Abstract
A scholar's initial stab at sharing his ideas gets mixed results; his continued effort to clarify his meaning produces a valuable article.
Sam Wineburg has not merely contributed to our understanding of how history is created, taught, and learned; he has nearly single-handedly forged a distinctive field of research and a new educational literature.
—Lee S. Shulman on the presentation of the Association of American Colleges and Universities Frederic W. Ness Book Award to Sam Wineberg, January 2002.
“Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” by Sam Wineburg. Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (March 1999): 488–499.
My essay, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts” (Phi Delta Kappan, March 1999), has a curious history.
It was an attempt to step back from a clutch of empirical studies I'd completed in order to gain perspective and see a larger picture. I'd been working for a decade to understand how young people interpret historical texts. I'd concluded that their difficulties went beyond gaps in background knowledge or a missing fact here or there. Understanding those who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago demands a herculean stretch of the imagination, a willingness to consider that everything we know — what makes people tick, what makes them willing to put their lives on the line, their deepest hopes and fears — could be radically different in another age. We don't come by this insight “naturally”; it doesn't sprout spontaneously in the course of development. Thinking historically must be cultivated. It must, in short, be taught.
I originally submitted the essay to Teachers College Record, where it was sentenced to the purgatory of split decisions. I had gotten mixed reviews before, but never had they been so different. Review 1 just hated the piece. “Each anecdote,” it began, “is interesting.” (Beware of reviews that begin with the most damning of adjectives.) “But the parts do not add up to a whole… . For a paper ostensibly about historical thinking the author has an a historical, decontextualized essay.”
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and Review 2 offered a soothing balm: “Through narrative and anecdote, this essay illustrates why it is so difficult for us to avoid the pitfalls of presentism in historical thinking… . This, of course, is something that historians deal with and talk about all the time. But I have read few essays that discuss these problems so elegantly or that make them so understandable to nonhistorians.” So far so good.
But then the reviewer had to ruin it all by explaining in excruciating detail how the broader frame for the essay was off, how I had failed to notice what was right under my nose. The essay was conceived in the mid-1990s, when acrimony over proposed national history standards filled editorial pages. The reviewer reminded me that curriculum had become so mired in politics that the larger purposes of history — teaching young people to deal with complexity, to tolerate multiple perspectives, and to understand the shades of gray between the seductive poles of black and white — had become lost. That, the reviewer claimed, was what the paper was really about. OK … .
I decided to put the reviews aside for a day. A year later, I was pretty happy in my work as long as I didn't open my file cabinet.
When I finally mustered the courage to look, I realized that I most wanted to reach practicing history and social studies teachers. The late Pauline Gough had published my first article in Kappan in 1987. She (and Bruce Smith after her) had taught me so much about writing that I will forever be indebted. Reworking the essay for Kappan helped me understand what Pauline had tried to teach me years before. The act of editing myself into clarity was all about figuring out what I most wanted to say.
Something worked. Not only did Kappan run the essay on its cover in 1999, but it became the title essay of my book, now in its 10th printing. Although the essay bears my name, the thinking in it benefited from countless others — including those I have never met and whose names I still do not know. The kindness of strangers, indeed.