History & the Movies: Selma

March 2025 update: Check out this article that talks about the Eyes on the Prize episode of Selma. In it I found this link to John Lewis's reaction to the film (written back in 2015). 

Also, if you are looking for more Civil Rights resources, see my post, ""The Top 8 Mistakes Teachers When Teaching the Modern Civil Rights Era."

Jan 2024 update: check out this "looking back" on the film Selma article from The Root.

June 2020 update: See this guide to films/documentaries to use when teaching about Civil Rights by the Hasan Kwame Jeffries, history professor at Ohio State University.

March 6 update: Hooray! One of my favorite podcasts recently took on this issue. Check out BackStory with the American History Guys recent episode about history & the movies.

Jan 17 update: In response to one of my tweets, I was alerted to this helpful resource from
teachingforchange.org, "The Selma Voting Rights Struggle: 15 Points from Bottom-Up History and Why It Matters Today." Thank you to the ZinnEdProject.org for alerting me to it. Also, check out "Ten Things You Should Know about Selma before You See the Film" from CommonDreams.org.

And here is the link to read the transcript of the telephone conversation between LBJ and MLK on January 15, 1965. This is the key area in which the film's interpretation differs significantly from actual historic record. The film makes it seem like LBJ is really dragging; the transcript shows that LBJ wanted MLK to create the rationale to help LBJ move Congress (and public opinion) towards passage of voting rights bill.


Original Post:

I don't usually teach about the modern Civil Rights movement until April, but if your students are going to see the new movie, Selma, it will be soon, so I figured I'd get this post in the bank, so to speak, right now.

I haven't even seen the film yet--hope to soon--but as soon as I heard it was coming out, I started to wonder these questions:

1. How historically accurate will the film be? 
2. What inaccuracies will there be and will they matter?
3. I always liked showing episode 6 of the outstanding Eyes on the Prize documentary: Bridge to Freedom which is about the march to Selma. Will teachers still use documentaries instead of full-length feature films? Would students be bored with a documentary if they've seen Selma? Will they see the feature film as "truth" and then question the story told by the documentary (keeping in mind that documentaries, just like history books, also have their own "versions" of history and leave certain points out and others in)?
4. Who will students respond to more, the real MLK as seen in Eyes on the Prize and other documentaries or the actor who plays him, David Oyelowo? How could any actor top the man himself?
5. When we internalize fictional accounts of history, what is lost? what is gained?
6. What larger questions does this raise about who "owns" history? How do the stories and versions of history we tell ourselves shape our understanding of the past?

Because I haven't seen the movie yet, I don't have my own opinion to share, but lots of other folks have. So below are a few resources I've pulled together which may be useful for you to read so you can address the questions and comments from your students. I'm sure there are many more out there, but it's a start.

• Ken Halla, on his US History Educator blog posted on this today. See his Resources on Selma, including some excellent ones from the LBJ Library.
• Elizabeth Drew, "'Selma' vs. History," in New York Review of Books - about how LBJ is portrayed as being more opposed to MLK than he really was.
• A few resources from NPR (National Public Radio), on their Code Switch blog, a site devoted to issues of race, culture and ethnicity:

reactions in Selma to the movie

"Selma backlash misses the point" - from Tufts University history professor Peniel E. Joseph. Really interesting. Says, "The real problem many critics have with this film is that it's too black and too strong." Ouch. 

"The Selma Criticism for How It Portrays Lyndon B. Johnson: Is It Fair?

• from the Washington Post: "The Movie Selma Has a Glaring Flaw"
• from Slate.com: "What Matters in Selma" - offers a contrary view from critics who claim the characterization of LBJ is flawed
• "Oscar Films and the Prison of Historical Accuracy," from Vulture.com, the entertainment branch of New York Magazine.
• From The Nation, "What 'Selma' Gets Right-and Wrong-about Civil Rights History"
• From The Huffington Post, "Why 'Selma' Got It Right"
• CNN.com: "From Selma to Ferguson and back: Has Anything Changed?"

An idea I'm thinking about, for when you do teach the Civil Rights movement: some sort of historical inquiry where students examine clips from some of the above articles and the historic record of Selma to make their own determination of either the accuracy of the film (this would require that students have seen the film, either on their own or a viewing that you arrange after class or something) or their own editorial about the extent to which historical accuracy in this film matters.

And for when/if you use Eyes on the Prize to teach about Selma or other parts of the Civil Rights movement, see the Study guide for Eyes on the Prize from Blackside Productions, the makers of the Eyes on the Prize. 200-plus page guide to the full film series with questions for each film.

Progressivism Continued: One way to Tame the Tyranny of Coverage...Plus, a few thoughts on Paris

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 James Loewen, in his book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited about Doing History, gives outstanding advice to history teachers in chapter 1 which is titled, "The Tyranny of Coverage." In it, he compares the content of history to forests, trees and twigs. He points out the danger of students not being able to see the forest through the trees, i.e. the big ideas of history vs facts. It is a thoughtfully written chapter which I have used when teaching the methods class for student teachers (and I have mentioned in one of my earliest posts).

But the one thing I can't figure out about it is how he could support eliminating the Progressive Era altogether. If you read my previous post on Progressivism, you will understand why I think that it is a big mistake.

But I do agree with Loewen's premise: that you certainly cannot cover every little thing that is in the textbook.

So how to solve this problem for Progressivism?

If you define Progressivism broadly and simply, as seen below, you can carefully pick 1 or 2 "case studies" for each of the three points.

Progressivism is the attempt to make government more responsive to the public by

1. making government more democratic (examples: expanding the suffrage, cleaning up corruption)

2. government regulation of the economy (e.g. trustbusting)

3. government action to solve social problems (e.g. settlement houses, prohibition, food safety)

One other thing I like to do in the Progressive Unit is to "continue the story" of blacks and women. Because I don't have separate units on these groups, I teach lessons throughout the year where it makes the most chronological sense. And because Progressivism is about (3) solving social problems and because women were involved in organizing solutions to those problems, it makes sense to include them here. Plus, the fight for women's suffrage reaches its climax at this point in history. For African Americans, I focus on social activists Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. (I will do a separate post on this).

So here is an example of how an approximately two-week unit on Progressivism might look:

Day 1 - Introduction to Progressivism
Day 2 - The Urban Environment: American Cities, the Settlement Houses & Political Machines
Day 3 - continued
Day 4 - Theodore Roosevelt takes on Big Business
Day 5 - Roosevelt and Progressive Reforms
Day 6 - The Battle of Hetch Hetchy: Progressives and Environmental Reform
Day 7 - continued
Day 8 - Women during the Progressive Era
Day 9 - Racial Segregation and Black Leadership during the Progressive Era
Day 10 - The Election of 1912
Day 11 - Roosevelt v. Wilson: Comparing and Evaluating Progressivism


This Election of 1912 group activity is one way I have approached the politics of the Progressive Era. It involves dividing your class into 5 groups, one for each of the major candidates of this election and one to be reporters. You could eliminate the reporter group, but I include it because (1) otherwise the groups are too big, and (2) it is a good place to put kids who really prefer to work alone.

In the interest of making shorter posts and getting them "out there" more quickly, I will conclude here for now.

But one last thought....

 I have been wrestling with what happened in Paris last week and how one should handle it in the classroom. Though this blog is designed for U.S. history teachers, I think it is our duty as "social studies" teachers to probably say or do SOMETHING when a news story like this happens. Students don't care that you haven't gotten to your unit on the Middle East yet. And if yours is the only social studies class they are in at the moment, where else would they discuss it? So I would urge you to--at a minimum--provide a forum to allow students to discuss or ask questions about what happened and why this is such a big news story.

So here are a few ideas/questions to raise in a discussion (depending, of course, on the ages and maturity of your students):

• Most of the victims of Islamic fundamentalism over the last 10 years have been Muslim, not white Western Europeans or Americans.  See this editorial from Vox and this article, about the eulogy given by the brother of Ahmed Merabet, the French police officer of Algerian descent and a Muslim, who was murdered by one of the Kouachi brothers as they fled the office of Charlie Hebdo after their attack there. Both pieces raise some interesting questions about whether or not Muslims around the world, and particularly in France, have a responsibility to condemn the attacks of Islamic fundamentalists. This concern has been raised in other contexts--the extent to which an individual of a minority group represents the larger group. And what happens when a society blames the entire group for the evils of a few individuals or off-shoot of the group? See this map which shows attacks on French Muslims since the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
• Freedom of Speech. One of our most sacred rights in the U.S., and in France, came under attack last week. This provocative op-ed piece by David Brooks in the New York Times raises some interesting questions about the connection to speech codes and censorship in the U.S. I would not recommend using this piece with students (for starters, the vocabulary is likely to be beyond most high school students, and for sure, middle schoolers). But it is worth reading for you, and you can address some of those questions. Clarence Page, of the Chicago Tribune, wrote a piece with a similar theme, which you can read here. It raises some tough questions about the appropriateness of racist cartoons.
• When I read the paper on Saturday, there was a front page story, just under the article about France, about the rampage of Boko Haram in Nigeria (Read more here). I was struck by the fact that I hadn't heard much about the 2000 dead in Nigeria and--even as I read the article about it--I was still much more emotionally involved with the events in Paris. Proof of my own ethnocentrisms, I suppose, and this disturbs me. Have your students heard about Boko Haram? About the recent events in Nigeria? Is it "natural" for us, as Westerners, to be more concerned and pay more attention to events in Paris? Does this make us racist or ethnocentric? 
• What connections can we make to the events in Ferguson and the shooting of the two NY police officers in Brooklyn in December?
• This is a broader question/topic, but what connections can we make about the place of Muslims in French society to the place of the "new" immigrants in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century? Following the Progressive Era, we will see a rise in prejudice, nativism, anti-Catholic feeling and anti-Semitism, culminating in the 1924 Immigration Act that will severely limit immigration into the U.S. from areas other than Western Europe. France, and other Western European nations have only recently been dealing with questions about assimilation that the U.S. has been grappling with for over a century. The attacks in Paris bring this issue once again to a head. What lessons could the French draw from the United States? And, given problems we still have in the U.S. regarding racism and prejudice against minorities, including our own rising Muslim population, what lessons do we still have to learn?

Progressivism: Big Ideas for Beginning Your Unit

Brrrr...crazy cold here in Chicago! And schools have been closed, which throws off my schedule. I'm going to try to work on making some shorter posts with the hope of getting more posts out there more quickly. We'll see how that New Year's resolution goes!

How to begin a unit on the Progressive Era?

Described by some as "a mood" rather than an organized movement, the Progressive Era can be rather slippery. There is no specific start or end date. There are many kinds of people from many different groups who are involved, many of whom would vehemently disagree with each issue. Some progressives were concerned with just one area, some with many: prohibition, women's suffrage, business regulation, the environment, immigration, rights of blacks, labor and others. And, as I pointed out in my last post, there is a whole slew of legislation that could make your unit drier than the banana bread I made this morning.

But one thing about the Progressive Era is clear. There was a fundamental shift in the way we perceive the role of government. And a reorganization of how we define liberalism in the United States. What was considered "liberal" in the 19th century will become what is considered "conservative" in the twentieth. See the diagram below which illustrates this:

18th and 19th century Liberalism	20th century Liberalism
• protect natural rights (i.e. life, liberty and property) • laissez-faire • representative government • limited government	• it is the duty of government to intervene and regulate society • use government power to solve social problems in order to insure the average citizen a decent political and economic life (thus govt becomes “bigger”)

The “Left” Liberal

The “right” Conservative

So one thing I like to do near the beginning of the Progressive Unit is to help students see where they fall on the political spectrum. It is challenging to help students understand that "liberal" and "conservative" do not equal "Democrat" and "Republican." If I had any good ideas on how to help you do that, I would. It is tricky business.

I think introducing the unit this way can help set up students' understanding of the differences between liberals and conservatives for the entire 20th century and through today. And in the shorter term, it helps them understand the fundamental change in the role of government beginning in the early 20th century.

I have used this questionnaire in class with students to get them to think about their political views. Looking at it now, I see that is poorly designed (most people, whether liberal or conservative, would be likely to agree with almost everything) so it probably should be reworked. But it could be useful to point out that all of these ideas were solidified during the Progressive Era.

And now, I have found some even better quizzes that you can use online with students to help them understand their political leanings. Check out this one from the Pew Research Center. If you don't have access to computers in class, you could ask students to do it at home and print out their result. But if you do have access, here is a link to the group version which you can use to create one for your entire class or all of your classes. Students will then be able to see how they compare to each other and to the nation as a whole. And in the interest of giving parents and kids something to talk about at the dinner table, how cool would it be to ask students to administer the quiz to their parents, too? Click here for explanation of the poll and analysis of the political typology.

Here are links to a few others you could use or adapt to create your own:

• blogthings
• isidewith.com
• selectsmart.com
• and, just for fun, a silly one from buzzfeed (not for classroom use)

A few other useful ways to conceptualize the Progressive Era and/or interesting tidbits:

1. I usually draw something like this up on the board, to illustrate the flow of the 20th century. I do not usually add the little part at the end with Carter through Obama. I might talk about it, but I think this drawing makes it slightly misleading. The big curves represent 3 eras of reform and increased government programs and legislation (and of course, spending).  The arrows below refer to 3 periods characterized by either little reform or regulation, and also the wars that put an end to the reform eras. Once you get past Vietnam, things change. It's not that Carter, Clinton and Obama are reformers, while Reagan and Bush aren't. It's that those periods (in blue) are characterized by a rise in liberalism or conservativism. I fear that it may mislead students a bit, though. Plus it may suggest that Carter, Clinton and Obama are "high points" or successful, while Reagan and Bush are not. So use it with caution or as a starting point for a more refined version.

2. I came across this point in my notes that I thought was useful: that the Progressive Era transformed the legislature from the dominant branch of government to an enlarged executive branch. And it created, in a sense, a "fourth" branch of government: administrative boards and agencies.

3. About corruption: we now (sort of) seem to take for granted that corruption is entrenched in politics. And corruption in politics was not, before the Progressive Era, particularly new. But, according to my notes on an article by Richard L. McCormick ("The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism," in American Historical Review, (April 1981), corruption was no longer something that could be dismissed as simply actions of bad men in a particular time and place, but as a process that was at work everywhere. Therefore, regulation and increased administration becomes necessary to control this. You could have an interesting discussion about that--e.g. the nature of politics, the corrupting influence of power, etc.

4. And lastly, to further develop point #3, a word from my favorite Progressive, Theodore Roosevelt. Here is a great quotation to start off your unit/first day/brief discussion or at the beginning of your syllabus:

"A simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on the basis of sheer individualism. But a rich and complex society cannot so exist."

First explain--or have your students explain--what Roosevelt means. Then ask if they agree. Why? Why not? Does it depend? If so, on what? And how interesting is this in light of the person who said it. After all, Theodore Roosevelt was born to incredible wealth and privilege, but also suffered enormously from asthma and was considered a rather sickly little boy who would not likely live long. But through tremendous will and encouragement from his beloved father, he "remade" himself into one of the most powerful Presidents in American history.

Really, what Roosevelt is addressing is the one of THE big questions of life: the extent to which individuals have free will and the power to be whatever they can be. Can we, despite whatever bad hands we are dealt, rise about our circumstances, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and be successful? Or are we limited or constricted by larger social, political and economic forces?

Now that's what I call an "essential question" you can really chew on.

Second Semester & the Importance of a Good Syllabus: How to Help Students Find Meaning in U.S. History

Whether you concluded just before winter break with Reconstruction or with Industrialization (or something else--I realize many schools do things quite differently), you will likely soon be facing the Progressive Era. Personally, I love the Progressive Era, but have never quite felt that enthusiasm bubble over to my students. And in my observations of student teachers, I have

sometimes seen the Progressive Era become little more than a dull march from one piece of legislation to another. Another opportunity for students to look things up in the textbook and fill out a dreary chart like the one at the right.

I am not saying these items aren't worthy of study. But if most of your unit is devoted to going from one piece of legislation or amendment to another, your students will learn little and remember even less.

I would make two suggestions:

1. Do NOT try to cover every Progressive reform that ever was. More on this in a separate post.

2. Consider the Progressive Era as the beginning chapter of the twentieth century AS A WHOLE.

Let's examine this second point for a bit. I will start with a digression based on something I read in Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham, an educational psychologist I mentioned in an earlier post. In chapter two, he discusses working memory. He provides an example. If given a list of letters like the one below, most of us will likely have trouble memorizing all of it.

XCN NPH DFB ICI ANC AAX

However, consider the same list of letters in the order below:

X CNN PHD FBI CIA NCAA X

Much easier, yes? Because you now have a context. You can apply meaning to what at first seemed like just a random list of letters (or alphabet soup--sorry, couldn't resist). Of course, if you've never heard of the FBI or the CIA, you are no better off. But memorizing something that is meaningful is much easier than something that is not. This is why giving students a chart like the one above about Progressivism is not terribly helpful. It is just a list of random things to them.

Students need more context to make the seemingly endless list of names, dates, places, battles, legislation, amendments, policies, presidents, leaders, etc. meaningful to them. Have you ever told anyone you were a history teacher? And then the person says, "Oh, I never liked history. Too many dates to memorize." To avoid falling in this trap, we must provide CONTEXT and MEANING.

This goes back to an earlier point I have made about the false dichotomy between teaching content and teaching skills. They are inseparable. As Willingham points out, in order for students to think critically and analyze text--key Common Core stuff!-- they "require extensive factual knowledge." (His emphasis.) Willingham provides an example from a study of junior high school students in which students were asked comprehension questions about a story about a baseball game. The study found that the students who did the best were the ones that knew a lot about baseball, even if they were classified as "poor readers" based on standardized test scores. Amazing, isn't it? So yes, skills are important here. But in this case, it was the background knowledge that some of those students had about baseball that made the bigger difference. 

That does not mean that our classes should become a long list of facts posing as background knowledge. Willingam continues, "Knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another." (Again, I urge you to read the book--it's one of the first educational psychology books I read where I am constantly learning things that I can quickly apply to actual teaching, and of history specifically.)

So how does this apply to us as history teachers? Well, going back to my point at the beginning of this post about the Progressive Era, it occurs to me that one of the reasons students might not find it as amazing a period as I do is that they do not have the proper context. In fact, most of the reforms that were so revolutionary in the early part of the 20th century are so ingrained that they just don't seem like that big a deal. Women got the vote? Big whoop. This is taken for granted today. And so few Americans even vote anyway. The fact that someone might have gone on a hunger strike to get the vote just seems kinda wacky to them. Graduated income tax? Yeah, they've been hearing their parents complain about taxes for years. Meat Inspection Act and government regulation in general? This is such an everyday part of our lives today. And that someone of the social class background of Theodore Roosevelt was such a key player in this? Students have little appreciation of the social dynamics of the upper class 19th century that it is hard for them to appreciate Roosevelt as the radical he was.

Clearly, part of how well we teach the Progressive Era will depend on how much students have learned about the tremendous and unbridled growth of the post Civil War period and the extent of the social problems in cities and among immigrants, farmers, laborers and the like.

And now another digression to help explain the title of this post.

One year I started "dressing up" my syllabi for each unit by selecting a pithy quote that summed up the major ideas of the unit. So the American Revolution unit syllabus would have a quotation from the Declaration of Independence. The Antebellum unit would have Lincoln's quotation about a house divided. You get the idea. I did it just because I liked it. It made it more meaningful for me.

But at the end of first semester, on one of our final exam review days, I gave my students a sheet with the quotes on one side (out of order) and the units (also out of order) on the other. They had to put the titles of all the units in order and match them to the appropriate quotation. I thought this would be a 3-5 minute introductory activity to get thinking about the "big picture" as a beginning to a review session.

It took them forever. They thought it was so hard. I couldn't believe it. I thought it would be super easy, maybe even too easy. I mean, it's not like they hadn't had a copy of every syllabus and read every quotation--not just on the syllabus, but usually as part of some other classroom work. How could they not know that the "house divided" quote went with the Antebellum unit? And that it came before the Civil War???

It struck me that what was so obvious to me: the logical order of each unit, that the antebellum problems associated with "the house divided" over slavery led to Civil War, etc. was not obvious to them. Clearly, I had done something very wrong. Had they really learned so little?

I see this kind of mistake over and over again when I observe student teachers. They know that today they are teaching about mobilization for war because yesterday they taught about Pearl Harbor. And that is maybe a more obvious example. But their students have not thought this all through. And, to complicate matters, they have just come from math class where they had to struggle with the quadratic equation, or a fight with a girl friend in the hall, or whatever. It falls on us, then, to help our students see "the obvious."

I spend an incredible amount of time planning my syllabus, deciding what I should teach first and what next or maybe reverse the order, leave out this, add in this, etc. If I am going to spend that much time making sure that what I'm doing makes sense to me, then shouldn't I make sure that my students are privy to this dialogue I have with myself?

To do that, I began more systematically explaining to students what they would be learning and why. So now, I would begin teaching about the twentieth century by providing students an overview of the whole century. No, not a big long lecture. But by explaining that there are two major "stories" that they will be examining over the course of the rest of the school year. As I see it, there are two main story lines or plots to the century: one that centers on domestic policy and the other on foreign policy. (Do you see the beginning of two final exam essay questions??)

The foreign policy story (which I will develop in a future post) begins with a look back at the nineteenth century in which our first object was to affirm our independence from Britain in particular  (e.g. the War of 1812) and Europe in general (the Monroe Doctrine). Once that was "settled," the next goal was to expand west. So our "foreign policy" centered on Native Americans and conquest in Mexico.

Now, in the twentieth century (which will actually begin in 1898 with the war with Spain), the goal will be to assert U.S. power elsewhere in the world to protect our interests and, with mixed results, to spread democracy and contain communism.  With the collapse of communism, our concerns now look toward the Middle East. So, you can see the units now, yes?

1. U.S. Imperialism and World War I

2. World War II

3. The Cold War

4. Vietnam

5. The Middle East

Our domestic policy also has a plot line.

In an earlier post, I shared this lesson on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. You could save this lesson to begin your Progressive Era unit, or remind students of it. The point is that we end the 19th century with an economy and population that has grown tremendously, but with a government that has not. There is little regulation of business, immigration, the environment, cities, or anything else. There is no safety net for workers, as labor unions have had little success.

We know that today we have a much bigger government and far more regulation than we had a hundred-plus years ago. The issue of Big Government is probably The Issue today and one of the key markers between Democrats and Republicans today. So you might start your unit--and your whole semester or second half--with a look at a few of today's issues.

And now we can start to see the units:

1. The Progressive Era (the first period in which the government starts to grow and makes efforts to improve the lives of everyday Americans)
2. The Depression and the New Deal (the Depression as the wake-up call after a series of other major depressions and panics in the late 19th century followed by the New Deal reforms.
3. The Civil Rights Movement and Johnson's Great Society (the reforms to deal with the problems not solved by Reconstruction, as well as other legislation to combat poverty)
4. The Reagan Revolution and Reaction (the reaction against big government, the rise of conservatism, and then the reaction against that with Clinton & Obama).

So when you put it all together chronologically, you'd alternate domestic units with foreign policy units so it looks something like this:

If each of the above units (except for the 1950s one--a few days for that, I'd say) is about 2 weeks, that gives you 18 weeks total. You have to play around a bit, of course, allowing for testing, spring break, end-of-the-year events, etc.  And you might want to add a few days for post-Vietnam era issues like feminism, Watergate and 1960s counterculture. Spend a little more on one unit, a little less on another. But at least you have a story line here. And before you start each "chapter" or unit, make sure your students know where you are in that story.

My main point is that we should be careful not to base our decisions about what to teach simply on what comes next in the textbook, but to create our own logical order. (Of course, textbooks have an order, but they "have" to include everything and you don't.) And then we must make those decisions visible to our students. Nothing frustrates me more than when I look at a syllabus of a teacher and see things like " chapter 23, section 3" as the heading for a particular day. Or hear a teacher say, "tomorrow we will move on to chapter 12." This tells students NOTHING about meaning. Nobody is going to go home and tell their parents, today we did chapter 12!

My other pet peeve centers on how textbooks (and as a result, many teachers) end their study of U.S. history with units on "Ford," "Carter," "Reagan," "Clinton." We certainly don't teach the nineteenth century going president to president. I suspect this has to do with a lack of clarity in the profession about the storyline I have outlined above. And I admit, it is a far-from-perfect storyline.

I also realize, as I wrap this post up, that using the term "storyline" at all could be controversial by suggesting that there is a certain way to tell the story of our country that might exclude other perspectives. I do not mean to suggest that at all. I am merely suggesting that to prevent history from being "one damned thing after another" (see my earlier post on this) we need to organize a CLEAR SYLLABUS that emphasizes CONNECTIONS which helps students recognize the BIG IDEAS and ask MEANINGFUL QUESTIONS. The answers to those questions, and how the story ends depends on our--and our students'-- interpretations.

Immigration Today, Immigration Then

Like many of you, I had the best of intentions during the last week or so, but the holidays, kids, travel plans, etc. all got in the way.

So, I decided to go ahead and post an incomplete post. I will be back with more good things after the New Year. Enjoy the school break and the holiday.

Teaching about Nativism

If you're going to talk about late 19th century immigration to the U.S., you also have to talk about anti-immigration sentiment, or nativism. You won't have any trouble finding current examples of nativism, even if that's not the term we use anymore, so you could start with the present and then look backwards.

But if you prefer to start with the past, one way to teach about nativism is by having students read some primary sources and look at political cartoons to come up with their own definition. I created this document for that purpose. I have followed up this in-class activity up by using some of the political cartoons collected here. See here for more Thomas Nast cartoons, especially on the Chinese Exclusion Act. And here is a google doc presentation I found online with more political cartoons about nativism. Also see this short, readable essay that has good background information for the teacher or older students, including a connection to the post 9/11 surge in anti-immigrant sentiment.

Teaching about Contemporary Immigration

For contemporary statistics and other information on current U.S. immigration:

• From the U.S. Census Bureau: see graphics (charts and maps) and Information on foreign-born population. The graphics link has maps and charts that show the top 10 countries where immigrants came from in 1960 compared to 2010. You can also see this interactive map based on U.S. Census data from the Migration Policy Institute. It has data on each state.
• For recent news from the White House about Obama's actions on immigration, click here. See here for the story from The Atlantic Monthly.
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• frequently requested statistics from Migration Policy Institute (a non-partisan Washington think tank)
• You can find a variety of resources from another non-partisan Washington think tank, the Immigration Policy Center.

Biography and History, Rockefeller and Carnegie: Telling Stories to Grapple with Big Questions

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "All history is biography."

Whether or not the above quotation is accurate, it is true that history is about people. As as my Dear Friend and Mentor used to tell me, whenever I came running into his office at 3:04 pm panicking about how I should teach Topic X the next day, his response was always, "tell them a story."

Fortunately, for those of us who teach U.S. history there are a lot of good stories. And today, as I ponder how to teach about the rise of big business in the U.S., the obvious personalities are Rockefeller and Carnegie.

One interesting way to begin a lesson on big business in the late nineteenth century might be to to ask students which list of names on the left looks more familiar. Most students will have heard of at least some of the names on the right, while they are likely to be stumped by the presidents. This can be a useful way to introduce the question, where was the center of power in the late nineteenth century? (see the last political cartoon at the end of this post)
And the follow up questions suggests their influence: how do we know these names? (Trust me, they probably don't know them because they learned about them in an earlier U.S. history class.) If they have heard about them, it is because there are still foundations and banks and universities named for them. (Keep in mind the demographics of your students here. It may be more likely for middle to upper class students to know the names on the right than lower income students.)

Whether your students have heard of these businessmen or not, you now have the opportunity to introduce them to some pretty interesting characters.  But how do we use biographical information in class? How should we tell stories? And how do we avoid the problem I like to call "The Problem of Andrew Jackson's horse"? A friend of mine, explaining why he never liked history, claimed that his teacher tried to make it interesting by telling lots of irrelevant stories which meant he left high school knowing little about history but knew odd bits of random information like the name of Jackson's horse (Sam Patch).

I am likely as guilty as the history teacher in question of peppering a lesson with anecdotes in hopes of a good laugh, a smile or to get students' attention by "making it interesting."  If this is all we do with biographical information--throw it into lectures--then yes, it is probably useless.  

But a recent glance through the book, Why Don't Students Like School by education psychologist Daniel T. Willingham stopped me cold at the title of chapter 3, "Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I Say?" According to Willingham, the human mind is especially adept at understanding and remembering stories. He says that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as "psychologically privileged" because our memories actually treat them differently than other types of material. 

I cannot do justice to this chapter here (but if you want to check out other of Willingham's many articles which are useful to teachers, click here).  But the gist of it is that telling stories helps students remember information. He really means more than just tell a few anecdotes about Carnegie and Rockefeller. The key, he explains memorably, is that we remember what we think about. Sounds so obvious, doesn't it? So if our stories can engage students' attention and get them to think about something, they will remember it.

This leads to a new problem. We teach a lesson chock full of all kinds of important information about, let's say the rise of big business in the late nineteenth century, and we sit down to grade our students' work, and we note there's not a whole lot of substance, but they seem to remember the amusing little anecdote we told about how Rockefeller raised turkeys and lent some of the money he raised to a neighbor. 

The problem here is that we have neglected to connect the story to something meaningful. We need to tie the anecdote to something meaningful about Rockefeller and business. What is important is not the turkeys, but the fact that Rockefeller had a eureka moment when he realized the possibility of making money without doing any work at all: through investing.

So yes, by all means provide your students some interesting biographical information about Rockefeller and Carnegie. They are both fascinating characters, very different from each other, and their reach is still felt today. But connect it to something more meaningful.

The classic way to teach the topic meaningfully is to pose the subject as "Robber Barons or Captains of Industry"? (Do a quick Google search and you'll see what I mean; tons of lesson ideas with these terms.) The implicit question is whether or not the big industrialists and businessmen of the late nineteenth century earned their fortunes at the cost of the poor, or did they help develop the U.S. into an economic powerhouse? The answer, of course, includes both perspectives and any good lesson must help students see that.

But another way I have done it, usually after students have also studied the perspective of labor and some of the big strikes of the period, is to pose the question, "Do the ends justify the means?" In other words, do the economic achievements and subsequent philanthropy of these men justify whatever illegal, immoral, or at-great-cost-to-the-workers methods they used to get there? Here, too, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. But there are lots of opportunities here to ask tough questions, engage students in contentious debates, and bring the topic into the present. How? Check out the two resources below.

For grappling with the question of "do the ends justify the means?" 

• Check out this recent article in the New Yorker, "Was Carnegie Right about Philanthropy?" The article poses the question, "Does philanthropy by the most affluent among us make up for the negative consequences of inequality?" There is a list of the top 50 most generous donors of 2013. Mark Zuckerburg and his wife were #1. The article quotes Peter Buffet, son of Warren Buffet, who describes philanthropy by the super rich as "conscience laundering." Isn't that a fascinating way to put it? If I had the time, I might edit this article to use with students. But I also might simply read aloud a few passages of it as a way to begin a discussion. The article also points out that most philanthropic spending does not directly fight poverty. And check out this really cool ngram viewer from Google that shows the use of the term "new gilded age" in search engines that was linked to in the article.

• Below is a wonderful, short video that I was introduced to by one of my student teachers last semester. (Thanks!) Ironically, it was created by Evan Klassen who had his own rags-to-riches immigrant story like Carnegie. The video visualizes the income gap in the U.S. and Americans' perceptions of that gap. It is just over 6 minutes and could be shown in class. It works well for middle or high school students, though you may need to pause it and explain a few things for middle schoolers. For more info on income inequality, check out this map and info from the Washington Post about income inequality across the world and how the U.S. compares.

For more info on Carnegie:

• the Carnegie Corporation website - useful for finding out about Carnegie's legacy today; click here for a timeline of Carnegie's life. Also has some brief biographic info. (But keep in mind this will be a pro-Carnegie site).
• biography.com - has some links to videos that may be useful in class.
• The New Tycoons: Carnegie

For more info on Rockefeller:

• The New Tycoons - Rockefeller

For info on J.P. Morgan: The New Tycoons: Morgan

On the industrialists in general:

• Here is a lesson from edsitement on Edsitement on the classic topic of Robber Baron or Captain of Industry? Even if you don't use the lesson, it has links to useful materials. You can find lots of other lesson plans and resources by entering in "robber barons" and/or "captains of industry" into a search engine. That's how I found this one.
• Here is a useful in-class assignment that will help students understand how Rockefeller used his power to get rebates and drawbacks from the railroads. I have edited it only slightly from a handout in my files that I think probably came from some textbook company. 
• Here is a lesson from my files (adapted from work of other teachers) that addresses the inadequacy of government efforts to regulate big business. It is a useful segue to the theme of Progressive reform, when the government actually does reform business. I would use it as an in-class activity to do as a class, or in small groups with full class follow-up. It is designed to go along with a textbook (any U.S. history textbook will do). Students also might also need help with the question about what an attorney general does. And as long as we are talking about telling stories, you can use this as a "cliffhanger" to lead into the next unit--will the government get with the program and actually pass legislation that will limit the power of the trusts? Tune in next week as we look at President Roosevelt, the Trustbuster....
• Here's a lesson to connect gilded age entrepreneurs to contemporary ones. 
• There are some great resources at intellectualtakeout.org which presents definitely presents a pro-Captain of Industry look. (The section of the site presents the topic as "The Myth of the Robber Barons.") The website claims to be non-partisan, but a look at the "about us" page does mention an anti-government regulation leaning. But there are some links to primary sources, political cartoons, videos and interesting charts and graphs.
• For the opposite perspective, you can look at this lesson on the Homestead Strike from the Howard Zinn Education project.

And don't forget to use some of these classic political cartoons with your students:

 

Check out my recent work on Substack!

How to Handle the Post-Civil War/Reconstruction Period

A few years into my first job teaching U.S. History, our department made a unanimous decision to switch our semester "cut-off" to roughly 1900 in order to allow for more time for the twentieth century. Our school calendar was similar to most: students took finals a couple of weeks after winter break. This meant we had an awkward two-week break in the middle of our "Industrial America" unit. The challenge was to accommodate the calendar and final exams on the one hand, and create a logical unit of study on the other.

Below is an example of what we came up with (ours was a very collaborative department in the best sense).  I will use this year's calendar dates as an example, (which allows me to see how behind I am in my blogging!) Please keep in mind that our school was on a kind of mixed block schedule, so some of the topics below were taught on "block days" which meant that we had 80 minute periods. So it's not quite as condensed as it looks.

Mon. Dec 8 - Railroads, the West and Industrial Revolution

Tues. Dec 9 - continued (I usually included some specifics about Chicago)

Wed. Dec 10 - Big Business (here's where we'd look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.)

Thurs. Dec 11 - continued

Fri. Dec  12- Social Darwinism

Mon. Dec 15 - Immigration

Tues. Dec 16. - Anti-Immigration: The Nativist Response

Wed. Dec 17 - Labor and the New Industrial Working Class

Thurs. Dec 18 - Labor vs. the Capitalists (here's where I might do a simulation or debate activity centered around the Pullman strike. I like to use the Pullman strike as an example here in the Chicago area. But of course, there were lots of other strikes.)

Fri. Dec 19 - continued

Mon. Jan 5 - The "End of the Frontier" and the Indian Wars
Tues. Jan 6 - The Indian Reservation System
Wed. Jan 7 - Farm Problems and Protest
Thurs. Jan 8 - Government Regulation in the "Gilded Age"
Fri. Jan 9 - Populism and the Election of 1896

Mon. Jan 12 - Fri. Jan 16  This would be the week of exams, which would mean I'd probably do a day or two of review, and then the three days of exams.  Obviously, middle school teachers don't have this problem, though they usually seem to lose more days due to special assemblies and testing. 

I can't tell you how painful it is to put this into print-- I have left out so much. How can I do justice to Rockefeller and Carnegie in just 2 days?? How can students learn half of what there is to know about the immigrant experience and prejudice against them in just 2?? Is there time to discuss Obama and his recent executive order during those 2 days, or would I have to add a 3rd? What about other contemporary concerns about immigration reform? What if half my class is of immigrant or 2nd generation background? Wouldn't I want to spend more time comparing historic immigration to their experiences?

And while it sort of makes sense to segue from immigrants to labor to strikes, it also makes sense to discuss Indian policy right after the railroads and the West.  But then I would have to move labor to post-winter break, separating it from big business. Or move immigration to post-break, separating it from labor. And what activity will work well on the Friday before winter break? How many students will even be here? When/how/should I include a test in this unit? Do I really want to have students studying for a test right before winter break? Right after? Right before finals? How do I connect the Indians to the problems of the farmers? Do I really want to end my semester with the Populists? (Do I really want to teach the Populists at all?) Maybe that would be a better way to begin next semester's unit on the Progressives? 

Does anyone share my pain?

Even if your unit on this period doesn't start until second semester--as many teachers do--you will still have the "coverage problem" and the problem of what order to use.

But enough moaning. After all, this is one of favorite time periods. I joked about the Populists, but really, William Jennings Bryan is such a character. He can even make the Populists fun.

So time for some suggestions to help you in your unit planning. Just a few in this post, and I will include more in the next.

The key to both the coverage problem and the what-order-to-use problem is to develop your unit around a FEW BIG IDEAS/QUESTIONS and MAKE CONNECTIONS. As I mentioned above, how does the development of the railroads lead to big business and the wars with the Indians? How do the problems of how to assimilate the Indians compare to the situation of immigrants coming to the U.S.? How do those immigrants help fuel the labor demands of big business? If you can tell yourself the story about why you are moving from topic A to topic B to topic C, but how topic C also connects to topic A, then you are in business.

I like to use clips from episode 5 of Ken Burns's series, The West.  Click here for an interesting analysis of the series from the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History. Episode 6 is good for the Indian Wars. You could assign students a short essay or a few paragraphs that would answer the question, how did the railroad change the United States? Make sure they consider both positive and negative aspects. Probably your textbook has additional information they could use. This will force them to consider how a variety of things connect: buffalo, Chinese immigrants, Indians, women and the vote, Mormons, growth of a national economy, the role of the government, etc.

Looking for a way to connect Andrew Carnegie and the topic of immigration? This excerpt from Carnegie's autobiography describes his own immigrant experience.

Looking for Ellis Island info? Check out the National Park Service's info on Ellis Island and The Liberty Ellis Foundation (which is privately funded).

Don't forget to teach about Asian immigration during the late 19th century! The Library of Congress has a complete unit on Chinese immigration. Check out the Angel Island website. On the home page, there is a virtual tour. And under the Education tab they have a curriculum guide for teachers, a photo gallery, book and film recommendations, and lots more. Also check out books by Ronald Takaki, including his A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America.

How to connect immigrants and Indians to what you discussed in Reconstruction about African Americans? I created this chart for that very purpose. You can use it by having students brainstorm first on their own or in groups, and then fill in the gaps as you discuss the other groups. I have included at least some of the "answers" on the second page. You can follow up by having students write a compare/contrast paper or have a discussion. A caveat: you can find yourself in murky waters when you make some of these comparisons. The goal is NOT to decide "who had it the worst." It is not up to us to judge whether or not someone's experience of witnessing a beloved family member die from lynching or in a war was "worse." Avoid comparisons of personal pain and suffering.