Current Project: Timetables and Timelines for The Underground Railroad

A map of the Underground Railroad as portrayed in Colson Whitehead's novel.

Almost a year ago I read Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and became fixated on what a great teaching tool it would be. It does that thing that people think historians hate-- incorporate a flurry of time periods and events into one story supposedly set in another time altogether. It's centered around a major counterfactual-- that the Underground Railroad, rather than being a metaphorical name for a many-legged, many routed entity, is actually a full-on locomotive system under the earth. And because of these things, it's a great tool to emphasize that "accuracy," while always a buzzword in any course about history and fiction, is much more complicated than just a painstaking adherence to the details associated with a period.

So that personal bit of reading, and that idea that the book showcased what a powerful choice it could be to mix together aspects of different histories, blossomed into the course I'm teaching now, HIST 365: Fiction and the Historical Imagination/Fictionalizing US History, 1620-1920. We have this week reached the section of the course devoted to this book, and so I wanted to share the strategies I'm using to teach the novel in a way that emphasizes Whitehead's use of time (through some discussion of topics, but no major spoilers ahead for the novel).

The Reading

First, the novel itself. I split the book into three sections, each a bit shorter than the last. Monday was the chapters from "Ajarry" to "Stevens" (or, 1-142); Wednesday was "North Carolina" through "Tennessee (143-232); and Friday was "Caesar" through the final chapter, "The North," (233-313).

I paired each of these sections with brief supplementary material. Being that there are so many topics and events, I knew I would not be able to address all the historical allusions through supplementary primary and secondary source reading. So I chose to instead emphasize a few themes and encourage students to address others through their projects.

For Monday, I emphasized themes of race in medical experimentation with the Introduction to Susan Reverby's Tuskegee's Truths (2000) and a chapter on grave robbing from Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid (2006). (I also made available some of Reverby's critiques of Washington's text.) This was designed to suggest ways in which we could connect some of the events of The Underground Railroad to events which occurred during the time period in which the book is ostensibly set as well as to events in the mid twentieth century. I was surprised to find that although students had not read these exact texts before, many of them seemed familiar with their contents.

My choices for Wednesday seemed to be less familiar. I was pleased to find that many of my students were experiencing Jourdon Anderson's letter "To My Old Master" for the first time. If you have five minutes and have never read it, take a look-- it is an incredibly satisfying primary source. I also had students examine several pages of the Monroe Work Today site, which builds upon the lynching statistics assembled by sociologist Monroe Work in the early twentieth century to create an interactive map of (some) US lynchings from 1835-1964. These sources match some of the events and attitudes which appear in the novel, but they also provide some contours that the novel's story doesn't have the opportunity to express-- evidence of freedpeople's lives and self-expression; the national span of racial violence and the individual connections that our localism can lead us to make when we look at a map of it.

For Friday, when students are finishing the novel, they will read two pieces of commentary dealing with the novel itself: author Brit Bennett's "Ripping the Veil" and journalist Kathryn Schulz's "The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad."

The Project 

Of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone with reading and discussing these documents. I also wanted to incorporate a project with this section of the course, one which would encourage us to consider the broad connections Whitehead is making within this text. Instead of continuing with the style of group project that I had used for the two previous tasks, in which each group created some artifact together, I designed a project in which the entire class would work together on one large timeline. Each entry on this timeline would connect one historical event, big or small, to something similar that had occurred in the book. Each person would be responsible for five entries, and they would have groups which would serve as peer editors to give feedback on their entries.

Here's the project sheet and rubric:

Within the Google Doc for the timeline itself, I also provided a sketchy template for the entries, complete with fake names:

Rough Example Template:

DATE-- Brief Descriptive Title

[[RELATED IMAGE/VIDEO/DOCUMENT]]

Section explaining details and historical significance of event, its inclusion in the timeline, and the reason it connects to the novel. This section should incorporate both description and analysis. References to a document or source can be linked here in text.

Sources:

The Underground Railroad, page XX.

Other sources used (at least one).

Author: Jane Doe, Group 4. Assistance: Charlie Horse (suggested the video used); Jim Roe (corrected errors in description).

The ambitious thing here has been trying to fit discussion and time to work on the timeline into class. So far I have managed to mostly make it happen, but it could be better. In future, I'd also like to work to explain this a bit more clearly, as it has taken a couple of class sessions to clarify what exact kinds of things I wish to be in the entries. As I envision it-- and as I've been explaining it to everyone-- I anticipate that some small tidbit in a news article or a secondary source will strike some familiar chord with a theme or event from the book, and poof! There's your entry. We'll see how it goes when these are all coming together at the end of next week.