Film Review: Titanic

Date Published
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Photo, Mrs. James J. Molly Brown, survivor of the Titanic, c.1890-1920, LoC
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This marks the beginning of a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features. Look for one each month!

Titanic: History or Hollywood?

In December 1997, I underwent a metamorphosis (temporary, I hope) from cultural historian to "Titanic historian." As such, I was repeatedly called upon to assess the "historical accuracy" of James Cameron's movie.

How, in short, might we really locate this movie in time?

This, I tried to explain, was a task better left to others, especially to the subset of Titanic buffs known derisively as rivet counters, since what the questioners usually meant by historical accuracy largely had to do with the verisimilitude of the movie's sets and special effects—for example, did Cameron get the carpets right? The best I could do was point out a few of the most obvious anachronisms: Rose (Kate Winslet) using Tom Wolfe's phrase "masters of the universe" to describe her fellow first-cabin passengers; Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) quoting Bob Dylan—"When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose"—to assert his free-spiritedness; Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon apparently going down with the ship.

And so on. Very soon, however, this line of inquiry loses its interest. "Is this history or Hollywood?" I was asked at the end of a History Channel program called Movies in Time, as if it has to be one or the other, unvarnished or embellished, accurate or inaccurate. When a film costs and earns more than any other, when it becomes a major cultural phenomenon, we ought to be asking questions about Titanic's historical significance rather than its accuracy. How might we explain its resonance? How might we contextualize it? How might we compare it to previous representations of the disaster? How, in short, might we really locate this movie in time?

Revisionism in Titanic

In the wake of Titanicmania, several critics took on these broader questions. Frank Rich observed in the New York Times that Titanic "was destined to be truer to 1997 than 1912, no matter how faithfully the director, James Cameron, reproduced every last brandy snifter of the White Star Line."

This costless liberation marks the movie as what Rich calls "very much a 90's take on the familiar Titanic themes of gender and class."

In Rich's view, Cameron's "rich-bashing populism"—the fact that the first-class passengers are despicable almost without exception—signals that a resentment of the wealthy and powerful is bubbling beneath the surface of our apparent prosperity and contentment. Rich also described Winslet's Rose as a "feminist heroine who defies her stuffy First Class compatriots to take up with a guy in steerage."

Seeking an explanation for the movie's popularity with girls and women, Katha Pollitt in the Nation pointed to the anti-macho, androgynous, quasi-maternal figure of DiCaprio's Jack. The movie's "feminism," Pollitt wrote, is a "women's fantasy" of "costless liberation brought to you by a devoted, selfless, charming, funny, incredibly handsome lover."

This costless liberation marks the movie as what Rich calls "very much a 90's take on the familiar Titanic themes of gender and class." Through Jack, Rose learns to feel good about herself, to overcome oppression by overcoming repression. She dances with the steerage, stands on the bow with the breeze blowing through her hair, poses nude, has sex in a car in the ship's hold. The disaster is presented here for the first time as a kind of therapy: for Rose, the burdens of gender and class are swept away by Jack and the sea, even though her nasty mother and fiance survive. True to Hollywood's therapeutic ethos, Titanic depicts liberation as a matter of attitude rather than politics, self-actualization rather than collective struggle.

Contemporary Interpretations of the Disaster

Cameron's revisionism is thrown into relief when we compare his handling of these themes with earlier versions of the disaster. In 1912, most stories of the wreck gave the first-cabin men a monopoly on heroism. A widely published wire service report envisioned John Jacob Astor and other first-class heroes "stepping aside, bravely, gallantly remaining to die that the place [they] otherwise might have filled could perhaps be taken by some sabot-shod, shawl-enshrouded, illiterate, and penniless peasant woman of Europe."

Feminists and working-class radicals interpreted the disaster as a catalyst to collective action.

While Hollywood has not yet reached the point where the characters listed in Titanic's credits as "Syrian woman" or "Chinese man" occupy center screen, neither do the darker-skinned steerage passengers have a monopoly on panic as they did in 1912 depictions. Nor does Jack's heroism appear to be a racial trait. "The Anglo-Saxon may yet boast that his sons are fit to rule the earth," read an April 19, 1912, editorial in the Atlanta Constitution, "so long as men choose death with the courage they must have displayed when the great liner crashed into the mountains of ice, and the aftermath brought its final test."

The movie's "feminism" also stands in stark contrast to the antifeminist "lessons" that the disaster called forth in 1912. First-cabin chivalry, nowhere in evidence in Cameron's Titanic, was widely invoked as an argument against women suffrage. "Let the suffragists remember this," advised a letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun. "When the Lord created woman and placed her under the protection of man he had her well provided for. The Titanic disaster proves it very plainly." A letter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it even more bluntly: "I suggest, henceforth, when a woman talks woman's rights, she be answered with the word Titanic, nothing more—just Titanic." The movie clearly suggests that "the law of the sea"—"Women and Children First"—was the result, not of chivalry, but of the officers' orders, enforced at gunpoint.

Unlike Cameron's apolitical hero and heroine, those who resisted these "lessons" about class and gender in 1912 did so in explicitly political terms. Feminists and working-class radicals interpreted the disaster as a catalyst to collective action. "To the woman-heart of the nation this is not a tragedy to mourn and grieve over and forget," wrote the suffragist Agnes Ryan in the Woman's Journal;

it is simply typical of the countless lives that perish needlessly each year from the Ship of State! It gives new proof that the State needs women in law-making and law-enforcing, and it gives new impetus to the Votes for Women movement.

An Italian anarchist newspaper in Buffalo insisted that capitalists were to blame for the Titanic and all the lesser known disasters of industrial society, because they

uphold a society which considers profit more important than human life. . . . We, who struggle with every weapon at our disposal to overthrow the present social system, will avenge one day not too far distant all of your victims, including those of the "Titanic."

Compared to this, the movie that Newsweek called "quasi-Marxist" seems very nineties indeed.

Two hundred million dollars buys an awful lot of popular memory. But Cameron's Titanic is not the first attempt to tell the definitive story of the disaster, nor is it likely to be the last. "Historical accuracy" aside, the eighty-six-year effort to define the Titanic's significance may be the most compelling story of all.

Bibliography

This review was first published in the Journal of American History, Vol. 85, No. 3, 1177-1179, 1998. Reprinted with permission from the Organization of American Historians (OAH).

For more information

Read up on the pedagogy of teaching with films in the Research Brief "What Do Students Learn from Historical Feature Films?"

Scholars in Action: Analyzing a 19th-Century Daguerreotype

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Scholars in Action presents case studies that demonstrate how scholars interpret different kinds of historical evidence. This untitled daguerreotype of Niagara Falls was taken in 1853 by Platt Babbitt and reflects an era when the expansion of railroads and the rise of middle-class occupations enabled some Americans to enjoy leisure travel.

The daguerreotype process, the earliest form of photography, involved the painstaking manipulation of light, chemicals, and copper plates. Daguerreotypes were made public in 1839 and quickly became a popular medium in the United States for a growing middle class eager to document themselves and their surroundings. While daguerreotypes could not be mass produced, they often served as the basis for newspaper illustrations that reached large numbers of Americans.

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

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

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: A Dissection

Teaser

Explore the meaning behind "We the People" and other nuances of the U.S. Constitution in this lesson for grades 4–9.

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Glass negative, James Madison, President of the United States, 1913, LOC
Website
Consource: The Constitutional Sources Project
Description

NOTE: Unpublished because ConSource website moved and does not appear to feature this link. Contacted ConSource about this and did not hear back.

In this classroom-tested lesson, students use primary sources and a close reading of the Preamble to the Constitution to better understand its meaning and significance.

Article Body

In this lesson, students use primary sources related to the U.S. Constitution (specifically, Madison’s notes on the convention) to better understand the Preamble to the Constitution. This provides a great opportunity to teach an important element of historical thinking—the use of multiple sources to better understand the significance and meaning of one source. This is also an important part of contextualizing documents, or understanding how they relate to events and conditions at the time they were written.

The lesson guides students through the process of closely reading an important historical text. The steps in the lesson are clear and easy to follow, and breaking the Preamble down one clause at a time gives students a great opportunity to understand the purpose of one of the most important documents in the history of the United States, in addition to helping them learn how to read a text closely and carefully. Additionally, the "check for understanding" questions after each clause give teachers multiple opportunities for evaluating students' comprehension and modifying instruction. Depending on students' levels of understanding, teachers may want to supplement the provided questions with more probing questions of their own.

Topic
U.S. Constitution, Preamble, primary sources
Time Estimate
One classroom session
flexibility_scale
5
digital image, We the People, 2010, NARA, The Charter of Freedom online exhibit
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes
The lesson contains a link to one source that provides context, but elsewhere on the site there exists a wealth of documents providing context for the Preamble to the Constitution.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes
The lesson is centered on a close reading of the Preamble to the Constitution. In addition, teachers may use the "check for understanding" questions provided throughout the lesson as writing prompts.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes
While the explanations of each clause will facilitate understanding of the Preamble, teachers will want to develop ways to scaffold the other documents to make them more accessible to students.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

Yes
While no assessment is included in the lesson, teachers could easily develop an assessment using the "check for understanding" questions.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes

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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

Image
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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Transcript Text

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.

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