Multiperspectivity: What Is It, and Why Use It?

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Photo, San Francisco, Calif., April 1942. . . , Library of Congress
Question

What is multiperspectivity in history?

Answer

Exploring multiple perspectives (which is known as "multiperspectivity" in parts of Europe) requires incorporating source materials that reflect different views of a historical event. In recent decades scholars and educators have begun to question the validity of singular (one-sided) historical narratives. Instead of just focusing on dominant groups and communities, they recommend employing multiple perspectives. One reason for this stems from increasing diversity and cultural pluralism, since many groups—women, the poor, ethnic minorities, etc.—have been ignored in traditional historical narratives.

. . . many groups—women, the poor, ethnic minorities, etc.—have been ignored in traditional historical narratives.

Another reason is disciplinary. After all, good historians don’t just settle for one perspective on a historical issue—they piece together many (sometimes competing) versions of a story to construct an accurate interpretation. As Ann Low-Beer explains, "In history, multiple perspectives are usual and have to be tested against evidence, and accounted for in judgments and conclusions."

Here's an instance of using multiple perspectives: When studying the voyages of discovery, students would not only learn about explorers like Columbus, but about the peoples who had been "discovered." Historian Jon Wiener, writing in American History 101 in Slate magazine, offers the following example:

In the case of Reconstruction. . . I focus [on] the three most significant [perspectives]: the Northern Radicals, who shaped federal policy and who wanted to bring the former slaves into the economy of the free market, as wage earners, and into the political system, as voters; the Southern planter elite, who wanted to preserve as much of the old plantation labor system as possible; and the former slaves themselves. Their understanding of freedom was, as Eric Foner has written, "shaped by their experiences as slaves." Freedom for them meant freedom to work for themselves—economic autonomy and access to land. This argument shows the freedmen defining their own interests, in conflict with the federal government, which claimed to represent them. Thus, instead of giving students a list of facts and dates to memorize, I would ask them to conceive of what's happening as a three-sided conflict over the meaning of freedom.

. . . instead of giving students a list of facts and dates to memorize, I would ask them to conceive of what's happening as a three-sided conflict over the meaning of freedom.

Consequently, for Wiener, "students end up learning not just about what happened during Reconstruction, but about how history itself gets reconstructed."

If not yet universal, this approach is widely accepted. In its most recent Position Statement, the National Council for the Social Studies in the United States recommended students learn to "think critically, and make personal and civic decisions based on information from multiple perspectives."

So what can a classroom teacher do? Try incorporating primary sources that represent a range of views on a historical issue. Then, ask students to spend some time thinking about why different groups may see the same event in different ways. Oftentimes a different story emerges when those multiple perspectives are put together. The result is enriched historical understanding.

Women Taking History: Women's History Month 2011

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Photo, Woman with camera, White House, Washington, D.C., Apr. 8, 1922, LoC
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African American History Month ends, and Women's History Month begins! Take a glance around the internet, and you'll find plenty of resources for teaching women's history—whether it be the Seneca Falls Convention, heroes of the American Revolution and the Civil War, social activists, First Ladies, workers during the World Wars, jazz and blues stars, or presidential candidates. You'll find photographs of many of these women, too—working in factories, on the campaign trail, helping the wounded, conducting scientific experiments.

But who takes these photographs? Who makes these images that become the records of history? Aren't the people behind the camera as significant as the ones in front of it?

Of course they are, though they can easily be forgotten. When we look at photographs of Amelia Earhart, we rarely ask who took the photo. When we're struck by a picture of New York during 9/11, do we ever ask if it was snapped by a man or a woman?

Explore women's history behind the camera this Women's History Month. What have women chosen to capture on film, as they record and live through history?

Taking Photos and Making History
  • The Kansas Historical Society tells the story of Alice Gardiner Sennrich, a professional photographer early in photography's commercial history. Born in 1878, Sennrich purchased a Kansas photography studio in 1902, and ran it throughout her life, including after her marriage. Recognized by the National Association of Photographers, she was also active in the Photographers Association of Kansas (PAK), an organization that had active female members since its founding. You can hear more about Sennrich in this podcast by the Society.
  • During the Great Depression, the Federal Government gave photographers, both men and women, work documenting the lives of ordinary U.S. citizens and the social conditions of the day. The Library of Congress's American Memory collection From the Great Depression to World War II: Photos from the FSA-OWI preserves more than 150,000 of these photographs. Try browsing the collections' black-and-white and color photos by creator. Look for women's names and work—and remember to check names with only a first initial and a surname! These may be women, too. Giving only a first initial was (and remains) one way to avoid being judged (at least in print) by gender.
  • Photographs aren't always taken as documentation. Sometimes, they're carefully composed as art. The online archive Women Artists of the American West showcases the artwork of 19th- and 20th-century Western women. Photography exhibits include photographs by white women of Pueblo arts and crafts workers (many of them women), taken from 1900 to 1935; modern art photography by Native women; landscape photography by Laura Gilpin (1891–1979); and 1972–1997 lesbian photography (some pages contain nudity). The Women in International Photography Archive, collects essays on more than 25 women photographers.
  • For an example of a modern photographer using her work as part of a political journalistic career, check out Jo Freeman.com. A writer, lawyer, and activist, Freeman's site features her photographs of Democratic and Republican conventions, marches and protests, New York after 9/11, the Chicago riot following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's 1972 campaign for the presidency.

If photographs aren't enough, branch out into art, journalism, fiction and nonfiction writing, and other ways of recording and responding to the world, all meant for the public eye. What have women created and documented? What were their (myriad, uncountable) reasons for crafting "snapshots" and composing reactions? Women make history when they're behind its lens, as well as in front!

Further Resources

Looking for more resources? Take a quiz on women in history, with our weekly quiz archive! See how well you do on quizzes with subjects like women in the West. Search our Website Reviews, as well—we've reviewed and annotated more than 200 websites with women's history content.

If you'd still like more, these organizations feature content and pages created just for Women's History Month:

For more information

Speaking of photographs, the Smithsonian is looking for help identifying women in photographs with missing or incomplete background information. Take a look and see if you can help out!

Finding Local History Resources

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Photo, The old neighborhood. . . , Christopher Frith, 1998, NYPL
Question

I have been unable to find teaching materials and/or curriculum for the teaching of local history. Our small town has a very rich history, including being the place where Lewis and Clark joined together to form their expedition, and the town that is the oldest American town in what was the entire Northwest Territory. It is also the site of the only home that George Rogers Clark ever owned. We also have extensive archaeology of Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods.

We would like to incorporate teaching our town's history into the curriculum of grades K-5, but find no curriculum help or materials to do so.

Answer

Learning history through a local lens can be an engaging and powerful way to study the past. It sounds like your town (in Indiana, I presume?) has a rich history to mine with elementary students. For curricular resources, first try local museums, libraries, and historic sites. Their local collections often have interesting and evocative primary sources and orienting secondary material that can be curricular building blocks.

Some of these local institutions even provide lessons, resources, and field trips designed especially for the K-5 classroom. See this site's Museum and Historic Sites search for locating institutions near your community.

But even without specific curriculum, repositories of historic photographs, documents, maps, and other sources can get you well on your way to creating classroom plans.

Here are some tips for creating local history curricula for the elementary classroom:

Remember your state's standards—these can help you identify important topics, themes, and concepts at each of the grade levels. (Click here to search state standards.)

Timelines and maps are invaluable tools for helping students of all ages study history. From using a timeline to understand photographs that show a changing town landscape to using maps to understand settlement patterns, these tools help young students locate primary sources in concrete ways and read and analyze these sources. Connections between local and regional or national events can also be more transparent for students when timelines and maps are compared. For instance, compare a timeline of national events with a timeline of local events to help students see these connections.

Guiding questions are important. Use them to help students read and look carefully at sources and consider the significance of what they see.

Remember that walking tours can help students engage with the past. Seek out local history experts to help you identify promising sources, stories, and sites.

Use existing curricula and lesson ideas on this site to help you plan questions, activities, and lesson structures. For example, see this teaching guide about reading historic photographs closely and using them as doors into larger historic questions, or this video for a teacher who uses walking tours to help students learn their local colonial history. And don't forget to explore our Primary Source Guides. The entry about the National Parks Service may be especially helpful.

Other national organizations also provide resources for teaching local history. See the Regional Education Resources of the National Archives, National History Day's state pages, and a list of resources from the Library of Congress's American Memory site. Finally, the New England Flow of History project has some teaching ideas and resources that can be helpful.

Please come back and tell us about your successes and challenges—this is a topic that is important to many educators!

Texts for Today

Article Body

For all the innovative thinkers and grand new ideas, the world of academia is not known for its progressiveness. Most educational institutions, K – 16, still work on the September to June agrarian community model. Most schools still report students' progress using letter grades, and rely on paper and pencil (#2 only please) assessments to monitor students' achievements. And, yes, most schools still utilize the printed textbook, the descendent of the ancient scroll, as the primary teaching resource.

The average high school students often lugs around as much as 20 pounds in textbook weight (1). In addition to causing back injuries, these weighty tomes contain information that at best has not been updated since publication. All too often these texts contain outdated and inaccurate information.

In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman rejects the claim that technologies are themselves neutral. And so, it would seem, with etexts. Some people view them as the Holy Grail of instruction, as though they are capable of salvaging a long suffering educational system. To others, they are merely the latest gadget upon which to waste our ever-dwindling education dollars. While we may have been educated using traditional textbooks (and have done fairly well in our humble opinions) today's education is about today's children and tomorrow's citizens and leaders.

Today's Children

Imagine if you will the students entering kindergarten in September 2011. For as long as they can recall there have been iPads, smart phones, and other easily mobile devices which have allowed them quick and simple access to the world. They have listened and watched as grandparents a continent away have Skyped them a bedtime story. They have used the latest apps to learn handwriting, simple math, and even foreign languages. For them, the world of YouTube is a place to find Lego or Barbie videos. They have even created and produced their own digital stories using apps such as ToonDo to share with the world. Before setting foot in an educational institution, these children have been intuitively harnessing the power of digital media and devices to soar.

Their [upcoming students'] academic potential will be constrained by the ages-old technology of the printed text.

For the next 16 years, however, their academic experiences will likely disallow such incredible growth. Their academic potential will be constrained by the ages-old technology of the printed text. Digital texts, often referred to as etexts, ebooks, or digibooks, must be brought into the academic world today to teach today’s children for tomorrow!

Etexts exponentially increase students' learning potential. Information contained within the text can be updated as needed. No longer will an elementary textbook claim that Pluto is a planet years after it had been reclassified as a planetoid. Knowledge is an ever-changing and evolving asset; our students need to have that access to that type of knowledge.

What Is an Etext?

One caveat concerns the definition of an etext. An etext is not simply a digital copy of a paper text. Rather, it is a robust, fully interactive technology tool. It should allow for the digital exchange between students and students, students and teachers, and even students and experts from around the globe of all text-related activities such as discussion, highlighting, notes, summarizing, creating, and problem solving.

If we return to those same kindergarten students of September 2011, we may see a few lucky ones—ones whose schools have already adapted and integrated digital texts. We may see students who are able to learn at their own individual levels; at a school where there is differentiation of instruction and limitless, worldwide resources. As the students learn both inside and outside of the classroom they will be able to easily connect with global peers and content experts to collaborate and share, to learn and grown, to create.

Isn’t this something we want for our students? Of course it is. So yes, the time has come to move from print to etexts.

Footnotes

1 California State Board of Education, "Textbook Weight in California: Analysis and Recommendations," California Department of Education, May 2004, id: cib-cfir-may04item02.

Teaser

An etext is not simply a digital copy of a paper text. Rather, it is a robust, fully interactive technology tool.

Brookgreen Gardens

Description

In 1931 Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington founded Brookgreen Gardens, a non-profit 501(c) (3) garden museum, to preserve the native flora and fauna and display objects of art within that natural setting.

Today, Brookgreen Gardens is a National Historic Landmark with the most significant collection of figurative sculpture, in an outdoor setting, by American artists in the world, and has the only zoo accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums on the coast of the Carolinas.

In 2010, the Brookgreen Gardens Education Department provided field trip experiences for 4,093 students with South Carolina curriculum-based programs about History, Art, and Nature. Additionally, our annual curriculum-based special event for Horry and Georgetown County students, “Gullah Gullah Days,” a third-grade social studies program, provided educational enrichment for 1,708 students.

Programs generally are 50-minutes in length. History programs are: “Creek Excursion”, “Stretching and Growing: Children on Lowcountry Rice Plantations: and “Rice Plantation Exploration.” Cultural presentations offered are: “Gullah Lessons on History, Family & Respect”, “Gullah/Geechee Rhythms”, and “Priscilla’s Posse, A (Simulated) Press Conference about Gullah Heritage.” Teachers receive pre-visit Program Information Sheets that detail: content area, grade, maximum number of students, South Carolina State Standards, and program description. Program descriptions also are available at www.brookgreen/org, after viewers click on Education.

The Children’s Discovery Room attracts numerous enthusiastic public guests. Its seven interactive stations target 4- to 12-year-olds and reflect the history, nature, and art of Brookgreen Gardens. Educators also may gain historical enrichment through visiting one of the following Public programs: Gullah/Geechee Program Series, the Lowcountry Trail Audio Tour, Oaks History and Nature Trail, the Creek Excursion, and the “Lowcountry Change & Continuity” exhibit.

African American History Month 2011

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Photo, Navy baseball team--Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, Sept. 1944, NARA
Photo, Navy baseball team--Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, Sept. 1944, NARA
Article Body

It's February! Resources throughout the web stand ready to provide you with lessons and primary source materials for Black History Month (also known as African American History Month), but African American history stretches far beyond the confines of one month and the narrative litany of a handful of cultural heroes. Maybe you want to go beyond Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Jackie Robinson. What stories can you uncover beyond the headlining stories textbooks provide? Remind your students of the complexity of African American history with these resources.

Documenting African American History
  • The New York Times' lesson plan "Stories to Tell: Curating an African-American History Exhibit" introduces students to the difficulties in curating a large museum—or even just one exhibit. How can curators for the developing Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture create a museum that honors all of African American history?
  • Search the Carnegie Museum of Art's Teenie Harris Archive Project for photographs taken by photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris for the Pittsburgh Courier. Published from 1907 to 1965, the Courier was a major African American newspaper, and these photographs show Harris's journalistic perspective on Pittsburgh events of all scales. Use the keywords "Teenie Harris," along with others related to your topic of interest, to find images of life at school, home, community events, church, work, and out on the town.
  • The Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Portraits of a City provides a similar photographic record of a place. The Scurlocks ran studios in DC for much of the 20th century, documenting African American life in the nation's capital.
  • The Library of Congress's American Memory collection The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 focuses on the themes of slavery, politics, and religion. Its wide range of primary-source documents, including thousands of newspaper articles, can help students construct a view of just what the collection's title implies.
  • High-quality photographs in the National Archives and Records Administration's "Pictures of African Americans During World War II" could give students a look into another kind of community—one that formed both overseas and on the home front during war.
Looking for More Suggestions?

If none of these resources fit into your curriculum or spark your interests, there's plenty where they came from. Search our Website Reviews using the topic "African Americans," and you'll turn up close to 300 websites, on topics ranging from Marcus Garvey to the construction of race to Seattle's Black Panthers to sheet music by and about African Americans. Or test your African American history knowledge in our weekly quiz feature! You and your students can take online quizzes on African American baseball players and other athletes, the historical accuracy of the film Glory, Jim Crow laws, and foodways.

You can also explore the African American History Month pages of history and educational organizations, including:

Where Experience Meets Practicality

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Photography, Flat Classroom Workshop, 17 Sept 2009, Flickr CC
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Over the course of the many different TAH grants in which the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) has participated, it has become increasingly clear that listening and sharing are not just skills taught in kindergarten to get children through elementary school. Rather, they are essential skills for life, particularly when your work requires constant collaboration with a wide range of groups, including teachers, scholars, libraries, museums, and school administrators. It has also become clear that it is through listening and sharing with these many different stakeholders that the most rewarding results are achieved. This is where we find ways to make the experiences we provide meet practice in the classroom.

Institutions like museums and libraries have a unique set of resources that can enrich and revive teachers’ intellectual lives and interest in history. Beyond access to primary sources, these institutions can also provide valuable interactions with historians and curators. This is not always easy, however. One of the most common criticisms among teachers throughout our most recent TAH grant has been that while the scholars have offered a lot of interesting information, most of it is inapplicable to their classroom or grade level. In answer to this repeated concern, the TAH team, which included the AAS, Old Sturbridge Village, and the Worcester Public Schools, decided to offer separate sessions with the scholars for the different grade levels, and encouraged the scholars to follow a more informal, interactive lecture format. The feedback has been very positive and the teachers have begun to fully appreciate what specialty speakers have to offer.

Institutions like museums and libraries have a unique set of resources that can enrich and revive teachers’ intellectual lives and interest in history.

This grade-level specific content has also extended to breakout sessions, where elementary and high school teachers are looking for very different pedagogical approaches to the material. In particular, elementary teachers have often commented on the limited time they have to teach Social Studies and History, and are always looking for ways to teach the material quickly and powerfully. One way in which the team has attempted to rectify this problem is to focus on images and graphic arts. Elementary teachers have found that analyzing an image can often provide a poignant and thorough introduction to a historical subject.

Another approach has been to provide ideas about how to make history interdisciplinary, particularly highlighting its ability to connect to the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum. In some cases, the district’s ELA coordinator has presented at professional development workshops to illustrate how history can become a focal point for teaching ELA. Other workshops on the elementary level have incorporated math and science skills into a history lesson. By adjusting to the teachers’ constraints in the classroom, the professional development we provided became much more applicable and exciting for the teachers.

Elementary teachers have found that analyzing an image can often provide a poignant and thorough introduction to a historical subject.

Finally, the introduction of “teacher-coaches” to the program has been a great buoy to both the coaches and their colleagues. Among the requirements to become a teacher-coach is an independent original research project conducted in the AAS collections. Each of the coaches presents a workshop based on their research at one of the TAH professional development days. The enthusiasm these teacher-coaches gain for their subject through in-depth research brings energy into their workshops, and their ability to translate the material to classroom activities for their colleagues is greatly appreciated. Teachers have overwhelmingly deemed this an excellent opportunity for both the teacher-coaches and their colleagues.

"Shared authority" is a term often heard in the museum world these days, but I think it should also extend to collaborative programs such as TAH. By sharing authority between cultural institutions, scholars, and teachers, by really listening to each other and adjusting, by understanding each group's strengths and needs, we can create programming that is thoughtful, useful, and effective.

A Day On, Not a Day Off

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Logo, Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service
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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Since 1994 and the signing into law of the King Holiday and Service Act, the holiday is a "day on, not a day off," a national day of service. According to the King Center, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, described the holiday this way:

Every King Holiday has been a national "teach-in" on the values of nonviolence, including unconditional love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation, which are so desperately needed to unify America. It is a day of intensive education and training in Martin's philosophy and methods of nonviolent social change and conflict-reconciliation. The Holiday provides a unique opportunity to teach young people to fight evil, not people, to get in the habit of asking themselves, "what is the most loving way I can resolve this conflict?"

Maybe you've given your students background on the holiday and prepared them to get involved in the local community today. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day shouldn't be the only day your students are ready to serve—and King isn't the only topic that can connect service and history education.

More Than One Day of Service

President Barack Obama's United We Serve initiative calls on citizens to come together to improve their communities. The government Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service website reflects that call, and provides resources you can draw on throughout the year.

Helping to preserve history can be service, too!

Use this site to familiarize yourself (and your students, depending on their grade level and readiness to organize projects) with service opportunities in your area. Search by city, state, or zip code; register your own project; or read up on planning a project with the site's detailed Action Guides.

Now consider your curriculum and your local community. Don't limit yourself to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, or to the third Monday of January. Think about the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the women's rights movement, the victory gardens and scrap drives of the World War II homefront, the Berlin Airlift. What sorts of projects might you guide students in initiating (or at least considering) for any of these topics or time periods that would also help them learn—and feel connected to—historical content?

Serving to Preserve

Helping to preserve history can be service, too! Listen to teacher James Percoco speak on teaching with memorials and monuments and think about your local history. Are there places that need young volunteers? Locations that students could research and then prepare their own interpretive materials?

Use Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a reminder not just to memorialize history, but to empower students to connect with, interpret, and preserve it in the service of the present!

Resources on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sounds good, you say, but maybe you need resources for teaching about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, before you head off onto wider projects. Last year, we recommended a variety of online resources in our Jan. 13 blog entry. Here are those recommendations again—and a few new ones! Remember to search our Website Reviews and try our Lesson Plan Gateway for even more links to great materials.

Presidents in the Library

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Photo, US Flag, Kennedy Library, Boston, Feb. 16, 2009, Tony the Misfit, Flickr
Article Body

Happy (almost) Presidents Day! Have your ever thought about all of the papers a presidency must create? Emails, memoranda, schedules, notes, speeches, letters, drafts, on and on and on, an entire term (or terms) set down in a sea of potential primary sources. But how can educators access this wealth of materials?

In many cases, all you have to do is go online. Before the 20th century, presidents had ownership of their papers, and many were lost to time or split up in private collections. However, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that his papers should become the property of the American people following his presidency. He donated both his papers and part of his Hyde Park estate to the government, and the first presidential library was born.

In 1955, the Presidential Libraries Act set rules for gifting the government with property and other resources to be used to establish the libraries, and in 1978, the Presidential Records Act made it official—presidential papers were government property.

Today, 13 presidential libraries house the papers of the last 13 presidents. The National Archives and Records Administration, which oversees the libraries, describes them as combination archive-museums, “bringing together in one place the documents and artifacts of a President and his administration and presenting them to the public for study and discussion without regard for political considerations or affiliation.”

Presidential Libraries Online

Each of the libraries maintains its own website. Though the resources available on each vary greatly, almost all provide biographical information on the president and first lady, student and educator sections, and a selection of digitized photographs and documents. Some have extensive searchable databases full of documents, photos, and other primary sources! Here's a list of the libraries:

  • Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA — features 13 simple online exhibits and Hoover Online! Digital Archives, a collection of suggested units and lesson plans for secondary students with primary sources.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY — the first presidential library, completed in 1940. Offers five curriculum guides, an online exhibit on the art of the New Deal, and the Pare Lorentz Center, which encourages using multimedia to teach about FDR.
  • Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO — offers a searchable lesson plan database and digitized photographs, audio clips, and political cartoons, as well as documents divided up by topic (topics include such teachable subjects as the decision to drop the atom bomb and Japanese Americans during World War II).
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS — features a selection of online documents, grouped by topics (topics include Brown vs. Board of Education, Hawaiian statehood, McCarthyism, and others), and transcripts of oral history interviews.
  • John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA — provides six online exhibits (including exhibits on the space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and desegregating the University of Mississippi), a photo gallery, major speeches, and a searchable digital archive. It also houses the Ernest Hemingway Collection.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX — features a photo archive, the presidential daily diary, selected speeches, and the subsite LBJ for Kids!
  • Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, CA — includes digitized documents, samples of the Nixon tapes, a photo gallery, video oral histories, four lesson plans, and online exhibits on Watergate, gifts to the head of state, and Nixon's meeting with Elvis.
  • Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI — features 10 simple online exhibits, as well as digitized documents and photos.
  • Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA — offers selected documents and photographs, including the diary of Robert C. Ode, hostage in the Iran Hostage Crisis.
  • Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA — includes an image archive arranged by topic, and the public papers of Reagan, arranged by month and year.
  • George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX — includes 12 lesson plans, a photo archive, and searchable public papers of his presidency.
  • William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, AR — has both virtual exhibits and a digital library in development.
  • George W. Bush Presidential Library — the newest of the public libraries, it does not yet have a permanent building. Many papers from the Bush administration are not yet available to the public (papers become public five years after the end of a presidency, which can be extended up to 12 years).

Remember that many of the presidential libraries offer museum tours and activities for school groups! If your school is close to one, consider a field trip or participating in the professional development opportunities the library may offer.

Beyond the Libraries

Looking for resources on a pre-Hoover president? Several libraries exist outside of the official presidential library system, including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, and the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum. Try the Library of Congress's American Memory collections, as well, for papers that belonged to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Historic Stories, Fictional Accounts: Achieving Multiperspectivity

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Photography, for heart and mind, 21 Jan 2010, Flickr CC
Question

What is the significance of examining historical events from multiple perspectives (i.e. use of fiction, nonfiction, etc.) on an elementary school level?

Answer
Multiple Perspectives

Examining historical events from multiple perspectives introduces elementary students to core aspects of history and historical thinking. And as with much of history, it has relevance to helping students become more prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, college, and career.

Imagine that students are learning about early American settlements. Depending on where you teach and your curriculum, this might include learning about the Mayflower and Plymouth, Jamestown, or the Missions in California. Students read stories or textbook accounts of these early settlements and they learn the difficulties of the passage here and making a new life in a foreign land.

Students can learn to ask, whose voices are we not hearing?

Yet, this is only part of the story and to get a fuller picture, students need to consider the perspectives of those not necessarily represented in these accounts—most obviously, the perspective of the indigenous peoples who were here when the settlers arrived. (Viewing the settlements from this alternative perspective is not necessarily easy given that the historical record is incomplete, but using artifacts, surviving legends, historic sites, or even settlers’ first hand accounts can help students imagine this perspective.) Considering this missing perspective helps students recognize and articulate that people can experience the same event in different ways.

Students can learn to ask, whose voices are we not hearing? What perspective is not represented? What alternative stories are told about these events? Did participants in these events agree on their meaning? What might account for these differences in perspective?

This is a key piece of doing history—understanding that there are multiple perspectives and multiple stories that surround historical phenomena. And elementary students can learn this. Connections to daily life can be made, as students are familiar with such things as sifting through playmates’ differing accounts of recess events. Multiple perspectives can also be introduced in very concrete ways to young students. They could view something from different locations to see different aspects of it, or use tools such as a cardboard picture frame to see how a frame is selective--including some aspects of the view while ignoring others.

Ideally, students can learn to ask the same questions of daily life and sources that they learn to ask of history: Whose voices are we not hearing? What are the other stories that people tell about this issue? How and why do they differ?

Fiction & Nonfiction

You ask particularly about the use of fiction and nonfiction to teach multiple perspectives. See this entry about “book sets” a strategy for including both to engage students and guide them toward deep understanding of historical events. Also see this roundtable where panelists discuss the use of fiction in the elementary classroom or this blog.

Using both fiction and nonfiction allows students to engage with multiple kinds of text and it allows you, as teacher, to use the texts for different purposes. Good fiction can be used to engage and interest students in the past and help them imagine that past or create a picture of the historical context of the events you are studying. Non-fictional texts, such as primary sources, can be used to explore an experience or perspective in more depth and to represent missing perspectives. Both can be used to challenge students to look across and synthesize texts to create a fuller picture of the past.

A critical aspect of using both fiction and nonfiction texts together is that they give you an opportunity to teach students the difference between the two.

A critical aspect of using both fiction and non-fiction texts together is that they give you an opportunity to teach students the difference between the two. Young students can learn that history is an evidentiary discipline and strives for the most accurate and complete picture of the past, whereas fiction does not have this constraint. While there are examples of fictional stories that try to do the same, this basic distinction is an important one for students to learn.

Teaching young students that history includes multiple stories and perspectives aligns with the Common Core State Standards, and can prepare students for future history classes and academic work. But, more significantly, it is critical for helping students understand that their perspective can be partial and does not represent all peoples—it can help them develop empathy and be more skeptical of the single account as the one true answer in our complex world.

For more information

Also see this Ask a Master Teacher answer about the manner in which multiperspectivity can be used in the history classroom.

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