Scholars in Action: Analyzing a Thomas Nast Cartoon

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Scholars in Action presents case studies that demonstrate how scholars interpret different kinds of historical evidence. This cartoon, "Milk Tickets for Babies, in Place of Milk," created by Thomas Nast in 1876, comments on one debate that raged in the years following the Civil War: should the currency of the United States be based on gold (the "gold standard") or on paper (known as "greenbacks")? These debates about the nature of money, and the meaning of value itself, coincided with equally fundamental social and political debates about the nature of citizenship as it applied to the newly emancipated slaves. Political cartoons were a major form of commentary in late 19th-century American life, and Thomas Nast (1840–1902) was the most famous cartoonist of his day.

Website
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/sia/cartoon.htm

Connecting Professional Development and Classroom Practice

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In the library of an Oakland, CA, middle school, four 8th-grade American history teachers are gathered around a table. A doctoral student in U.S. History, the school librarian, and two staff members from the Oakland Unified Teaching American History (TAH) Grant's professional development project join them. The teachers have come from three different schools to observe a lesson on the Fourth Amendment they have planned together.

They wanted students to understand the ideas, rights, and controversy embedded in the dry language of the Constitution. The lesson began in a dramatic fashion. The teacher who was teaching the lesson arranged for a campus security guard to walk into the classroom and search the backpacks of three students. The students had agreed before class to participate in the simulation. After the search, students in the class were asked to write a brief response explaining whether they thought the search was legal. A discussion of this question followed. Then the students read and tried to rewrite the Fourth Amendment in their own words.

Reading and understanding the Amendment proved, as the teachers anticipated, a challenge to many of the students in this class, which included a number of second-language students. At one point the teacher asked, "What do you think they mean by the term effects?" As the teachers had predicted the students had difficulty in explaining how the term was used in this context.

After this introduction, the teacher passed out the Supreme Court case, T.L.O. v. New Jersey (1985), which asked what rights students have against search and seizure if they are on school grounds. (The court ruled they don't have the same rights as individuals outside the authority of the school.) Finally, students were asked to revise what they had written at the beginning of the period on whether or not the search was legal.

After reading what students wrote the mood at the table changed, for it became clear that the students had gained, at best, only a limited understanding of the Fourth Amendment. . .

Initially, the group of teachers clustered around the table was certain that the lesson was successful; students seemed to understand that there were limitations to their Fourth Amendment right to not be searched. Then, the student writing samples were passed out to each teacher. After reading what students wrote the mood at the table changed, for it became clear that the students had gained, at best, only a limited understanding of the Fourth Amendment and how it is applied in a variety of situations and contexts. They did not see how the Fourth Amendment had been applied to the T.L.O. case and argued that school officials had no right to search their belongings without a warrant or probable cause.

As this finding emerged, teachers began to reconsider the design of their lesson—what would they do differently next time? When the lesson was taught again, it benefited from this close examination of instruction and student learning. Indeed, to help the students better understand how the Fourth Amendment had been applied, the teachers refined the lesson to provide a greater focus on the actual court ruling and reasoning in T.L.O., as well as looking closely at additional significant Fourth Amendment cases in American history.

This brief example of teacher collaboration illustrates one aspect of the Oakland TAH program. This collaborative process is known as lesson study.

. . . working to increase teacher content knowledge of American history was just a first step towards achieving the main goal of the project. . .
A Project Challenge: Connecting Professional Development and Classroom Practice

The Oakland Unified School District has received two TAH grants. Each project had the goal of increasing teacher content knowledge of American history and connecting classroom teachers and professional historians. But, working to increase teacher content knowledge of American history was just a first step towards achieving the main goal of the project—increasing student knowledge, understanding, and achievement in American history. This goal raises the fundamental question we sought to answer in our projects:

"How can the enhanced historical knowledge gained by teachers find its way into their lessons and thus increase student knowledge and understanding of American history?"

From long experience in professional development, it is clear the most challenging aspect of this work is helping teachers make connections between what is learned in a workshop and what happens in their classrooms. Lesson Study helped us meet our goal of strengthening that connection.

Lesson Study: Working to Integrate Historical Content and Classroom Practice

As described above, "Lesson Study" provides an ongoing method to examine, refine, and improve instruction. The process is quite basic. A group of 3–5 teachers meet to plan a lesson on a specific historical topic and identify what important information, ideas, and concepts they want the students to understand. The lesson is then taught in one group member's classroom, while the other teachers and project staff observe. After the observation the group members and project staff meet to analyze, with a focus on student talk and writing and on how successful the lesson was in achieving the instructional goals they set for themselves. Based on this discussion, the teachers then refine and/or revise the lesson before it is taught in another group member's classroom.

It is important to note two very important details about what is accomplished in the planning phase:

1. The teachers develop a student question for the lesson. The student question guides the selection of materials and activities that will help students develop thoughtful and accurate responses. It also identifies what student words and work will be the focus of the teachers' analysis of the lesson's effectiveness.

2. The teachers also develop a research question for themselves about the teaching and learning of American history. This both focuses the lesson planning and the gathering of data, and gives the lesson importance beyond the immediacy of its topic and teaching.

Below are some examples of how past lesson study groups connected their student and teacher questions.

A fifth grade lesson focused on Chinese immigration through family photos:

Student question: What can we learn from this picture about the experiences of Chinese immigrants?
Teacher question: Can students use an immigration story to understand a larger historical movement? (A focus on making generalizations and inferential thinking.)

A fifth grade lesson focused on the experiences of slaves and questions of freedom. The class had read the historical novel A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, by Patricia C. McKissack:

Student question: Which characters in the book have the most and least amount of freedom?
Teacher question: Can students develop a nuanced understanding, through multiple perspectives, of freedom at this time and place in American history?

An eighth grade lesson on Nat Turner:

Student question: Was Nat Turner's Revolt a success?
Teacher question: How can we help students understand that it is possible to tell different stories and come to different conclusions about the same event?

An 11th grade lesson on Populism:

Student question: How successful was the Populist Party?
Teacher Question: How can we teach students to use evidence to support their argument?

Lessons Learned—Lesson Study: Possibilities and Challenges

We found that Lesson Study, both through its promise and its implementation addressed a genuine need among history teachers for a systematic way of learning about how to improve instruction, but it was not without its challenges. Lesson study takes time, a scarce resource for teachers. It requires meeting after school and finding and locating resources for a lesson. It requires an understanding among members that by investigating a lesson they might come to different answers and understandings about how best to increase student knowledge and understanding. Indeed, a number of lesson study groups were not able to overcome these challenges. Some teachers showed up late to meetings, or didn't show up at all. Some teachers planned extensively while others in the group did not contribute an equal share. Also, lesson study requires a stance towards teaching and collaboration that is often at odds with how teachers work together at school sites. A successful lesson study develops a lesson that is seen by group members as "our" lesson, rather than the lesson of the teacher who is going to teach it first.

A successful lesson study develops a lesson that is seen by group members as "our" lesson, rather than the lesson of the teacher who is going to teach it first.

So why would teachers want to continue with lesson study? The answer can be found in what teachers believed to be beneficial besides the opportunity to collaborate. Not only did lesson study address a need, but it helped meet the need. Over three quarters reported that they actually learned something new about their teaching—something that was revealed to them through the lesson study process. There was the learning of new content as lessons were developed and materials selected. Indeed, a number of groups chose to focus their lessons on topics they had not taught in depth before, such as Nat Turner and slave rebellions, McCarthyism and the Cold War, or the Fourth Amendment in American history.

There were also new specific instructional strategies designed to help students learn and understand more about American history. For example, groups focused on how to help students read difficult primary source documents, move from specific historical details to generalizations about a time or place, or see a specific event through the multiple perspectives of the time. And there was new learning around the big instructional questions teachers framed for themselves. "Can fifth grade students develop a nuanced understanding of freedom and slavery?" "How to help students use historical evidence to develop and support an historical argument?"

To support lesson study through TAH activities, our efforts have focused on linking lesson studies with historians' presentations. This allows us to provide resources (documents, activities, readings, etc.) that support teachers through the lesson planning phase so they can focus on the lesson analysis portion. The analysis portion, framed by a teacher research question, is often the part of teaching that teachers are unable to make time for as they try and meet the demands of moving through their American history curriculum.

When we first started with lesson study we didn't stress this aspect enough, even though we understood the research nature of the process. We learned that having a teacher question helped immensely in focusing on student understanding as a means for evaluating the lesson's success and instructional meaning. For lesson study to be truly successful, it should help teachers improve the instruction of a particular lesson, inform their instruction beyond that one lesson, and influence future instructional decisions and choices. Why else spend that much time on one lesson?

References

Lewis, Catherine, "Lesson Study: A Handbook for Teacher-Led Instructional Change," (Research for Better Schools, 2002).

Stigler, James and Hiebert, James, "The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom," (New York: Free Press, 1999).

Oakland Unified School District TAH project website.

Researching for a Research Topic

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Digital photo, 2005, Magnifying Glass, Flickr Commons
Question

I am searching for an unique topic for the National History Day 2010-2011. The theme is "Debate and Diplomacy In History: Successes, Failures, Consequences". We have to choose a topic that reflects that theme, however, we can choose if we want an event that has to do with diplomacy or debate. So, I was wondering if there is a way diplomacy and the concept of spies is related. Is there any event in specific having to do with spies and diplomacy that can relate to the theme? Thank You!

Answer

Kudos on getting started on your NHD project. You ask a specific question about whether diplomacy and spies are related, and the shortest answer is yes, indeed, there are many events and issues you could explore that connect to both of these subjects. But before I get specific, let me share some approaches to finding those topics.

Choosing a topic for historical research can be a lengthier process that we expect. While you’ve done the key initial step of identifying a personal interest that connects to the theme, below are some tips to help you answer your own question.

Background Reading
Do some background reading on Spies and Diplomacy. You can start with something as simple as an encyclopedia or Wikipedia entry. Look for references to events, issues and people that you find intriguing or puzzling. Take notes on those specifics.

Using primary sources and secondary sources truly allows you to engage in historical research

As you do this background reading, also look for sources that are cited in the footnotes, bibliography, or “further reading” sections that look interesting or that you can find easily. You will want to read multiple accounts and overviews on these topics to get a more full range of the possibilities for specific topics.

The Importance of Questions
Ultimately, your project, given that is a historical research project, will answer a question. A good research question both bounds and guides your investigation. Indeed, questions are key to all your tasks—while doing background reading, record questions you have. Look for information that seems incomplete or unexpected. Ask yourself, what do you want to know more about?

Use your questions to help you look into a topic more deeply and extensively. Ultimately, you will need to revise and craft your question so it is neither too broad nor too narrow. But this will not happen in a day. Learning more about the topic will help you finalize your question.

Available Sources
One thing you will have to figure out is: are there sources available and accessible that address this topic and question? Remember you can’t do a project on a topic that has no available sources!

You will want to use a variety of sources, including texts, photos, and so on. Using primary and secondary sources truly allows you to engage in historical research, as you investigate the voices of the past while learning about how previous historians have made sense of them. And to do this, you will have to go beyond google and explore archives and library holdings. This may sound daunting, but at the end of this answer are some resources that can help.

Next Steps
So practically, after you do some background reading, your next steps could be:

Start with three specific topics (an event or person) or questions to explore and for each, ask the following four questions:
1. Is it interesting?
2. Are there sources on it?
3. Is there a problem or mystery that can be investigated?
4. What have historians already found out about it?

Spend at most a few hours on each topic. In that time, you will hopefully get a sense of whether there is an interesting question and available sources for that topic. (You will find this out by reading more and looking for sources, both on and off line.) Then eliminate two of the three. But be forewarned, you may also discover a different person, event, or question that you find more interesting and manageable for your project. Be prepared for that possibility. Better to change topic in the early stages, than stick unnecessarily with a dull or overly difficult one because you feel you have to.

A Recursive Process
One thing to keep in mind throughout your research is that it is an iterative process. As you read more about spies, you encounter more options for topics. As you search for sources about a specific topic (for example, French Spy in 1775, Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir), you will have additional questions. At some point, you will need to finalize your topic and question, but in these early stages, be open to changing and tweaking them. And while your topic will become more fixed as you proceed, you may find that the question you answer continues to be refined for months to come as you learn what the sources reveal.

Remember, researching the past is a complex process, these tips only scratch the surface

Finally, remember that espionage is a secret enterprise. If you pick a less current topic, you may find that more sources are available.

Good Luck!

For more information

Here are some other resources that may help you think through the process:

  • Historian William Cronon’s helpful site. Especially helpful for choosing a topic is the section titled “asking good questions.”
  • National History Day’s Eight Steps of Historical Research. Steps 2, 3, and 4 are most relevant to your question.
  • Local resources including school and local librarians, professors, teachers, museums, and historical societies. Use the search function at our "Content” page to find local museums and historical sites (scroll down and look in the right column).

Places you may want to browse to do some background reading and look for topics specific to spies include:

  • The International Spy Museum website: Spend some time with the “From Spy” and “exhibits” sections to find ideas for topics.
  • The National Security Archives: Browse the electronic briefing books for topic ideas. This list includes a variety of topics with accompanying sources, although they can be difficult to read. Also read about the Freedom of Information Act here—one major tool for finding out about espionage after the fact.
  • Use keywords (e.g., spy, diplomacy) in the History Content Gateway search function and explore some of those results.

Researching the Role of the Map in History Teaching

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oster, Map Your Course. . . , 1941-1945, Office of Emergency Mgm't., NARA
Question

I am doing some research on the use of maps to teach history. Any suggestions for research or theory would be helpful.

Answer

To get oriented to how maps can be used to teach history and begin exploring links to relevant websites, this newsletter can be a useful first stop. You will find links to videos of teachers using historical maps, checklists for what to focus on when teaching with maps, reviews of best practices, and links to teaching modules. The fundamental idea behind these resources is that geography can provide the context for sophisticated historical thinking if students are encouraged to actively think about what maps show and why they show it.

One of the clearest rationales for using maps to teach history that I have seen can be found in a recent book by David Rumsey(1) and Meredith Williams entitled Historical Maps in GIS. The authors argue that:

Historical maps often hold information retained by no other written source, such as place-names, boundaries, and physical features that have been modified or erased by modern development. Historical maps capture the attitudes of those who made them and represent worldviews of their time.

Geographic Information System (GIS) is an exciting new tool for history and geography educators that has been the focus of some recent research. If this is of interest you might begin your exploration of the benefits of using GIS by reading "Using GIS to Answer the 'Whys' of 'Where' in Social Studies" by Marsha Alibranadi and Herschel M. Sarnoff. In the article, the authors discuss not only the pedagogical and social benefits of using GIS, but also use real classroom examples to reflect on the challenges that the technology poses.

[. . . S]tudies might show how to develop map reading skills, but they rarely show how to interrogate the map as a document. . .

The most recent research on using maps to teach traditional geography that I could find was Ava L. McCall's "Promoting Critical Thinking and Inquiry through Maps in Elementary Classrooms" published in The Social Studies. The critical thinking that is promoted by this work is very similar to contextualized historical thinking. This is a key point. One of the difficulties in finding research on using maps in history education is that researchers often aren't looking for the dynamic recursive relationships between history and geography that are critical to both disciplines. For instance, studies might show how to develop map-reading skills, but they rarely show how to interrogate the map as a document as a means of determining why it was created and for whom, or how it helps us understand the past. There is very little research using this orientation to historical and geographical relationships.

Depending on your specific research interests, you may want to consult the following resources. You may not have access to all of the materials but if you see something of interest you can contact your librarian. Or you may try a trial membership. The large national database on educational research can be accessed here. Two journals (Theory and Research in Social Education and The History Teacher) devoted to history and social educational research can be accessed here and here. And finally, if you are interested in international research in geography education you may want to look at the Review of International Geographic Education Online or back issues of the journal Research in Geographic Education.

Good luck with your research and let us know if you discover anything.

(1)Rumsey is a map aficionado who has compiled an enormous database of historical map images that he has posted for free on the Internet. It's worth exploring.

TAH Projects and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Video Overview

Christina Chavarria of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the many resources the museum can offer TAH Grant projects and her own perceptions on the value of the TAH Grant program.

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During the course of the time that I've been at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, we've had quite a few calls from TAH grant directors who are bringing teachers to Washington who would like a tour of the museum, and sometimes they might ask for a short professional development session.

So this really piqued our curiosity and we began to think of how we could work more intentionally with the TAH program, and it led us to really look at our resources and how our resources support American history, because even though the Holocaust took place in Europe, it is also very much a story about the United States and American responses and how those responses inform a lot of what we're teaching in schools today and issues that we're dealing with here in the United States.

We ask what the theme of the grant is and if there's any particular focus that they are looking at within the grant. For example, we had one TAH project director telling us about the focus on President Roosevelt. So we worked with our historians, our Senior Historians Office; we also work with collections, to see what collections we have that support American history, and we also look at using our permanent exhibition because our permanent exhibition does have a focus on the United States and the role of the United States.

So we try to put in time, of course, for the teachers to see the exhibit, that's very important. and a session on how to teach about the Holocaust and if there is a direct focus within the grant, we can look at our senior historians office to support a lecture about some historical topic that's related to the grant.

We also encourage teachers to hear Holocaust survivors, their testimonies. We do have Holocaust survivors who are at the museum every day. And if we have a phone call and if the project directors make contact with us early on, we can arrange to have Holocaust survivors speak, and that's very important, because we are losing that generation. So while we still have our survivors with us we do encourage teachers and the project directors to incorporate Holocaust testimony in the visit.

The standards in the United States for teaching U.S. history are either very explicit on teaching the Holocaust, where they state responses to what was happening in Nazi Germany and what was happening in occupied Europe during that time—those are very explicitly stated in many states. But when you look at other themes, American response, foreign policy respond, the rise of fascism, American responses to fascism—if you look at American responses to dictatorships, all of these strands within the elements and standards are very much a part of what we focus on at the museum. It's a very natural fit.

Pretty much everything you will see at the United States Holocaust Museum fits in perfectly to support U.S. history teachers when you're looking at 20th-century history. And even the precedents that were set before. You can look at the 19th century, you can look at the role of antisemitism. There are so many elements. And then of course, today, focusing on our responses to genocides since the Holocaust—that is an incredibly important topic to our museum. And, so, we would encourage U.S. history teachers to look at American foreign policy in trouble spots in places like Darfur, in the former Yugoslavia, like Rwanda, and how we've responded to those situations, and how the Holocaust gave us this, I don't want to say opportunity, but it gave us this light on the subject that is still very much with us today.

Because our primary focus is on the victims and our survivors and their testimonies, but, for example, in working with a Teaching American History group a few weeks ago, I focused on some interviews with an African American athlete, John Will—John Woodruff, excuse me, who was a participant in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and he speaks very eloquently about his experiences in Berlin in 1936, representing the United States and being proud to represent his country and his race and what he saw there and the euphoria of the crowds in reaction to his gold medal victory—also Jesse Owens, which is a story that many people know very well. And then when he returns home, he speaks about being excluded from the hall of fame, from the university where he, that he attended.

In looking at that, to show again what we do in a professional development is to show how expansive this history really is. And we use survivor testimony, we use witness testimony, we use liberator testimony. we also focus very much on photos and other primary source documents. And what we really want to do is to complicate the thinking of the teachers that come to us for professional development, to show that this history is so complex and so vast in its context from the years that it took place, but what happened in the years before, the decades and centuries before, and what's happening after.

June and July are very, very busy months for us and usually we're booked about a year before in our schedules, so I recommend to project directors that they contact us, perhaps in the fall, but as soon as they know that they want to come, they need to be in touch with us, and we will do our absolute best to get them in the museum—because that's very important and if there's time and if there's space and we're available to do so we would be very happy to provide professional development to them, as well.

And for groups that they cannot come to Washington, DC, we offer many resources offsite. First of all, our website is filled with archival material—our photo archives, for example. We also have exemplary lessons that have been tested by teachers and education experts, and they have been vetted for historical accuracy. We also have online exhibitions that contain collections that we encourage teachers to use for a more hands-on approach. More importantly, we have traveling exhibitions, and on our website, you can see a schedule of what exhibitions will be in certain venues around the country and when.

And from our standpoint, from the educational standpoint, we have a network of museum regional educators, our Regional Education Corps, and these are 30 educators who are deeply involved with our museum who are spread out around the country, and if you contact us in the Education Division, in the National Outreach for Teacher Initiatives branch, we can be in touch with our museum regional educators and they can work with a TAH project anywhere in the country to provide professional development even before a group comes to the museum, or after, or if they never come at all—we still have that on-ground support. We also have 246 museum Teacher Fellows around the country, one in each of the 50 states, and they are also resources whom we turn to to provide professional development in places where we're not able to go.

The value of Teaching American History is that it works so closely with a group of teachers and it provides sustainability, and sustainability in the career of a teacher is incredibly important. Sometimes you feel like you're alone as a teacher in your classroom, and when you have that network of support and it's ongoing and it's centered on a theme and a particular rational, that makes a teacher feel incredibly rewarded for having that experience, but more importantly that translates into student success.

And students will only benefit from a teacher having that kind of quality interaction with professionals around a sustained program that will keep them going. The network and the broad availability of resources in the form of other teachers and other grants and what is available online is astounding, and I hope that it continues, and I encourage teachers and educators throughout the country to look at this program, because it does sustain teachers, and if you sustain the teacher, the teacher can better sustain the student, so that that translates into success in the classroom for the student.

World War and Literature

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Poster, Books wanted for our men in camp..., c.1918-1923, C.B. Falls, LoC
Question

Can you suggest any literature covering World War I to World War II that my 10th-grade world history class can read? I am looking for short stories or novels from that period that would interest my students. I would like stories that include what life was like during these years for young people.

Answer

Historical literature can really grab your students' interest. Consider the following excerpt:

They had come for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. 'Grab your toothbrush,' they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.

He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.

Grab your toothbrush.
Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.
We just need to ask your husband a few questions.
Into the car, Papa-san

Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth's, he was sure of it. Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.

The next morning his sister had wandered around the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.

"The edge of my bed," their mother had said.

That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy's uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor's army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. "From now on," she said, "we are counting on our fingers."

The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. "No more rice balls," she said. "And if anyone asks, you're Chinese."

The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese."

"And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain."

"In your dreams," said the boy.

"In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King."

—When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel by Julie Otsuka, p. 73–75

Recommendations

This list includes books considered to be for adult readers as well as books considered to be for young adult readers. These labels are only somewhat useful. Occasionally the young adult books are less challenging, though perhaps equally rewarding, for the reader.

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot won the Prix Interallie in 1991. This nonlinear mystery is a moving and incisive portrait of life in France during and after the First World War.

An ambitious, meticulously researched, novel, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages is set in New Mexico in 1943 and told from the viewpoint of two disenfranchised children at Los Alamos where scientists and mathematicians converge (along with their families) to construct and test the first nuclear bomb. Grades 5–up.

No Pretty Pictures, Caldecott illustrator Anita Lobel's haunting memoir of her traumatic years in Nazi-occupied Poland, is told from the perspective of a child—she is just five when the war begins—who does not fully comprehend what she is witnessing. Grade 6–up.

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo is a slim, stunning, and easily accessible novel written by the author of War Horse. "Exquisitely written vignettes explore bonds of brotherhood that cannot be broken by the physical and psychological wars of the First World War," said Horn Book Magazine. Grade 7–up. Match with the superb photo-essay The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman.

Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney is a graceful, restrained, and detailed portrait of America's Great Depression, a time when the radio delivered the sound of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington into living rooms across the country and boxing champion, Joe Lewis, the "Brown Bomber," came to represent so much more than the zenith of a sport. Grade 4–up.

Set on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in the years immediately following World War II, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, focuses on Tayo, a young vet of mixed Indian ancestry. The book is Tayo's story of return and redemption. "The novel is very deliberately a ceremony in itself—demanding but confident and beautifully written," said the Boston Globe.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is an unsettling, unsentimental, poetic novel, set in World War II and narrated by Death. This is not an easy read, but it is a book that can change a life. Grade 9–up.

We Are the Ship by Kadir Nelson is a sumptuous history of Negro League Baseball from its beginning in the 1920s to 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the major leagues’ color barrier. Dazzling, almost iconic paintings illustrate the easygoing, conversational, historically detailed text, and all in all the book illuminates more than baseball in the '20s and '30s—it is a history of all of us. Grade 4–up.

The narrator of Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray, 15-year-old Lina, begins "They took me in my nightgown." In 1941, Stalin is deporting families from Lithuania and imprisoning them in Siberia where daily life is brutal. It is the slim possibility of survival that provides hope. This book is similar to Esther Hautzig's earlier autobiographical novel, Endless Steppe in that it is similarly themed and equally searing. In Endless Steppe, 10-year-old Esther Rudmin is arrested with her family in Poland as "enemies of the people" and exiled to Siberia. Grade 6–up.

Homestead, by Rosina Lippi, is a series of interconnected vignettes beginning in 1909, about life in Rosenau, a small isolated village in the Austrian Alps. The villagers harvest, tend animals, and make cheese. Against this pastoral backdrop are all of life's vicissitudes. The prose is clean and clear, each chapter is seemingly autonomous but as we see an event (over generations) from different characters' points of view, the life of Rosenau becomes increasingly rich and complex. This novel won the 1998 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first fiction and was short-listed for the 2001 Orange Prize.

Complete List of Titles
  • When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
  • A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
  • The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
  • No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel
  • Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
  • The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman
  • Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney
  • Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
  • The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  • We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson
  • Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
  • The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia by Esther Hautzig
  • Homestead by Rosina Lippi
For more information

See here to search the California literature recommendations. Choose “historical fiction” as one of your search parameters.

This Ask a Master Teacher entry has some other helpful resources for finding historical literature.

International Spy Museum

Description

The International Spy Museum is "the only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage," according to its website, featuring "the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display." The museum works to offer an apolitical view into the world of spies and espionage and to explore the importance of espionage work worldwide, both in the past and the present day.

The museum offers downloadable educator guides, pre- and post-visit materials, workshops for grades 5–12, bus tours, and long-distance web-conferencing-based programs.

Michael Yell on Making Every History Lecture Engaging

Date Published
Image
Photography, Lecture in Milan Italy, 4 Sept 2011, Francesco Spagnolo, Flickr CC
Article Body

The lecture has fallen on difficult times . . . it relies too heavily on auditory input and makes students passive as opposed to active learners. —Silver, Strong, and Perini (1)

As history teachers we may often use the lecture format, and perhaps many of us had our first excitement about history ignited by an incredible lecture that sparked our interest in the past. But we also know that  for an engaging lesson, we need students to be actively involved in that lesson. They must be actively processing what they are hearing. Because interaction and engagement are the climate to set in our history classes, our focus must be on more than teacher-led lectures consisting of just "teacher talk/students listen." A lot more.

Incorporating two elements into your lecture will make it interactive and engaging for your student.

You may have decided that you are going to use a lecture to impart a certain amount of information to your students. And perhaps you have some slides you wish to have them view, so you have created a PowerPoint presentation. Can the lecture be made more engaging? Can the lecture become less a passive imparting of information and more an interactive experience grappling with that information? Absolutely! Incorporating two elements into your lecture will make it interactive and engaging for your students:

  1. An introduction that taps into students curiosity, involves them, and grabs their attention; and
  2. The use of processing strategies throughout the lecture allowing students to interact with the content, and with each other.
Beginning the Lecture

To begin with, make the students first encounter with your lecture an interactive encounter. Rather than “Okay, take out your notebooks,” you might choose to begin with a Discrepant Event Inquiry. In this strategy (which my students have always termed their favorite), a puzzling statement or story is presented to students which they must figure out using questions that are answerable with a yes or a no. Questions build upon questions and answers build upon answers as students try to figure out the puzzle. Try beginning a lecture on General U.S. Grant with an inquiry such as "Although this person failed at much, this person’s successes ensured his success."

Or perhaps begin your lecture with a Media Hook. In this simple strategy you will select a powerful visual image to show the class. If you have an LCD or Smartboard the image can be made large enough for students to come up and interact with. Imagine the interest generated by beginning a lecture on the Depression with viewing Dorothea Lange’s "Migrant Mother." Use guiding questions to have students identify specific components of the image.

During the Lecture

During the lecture give students time to review, formulate questions about the ideas, and process.

There are many excellent quick-write strategies that can be used to augment note-taking during the lecture.

One quick strategy for processing is a Think-Pair-Share. At particular points, stop lecturing and ask an open-ended question about the material that has been covered. Students are given a short amount of time to think about their answer. Students then pair up to discuss their answer, and a brief whole-class discussion ensues. A variation of this is a Timed-Pair-Share in which students think about the open-ended question and in pairs take turns discussing their ideas, each for a specified period of time. Another strategy for processing is Spencer Kagan’s Numbered-Heads-Together. After numbering off one through four in a group, students put their heads together to discuss. A number is then called; the students with that number in each group must explain their group’s ideas.

And if you are using PowerPoint or other presentation programs during the lecture, pause at a picture and discuss it, and/or listen to a recording. Imagine pausing during a lecture on the Civil War to have students listen to a recording of a reading of the Sullivan Ballou letter from the soundtrack of Ken Burns’s Civil War (there are a number of excellent YouTube clips with this letter and accompanying images).

Finally, there are many excellent quick-write strategies that can be used to augment note-taking during the lecture. One excellent example is Sentence Syntheses. In addition to inserting within a lecture, it is particularly good for closure. In this quick-write, students construct meaningful sentences on ideas from the lecture, using two or three key terms. They then share these sentences. In a lecture on the Constitution, for example, the teacher might select the words separation, Constitution, and branch. Students must use all three words in a sentence that might come out like this: "Separation of powers is the principle in our Constitution of dividing powers between the different branches of government."

Or you might pause and have students respond to a Question All Write (which is exactly what its name states; you as the teacher give your students a question and they all write the answer prior to the classroom discussion). At the end of the lecture, you might ask students to write and share Outcomes Sentences, which, as in a Question All Write, has students responding in writing to a teacher prompt. Students complete the sentence stem I learned that…, or I still wonder why….

A lecture need not be a passive experience for students. It can easily become an interactive experience that will engage them in the ideas you are imparting. Give some of these mini-strategies a try in your next lecture.

Bibliography

1 Harvey F. Silver, Richard W. Strong, and Matthew J. Perin, The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-based Strategy for Every Lesson (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2007).

For more information

Yell recommends several resources for finding quick engaging mini-strategies that can be inserted to make a lecture more interactive:

  • Merrill Harman and Melanie Toth, Inspiring Active Learning (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2006).
  • Spencer Kagan and Miguel Kagan, Kagan Cooperative Learning (San Clemente, CA: Kagan, 1994).
  • Michael Yell, Geoffrey Scheurman, and Keith Reynolds, A Link to the Past: Engaging Students in the Study of History (Silver Spring, MD: National Council for the Social Studies, 2004).

Check out Yell's past blog entries here at Teachinghistory.org for more strategies, including ideas for teaching with documentary films, using textbooks, and drawing students into history as a mystery.

In a Ask a Master Teacher, we answer the question "How do I mix document-based teaching with lecture-style teaching to try to make sure the students learn the entire curriculum?"

Scholars in Action: Analyzing a Melville Story

Article Body

Scholars In Action presents case studies that demonstrate how scholars interpret different kinds of historical evidence. This short story by Herman Melville was published serially in Putnam's Monthly magazine in November and December 1853. "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is the story of a copyist in a New York City legal office who refuses to perform any other work asked of him. It is also a story about office work and social relations at a time when urbanization and class stratification were increasing in New York City.

Economic and technological changes reshaped daily life dramatically in the mid-19th century. The rise of new categories of professionals and managers created a growing middle class that sought to impose its values and morals on the working class and poor through a wide range of reform movements. Melville's story of the relationship between the narrator, a lawyer, and his employee, Bartleby, was one of many stories about lawyers published in popular magazines in the 1850s and is part of a genre of stories that explore the culture of New York in that period.

Website
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/sia/melvillestory.htm
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