HISTORY CO67
Course
Portfolio Addendum
Spring 2000
by
William W.
Cutler, III
Temple
University
History
CO67 is a survey course in early American history that I have been teaching at
Temple University for more than twenty-five years. It is a course that few students take by choice. Because it satisfies the American culture
requirement of the university's core curriculum, it enrolls undergraduates,
especially freshmen and sophomores, who come from many different backgrounds
and have a wide variety of interests.
Few will end up being history majors.
Instead, most will study in other departments in the College of Liberal
Arts or concentrate in such applied fields as business, education, and
communications. It is no small
challenge to make such a course successful.
The instructor must strike a balance between rigor and reality, holding
students to reasonable standards while keeping them interested and involved.
This
portfolio describes and analyzes the way I taught this course in the spring term,
2000. My section met on Tuesday and
Thursday morning from 8:30 to 10 a.m. in Tuttleman Hall, Temple's new,
high-tech classroom building on the university's main campus. Forty-five students registered for the
class; forty were still around at the end of the term. My room had one computer
for the instructor to use. It was
linked to the Internet and connected to an internal projection system that
permitted me to show documents, images, and anything else relevant to the day's
lesson. Other electronic equipment
included a VCR, an audio tape player, and a document camera. Each could be operated from a console on the
instructor's podium. The room was
designed for large group instruction.
It was furnished with heavy tables and chairs, facing forward. It did not lend itself to anything other
than the lecture format of instruction.
I used the computer almost every day, projecting my new electronic
syllabus and many documents and images.
Some of these were in my teaching plans from the beginning; others were
late additions, prompted by the discovery of new materials that I found online
as I was preparing for a particular lesson.
For
the last five years, I have organized History CO67 around three conceptual
themes: freedom, diversity, and migration.
Every topic that I cover addresses at least one of these themes. This approach helps my students structure
their historical thinking. When they
want to know how to study for my course, I refer them to these themes. But as an introductory course in Temple's
history department, History CO67 has a second educational mission. Aside from teaching students about early
American life, it is supposed to help them learn certain basic competencies. For example, it is expected that the course
will enhance their organizational, reading, and writing skills. It is also expected that they will learn to
differentiate between fact and interpretation, understand what historians do
and how they do it, recognize the difference between primary and secondary
sources, and construct simple essay arguments using historical evidence. Courses at the intermediate and advanced
level have their own, more sophisticated competencies that build on those
taught at the introductory level. The
teaching of such competencies has been department policy since 1998.
When
I wrote my first portfolio for History CO67 in 1996-1997, I focused my
attention on the way I used freedom, migration, and diversity as historical
themes. This portfolio is online at the
Web site of the American Historical Association. To see it go to the following URL: http://www.theaha.org/teaching/aahe/portfol1.html.
This addendum to that portfolio documents how the course remains the same,
as well as how it has changed. In
addition to the three conceptual themes, the basic assessment scheme that I
used then has not been replaced. It
still rests on my firm belief that students learn in different ways and should,
therefore, have the chance to show what they know in several ways. I continue to ask my students to prepare
weekly reports about the required reading, participate in class, write a short
book report from a list of selected readings, and take both a mid term and a
final examination. However, I have
changed my course in two significant ways.
First, I have taken it into cyberspace
-- at least part way. I have not
made it into an online course per se; my students still attend class every
week. But they now must refer to an
electronic syllabus that I created for them to use both in and out of
class. Actually, it might be better to
say that the course now has an electronic curriculum because what I have put
online lays out the intellectual framework for the course, integrating mission,
method, and content in an unconventional way.
Second, I have eliminated one of the texts; instead of using a
traditional reader, composed of short historical essays, I have built primary
sources into the required reading.
Students reach these sources through the electronic syllabus. They are asked to read these sources as well
as the textbook and respond to study questions that I have prepared. These questions can only be found on the
electronic syllabus. The purpose of
this assignment is to teach the students how to make a historical argument, one
that uses evidence drawn from the past to defend a historical generalization.
Ten
times during Temple's fourteen-week semester in spring 2000 the students in my
course had to write a report about what they had read. In any given week, they could write in
response to one of the questions about either the text or the primary sources,
but they had to write a minimum of four reports about each type of source
before the end of the semester. Ever
since I began to require such reports, I have found that not every student can
complete this assignment. During the
spring term 2000, only twenty-one of the thirty-seven students who received a
final grade for the course finished this assignment. Some students do not have the requisite discipline. Completing
this assignment also seems to correlate with success in the course as a
whole. Perhaps this is because students
learn more history by writing weekly reports.
But the knowledge they acquire and skills they develop by doing this
assignment do not necessarily transfer to other means of assessment. For example, students who can write
well-argued reports on their own time are not always able to do the same thing
on examinations. In other words, in a
different context, the same skill may not be so easily replicated. This is why I believe that it is essential
in a survey course to employ different assessment methods.
In
reflecting on the course as revised, I have asked myself how the changes that I
made affected both the delivery and the consequences of my instruction. What effect did my use of primary sources
have on student learning? Did my
electronic syllabus alter the way I taught the course? Did it allow me to offer my students
learning experiences that would have been impossible using more conventional
methods? Did it make any difference in
what and how they learned? These
questions and their answers are inter-related because I built the electronic
syllabus to house the sources, and my students worked with them
simultaneously. It would be difficult
if not impossible for me to sort out the difference that either the use of
primary sources or the electronic syllabus might have made separately. However, it is possible to make some
generalizations about the overall effect that the changes I made had on
teaching and learning.
1)
The
electronic syllabus allowed me to use a wide variety of primary sources and to
display them during class, generating student interest and class
participation. On the syllabus for spring
2000 there were thirty-three primary sources.
Twenty-eight of these were linked to the syllabus from twelve different
Web sites. The other five were mounted
on the syllabus itself. These sources
included graphics as well as documents.
There were three maps and many illustrations. Among the public documents were George Washington's farewell
address, James Polk's message to Congress on the eve of the Mexican War, and
Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural. Of a
more private nature were letters from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Banneker,
Andrew Jackson to Martin Van Buren, and John C. Calhoun to William R. King,
Britain's ambassador to the United States in 1846. In the absence of the Internet, my students would not have been
able to work with the maps I used; nor would they have been able to view
Jefferson's letter to Banneker in the author's own hand.
By assembling my own set of primary sources from the Internet, I was able to select sources that matched my instructional preferences and objectives. I was also able to put these sources in front of my students without cost to them, and I will be able to subtract some and add others easily in the future. For example, I have edited one of the two primary sources that did not generate a single student report this semester and replaced the other.
2) The electronic syllabus served as the receptor for an enormous amount of student work. Weekly reports were either handed in to the instructor in hard copy or submitted electronically to a frameset on the syllabus created in Blackboard software. Bonus points were offered as an incentive for posting. A handful never posted and a few waited until the second half of the course to begin using the frameset. But by the end of the term thirty-six of the forty students in the course had posted at least once; altogether the frameset received 260 different student reports. This number represents about 75% of all the reports submitted during the semester. Although the students who satisfied the weekly writing assignment did so in many different ways, the most common pattern of work was six reports based on the text and four based on primary sources. Only two students did the majority of their weekly reports on the primary sources. I conclude from this that most students followed the path of least resistance. For additional data on these reports see Tables A and B. It should be pointed out that students could read their classmates' electronic reports while still working on their own because some students always posted before the electronic submission deadline, which was later than the submission deadline for hard copies. At the end of the semester some said they looked at the work of others for help with the conceptualization of their own. But plagiarism did not turn out to be a problem, perhaps because all posted reports were open to everyone in the class, making any such unethical behavior readily apparent.
TABLE A
STUDENT
POSTINGS BY READING TYPE
|
TYPE |
TOTAL |
BEFORE MID TERM 1 |
AFTER MID TERM |
|
TEXT |
137 |
76 |
61 |
|
PRIMARY |
118 |
48 |
70 |
|
OTHER |
5 2 |
5 |
0 |
|
TOTAL |
260 |
129 |
131 |
1.
The mid-term examination was
given in week eight of a fourteen-week semester.
2.
Five reports posted in week
one dealt with a lesson on the difference between primary and secondary sources
available on the American Memory site maintained by the Library of Congress.
|
NEVER POSTED |
5 |
|
FEWER THAN FIVE POSTS |
10 |
|
FIVE TO NINE POSTS |
15 |
|
TEN OR MORE POSTS |
11 |
|
TOTAL |
41 |
The 260 weekly reports demonstrate that many students learned how to construct a simple essay argument using historical evidence. Some students knew how to do this before the semester began; others never learned. But many became increasingly adept at this during the semester. After working with the electronic syllabus and writing their weekly reports, most members of the class had a much better understanding of historical knowledge by the end of the term. Evidence for this generalization comes from comparing a pre and post-test that I gave my students. In January and again in May I asked them to describe what historians do and explain how they do it. At the beginning of the term some students could say that historians do not deal in opinion but instead analyze, interpret, or explain the past based on documents, artifacts, and even interviews. But most thought that the historians' job is to collect facts and report about past people and events as objectively as possible. A few even made historians into soothsayers; they predict the future based upon their knowledge of the past, these students said. By the end of the term there was a much better understanding of what historians do and what history is. More students now could say that historians make arguments to explain change over time or that they explain events by associating a cause or causes with one or more effects. However, the biggest change by far was in their ability to differentiate between primary and secondary sources. Not one student made such a distinction in the pretest, but eighteen did so in the post-test given at the end of the semester. A tabular accounting of their responses to these two tests can be found in Tables C and D.
TABLE C
HISTORIAN'S
TASK
|
TASK |
PRE TEST (n 37) |
POST TEST (n 35) |
|
Analyze |
6 |
5 |
|
Interpret |
2 |
3 |
|
Explain |
6 |
11 |
|
Describe |
15 |
11 |
|
Write |
4 |
6 |
|
Predict |
3 |
1 |
|
Teach |
2 |
2 |
|
Total1 |
38 |
39 |
1.
Responses total
more than the number of respondents because some responses fit into more than
one category.
TABLE
D
HISTORIAN'S METHODS
|
TASK |
PRE TEST (n 37) |
POST TEST (n 35) |
|
Use primary sources only |
23 |
11 |
|
Use secondary sources only |
6 |
1 |
|
Use both |
0 |
18 |
|
TOTAL1 |
29 |
30 |
1.
Responses
total less than the total number of respondents because some responses did not
fit into any of these categories.
3) Having students post their weekly reports to the electronic syllabus changed the way I taught the course. It allowed me to read the student's work before the second class of each week and respond to what they wrote. Sometimes I asked students to walk the rest of the class through their particular report. But more often, I shaped the second class of each week using the students' written reports. Knowing what questions they answered, I could build my presentation around their reading and writing. Doing this electronically proved to be much more efficient than doing this with hard copy. Students could post their weekly report as late as Thursday morning before class and still have their work incorporated into the mix of lecture and discussion. My teaching assistant, who took responsibility for Week Eleven, adopted the same approach in the two classes he taught.
Projecting a particular primary source on the classroom computer screen, we could ask the students to break it down into its component parts and reconstruct it into a historical generalization. Not all students responded favorably to this technique because it put them on the spot; they had to be ready to think in class. But it insured that they came to class prepared (or did not come to class at all) and if their posted reports are any indication, it increased their historical learning. As one student said at the end of the semester, knowing that her report might be the subject of a classroom discussion gave her a real incentive to do the assignment with care and come to class prepared.
On the first day of class I gave students a pretest to determine what they knew about history and historians. I asked them to write a short answer to the following questions:
(1) What do historians do?
(2) How do they do it?
There were many different answers to these questions. Some students showed a real understanding of the intellectual work of historians. "A historian's task is to record and interpret the events of the past," one student said. "Historians do not merely compile facts. Instead, they gather information and attempt to prove a theory . . . about a particular person, place, or event." Another student added that history involved "creating a structured idea about how people lived and what caused many occurrences to take place." But most students did not offer such perceptive observations. For example, some said that historians study the past so they can predict the future or solve modern problems. Almost all of them were unclear about how historians decide what to study or what evidence to use to support their conclusions.
Day two was devoted to a discussion of the electronic assignment for the week. Mounted on the American Memory site at the Library of Congress, it explains the difference between primary and secondary sources, identifies some of the many different kinds of primary sources, and demonstrates how to assess the reliability and credibility of such sources. The class focused on the evaluation of primary sources for the bias they may contain as well as the different kinds of information that may be found in different kinds of primary sources. We finished by analyzing a photograph of African American slaves, taken in the 1860s, to see what it might be able to reveal about the status and condition of blacks in American at that time. The purpose of this lesson was to prepare the students for their first exposure to an assignment based on primary sources relevant to the content of the course. Such assignments begin next week.
Because
of the blizzard that closed Temple for two days, I had to telescope two classes
into one. The purpose of this week's
lecture and readings was to teach the students how Europeans thought about and
interacted with the New World in the 16th and 17th
centuries. My intention had been to
lecture about Columbus and his successors, the social and economic conditions
in Elizabethan England, and the early attempts at colonization in North
America. This was to have been followed
by a discussion of the relevant material in the text and the two primary
sources that represent different ideas about the New World in the 16th
century. In the one session that I
actually taught, I began discussing briefly the significance of Columbus and
then inviting the students to look at the Gastaldi map (1556). One student had written about this map in
his weekly report that he posted on the Web site. Together we were able to help the other students analyze the map
for what it says about the expectations of Europeans, especially the Spanish,
in the mid-16th century. Our
analysis of the map's many interesting features (e.g. Coronado's discoveries or the notation "terra de bacalaos")
revealed that Spanish imagined the New World to be a place to exploit for its
natural resources. Comparing this with
Richard Hakluyt's "Discourse on Western
Planing" led to the conclusion that promoters like Hakluyt urged the English to
consider the New World as a place for settlement and trade as well as mining
and fishing. At the end of the class I
invited comments from those students who had written reports, based on the
text, about how the English, French, and Spanish differed in their approaches
to the New World. This led us to the
realization that both the Europeans and the Indians were transformed by their
interactions. But this point was still
in need of more discussion when time ran out.
This
week I developed the diversity theme in several ways. In class on Tuesday, we looked at how Native American groupings
and tribes differed from each other as well from the Europeans. We compared the lifestyle of
hunters-and-gatherers with that of agricultural tribes like the Wampanoags, for
example, and looked at how whites and reds differed in their understanding of
man's relationship to the land. Diversity
and freedom were intertwined in our examination of the early history of
Virginia and Massachusetts. Settlers in the two colonies took a different
approach to the relationship between the individual and the group -- a point
that was made by comparing family life in these two colonies in the seventeenth
century and by analyzing the process by which population went from being
concentrated to dispersed. Case studies
of the Salem witch trials and Bacon's Rebellion served to further our
understanding of the relationship between freedom and diversity in colonial
America.
Our
treatment of these topics created a context for the students' work with the
primary sources for the week. Some
looked at the passenger lists for the ships that supplied Jamestown with settlers
in 1607 and 1608. They compared these
with a similar list of the passengers on the Mayflower. The students could easily see that the
single men who predominated in the Jamestown supply came to America for a
different reason than the families aboard the Mayflower. Being able to display these data, using the
classroom computer allowed us to undertake this analysis as a group and come to
a collective interpretation. Only a few
students had read John Winthrop's sermon, "A Modell of Christian Charity"
(1630), but one young women who had was able to explain his point
beautifully. Winthrop told his
followers, she said, that they had a special obligation to work together
because God ordained their colony in the New World. He would judge any failure on their part even more very
harshly.
Teaching these primary sources online made it possible for the class to look at them while discussing them. We could go back and forth very easily between the Jamestown and Plymouth passenger lists, discovering their similarities and differences as we worked. I relied on some of the students who had written reports about one of the week's primary sources to take the lead in discussing them. But having the materials online allowed even those students who had not written about these sources (or read them, for that matter) to participate in the discussion. I still have not taken full advantage of those reports that the students have posted to the site. I am thinking that I will go directly to some of those reports next week and ask their authors to walk us through them.
In
week four the class turned its attention to freedom, diversity, and migration
in America in the eighteenth century.
On Tuesday I explored these themes by examining the patterns of
migration to North America, looking in particular at the extent to which those
who came were free or unfree. Available
data indicate that between 1607 and 1819 the majority of newcomers were not
free. Some were convicts, a lot were
indentures, and between 1700 and 1809 most were slaves. By displaying these data in tabular form,
the class was able to analyze them for itself, and come to the conclusion that
the cause of freedom was not necessarily served by the transplantation of
peoples that bridged the Atlantic Ocean in the eighteenth century. The class was also able to see that on the
eve of independence the American people were not unified; instead, they were
marked by considerable diversity. I
tried to make this point by examining the class structure, using Philadelphia
as a case study. Together, the students
and I compared the city's artisan community with its aristocracy. I argued that there was an elite culture in
eighteenth century Philadelphia that lived by its own rules of etiquette and
the ideology of gentility.
We
used the textbook assignment and the primary source readings for the week to
elaborate on these themes. In class on
Thursday I displayed papers posted to the Web site by students who had written
on several relevant topics: (a) the Great Awakening (b) George Washington's
"lessons for a schoolboy"; (c) the origins of slavery in North America; and (d)
the slave trade. From a report on the
Great Awakening we learned that revivalism sparked a competition among
different religious groups that increased religious diversity. It did this without abandoning completely
the Puritans' devotion to learning, as evidenced by the founding of several
colleges in America either during or soon after the Great Awakening. George Washington's "lessons" gave the class
a concrete example of American elitism in the eighteenth century. The student
reports about this reading that I chose to display both saw it as illustrative
of the class bias existing in Virginia in Washington's day. Slaves, of course, lived at the bottom of
the American social spectrum, and the two primary source readings for the week
on the slave trade gave us an opportunity to examine how Americans were forced
to deal with their own ambivalence about blacks and the institution of
slavery. By class time on Thursday of
this week I had about fifteen posted reports from which to draw. I used five, and this strategy not only
brought some students into the discussion who might not otherwise have contributed,
but also gave me a chance to talk about the elements of a report writing in
history. For example, one student's
report was long on creative ideas but short on the evidence it needed to
corroborate his good ideas.
The
topic for Week Five was the American Revolution. My objective for the week was to examine why the Americans took
more than ten years to decide in favor of independence. In other words, I wanted my students to come
away from this week's work understanding that the patriots were reluctant
revolutionaries. We began by discussing
the concept of sovereignty. This is a
term that most undergraduates have heard but which few can define
satisfactorily. Through an interactive
conversation we decided that sovereignty meant the use of power or authority in
government, and that the term is normally reserved for those people or
institutions that do not use political power or authority arbitrarily. Having laid this foundation, we then
considered the actions of Parliament and the policies of the Crown in America
between 1765 and 1776. We focused on how these policies and actions contributed
to the gradual erosion of the Parliament's and the Crown's sovereignty in
America. I showed how and why the
patriots rejected Parliament's sovereignty first, holding on to the idea that
the Crown might redress their grievances to the bitter end.
The
primary source materials for the week spoke to these issues and questions. The
Stamp Act Resolves (1765) and the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
articulate the American point of view at the beginning and the end of the pre
revolutionary period. They exemplify
the changing political culture in America in the years before the Declaration
of Independence. By contrast, Thomas
Hutchinson's "Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia"
expresses in elegant terms the Loyalist point of view. It answers, point-by-point, the complaints
lodged by Thomas Jefferson against George III in the Declaration of
Independence. Unfortunately, no
students chose to write on the "Strictures," but several wrote reports about
the Stamp Act Resolves and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. And there were many who responded to the
text questions that asked about how the Americans arrived at their decision to
declare independence. In class on
Thursday, we looked at some of those reports posted to the course Web
site. One such report pointed out that
the patriots often wrote about the importance of public virtue in America, a
report that opened the door to a discussion of the meaning of the American
Revolution. Did it reaffirm the rule of
law or undo it?
The
topic for week six was the making of both the state and federal
constitutions. I focused our work on
two basic questions: (1) what is a constitution? (2) how did the founding
fathers go about creating them? To
answer the first question, I examined the functions that the early constitutions
performed, serving as both a statement of first principles and a blueprint for
the institution of government. Our
discussion of the early state constitutions also centered around the ideology
of "utopian republicanism," which rested on the assumption that men could be
trusted with the responsibilities of citizenship. This conversation connected our examination of government
building in the Revolutionary era with our previous consideration of the
importance of virtue in private and public behavior. When the patriots discovered that Americans could not always be
trusted to behave virtuously on their own, they adopted a more pragmatic
approach that emphasized education as a primary source of public virtue and the
restructuring of government to protect the public interest. As an example of
the latter, we explored the difference between the English concept of mixed
government and the separation of powers that the Americans introduced to
prevent or at least control the tyranny of the majority.
I
brought student reports into the classroom this week by picking up on several
topics that attracted considerable interest among those who posted. On Tuesday, I asked those students who wrote
in response to my question about whether the British lost or the Americans won
the Revolutionary War to explain their reasoning. My purpose here was to help the class understand how to interpret
the intent of the question. Many did
not grasp the issue; they failed to realize that a good case can be made for
the claim that that the British lost the war mainly because they made crucial
mistakes. The Americans, who were on
the defensive for the most of the war, took advantage of these blunders. On Thursday, I featured in class the reports
of those who wrote about the Bill of Rights and the L'Enfant plan for the new
capital in Washington. The plan, drawn
in 1792, illustrates some of the political tensions that affected those who
wrote the US Constitution. It
demonstrates in graphic terms the conflict between federal power and states
rights. It captures the idea that
Jefferson, among others, expected Washington to be a city like some of its
European counterparts, such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan. It documents the conflict between freedom
and order in the new republic because it combines the grid plan of a commercial
city with the grand avenues and sharp angles of an imperial town. The students had covered some of these
points in their reports, but they are still learning how to use visual sources
to build historical generalizations.
The
deeper we get into the semester, the more I find myself working back and forth
between the papers posted by my students and the content of the course imbedded
in my lectures and the assigned reading.
In other words, these reports have become a springboard for an open
discussion of the text and regular student involvement with the material I
present in class. On Tuesday, for
example, we began by discussing the sections in the text devoted to the status
of women and blacks in the new republic.
Some of my students had written reports on this topic, and they were
able to explain that both women and blacks enjoyed more freedom after the
American Revolution, but not much more.
Women gradually began to assert control over the home, articulating the
ideology of republican womanhood as a justification for their hegemony in the
domestic sphere. African Americans
benefited from the abolition of slavery in the northern states, but even there,
political and economic discrimination meant less freedom for them than their
Caucasian counterparts. Those who had
read Thomas Jefferson's letter to Benjamin Banneker were able to work into our
conversation a specific example of the prejudice that infected American culture
at the time. They were able to point
out (with some prompting from me) that Jefferson believed blacks to be inferior
to whites but for reasons of nurture rather than nature.
Several
student reports informed our examination of the political and diplomatic events
peculiar to the 1790s. I began by
helping the students define the term "political party." I then argued that the first political
parties in the United States emerged in response to the heated debate in the
New Republic about the role of the federal government in the affairs of the
nation. Students who had written and
posted reports about Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were invited to
comment on their differing views of human nature. They were able to point out that Hamilton had less faith in the
wisdom and virtue of the common man, which helps explain why he preferred to
rely on the economic and political elite for decision making. Having a greater stake in the nation's
affairs, they could be relied upon to act with reason and restraint. The Jeffersonians, on the other hand,
believed that the yeoman farmer was the best guardian of the public
interest. The three students who wrote
reports about George Washington's farewell address helped introduce the class
to the politics of American foreign relations in the 1790s. They pointed out that Washington cautioned
against "foreign entanglements" in an era when such controversial developments
as Jay's Treaty and the XYZ affair demonstrated how difficult it was for the
United States to be neutral in the world.
They helped us come to terms with the paradox about liberty that
Washington explored in this address.
True freedom, he said, is impossible if they are no limitations on
individual liberty. We ended the week
with a quick examination of the election of 1800, when the common good came
face to face with political self interest, a lesson which, I hope, served to
drive home Washington's point about the dangers of unrestricted power in a
democracy.
The
transportation revolution supplied the theme for this week's work, but it was
merely the framework for a discussion of entrepreneurial capitalism in
antebellum America and the role of technology in the development of American
business and industry. Once again, I
used the students' work posted on the syllabus to get us started. At the end of week seven several students
posted reports written in response to a section in the text about the impact of
technology on industry in the United States.
Their reports served as a prompt for our examination of the rise of the
factory system in such industries as textiles and firearms manufacture. From the factory system we moved to a
consideration of the development of a market economy in the United States and
the contribution of the transportation revolution to the development of such an
economy. The primary source on the
syllabus, a map of Pennsylvania's railroads in 1860, provided data for this
discussion. Our analysis of it showed
how many railroads there were in the state by the beginning of the Civil War
and how much this technology affected everyday life. It made clear that transportation was a booming industry that
featured many players and fierce competition.
The
week's work also included a consideration of the changing definition of virtue
in the nineteenth century. Returning to
an idea that we had explored before, we examined American business for what it
could tell us about the redefinition of virtue. Increasingly, Americans thought of it as the exercise of
self-interest rather than, as in colonial times, deference to the common
good. Two topics provided substance for
this discussion. I used the Supreme
Court's decisions in Gibbons v Odgen (1824) and the Charles River
Bridge case (1837) to demonstrate how Americans were moving toward a more
competitive economy driven by the liberal idea that self-interest would promote
the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
But historical change is never linear and to illustrate this point, I
directed the attention of the class to the experience of the mill girls who
worked in the Lowell textile factories in the 1830s and 1840s. By leaving home to work in a factory, these
women declared their freedom from the patriarchal society into which they were
born. But their individual freedom was
not complete because many returned home to marry, and in Lowell the factory
owners practiced a form of industrial paternalism by controlling the private
lives of their female workers. Even the
women themselves demonstrated a commitment to group solidarity when they formed
a union and withheld their labor to protest low wages and long hours.
Because the class took its mid term on Tuesday of this week, it seemed altogether likely that only a handful of students would post a report to the online syllabus this week. But to my delight there were twenty reports on the site by 8:30 Thursday morning. Thirteen dealt with the letter from Andrew Jackson to Martin Van Buren that served as the primary source for the week. Accordingly, I used the opportunity presented by this corpus of student work to teach the class I had planned backwards. Instead of starting with the origins of the Jacksonian Democratic Party in the 1820s, I opened our treatment of this topic by directing the students' attention to Jackson's letter, which deals with the problem the president faced in 1832 over South Carolina's claim to the right of nullification. Referring to their own reports, several members of the class were able to explain that Jackson opposed his own vice president, John C. Calhoun, and the leaders of South Carolina over nullification. He promised to use whatever force it would take to uphold the laws of Congress, defend the constitution, and preserve the union. We then explored the irony of this situation by examining Jackson's views on states-rights, slavery, and the role of the federal government in the social and economic life of the nation. How could a man who favored states-rights, owned slaves, and advocated a limited role for government reject a southern state's claim to the right of nullification? To answer this question, we looked at how Andrew Jackson became president, examining, in particular, the elections of 1824 and 1828 when Jackson helped to bring a new political party into being. We examined his self-conscious leadership style and finished with a reconsideration of the tensions and contradictions to be found in the study of history. Not entirely unlike the Lowell mill girls, Andrew Jackson was able to reconcile for himself contrasting policies and competing ideas.
The
topic for Week Ten was antebellum reform.
We began with the idea of reform itself, discussing whether it implies
changes that are necessarily progressive.
In the first half of the nineteenth century abolitionists, suffragists,
and utopian socialists proposed fundamental changes for America, but those who
worked for temperance, prison reform, and common schools did not advocate such
radical changes. They often believed
that existing values and institutions could be improved upon. Several students argued that temperance and
prison reform were progressive because they aimed to erase long- standing evils
even if they wanted to do so within the framework of existing values and
institutions. But we all agreed that if
most reformers held anything in common, it was a belief in individual
freedom. They differed about the means
by which society could place limits on their expression of that freedom.
I directed the attention of the class to the relationship between religion and reform in pre Civil War America. Many reformers sought to control the disorder brought about by urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and westward expansion by religious education or emotional appeals to the need for a renewal of Christian virtue. Abolitionists, temperance reformers, and common school advocates all built piety into their prescriptions for the revitalization of America. This discussion anticipated the issues that came out in our discussion of the students' reports for the week. Some wrote about the changing role of white women, explaining how they became moral guardians both at home and in society. Others wrote about the temperance essay of J. S. Wilson who challenged American women in 1841 to shame their husbands, sons, and brothers into total abstinence. Most analyzed the broadside published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 that depicts the brutality of slavery and its corrupting effects on everyone regardless of where they lived, north or south. As one student put it, "these illustrations were designed to show the horrors of slavery and the prejudiced behavior of many Americans." Another pointed out that the masters featured in these images showed "no regard for the slave's emotions or attachments." But the drawings also illustrate northern complicity with the peculiar institution, showing that slavery was not just the South's problem. This primary source attracted a disproportionate amount of student interest and involvement, perhaps because of its lurid content and visual presentation.
Week
11 focused on the westward expansion of the American nation-state in the
nineteenth century. As framework for
discussion, I introduced a contrast between the ideas of empire and
democracy. Empires, by nature,
accommodate a plurality of races, ethnicities, and religious groups. Democracies, which rely on ideals of common
identities and shared interests, stress homogeneity rather than diversity. With that in mind, I asked students to
consider ways that Americans encountered and dealt with diversity as the United
States gained an empire in the west. I
asked the students to define Manifest Destiny, a term that most had heard
before but few could fully explain. I
asked students to consider how inclusive the ideology of Manifest Destiny was,
and most agreed that it was a racist, exclusive doctrine. To illustrate they ways that this exclusive
doctrine was applied, I discussed the varied experiences of Indians, Mormons,
and Mexicans. In discussing these
examples, I emphasized the homogenizing forces exerted by the federal
government, and described the various ways that Indians, Mexicans, and Mormons
were forced to assimilate.
The
session on Thursday focused on the primary documents for the week,
"Slavery: Mr. [John C.] Calhoun's Letter to Mr. [William R.] King, August
12, 1844" De Bow's Southern and Western Review (August 1850) and the
Message to Congress of President James Polk, delivered on May 11, 1846 , and
their themes of slavery and war with Mexico.
I asked students to compare the reasons for the outbreak of war as
described by Polk and as described by the text. They were quite eager and able to point out the inconsistencies
in the two versions of events, but were much less willing to speculate as to
why Polkıs version was so different from the textıs. Discussion of the Calhoun document was much less successful; only
one student had written on it and seemed to have limited recall of its
contents, so I was forced to do more talking than I had wanted to. The document did allow me to lead a
discussion of other issues, including the role of slavery in the economy and
society of the United States, its expansion into western lands, and anti-Catholicism
as applied to Mexicans in the newly conquered territories and to European
immigrants in the United States. I
finished the week by asking students to think about how much the west had been
homogenized, and to what extent diversity still existed in the present
day. Several students were quite
engaged in this exercise, and pointed out that many of the issues were still
contested today, citing struggles over bilingualism and efforts to secure
rights for Native Americans as examples.
Building
on the foundation erected by Mr. Mackintosh in Week Eleven, I set out to
explore the relationship between westward expansion and the politics of slavery
in Week Twelve. The content best suited
to the study of this relationship is standard fare in any early American
history survey. The Compromise of 1820,
the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision all figured
prominently in my week's teaching. To
place these events into a broader perspective, we began by looking closely at
the United States Constitution, asking whether it was for, against, or neutral
on the institution of slavery. On Tuesday two or three students argued that the
founding fathers avoided conflict over the provisions of the Constitution by
finessing the question of slavery. But
even they had to admit that the three-fifths clause (Article 1, Section 2,
Clause 3) and the fugitive slave clause (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) seemed
to support the peculiar institution. If
the Constitution could be said to have achieved neutrality on the slavery
question, did not its failure to take a position end up as a tacit endorsement
of the status quo? This was a question
that prompted the class to re-examine their initial reaction to my question
about the role of slavery in the Constitution.
On
Thursday our discussion of the reports that students wrote this week reinforced
my growing conviction that historians need to employ different means of
assessment not only to determine whether students are learning but also to help
them learn. The posted reports
concentrated on two topics. Several
students wrote in response to a question based on the text that asked how well
slaves coped with their servile condition.
Slaves, they said, echoing the text, did not become totally dependent on
their owners; instead they retained some autonomy over their lives through
their control, however limited, of family life and religion. That many slaves were also uncooperative and
even engaged in occasional acts of outright rebellion demonstrated their
independence. Others wrote about the
two primary sources on the electronic syllabus for this week. Paired for effect, these two sources give
contrasting accounts of slavery, one from the perspective of Harriet Jacobs, a
former slave, who was sexually abused by her master, and the other by Mary
Norcutt Bryan, a white woman and former slave owner. The students who wrote about them brought a sense of indignation
to their work that perhaps explains why they were able to write with effect as
well as conviction. When given the
opportunity to reflect on their reading, the undergraduates in this course have
shown me that they are able to make and defend historical generalizations. This is true not only when they work with
provocative material such as that found in Jacobs' diary, Incidents in
the Life of A Slave Girl, but also
the more dispassionate content typical of an undergraduate history text.
To say that my students were not inclined to participate in an interactive class on Tuesday of Week Thirteen would be an understatement. Their short papers were due on this day, and most of those who came to class turned one in. I do not know how many had read the chapter in the text for this week, but their distinct preference on this day was to sit and listen. When this happens it is easy to give in to the temptation to lecture and that in the end is what I did. I covered two topics to prepare them for what I hoped would be a more interactive class on Thursday. First, I examined the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, arguing that it was composed of several different political elements drawn from the old Whig Party, the Democratic Party, and those for whom American politics revolved around controlling slavery in the western territories. I used the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 to illustrate the complexity of the political situation. Although he espoused non-extension as a temporary solution to the problem of slavery in the West, Lincoln made it clear in his "House Divided" speech that Americans would not be able to compromise forever with the institution of slavery. Sooner or later, the nation would have to become either all slave or all free. Jumping ahead to the conduct of the war, I used the Pennsylvania and Mississippi campaigns of 1863 to make the point that the Civil War was fought on two fronts, hoping as a result to set up the excerpt from the Ken Burns video that I would show on Thursday.
Fifteen
students posted reports for Week Thirteen.
Some wrote in response to my text question on the strengths and
weaknesses of the north and the south in the Civil War. I do not think I took sufficient advantage
of these reports get the students thinking about the concept of total war that
Burns develops in the episode I showed on Sherman's march to the sea. But I did try to link my discussion of the
pivotal election of 1860 to those students reports that dealt with the primary
sources for the week -- Lincoln's first inaugural address and commentary on it
from three very different newspapers: the New York Tribune,
the Richmond Enquirer, and the Staunton (Virginia) Spectator. By the time Lincoln became the sixteenth
president of the United States, seven states had seceded mainly because he had
won the election. How could the new
chief executive hope to uphold the Constitution without plunging the nation
into anarchy? This was the question that I hoped my students would ask
themselves but since only four or five had read these primary sources, we spent
much of the hour debating whether Lincoln's words were those of a statesman or
a politician. It occurred to me, as I
was having a conversation with one of my students after class, that I should
have done more to make the point that what set Abraham Lincoln apart was his
ability to be both.
The
primary sources for the final week of the term meshed particularly well with
the material on Reconstruction that I wanted to cover in class. I had mounted on the Web site Andrew
Johnson's obituary from the New York Times and a chapter
from The Black Man of the South and
the Rebels (1872) by the abolitionist Charles Stearns. Although Johnson was one of the nation's
most unpopular presidents, he was supported by the New York Times,
and by the time he died in 1875 his reputation had recovered somewhat from the
depths to which it had fallen during his administration. The obituary recounts his rise from
obscurity to the presidency, and concludes by calling him a man of
"integrity and courage." It
makes his career sound very much like an example of the American Dream. By asking how such a man could have been so
reviled, I opened the door to an analysis of race, class, and government power
in the era of Reconstruction. I argued
that Reconstruction was all about finding a place for the freedman in the
economic and political life of the South.
Could he be relied upon to live by the free labor ideology championed by
the Republican Party both before and after the Civil War? What should the federal government do to
protect him from those who had previously enslaved him? These were among the most important
questions asked by those responsible for Reconstruction.
We
answered these questions by dividing Reconstruction into three distinct
periods: presidential (1865-1866); radical (1866-1870); and redemption
(1870-1877). Concerned about the need
for labor and the possibility of disorder in the post war South, the Johnson
administration did little to prevent the freedman from being returned to the
plantation. Stearns' account of the
freedman's initial reaction to emancipation illustrates just how unacceptable
this prospect was for those who had long been yearning for freedom. His observation that the freedmen highly
valued education allowed for a discussion of the self-reliance assumed by the
ideology of free labor. To demonstrate
the importance that the radical reformers attached to political and civil
rights for the freedmen, I asked the class to examine the Constitutional
amendments adopted during Reconstruction, especially the Fourteenth
Amendment. Its due process and equal
protection clauses defined the meaning of citizenship. Its requirement that the readmitted states
extend the suffrage to black men or lose representation in Congress also
illustrates the political nature of the U.S. Constitution, rehearsing a point
that I had made when we studied the writing of Constitution. The history of the Freedmen's Bureau
provided evidence for the claim that
Reconstruction did not live up to its promise because it neglected the
economic well-being of the freedmen.
Its failure to distribute land and prevent the exploitation of black
labor paved the way for redemption. The
Panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression justified the federal government's
ultimate abandonment of the freedmen.
On
the whole, I was pleased with my new version of History CO67. The electronic syllabus worked very
well. Most students adjusted to its use
quickly and easily, while most of those who didn't became more comfortable with
it as the semester went along. As a
class, we experienced virtually no problems with the technology.
Student
attendance and involvement in the class was satisfactory but did not live up to
my hopes or expectations. A few tried
to pretend that this was an online class that did not require regular
attendance. The volume of work was too
much for some others; three students took Incompletes for the semester, and
only twenty-two successfully completed the weekly report assignment. The bonus system certainly encouraged
students to post. But I set the bonus
points too high and will scale it back in future terms. Too many students received A's in the course
based on bonus points. The final
distribution of grades was as follows: nineteen A's; six B's; eight C's; two
D's; 2 F's; and three Incompletes.
Mid Term and Final
Examinations
History 67
Mid Term
Examination
Part I (40 minutes)
Answer
one of the following two questions:
1.
Discuss
Bacon's Rebellion (1675-1676) and the Salem witch trials (1690-1692) as events
that demonstrate the importance of freedom and migration in early American
history. Be sure to show how freedom
and migration played a role in each and, comparing the two, explain how this
role was the same or different.
2.
Identify
the major sources of diversity in America on the eve of the Revolution. Were some more important than others? Did these sources of diversity make it
easier or more difficult for the patriots to declare independence from
Britain? Explain.
Part
I (40 minutes)
Answer
the following questions.
In
1768 John Dickinson wrote a letter to "his countrymen" that contained the
following paragraphs:
The cause of liberty
is a cause of too much dignity to be sullied by turbulence and tumult. It ought to be maintained in a manner
suitable to her nature. Those who
engage in it should breathe a sedate yet fervent spirit, animating them to
actions of prudence, justice, modesty, bravery, humanity, and magnanimity.
Every government at some time or others falls into
wrong measures. These may proceed from
mistake or passion. But every such
measure does not dissolve the obligation between the governors and the
governed. This mistake may be
corrected; the passion may subside. It
is the duty of the governed to endeavor to rectify the mistake, and to appease
the passion. They have not at first any
other right, than to represent their grievances, and to pray for redress,
unless an emergency is so pressing as not to allow time for receiving any
answer to their applications, which rarely happens. If their applications are disregarded, then the kind of opposition becomes justifiable which can
be made without breaking the laws or disturbing the public peace.
If at length it becomes undoubted that an inveterate revolution is formed to annihilate the
liberties of the governed, the English
history affords frequent examples of resistance by force. What particular circumstances will in any
future case justify such resistance can never be ascertained till they
happen. Perhaps it may be allowable to
say generally that it never can be justifiable until the people are fully convinced that any further
submission will be destructive to their happiness.
Based
on your knowledge of the period in which this letter was written,
1)
explain
why you think Dickinson wrote it. To
what people or events was he reacting?
2)
evaluate
Dickinson's message. Were his views
more or less representative of American sentiment at the time?
3)
compare
Dickinson with men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Thomas
Hutchinson. With whom would he have
been more likely to agree in 1768? In
1776?
TEMPLE
UNIVERSITY
History 67
Final
Examination
Part I (40 minutes)
Answer
one of the following two questions:
1. Why have the years between 1830 and 1860 been described as an era of reform in the United States? What kinds of reforms were proposed? Who proposed them and why were they proposed? Did the reforms take hold? Did they achieve fundamental or superficial change? Explain.
2. Read the following quote about the life of Mary Norcott Bryan's grandmother.
Twice a year we made visits to Fort Barnwell and Hermitage, two noted plantations belonging to the Simpsons and Biddles. The fondest memories linger around each. I see my old Grandmother with her neat cap strings tied under her chin, a lace cap around her shoulders and a pleasant word for everybody, which meant a great deal of forbearance in the Mistress of a large plantation. Such a busy life was hers, the care of many slaves, the responsibility of their souls, teaching them truth and honesty, watching over the sick, entertaining strangers. No life of ease, I assure you, was that of the Mistress of a large plantation, her purse was ever opened to the distressed, her hospitable doors were never closed.
How was her life similar to or different from the lives of other women in early nineteenth century America? How much did women's lives change between 1780 and 1850? Explain.
Part II (40 minutes)
Answer one of the following two questions:
1. Both Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson said they were presidents who represented the interests of the common man. What did each say or do to lend credibility to such a claim? What did each say or do to call such a claim into question? Do you agree with their claims? Do you think either one had a better case for such a claim? Why?
2. Why did the United States annex Texas in 1845 and then go to war with Mexico? What issues and resources were at stake? In your view which side was in the right? Explain.
Part III (40 minutes)
Choose one of the following sets of historical data. Write an essay using these data to explain how freedom, diversity, and migration played a role in American life in the mid- nineteenth century.
Data Set
One
|
Fugitive Slave Law |
Kansas Nebraska Act |
|
Manifest Destiny |
Popular Sovereignty |
|
Dred Scott Decision |
Election of 1860 |
|
Lincoln's First Inaugural |
Lincoln Douglas Debates |
Data Set Two
|
Freedmen's Bureau |
Thirteenth Amendment |
|
Civil Rights Acts of 1866 |
Reconstruction Act of 1867 |
|
Fourteenth Amendment |
Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson |
|
Black Codes |
Fifteenth Amendment |
|
Panic of 1873 |
Civil Rights Act of 1875 |