Civil Rights. (No wonder all our presidents' hair turns gray in office!)

Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King arriving in New Delhi.

So the mistake we need to avoid is keeping our unit on the Civil Rights too separate from that of Vietnam. We don't want our students' hair to turn gray, so we probably need to make it two units, but you can at least remind them repeatedly of the connections during both units.But--and here's the bigger mistake, I think: we neglect to connect the Civil Rights era to the Cold War that may precede it in our teaching, but is happening at the same time in real life. An essay by Kevin Gains, "The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective" is an excellent resource for this. It is worth reading (and only 8 pages.) Looks like may be able to link to it from your local library here. This article gave me some insights that I used to create this lesson on Martin Luther's trip to Ghana and India. We tend to be rather myopic in U.S. history and fail to connect what happens in the U.S. to what is happening elsewhere in the world. This lesson helps remedy that.

It gives me an opportunity to remind students about a major event in world history--decolonization--and connect that to the Cold War and Civil Rights. Examples like African dignitaries coming to segregated Washington, D.C. are revealing. Or John F. Kennedy realizing what bad PR the photo to the left is for U.S. standing abroad, as he tried to portray the country as Leader of the Free World.

Mistake #8: Failure to Connect to the Present

Click here to read the article and for larger image of this chart.

An article in yesterday's Washington Post points out that public opinion about deaths of black men at the hands of police has changed over the past year. The article states, "The end result is that incidents that would have been local news stories a year ago 'now [appear] to fit this larger national narrative.'"
While public opinion is still split and there is still a big gap between blacks, whites, Democrats, and Republicans, the article claims that the shift from December is significant.

It is challenging to discuss these events in class--not just because it is a controversial topic, but because everything is still so current. But this doesn't excuse us from trying. As history teachers, even when we know that there are few "right answers" in history, we feel a little safer in the past. Teaching about today is far messier. But even raising the questions-- in what ways do recent events in Baltimore suggest that inequality between blacks and whites is still a problem? in what ways do they suggest civil rights for young black males in particular are still compromised?-- helps students see connections between what they are studying and what is going on in the world today.

And in this unit in particular, not raising current examples of inequality sends the message that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s solved everything and was an unqualified success.
You can use this document I created to help dispel that myth.

And here are a few resources for teaching about Ferguson and Baltimore:

• Sociological Research puts Ferguson in Context
• A "Baltimore Syllabus" - links on a Google Doc
• My previous post on Ferguson and Reconstruction - (roughly the middle of the post, some links to Ferguson resources)
• Go on twitter! Seriously. Check out: #BaltimoreUprising, #Fergusonsyllabus, #BlackLivesMatter. There seems to be a bit on #BaltimoreSyllabus, but I don't know if that will evolve into it's own thing or merge with #Fergusonsyllabus.

And a few additional resources for teaching about civil rights:

See this guide to films/documentaries to use when teaching about Civil Rights by the Hasan Kwame Jeffries, history professor at Ohio State University.

• New Jersey State Library
• CivilRightsTeaching.org
• Digital History project lesson plans
• FacingHistory.org
• PBS.org "Eyes on the Prize" resources
• the DBQ I created for 8th grade civil rights unit - please feel free to comment; it's far from perfect
• my last post on connecting the birth of the 1950s Civil Rights movement with the birth of Rock 'n' Roll

Black Migration to the North: Teaching Suggestions & Resources

Sometimes it is important to address basic questions about our society today--things we tend to take for granted. Isn't that one of the points of studying history, after all? To illuminate how we got to be what we are?

Growing up in the Chicago area, I have always known that Chicago was racially divided and that blacks lived predominately on the west and south sides of the cities. The city has changed in dramatic ways since I was a child (most notably with the rise of a large Latino community throughout the greater Chicago area) but there are still sharp racial boundaries in Chicago. (Check out this AMAZING map --also below--for details. And see the list at the end of the post* for similar information for the rest of the country and other U.S. cities.) How did this happen? And why?

As I mentioned back in October in this post, students should know that slavery existed in the North as well as the South. So there have been African Americans in the North from the beginning. But the numbers grew dramatically beginning in the 1910s with what has become known as, "The Great Migration." The movement of black Americans between 1910 and 1930 from the rural South to Northern cities represented the largest movement of black people since the slave trade.  Approximately 1.5 million blacks made this move. And between 1940 and 1960, there were another 3 million who did so.  Just as slavery created a unique African American culture, the Great Migration created a new urban black culture.

The decision to leave the South was influenced--just like immigration--by what historians sometimes refer to as push and pull factors. Push factors were those that tended to support leaving the South; pull factors were those that attracted blacks to come to the North. The Chicago Defender, a newspaper for African Americans, highlighted stories of blacks who had "made it" in Chicago, inspiring greater numbers to leave the South. The Defender was founded in 1905 and is still published today. Lots of blacks wrote in to the Defender to get advice and assistance. You can use some of these letters with your students to illustrate the kinds of issues migrants faced. See Letters to the Chicago Defender - from History Matters. I have also a few on this handout, which I put together originally to go along with a lecture.  You can also use the sources on that handout as an in-class activity. For example, ask students to read them and consider questions such as the following:

• What does the writing tell you about the level of education of the writers? (interestingly, while there are clearly some grammatical and spelling errors, there is also a certain kind of eloquence that I don't always find in student papers!)
• What do the letters to the Defender suggest about work ethic? about Blacks willingness to work hard in a system in which the traditional paths to success had so often been denied?
• What do the quotations from Richard Wright and from Lucy Jefferson suggest about race relations in the North? And for Jefferson, what do they say about how those relations changed over time?

See also these sources:

• What life was like in the North sources - from History Matters
• Letters from resettled Southerners - from History Matters
• Resources on Chicago and the Great Migration from the Library of Congress

Once they arrived in the North, the experiences that greeted a rural southern people could be daunting. The noise, hustle and bustle, the smokestacks of the urban industries, the big buildings--and the weather! If you were lucky, you arrived in good weather. But even a late spring arrival (as those of us living in Northern cities know all too well) can mean winter jacket weather. Which of course, the migrants did not have.

I like to use the paintings by Jacob Lawrence as a way to "tell the story" of the Great Migration or--how it was sometimes referred to at the time: the 2nd Emancipation or the journey to the promised land.  Jacob Lawrence is an African American painter.  He was 23 years old when he painted the first panel of what became a series of 60 paintings, known as the "Migration Series." They are marvelous to see in person, (which I did when they were first shown together in 2008). Normally, half of them are at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the other half at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently, they are being shown all together in New York, so if you are anywhere near there check it out. Fortunately, you can see all of them online at the Phillips Collection website or the MOMA site wherever you might be. There is also a youtube video:

Alternatively--and this is what I like to do--is assign students to read the captions that Lawrence wrote for each panel. The captions and paintings are excellent tools to describe not just the who, what, when, where and why of the Migration, but the feelings and emotions as well.

For biographical information about Jacob Lawrence, see the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center. And see this story from NPR on the current exhibit on Lawrence's migration series in its historical context.

The other reason I like to use these paintings is because they create a perfect segue into a discussion of the creation of the urban African American culture I mentioned above. Though Lawrence painted his series in 1940-1941, he grew up in Harlem during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. (He was born in 1917, so he was a little young). His paintings were said to be inspired by the poem of Langston Hughes, "One-Way Ticket."(See here for the poem, and also a link to a larger collection from Chicago's Newberry Library about the Great Migration. You can also link here to download a recording of Hughes himself reading the poem.) Or I also like to use one of Hughes's other poems, "The South."

I probably don't say it often enough in this blog, so I'll say it now: history is one of the humanities. And the humanities include art, literature, and music. Teaching about the Harlem Renaissance is one of the great opportunities to connect with your Language Arts teachers down the hall. (It is also one of the topics that turned me from an English major in college to a focus on history, ultimately majoring in American Culture!)

One of my non-teaching passions is music, so I'm always looking for excuses to expose students to music they likely don't know and that has historical significance. One of my favorites for this topic, "Down in Mississippi." I post the lyrics up on the screen while playing it.

• Pop Staples, "Down in Mississippi" 
• or this more contemporary version from his daughter, Mavis Staples, "Down in Mississippi" (lyrics for Mavis's version here).
• Alternatively, check out "Times is Gettin' Harder"

Here are just a few more references for you to expand your lesson on the Great Migration to the Harlem Renaissance:

• excerpt from Langston Hughes's autobiograpy, The Big Sea (which is a great read, by the way...check out the whole book.)
• a link to links, and the lesson they came from on readwritethink.org
• Resources on the Harlem Renaissance from the Library of Congress
• Lesson from PBS: The South, The North and the Great Migration: Blues and Literature

With the events of Ferguson this year, and the Black Lives Matter movement (see yesterday's article from the Huffington Post) it is especially poignant to me that I feel the need to follow a lesson on the Great Migration with a lesson on race riots. The Chicago race riot of 1919, the East St. Louis riot of 1917, the Tulsa riot of 1921.... I used to conclude my lesson on migration with just a brief lecture about the Chicago riot of 1919, and conclude by suggesting that while such riots eroded the "myth of the Promised Land" by demonstrating that life did not become automatically better by moving to the North. And it is a critical point to come back to when you get to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as race riots will once again rattle across Northern cities. Today, I'd be inclined to develop this into a lesson of its own. See here for a good starting place, from the SHEG (Stanford History Education Group).

In order that this blogpost doesn't go on too much longer (and because my kids will be wondering soon what is for dinner!) I will leave you with this parting question about the intersection of history and the present: recently, there has been a reverse migration of African Americans from Northern cities "back" to the South-- what does this tell us race and American today? Here are a few articles to give you the background on that trend (remember, whites are moving out of the cold, snowy North, too!):

• "Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend," March 2011 - from The New York Times
• "Why African-Americans are moving back to the South," March 2014 - from The Christian Science Monitor
• "Black Migration is Now from North to South," March 2014 - from Black Entertainment Television

* From the beginning of this post, here are the websites where you can find racial maps of other regions:

• for the whole United States
• for many other U.S. cities (I'm including the link that includes the link to maps about immigration, because they are really neat, too!)
• other interesting demographic maps
• Maps from University of Illinois at Chicago on Great Migration -  (Also check out their fully conceived unit on the topic here.)

Looking through the Trick-or-Treat bag for History:

Ideas for Teaching about Halloween

I never realized that there was history, close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

— Stephen Leacock

In my work with student teachers, there are two days that I will never observe them teach: the Friday before spring break and Halloween. No teacher wants to be evaluated on those days.

And this year, Halloween falls on a Friday. Of course, there is no reason why you cannot go about your business and teach whatever topic you are on. As I mentioned in my last post, I meant my next post to be about slavery. But then I got thinking about Halloween and the quotation above, and I thought, why not teach something about the history of Halloween next Friday? I like the idea of getting students to see that history is all around them. Even at the bottom of the trick-or-treat bag.

I live just outside Chicago within biking distance of one of the Mars Candy Co. headquarters and Ferrara Pan Co. factory (maker of Lemonheads, Redhots and Jugyfruits among others). The Chicago area is also home to Blommer's Chocolate Factory, which (according to their website) is the largest cocoa processor and chocolate supplier in North America. You can smell the chocolate up to a mile away depending on the direction of the wind. Very Willy Wonka-esque.

When I drive on I-294, I go past the rotating Baby Ruth/Butterfinger sign. And I love to see the Wrigley building on the Chicago River when it’s lit up at night. Yes, that Wrigley. Chicago used to be the candy capital of America. At one time it produced up to a third of all the candy in the country, as I learned two years ago at a wonderful little exhibit at the Elmhurst Historical Museum (if you’re in the Chicago area, check out their website. It says you can contact the curator for a traveling version of the exhibition).  


But even if you live nowhere near a candy factory, you can still teach a lesson about candy and Halloween.  Halloween is the second largest commercial holiday in the country, and I read somewhere that we spend an estimated six billion dollars on it. Of course, Halloween was not always such a big deal. Neither was Christmas, for that matter. I remember being surprised when I first learned that Puritans in colonial New England had banned the celebration of Christmas.

Teaching students about how the holiday of Halloween has evolved offers opportunities to see that history is everywhere; that our celebrations of holidays changes over time and is impacted by other changes in society.

For example, both Christmas and Halloween have been profoundly affected by immigration. The tradition of Christmas trees came from German immigrants and carving pumpkins may have evolved from an Irish tradition of carving turnips into lanterns during an Irish festival marking the end of the harvest. (See here.) Candy-making, too, was influenced by immigration. (See below for more info).

So below are some additional websites I have found that are useful for pulling together a lesson on either Halloween or candy or both. What would you do with them? Well, I have also recently been looking into the concept of Genius Hour. While the whole point of genius hour is to let students explore what interests them, not to predetermine the topic, I think you could still adapt the idea by giving them the predetermined topic.

Here is a link to a post that describes doing something like that in a Civil War unit in a middle school setting. (This is Project Based Learning or PBL. Find out more about that here.) Perhaps you could adapt this to Halloween for a day and ask students one big question and then let them go to town trying to find answers and information. So maybe--it's Halloween Friday, so why not?--just have students look through some of the websites I have listed below and see what they come up with about one of the questions below:

How has the holiday of Halloween changed over time and why?

What can we learn about history from the history of candy?

Or perhaps you can eliminate the question and have the students come up with a good, historical question. (Admittedly, teaching students how to ask historical questions is something that you really have to train students how to do in advance. Maybe this could be your first lesson in a series of lessons teaching about how to ask good questions.) So maybe you could try something really basic: Find one fun or cool fact to share with the class and one "interesting" question (as opposed to historical--just see what they come up with. Just make sure it's not a factual-type question. Find some way for students to post this online or share. 

Just one suggestion: do NOT make any of this a homework assignment over the Halloween weekend!

• Edsitement's website has a page about Halloween and other similar festivals around the world. It includes information about the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, along with other festivals (If you have a significant Hispanic population at your school, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the two. I was in Mexico City last October, just before Day of the Dead and was surprised at the markets to find so many more decorations for American-style Halloween than traditional sugar skulls and Mexican decorations!) The website also contains lesson ideas and links to the American Memory Project's documents about Halloween. (If you've never been to the American Memory Project, it is an essential website. Check it out!)
• The History Channel has a brief history.
• I missed this exhibit at the University of Chicago, but it's online now. There are quite a few images and a page on the history of chocolate and candymaking in Chicago.
• See "Halloween by the Numbers," where you can find statistics from the U.S. census.
• See this "flashback" article from the Chicago Tribune about the role of immigrants and Chicago in the history of candy. (Paywall, but maybe you can get from your public library.) This book is for those of you who live in Chicago and want to learn more.
• An article from the Huffington Post about Chicago and candymaking.

• This article from the National Retail Federation discusses current economics/business news related to the holiday.

• This article from the Smithsonian's website discusses the history of candy, Halloween and the surprising relationship between candy and medicine.
• Candyfavorites.com is an online store, but has surprisingly good (and fun!) historic resources, including a timeline, a list of discontinued candy, a history overview, and lots of nostalgic candy ads and old TV commercials. Check out their candy timeline.
• And last, but certainly not least, connect baseball to candy! Check out this history of the Baby Ruth candy bar or this one.