Several profoundly important questions emerged during the Texas Conference on Introductory History Courses. How important is the introductory survey course? What will its future look like? Do we need to think differently about the survey course? Texas provides an important setting in which to ask these questions for the simple fact that Texas is not like Las Vegas—what happens in Texas will not stay in Texas.
How important is the introductory course in Texas? Texas lies at the center of college history teaching in the United States. During the Cold War, the Texas State Legislature mandated six hours of college-level history for all students, a requirement that continues even as other states have eliminated history requirements or allowed other elective substitutions. This fact, combined with the population size of the Lone Star State, prompted one book publisher to observe that in any given semester there are more students in US history survey courses in the Houston metropolitan area than along the entire eastern seaboard.
Because of the outsized impact of Texas, the future of the introductory survey course in America is tied to the future of college history in Texas. For this reason, it was extremely significant that Texas Commissioner of Higher Education Raymund Paredes addressed the gathering and responded to questions (kudos to the conference organizers!). Paredes began with the larger context that concerns parents and policy makers: Texas’s six-year graduation rate for undergraduate programs is 60%, and its three-year completion rate of associate programs is 14%. Those strikingly low numbers, combined with escalating college costs and postgraduation debt, have drawn the attention of lawmakers. Though a proposed bill addressing the introductory history course did not make it through the legislature in 2015, it will likely resurface at the next session in 2017. What are lawmakers concerned about? In Paredes’ words, “the big shortcoming in American public education is the quality of teaching.” How will lawmakers make improvements? “We are going to have to measure learning outcomes,” said Paredes, and “degree plans will have to demonstrate marketability.” The future in Texas looks like a world in which history professors will have to show that their courses do more than train students to answer identification questions and write book reviews.
What does the rapidly changing world of 21st-century higher education mean for the survey course? The old view of the course held that college was different from K–12 learning, that the course was taught by people with different training, that the course was therefore “harder” than a high school course, and that it was the “first” or “gateway” or “introduction” on a pathway to something like a major or a career. But the expansion of the AP program and the development of dual-credit programs mean that policy makers, parents, and students now look at the course very differently. For instance, to save time and money, a high school student could take the course in high school. Alternatively, a college student living in a community with a university and a community college could take the same course at either institution at starkly different costs (and sometimes the courses at both are taught by the same instructor!). Perhaps most significantly, completion of such a course is often seen as the “end” of history study, a requirement to be eliminated quickly before moving on to the courses that “really matter” for one’s future.
The landscape for history teaching in Texas is changing; and with Texas, the nation. If we are to respond to these changes it will require more than personal reflection and consensus building. We’ll need to develop and apply the scholarly literature that has developed over the past three decades on history teaching and learning. Gatherings like this conference in Texas provide the opportunity to do just that.
This post appeared on the American Historical Association’s AHA Today blog on September 29, 2015.
This essay was published on July 23, 2015, in the Deseret News and the Church News. It it reproduced here with links to the sources cited. I am grateful to my colleagues Marie Erickson, Jenny Lund, Emily Utt, Michael Landon, Tyson Thorpe, and Deb Xavier for their leads, advice, and support.
The first Mormon settlers of Salt Lake City came to the area in 1847, and over the next 20 years they were followed by an estimated 70,000 emigrants. Now, nearly two centuries later, a new database provides fresh new insights about these overland pioneers.
The Church History Library’s Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database, online at history.lds.org/overlandtravels, attempts to document every overland pioneer and is the product of more than two decades of work. The database currently lists more than 57,000 individuals with links to thousands of original and authoritative records of pioneer experience. The database can be searched by name or browsed to find stories and photos of the city’s first residents.
Here are five things we learn from this powerful new resource:
1. Most of the pioneers did not die.
Despite the fact that tens of thousands of pioneers survived to settle in the Salt Lake Valley, the idea of pioneer death has been perpetuated in popular culture. But, if a person compares rosters of pioneers who started the journey against later censuses of residents in the city, the result is quite surprising.
Using the database, a team of statisticians and a historian calculated the pioneer mortality rate at 3.4 percent, which was only slightly higher than national averages at the time (between 2.5 and 2.9 percent). Of the 1,900 pioneers who died on the trail or within the calendar year of their arrival, many died from illnesses common to the time, such as cholera or dysentery. The year of travel, month of departure, and mode of travel all influenced the likelihood of death (Source: BYU Studies).
2. Very few pioneers pulled handcarts.
Monuments, murals, movies and music have also enshrined the image of a struggling pioneer family pulling a handcart across the plains. But, scan the list of more than 370 companies in the database and you’ll find only 10 handcart companies. This mode of transportation was used in 1856-57 and 1859-60 by roughly 3,000 of the overland pioneers.
The trip by handcart was, however, quite rough. For eight of the companies, the mortality rate was 4.7 percent. Two of the companies, the ill-fated Willie and Martin companies, left late in the travel season, became trapped in early winter snows, and required the aid of rescue wagons sent from Salt Lake City. These two companies suffered a 16.5 percent mortality rate (Source: BYU Studies).
3. Pioneers actually had fun.
If most of the pioneers weren’t dying or pulling handcarts, what did they actually do? Their diaries, letters and other records show that in addition to completing the tasks and chores of traveling, most of them had fun. They formed friendships, helped one another, sang and danced, hunted game, gathered wild fruit, picked flowers and climbed hills.
“We enjoyed the journey much,” wrote Ellen Hallett to her parents in England in 1862. “When night came we were generally tired,” she added, “but not too much to enjoy the dance and song.” William Fuller wrote to his wife’s parents that she “walked almost the entire way. The truth is, you somehow get the spirit of walking, and the travelling is not half so bad as it is to sit and think of it.”
This year, the Overland Travel website begins a new feature sharing “Humor on the Plains,” such as an embarrassing encounter with a skunk, a squishy discovery of soft buffalo chips, and the hijinks of teenage boys with wagon grease.
4. Many of the pioneers traveled east.
One of the striking features of pioneer diaries and letters is how often they met other pioneers going the opposite direction on the trail. Many who completed the journey returned to the east to lead others along the route. Freighters moved goods back and forth. Mormon missionaries left Salt Lake City and followed the trail to the cities and states of the east. At least three pioneers in the database made the westward trip seven times! In this, even Brigham Young provides an example. After leading the vanguard pioneer company that arrived on July 24, 1847, he returned east to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, by December 1847. He led a second company to Salt Lake the following year.
5. Pioneers were not alone on the trail.
Even as Mormon pioneers traveled both west and east, they were far from the only travelers on a very busy trail. Throughout the nineteenth century, hunters and trappers traversed the trails and rivers. The first portion of the overland trail led to Utah as well as Oregon and Montana. Beginning in 1849 westbound gold seekers used the trail to get to California. Express riders and stage coaches carried mail and passengers back and forth. Historians estimate that more than 500,000 Americans traveled west during the 1840s through 1860s. Salt Lake City’s pioneers formed a unique part of the nation’s wider history.
This year, the Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database has been integrated with FamilySearch, linking the trees of FamilySearch users with the pioneers in the database. The database is also featured in FamilySearch’s international “I Am a Pioneer” social media campaign (#IAmAPioneer), which will encourage individuals today to recognize themselves as modern-day pioneers and emphasize the need to record their own stories of triumph for future generations.
[These comments were presented at the Mormon History Association Annual Conference, June 6, 2015, as part of the session “Telling Mormon History.”]
Our very language of English turns out to be quite impoverished for telling of historical things. Let’s begin with the word “history,” used by English speakers to mean past, story, and inquiry.
Sometimes we use this word history to describe the past, a moment or moments in previous times that existed once, but no longer. Novelists and sci-fi writers have dreamed of traveling to this history, while the marketing materials at historic sites and museums often promise that fee-paying visitors can “step back in time” to this kind of history. Such rhetorical deceptions elide the fact that the past is gone and all that remains of it are traces, pieces, records, sources created “way back then” that somehow wind up today in a family or library collection. Sometimes, as Richard Saunders pointed out, people will point to a trace and allege that it was the whole. Even very well trained and intelligent persons can mistake the contents of a letter or journal entry for “the past” and believe that they have discovered history.
Next, we use the very same word history to describe the stories that we tell about the past, as in an academic who wrote a history of the church or, as Richard Jensen illustrated, a clerk who prepared an annual history of the congregation. This kind of history is inseparable from the perspective of the teller, as highlighted by the sponsor of our MHA handbag who reminded us there is his-story, her-story, and my-story (but apparently no our-story). Again there is the temptation to conflate, this time the written “story” with the “past” in rhetoric that grants the teller authority over both past and present. If I can convince you that my telling of history really was the way it was, then I have hidden the loss of the past, I have hidden its fragmentary and politicized records, and I have hidden my own present perspective in a triple sleight of hand that happens far more frequently and with far less fanfare than horse racing’s Triple Crown.
Third, the word history is also used to describe the process of inquiring about the past and the stories told about it. So history is a discipline, a profession, a methodology of academic inquiry and discourse. The traces matter here, as do the perspectivally-based stories, but most importantly, the inquiry finds its home amongst a community of inquirers and participation in the community becomes a way of differentiating the trained inquirers on the inside from those on the outside who just love history (amateurs) or collect its traces as a hobby.
Past, story, inquiry . . . the English word history is used to mean them all. So how do we know which meaning we invoke? Does my Church History Library house the past and its traces, or tell stories, or promote inquiry? Do polemicists battle over the existence of the past and its traces, the validity of its stories, or the sophistication of the inquiry? Has this session brought any of us into communion with the past, into the presence of good stories, or fostered future inquiry?
We don’t really know, or at least we cannot know in English because there is not a word in our Westernized and professionalized lingua franca for the meta- cognitive analysis of what we are actually doing when we say that we are doing history. Richard Saunders had to use what seems like an invented word, “historiology.” The word “historiography” doesn’t cut it either because it, too, is burdened with more usages than a Swiss pocket knife. We need words that will remind us that the debates Saunders traced unfolded within a larger Western and professional context in which historians seeking authority in modern society looked to Ranke and sources in quest for objectivity that was contested from the outset by Progressive historians. We need words that will suggest that the Mormon encounter with historicism and higher criticism should not and cannot not be viewed outside of the context of Protestants and Catholics who likewise wrestled with the same concerns. We need words that will help us unravel the sleights of hand and disentangle the assumptions we bring to the table. We need words that articulate the values and experiences of those who seek the past, listen to its stories, and participate in its inquiries.
If doing history were like painting, then we would need to create a composition containing both the hard lines of realism and unbounded and dazzling light of impressionism. In short, if we are to Tell Mormon History, it will behoove us to talk more about what we are doing.
Mormon History Association Annual Meeting 2015
Provo, Utah, June 6, 2015
Session 4F. “Telling Mormon History”Richard L. Jensen, “A Record-Keeping Culture? The Rise, Fall, and Partial Resuscitation of Local Latter-day Saint Historical Records”
Dr. Richard L. Saunders, “The Contest over Historical Proof in Mormonism in the Generation before MHA: Brodie, Burgess, Morgan, Smith, Smith, Smith, and Others”
Brent Smith, “Taking Mormon History Into All the World”
The word history refers to three different but related things–to the past, to the stories people tell about the past, and to the formal inquiry into the past and its stories.
In my mind, the best evocations of history are sensible–they are:
- clear and rational (they “make sense”),
- wise and practical (“common sense”), and
- perceptible to the senses (sensory and experiential).
Everybody does not share the same past or even appreciate the same stories, but everybody can and must take part in the process of asking—and learning—about history.
History matters today more than ever. It is popular–Americans purchase historical books and movie tickets, visit historic sites and museums, commemorate anniversaries and historic places, save old buildings and family heirlooms, and research genealogy and local history. It is polemical–commemorations prompt both reflection and protests, curriculum debates spur both devotion and death threats, and historically themed amusement parks draw both acclaim and ire.
All history is public history because, beyond filling course requirements, beyond teaching critical thinking, beyond preparing people for civic engagement, history possesses the power to whisper life, feeling, and meaning into the present human experience. Because the past can be everybody’s subject of inquiry, everybody’s history matters.
The El Paso Inc. newspaper awarded its 2014 Community Spirit Award to UTEP’s Centennial Celebration. The celebration was intentionally designed to involve as many people as possible and the announcement cites 175 official events–and many more unofficial–that drew hundreds of thousands of participants, tens of thousands for some of the larger single events. On one day in October UTEP representatives visited every school in the city–more than 180,000 students–with a message to prepare for college. “You only get to celebrate a centennial once,” the announcement noted, “so you want to get it right, and by all accounts the organizers did.”
Read the full announcement at http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/local_news/article_a0f422b4-8f78-11e4-822d-232c17e5a2cd.html. See photos of the award ceremony at http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/el_pasoan_of_year/article_c35f2d56-b072-11e4-858e-d7124529b0e1.html.
[Note: Since 2012 I have been working with the American Historical Association to improve history teaching and learning at the undergraduate and graduate levels. As part of that initiative, I was invited to speak at the AHA’s annual meeting in New York City on January 5, 2015. This as a summary of my remarks and comments on that occasion.]
Today we have gathered to ask the question “What’s the Problem with Teaching?” For fourteen years, I taught history at three universities in every rank–from visiting to tenure-track to tenured–and at every level from undergraduate to doctoral. Last June I became the director of the LDS Church History Library and transitioned from encouraging students to go to an archive to overseeing those who help them when they arrive.
The archive is central to what historians do and to how we talk about what we do, from the 19th-century origins of our profession in the work of Ranke and his students to this very conference that seeks to re-connect history with related disciplines. So, where is the archive in our teaching? In an article published in the Journal of American History in 2011, I argued that teaching about historical thinking needs to occur in the places where historians think–one of which is the archive. I argued that such teaching was possible, shared successful examples of past archivally-placed teaching, and sketched out what such teaching might look like in the 21st century.
But now I sit on the other side of the reference desk. Instead of sending students merrily off to the archive, my team waits for them to arrive. Would you like to know how your students fare? Most show up having read some literature and with a topic or question in mind that shows some signs of having been narrowed. Good work. But very few of ours students know how to move from topic to answers. Here are some of the questions we might help them consider: What kinds of sources might answer my question? Where might those sources be today? Who might know about those sources and collections? How is a library catalog more powerful than Google? What is not in the catalog or online? Once we get them asking these questions we must prepare them for answers both expected and surprising–sometimes there are many sources, sometimes none; sometimes the sources are in one repository, most often they are in many, sometimes they are in very unlikely places; library catalogs do (!) know more than Google, but less than finding aids and the humans who produced both.
Therefore, I invite you to consider not just what students should do when they encounter a primary source in your classroom, but how to imagine that a source might exist somewhere and then how to go and find it in archive. If the archive is central to our work as historians, but has no place in our teaching, then are we really teaching our students to do history?
The AHA Program Committee has scheduled this session for:
Monday, January 5, 2015: 11:00 AM-1:00 PM | New York Hilton, Sutton North
272. What’s the Problem? Turning Teaching Questions into Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Research
Co-Sponsor(s): AHA Teaching Division
Chair: Laura M. Westhoff, University of Missouri–St. Louis
Lendol G. Calder, Augustana College
Keith A. Erekson, University of Texas at El Paso/LDS Church History Library
David P. Jaffee, Bard Graduate Center
Leah Shopkow, Indiana University Bloomington
@KeithAErekson asks if we are really teaching students to do history if we aren’t including archives in our teaching #aha2015
— Clio (@thecliodotcom) January 5, 2015
