Excerpts from Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg (2001)
Temple University Press
Chapter two of the Wineburg text reviews the psychology and history of teaching history.
I have summarized the key ideas. Think back to your experiences in history classrooms.
Chances are you experienced many of the following: a) memorizing a list of dates; b)
reading a textbook summary of complex events and then answering multiple choice, true
false, or short answer questions that mirrored the textbook summary; c) recreating an
historical event through simulation or role play; d) researching an historical event or
person and writing an essay.
Wineburg explains that early research on the teaching of history was done by educational
psychologists. In the early years of the 20th century Thorndike suggested that history should be
taught “backward” beginning with the present and tracing events back in time, rather than the
traditional chronological treatment. Another psychologist of the time, Hall, contended that
history should be “infused with lessons to inspire ideas of social service and unselfishness.” At
about the same time, Judd wrote about the problem of “presentism” which continues to plague
us as students of history. “The modern student…is guided in all of his judgments by an
established mode of thought…peculiar to his own generation. We have certain notions that are
wholly different from the notions that [earlier generations held]. When [the student confronts
historical situations] that differ altogether from the situations of [the present day] the student uses
standards of judgment and ethical thought of the present” (Wineburg, 2001, p. 30). Still
another psychologist of this era, Bell, asked questions which remain relevant today: What is the
essence of historical thinking? What determines success on tasks that have more than one right
answer? What role might instruction play in improving a student’s ability to think?
Despite these challenging questions, educational psychologists chose to study the aspect
of history teaching which is easiest to assess: students’ ability to answer factual questions about
historical personalities and events. Bell and his associate, McCollum, created a test of names,
dates, and events that history teachers thought every student should know and administered the
test to 1500 students in upper elementary, high school, and college. Not surprisingly the results
were dismal; elementary students averaged 16% correct; high schools students averaged 33%;
and college students averaged 49% correct. These results have been corroborated multiple times.
Wineburg (2001, p. 33) quotes another historian, “When tests results from the early part of the
twentieth century are compared with the most recent findings, we learn that there has been little
appreciable change in students’ historical knowledge over time.”
After World War I, behaviorism became the dominant educational pedagogy.
Behaviorism views learning as a system of behavioral response to physical stimuli. Teachers
break content into parts and teach from the simple to the complex. Learning results from
observing, listening to explanations, and memorizing information, and learners are essentially
passive, needing external motivation and reinforcement. Critics contend that most teaching
practices continue to reflect the idea that learning is an accumulation of pieces of knowledge and
bits of skill . Most classrooms are dominated by teacher talk and textbook assignments, with
most students working in relative isolation on low skilled tasks to produce the one right answer.
In contrast to their American colleagues at this time, British psychologists such as Piaget
and Peel were developing constructivist theory. Constructivism views learners as actively
searching for patterns, questioning, and constructing deep understanding through concrete,
meaningful experiences. Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky contributed to constructivist
theory that explains learning as a the result of a conflict between the learner's existing model of
the world and discrepant new insights. Learning involves constructing a new representation of
reality with culturally developed tools and symbols, such as language, and negotiating meaning
through cooperative social activity.
Piaget’s British colleague, Peel, argued that the evidence of historical understanding was not
memorizing a list of facts but the ability to grasp cause and effect, follow a sustained argument,
and evaluate. According to Wineburg, Peel attempted to create history tests that would assess
these abilities, with disastrous results: Students’ essay answers were judged to reflect
“preoperational” or “concrete operational” thinking, not the “formal operations” we would
associate with higher order thinking skills. Students could not answer the questions which led
history teachers to underrate their students’ capacities and caused historians to believe that
serious study of history could not begin until students entered college.
Jumping ahead to the present, the cognitive revolution of the last 30 years has
reenergized the study of history. According to cognitive researchers, knowledge cannot be
"transmitted" to students. Building on Piaget's theory, Resnick and Klopfer (1989) argue that
learning requires students to elaborate and question what they are told, examine new information
in relation to previous understanding, and build new cognitive structures before knowledge
becomes "generative" (used to interpret new situations, solve problems, think, and reason).
Reflecting Dewey's emphasis on experience, Bransford and Vye (1989) believe students must
have the opportunity to use information to solve problems connected to the real world and
experience its effect on their own understanding. Otherwise, students acquire information that
remains isolated and can not be applied in new situations. Furthermore, students need the
experience of "coached practice" in which their attempts at problem solving are supported by
their teacher or peers in a cooperative group.
Returning to the summary of Wineburg’s chapter two, he cites recent research on
students’ historical thinking that reminds me of Art Linkletter’s TV show from the 1950’s “Kids
Say the Darnedest Things.” In examining elementary school children’s beliefs about history,
researchers found misconceptions and sparse knowledge; they also discovered that “some
children were willing to construct narratives about events for which they possessed little
information…..ten year old Helen explained that the Pilgrims sailed on a boat called the
Mayflower… and then added: That’s how we got April showers bring May flowers. (Wineburg,
2001, p. 45). Think about the most amusing answers you have read on students’ history test
papers—all of us have laughed over these bloopers whether we teach elementary, middle level,
high school, or college students.
So do these historical misconceptions mean that students can NOT learn to use “historical
thinking”? I believe Wineburg would disagree and ask us to consider the problems with most
history textbooks and teaching. Most history textbooks presume background knowledge many
students lack and provide a simplified view which fails to include sufficient information so that
students can connect a cause to an event and an event to a consequence. In addition history
textbooks do NOT usually do what historians do, i.e., explain why they came to a certain
conclusion about an historical event, including their evidence, judgments and uncertainties.
Examine the social studies or history text in your classroom and evaluate the extent to
which the textbook writer provides sufficient background knowledge AND also explains
how he or she came to the conclusions offered about a specific event. Chances are your
textbook just lists the “facts” but whose facts were selected for the textbook and why.
Wineburg closes chapter two with some research on the teaching of history. Between
1950 and 1975 research on teaching reflected the behaviorist pedagogy of the era, e.g.,
researchers focused on discrete teaching acts. Since then cognitive researchers have begun to
look qualitatively at the interactions in the classroom, at the nature of teachers’ questions and
students’ responses. They are beginning to ask, “What do students and teachers know about
history, and how do they come to know it?”
Now that you have read this lengthy summary, think about your own teaching.
Where are you on the behaviorist/constructivist continuum? What are two examples that
reflect primarily behaviorist pedagogy or cognitive/constructivist pedagogy or an example
of each? Jot down your ideas to share in class on Thursday.
In chapter three, On the Reading of Historical Texts, Wineburg explains how historians
read historical documents (going beyond the literal and inferred texts to the subtexts of hidden
meanings). As they read primary sources, historians try to reconstruct the author’s purposes,
intentions, and goals. They also try to understand the assumptions, world views, and beliefs of
the author that are hidden beneath the actual words. They understand that “texts are speech
acts—social interactions set down on paper which can only be understood by reconstructing the
social context in which they are created” (Wineburg, p. 67). In Wineburg’s study when high
schools seniors read a selection from a textbook about the shots fired at Lexington Green, they
failed to understand the subtext of the textbook writer’s assumptions, world views, and beliefs
about the event. The high school students took the textbook account pretty much at face value.
Wineburg describes the think aloud process he used to research the historical thinking of
historians and of high school students. The think aloud technique asks students (or historians) to
report their thoughts as they read the text and it asks them to verbalize the contents of their
thoughts, not the processes used to generate them. (For further discussion of the think aloud
methodology, see Michael Pressley and Peter Afferbach (1995) Verbal Reports of Reading: The
Nature of Constructively Responsive Reading. Wineburg provides an example of the think aloud
2001, pp. 64-65) reported by an historian who read a letter sent on April 28, 1775 by Joseph
Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, to Benjamin Franklin, the colonists’
representative in London. After the clash between the colonists and British regulars on
Lexington Green, Warren compiled eyewitnesses’ depositions, and sent them to Franklin with a
cover letter in which he described the events at Lexington as “marks of ministerial vengeance
against [Massachusetts Bay’ for refusing with her sister colonies a submission to slavery.” The
historian read the letter and remarked:
What I think of is a book I read by Rakove [another historian] talking about how one of
the problems at the time was getting the colonies to hang together, and to try to get some unit. So
the “refusing with her sister colonies” is a kind of an appeal to the other groups.”
Another historian remarked: “It’s a way to get people in England to see things their way;
it’s encouraging loyalty to the king, but it’s saying the government has messed up. It clearly
shows that the Regular troops are guilty of violence at Lexington…”
Wineburg points out that what the historians have done is go beyond what the text says
(since it does not mention an appeal and the letter was going to Franklin to share with the British
Parliament) to what the text does: it changes the meaning of the event at Lexington from a clash
between nervous farmers and tired soldiers to something more momentous: a clash between
representatives of the king and of the 13 colonies. This appeal was designed to rally the
colonists. Wineburg goes on: “It is not the literal text or even the inferred text that this historian
comprehends, but the subtext, a text of hidden and latent meanings.” There are two types of
subtexts: (a) text as a rhetorical artifact where the historian tries to reconstruct the authors’
purposes, intentions, and goals….. and (b) the text as a human artifact that frames reality and
discloses information about its author’s assumptions, world view, and beliefs.” (p. 66)
Wineburg provides an excerpt from a high school text which historians also interpreted
through the think aloud process.
In April, 1775, General Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, sent out a body of
troops to take possession of military stores at Concord, a short distance from Boston. At
Lexington, a handful of “embattled farmers” who had been tipped off by Paul Revere barred the
way. The “rebels” were ordered to disperse. They stood their ground. The English fired a volley
of shots that killed eight patriots. It was not long before the swift riding Paul Revere spread the
news of this new atrocity to the neighboring colonies. The patriots of all of New England,
although still a handful, were not ready to fight the English. Even in faraway North Carolina,
patriots organized to resist them.” (The United States. A Story of a Free People. 1963).
Historians rated this account the least trustworthy of 8 other documents including an
excerpt from Howard Fast’s novel, April Morning, because the textbook contradicts primary
source documents from both British and colonial observers. Most of the “Advanced Placement
history” students failed to recognize that the use of the word “atrocity” by the textbook author
slants the event and creates an association with other atrocities the high school reader might
have known about (e.g., the Holocaust). As historians read a primary source document, they do
not take the words at face value. They carry on a conversation with the text, asking questions,
making connections to other texts they have read. For students “reading history is not a process
of puzzling about the author’s intentions or situating texts in a social world but of gathering
information, with texts serving as bearers of information.” (p. 76)
Wineburg uses another metaphor to describe the difference between how students and
historians treat text.
Historians worked through the documents as if they were prosecuting attorneys; they
did not merely listen to testimony but actively drew it out by putting documents side by
side, locating discrepancies, and questioning sources and delving into their conscious
and unconscious motives. Students, on the other hand were like jurors, patiently
listening to testimony and questioning themselves about what they heard, but unable to
question witnesses directly or subject them to cross examination. For students, the locus
of authority was in the text; for historians it was in the questions they formulated about
the text. (p. 77)
Wineburg closes the chapter by asking, “What would teachers have to do differently to
create history classrooms where real learning takes place?” He provides an example of an
undergraduate history teacher who begins by teaching his students to “unlearn” history as a fixed
story. Students receive primary source documents and pretend to be museum curators who
annotate the documents for an exhibit. Students must read a variety of documents which
contradict each other, and construct a narrative that is a conversation with the past. (p. 82)
Wineburg urges his teacher readers not to wait until high school to teach students to ask
questions about their texts: “…under the right conditions even third graders can grasp something
of history’s indeterminate nature and thereby arrive at sophisticated interpretations of the past.”
I would like you to read the following excerpt from Franklin Roosevelt’s Good
Neighbor Policy and then jot down your thoughts to share in class on Wednesday.
In an address in New York on August 14, 1936 President Roosevelt explained his Good
Neighbor Policy which continued former President Hoover’s policy of not interfering in the
internal affairs of Latin America and seeking alliances there. “….In the field of world policy I
would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely
respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who
respects his obligations and respects the santity of his agreements in and with a world of
neighbors. This declaration represents my purpose; but it represents more than a purpose, for it
standards for a practice. To a measureable degree it has succeeded; the whole world now knows
that the United States cherishes no predatory ambitions. We are strong; but less powerful nations
know that they need not fear our strength. We seek no conquest; we stand for peace….Peace,
like charity begins at home; that is why we have begun at home. But peace in the Western world
is not all that we seek. It is our hope that knowledge of the practical application of the goodneighbor policy in this hemisphere will be borne home to our neighbors across the sea.” From
Selected Readings on Great Issues in American History 1620-1968 (1969) Encyclopedia
Britannica Educational Corporation.
Don’t be intimidated by this activity; just have fun with it; you are not being graded
on whether you can “think aloud” like a professional historian. What questions do you
have about the text?