Flashback Roundup: Early American Witches

In honor of the season's plethora of pop culture references to witches, here's a roundup of all of my posts on teaching about witchcraft in Early America, with some updates and additional resources. I'd love to hear more about other witchcraft history resources--anywhere, anytime-- in comments!

Syllabizing Salem (originally published April 9, 2018)

I'll be teaching a course next fall under the shell "Fiction and Historical Imagination," which I am using to explore American historical mythologies from Puritan witch trials to the passing of the 19th Amendment. Since I've last written about this project, the title has evolved to "Fictionalizing US History, 1630-1920" and I've begun to try and tackle turning my Course Rationale into a functional syllabus. Today, I want to talk about my process of figuring out where to start and what to start with.

Hopefully this will provide a few items of interest-- to students who might be thinking about taking the course and would like a sneak peek; to anyone looking for readings to assign for courses on Salem or just for their own reading pleasure; or to any instructors wondering, "How do other people find things to assign?" These are not the definitive selections-- I may in the end need to add or subtract based on time, availability, or content-- but this is where I am for now.

Beginnings: A Reaction to Reacting

To set the stage: When I first conceptualized teaching my Reacting to the Past course, Conflict and Unity in American History, the early American setting of the first game we were to play was daunting. I had not previously had much interest in

• Colonial America
• The history of religion
• New England in general
• Anything involving reading documents with "f"s instead of "s"s*

So, Trial of Anne Hutchinson was an odd match. But I wanted to assign Greenwich Village, 1913, which I had played as part of my Reacting to the Past training, and I wanted to emphasize an aspect of the game that I thought could be easily overlooked in a course that attempted to focus on a narrow time period: the struggle for group definition that occasioned the conflict of the game. The players in Greenwich Village are ultimately struggling not only to decide whether they will support suffragists or labor activists with their time and art; they are also trying to determine what they as a community value. Trial of Anne Hutchinson, set in a vastly different time (the 1620s) and with far different consequences for winners and losers (various implied possibilities including: banishment, divine punishment, social censure), represents at its heart a similar attempt to figure out what parameters defined their group.

To truly appreciate this element of the trial, it was necessary for both the players and I to understand what, precisely, the debate was all about (who is really "saved" by God, and how do we know?), and what motivated the drive to ensure the Massachusetts Bay Colony was spiritually unified. The game materials were handy for providing context about religious debates that preceded the trial, the insecurities about the colony's survival, and the Calvinist convictions which made the unity of the colony a critical matter. In the end, these served their purpose well, and I left both semesters confident that students had, in addition to improving their argumentation skills, gained a greater understanding of some very unfamiliar points of view.

However, Anne Hutchinson and Puritan New England has stuck in my head, partially because I noticed an interesting trend when I discussed the course with people. Whether students on the first day of class or other graduate students, most only dimly recalled Hutchinson (I was unfamiliar with her when I first heard of the game) and thought that perhaps she had been tried for witchcraft. I was intrigued by how the complexity of Puritan religious thought, well expressed by my students in their roles as Governors, Pastors, and Teachers in the colony, has been widely translated to "those witch-burners."

Starting from Fiction

The family from The Witch (2015), kneeling.

When I began conceptualizing this course, I knew I wanted to build upon the complications we had explored in Trial of Anne Hutchinson. I also knew that I wanted to assign The Witch (2015) as one of our fictional treatments of history. I had wanted to screen clips of the film as part of my Reacting course the previous year, but couldn't quite justify its incorporation. Yet I found the film very reflective of the spritual anxieties articulated by the major players in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: not just a censure of powerful womanhood (although, sure, that) but also a genuine belief that one's community must reflect compliance with divine will and a certainty that the devil did, in fact, exist. I now needed two things:

• A secondary source which could provide the context to appreciate this aspect of the film
• A reading which could provide a more traditional view of the witchcraft myth

I cast about for options, using the UIUC library catalog to seek out titles related to the history of witches, witch trials, and colonial America. I found Elizabeth Reis's book Damned Women, contemplated assigning it, and realized that her collection Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America not only contained an abbreviated chapter of her book but also additional readings that might come in handy.

My second task was more obvious: I quickly opted for the quintessential treatment of the witchcraft myth, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Not only is it frequently cited in any discussion of real or figurative "witchhunts," it also represented a different form of fiction, and I wanted to be able to potentially incorporate a discussion of form and performance into the course. I decided to start the course, after introductory materials on source analysis, by delving into this text together.

From here, I wanted to provide some complicating counterpoints to the Salem presented by Miller. First, I knew that I wanted to include discussion of Tituba and the role of race in the Salem mythology. I plan to assign selections of Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem, which attempts to use the sparse historical record to trace Tituba's life story and argue for rethinking both her racial identity and her role in the story of Salem.

Upon doing a little digging, it becomes fairly obvious that Salem's witchcraft trials were far afield of what most witchcraft trials looked like. Paradoxically, because the Salem incident was so unusual, they have been remembered; yet in being the only ones remembered, they have passed as the only available example and thus defined popular understanding of American witch trials. I chose Richard Godbeer's Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 to call attention to this discrepancy. Godbeer focuses on a Connecticut incident which occurred in the same yea, but which unfolded very dissimilarly: if Salem was a "panic," officials' treatment of witch claims in Stamford could best be described as "cautious" (7).

Conclusions

So, below is the current list in order-- next step, assigning each reading to a date!

• The Crucible (1953)
• Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem (selections)
• Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692
• The Witch (2015)
• Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (selections)

As you can see, the final order is very different than the order in which I conceived of the sources to use. Obviously, there are tons of other things that one could assign to talk about the American mythology of Salem-- these are just a few of my frontrunners, and not the final word (and I suspect I may need to cut this down a bit!). Likewise, there are other great approaches to figuring out what to assign-- I'd love to hear about yours.


* Yes, I know it's not really an f. No, I won't stop pronouncing it "Congrefs."

Related Links:

An interesting guide to the proper use of the long and short s.
Quite an extensive online archive of Salem sources exists at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.
A Smithsonian Magazine article on Tituba.
I'm also considering using Veta Smith Tucker's article Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village, from the Journal of Black Studies.

Update: 

Interested in how scheduling and organization for this section of the course turned out? Check out my Fiction and the Historical Imagination syllabus. 

Time Travel and Crucible Critique (originally published September 5, 2018)

A shot of the original production of The Crucible, from playbill.com.

It's Week 2 of the semester, and History 365 is now in full swing. In this course, in addition to seminar style discussions, weekly response papers, and a final project, I'm using various creative projects to encourage students to make connections between the historical fictions we're reading and other primary and secondary sources of the eras under study. Today I debuted an activity which asks students to step into one of three perspectives and work together to argue about The Crucible's relevance to the experiences of their group.

How do you solve a problem like Arthur Miller?

I have to admit that I was stuck on what to do with The Crucible for a while. I knew that I wanted to include it as a starting point for our discussion of witchcraft and religion in colonial New England, as so many people's ideas about the topic and the period are already informed by the work. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to read and discuss it in class, so that we would all have a basis for understanding this influential portrayal of the Salem trials. I knew also that it was long enough that it would be difficult to pair with the longer companion texts in the section for a comparative discussion-- I didn't want to have it due the same day as Escaping Salem or The Witch so that we could compare the two immediately. It would not only be more reading than was reasonable for one day but also rush the discussion of both, leaving us little time to get to some of the smaller details. It would have to be the subject of a few days of discussion before getting to these newer texts.

Knowing this was the case, I still couldn't figure out what to do with The Crucible. As performance of a theatrical work can be an important part of its interpretation, I toyed with the idea of having students produce scenes from the work, with one as a dramaturg, one as a director, some as actors, etcetera. Perhaps pairing it with a performance of a HUAC trial transcript. But although I could see the potential value of doing this, I couldn't see my way into or out of it-- I couldn't make it make sense for this class and the kind of intellectual engagement with the text I wanted to encourage.


I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in under half an hour for once when the solution finally came to me, as these things so often do. I had assigned the Christopher Bigsby introduction to the Penguin edition for the week before the actual play was due, and when I went back to consider it again I found a great deal which seemed delightfully questionable. No statement was so ripe for critique as that which came near the end of the piece, in which Bigsby claims that "the play's success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written." Such a claim echoes the widespread interest in declaring this particular work as well as most other well-regarded literature as somehow good because they capture a universal humanity, a transcendence of context. How could I encourage students to avoid this mentality, which sounds very nice but is useless for an appreciation of history?

The Project: Time-Travelers and The Crucible

The conceit of the project I ended up designing is this:

In a mysterious and poetic quirk of fate, two groups of 1690s Puritans from Salem, Massachusetts AND two groups of Hollywood writers targeted by HUAC in the 1940s and 50s have been transported forward in time to the modern day. As coincidence would have it, they have landed in the midst of a conference of historians of race and gender who are analyzing The Crucible. In this project, you and your group will analyze Miller’s play in light of your particular viewpoint and come up with a plan to present your experiences to one another and to the curious world in a press conference.

In this project, students are in one of six groups. (For a smaller class, three could easily be used-- my class is too big to have only three groups).

• Groups 1 and 2: 1690s Puritans who lived through the trials. They are tasked with answering the question: Does this play reflect our experience and values?
• Groups 3 and 4: Targets of HUAC in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. They investigate whether this play speaks to their experiences as suspected Hollywood Communists.
• Groups 5 and 6: Modern day historians of race and gender. They have a more removed task, contemplating whether Miller’s play is more reflective of 1690’s ideas on race and gender, 1950s ideas of race and gender, or some combination of the two.

Each group confers with one another to consider Miller's work in relation to "their" experiences and interests. They create a 5-7 minute presentation, using evidence from the play and other sources provided, such as lecture, primary documents such as selections from Puritan sermons and HUAC trial transcripts, and secondary literature. They took the class period to work on this, and are free (but not required) to work on this outside of class as well. On Friday, they will present their conclusions to the group.

Project sheets and rubric are here.

Reflections

I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the class has taken to the activity so far. I was a bit worried it would be confusing and I would get a lot of questions about the details of the project. In reality, many of the questions I got were complex historical ones about relationships between ideologies and actions in the Puritan context. From observations I made walking around the room, most of the class seemed to come to the questions and ideas I wanted to encourage, considering issues of race, religion, gender, enslavement, historical interpretation, and the nature of experience in relation to the texts. The questions and arguments raised in this section will serve as a nice platform to build upon for the final week of inquiry into the mythological role that Salem and the concept of colonial witchcraft trials have played in US historical memory.

Related Links:

Some of the sources I provided include the HUAC transcripts of Paul Robeson and John Howard Lawson; Gretchen Adams, "The Specter of Salem in American Culture," from the OAH Magazine of History, July 2003; and selections of John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; "Regulating Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies," from Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality; Elaine Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem; Steven J. Ross, Movies and American Society.

Update: 

Interested in how to make this activity work on a more individual level, or help students who miss a day to catch up? I also created a project sheet for making up this activity.

Making a Course You Love (originally published June 18, 2018)

I've talked before about being a proponent of giving students an excuse to spend time on something that interests them, having relished those opportunities during my own education. There are so many obligations which face students that they must prioritize, and wrapping some freedom of choice into assignments allows them to reflect on what sorts of things they might be intellectually passionate about. Today I want to talk about the flip side of this concept-- instructors and the freedom they have to steer the content of a course toward things that pique their interest.

An empty page for only me to fill! Should I hold the light bulb over my head, or...

I've been prepping on and off for the last few months for my fall course, Fiction and the Historical Imagination. It's a fun one to organize not only because I'm always interested in how history is portrayed in fiction-- for this iteration of the course, I'm examining popular mythologies and narratives about American history in a variety of fictional sources from theatre to video games-- but because it's enabled me to expand on some topics and questions I've already taught in a much more limited sphere. Only semi-intentionally, this course positions itself roughly within the same time periods as my Reacting to the Past course. It begins with Massachusetts Puritans-- albeit to talk about the Salem witch trials in 1692-1693 rather than the Anne Hutchinson trial in the 1630s. And it ends in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, arguably the paramount goal of the Suffrage faction in Greenwich Village, 1913. So in many ways, it's as if I'm coming at much of this material backwards in planning this course. First, I helped two groups of students live the history; now I and a new group will together delve into the background, the historiography, and the popular memory which surrounds and bridges these two events.

It’s a great opportunity to incorporate the knowledge I have gained from the games into a (slightly) more conventional seminar-style course. Not only do the names and dates associated with these periods come more naturally to me than ever before, but also an appreciation of the humanity, subjectivity, and tendentiousness of historical moments that Reacting emphasizes. I feel I have a grasp on some critical theological ideas of Puritan life that I might not have appreciated without having led students to those realization in the Anne Hutchinson game. One of my former students commented that she had come into the course thinking the Puritans were nonsensical people, but that the game had given her an understanding of their priorities. It's also helping to me envision a future course that marries both approaches; for example, a deep dive into the Puritans which incorporates both the Salem material and the Anne Hutchinson trial.

The difficult part, as always, is transmitting knowledge and appreciation in an effective way to a new group. I know I will want to refer to the events of the games (much as I always make popular culture references in class that only two people understand), and being that there are only a couple of repeat customers I will have to restrain myself!

Tailoring a course to something you'd like to talk about in this way offers a lot of fun options, but it also threatens some pitfalls. Many of us, I'm sure, have taken or heard of courses that were clearly serving only the instructors' interests and not those of the proposed themes. How do we lean into the freedom to shape a course we're excited about without ignoring the needs of the course as a whole?

I don't claim to have all the answers-- hey, this is my first time doing something quite like this!-- but here's the general rules I've tried to make for myself in this process:

• Lean into joy rather than expertise-- that is, try for a course that emphasizes the things you think are really interesting rather than the very specific thing you are personally studying. These can of course overlap, but enthusiasm draws in people who might not care about the topic, whereas no amount of encyclopedic knowledge on children's hospitals during the Depression era can convince folks to stay in your course past the drop date.
• Related: Try not to be completely self-serving-- if something helps you with your reading to-do list, your prep for a conference, or just saves you time because you already have a lecture for that, consider whether it also serves the course well. There are many things I've considered incorporating that I've just had to cut because they weren't quite pulling their weight for my overall goals (but, okay, I'm still working on it).
• Don’t hesitate to embrace the new/fun-sounding-- if you have the time, try to break out of what you've done before and use new resources-- you might find things you never knew existed. For this course, I decided to use Valiant Hearts: The Great War as a fictional source to discuss US involvement in World War I. This decision led me to learn of the Gaming Initiative and try out the Gaming Center at the Undergraduate Library, as well as learning the game had iPhone and Android versions. Now that I know that those things exist, how they work, and who to talk to about them, I can not only use them with greater ease in the future but also refer students to those resources and describe how to use them.
• Related: Don’t embrace the new/fun just because it's new/fun-sounding-- this is particularly true for online materials, which bill themselves as being the newest most fun millennial/Gen Z appealing way to learn but in reality are often poorly structured and frustrating to both the computer unsavvy and the technology buff. If you don't have time to test the new thing and see if it's actually helpful, the old books/primary sources/paper copies/presentation styles are just fine.

You'll notice a pattern here-- there's a middle ground that I'm aiming for, a happy marriage of all the considerations of structure, effort, enthusiasm, knowledge. A balance between knowing and discovering which brings vibrancy to a group discussion of ideas-- which is, after all, what a seminar is at its base.

Do you have any tips for using intellectual interests to power a course?

The First Church in Northampton, MA (originally published October 23, 2017)

Sign outside of church, Northampton, MA. A link to the sign's text can be found here.

Being in Northampton is wonderful because one is surrounded by women of all ages who seem both smarter and more fashionable than you, and yet somehow it is motivating and not discouraging. Hence it was a little jarring to come upon this sign reminding me of the Trial of Anne Hutchinson, a Reacting to the Past Game I taught in my classes last year which, despite the title, features no women as playable characters --as a General Court of the period would not have contained any women. (See this post from the OAH blog for a description of both Reacting and The Trial of Anne Hutchinson by Mark Carnes, co-author of the Hutchinson game and Reacting Consortium Executive Director.)

In this game, it's 1637, and a variety of men of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have gathered to determine whether or not Anne Hutchinson, local religious thinker and midwife, should be banished from the colony. Her crime? Well, that's sort of complicated. Were I to tell you much more, I would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that those who have played the game come to a variety of conclusions about the charges and her guilt or innocence of them (but no, she's not a witch-- though some of these same Puritans' relatives will also be involved in the Salem Witch trials toward the end of the century. Puritan life was rife with religio-legal drama).

John Cotton plays a critical role in this game-- a noncommittal teacher whom all look up to, both pro and anti-Anne members of the General Court want to win his favor. Cotton is also in a precarious position within the conflict, not wishing to abandon any of his admirers or to upset the power players on the General Court. Historically, Anne is banished; Cotton escapes unscathed, becoming more conservative over the rest of his life. I give these historical details and more in the postmortem to the game (facts about the fate of their character which any student could look up were they inclined, so I'm not giving away any trade secrets here). During this postmortem, a clear theme emerges-- these people, and their descendants, have their mitts all over American history, especially on the East Coast. John Winthrop, Governor and main authority in the General Court, is perhaps the most famous example-- still quoted by a wide variety of politicians, he originated the "cittie on a hill" phraseology which has inspired many American-exceptionalist ideas. His son founded Connecticut and John Kerry is one of his notable descendents.

John Cotton has similarly notable descendents, particularly Cotton Mather, John Cotton's grandson who is known for his New England ministry and his historical writing (and, those darn Salem Witch Trials again!) This sign brings in another connection-- Eleazar Mather, cousin of Cotton Mather, was Northampton's first minister.



This tidbit suggests the reach of some of these families, a stark contrast to the way you meet them in the game. Despite some of their achievements and connections, or their apparent control over the colony, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay in 1637 are a small group in a tenuous position-- they're afraid of England; of attack by local Pequots, with whom they've recently warred; of sin, which lives within themselves; of one another, whose indiscretions threaten to bring down the wrath of God or England upon all of them.

Another connection to the problems and aftermath of the Hutchinson trial is the "Halfway Covenant" promoted by this church's second minister, Solomon Stoddard.



Previously, to join Puritan churches, parishioners had to stand before the assembly and tell them how they came to know that they were part of the elect few who were saved. During the Anne Hutchinson game, a third of the students play the roles of newcomers to the colony, who have to be admitted to the church before they can vote on the Anne matter in the General Court or pursue their own individual goals effectively. They do so through their comportment, the hope that no one can discredit them, and, most importantly, writing and presenting a conversion narrative. As illustrated by Hutchinson's case, the churches' main concern was restricting membership to "visible saints" who were definitely elect.

For example, here's John Winthrop's conversion narrative. Note the detailed chronological retelling of one's life experiences; the confession of one's sins; changing behavior as evidence of becoming sanctified ("the great change which God had wrought in me", pp 6) and yet the lasting struggle with sin ("continual conflicts between the flesh and the spirit", pp 12); yet, ultimately, assurance that he is elect ("when I have been put to it by any sudden danger or fearful temptation, the good spirit of the Lord hath not failed to bear witness to me, giving me comfort, and courage in the very pinch", pp12).

Fast forwarding thirty years or so, the exclusivity of the church resulted in reduced membership and thus a reduced power over public life. The Halfway Covenant allowed children of church members to be baptized into it (though as only "half," not full, members) without having had a conversion experience. This would increase church membership and address the issues that arose with second and third generations of Puritans, who wanted their children baptized within the church but often lacked a dramatic conversion to share. John Wilson, Pastor of the Boston Church at the time of the Hutchinson trial, supported the Halfway Covenant when it was proposed-- meaning that the arduous process that immigrants to the colony were forced to go through was downgraded in importance for the children of baptized members.

Why is this interesting? The church and sign showcases the reach of ideas and families across space and time (and suggests the familial ties between different New England cities), and illustrates the way a single place can echo to a variety of disparate, nationally relevant ideas.

Questions? Comments? Send them my way!

Related links:

Description of the Anne Hutchinson game on the Reacting site.
Winthrop's narrative at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Winthrop's journal at archive.org.

What's History: Little Local Sources on Big Cold Days

This is it, the Big Cold Day. We've been talking about it for a week. As predicted, Midwestern temperatures lost so many degrees it seems like sheer irresponsibility; the wind chill has it feeling like -40 F outside in Champaign today (not, of course, that I have felt it for myself, as I'm afraid to let in the cold air and never get warm again). Everyone here is hoping their furnaces keep kicking for the duration and fervently instructing one another to "stay warm." 

In honor of the occasion and because I definitely don't have anything else to do (ha), I thought it might be interesting to do a little investigation into the history of notably cold weather in these parts, using a nifty little database called the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. I wanted to see the papers in the immediate vicinity, to link as closely as possible the weather of today to other past Big Cold Days , and see if there was anything useful for a class assignment that might come out of this sort of investigation. The great thing about this collection is that, unlike many library resources I use to do research, it's free to use for anyone without any sort of login, so follow along if you'd like! 

As I settled in I ran into an interesting little research problem. There were four collections involved in this project: the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, which has the local papers I was hoping to examine; Farm, Field, and Fireside, which holds agricultural papers from around the country; American Popular Entertainment, full of entertainment industry trade journals; and Collegiate Chronicle, students newspapers from a wide variety of postsecondary institutions. I'm sure these last three all have something to say about weather, but I wanted to know only about the closest regions' papers, so I needed to look only at the first collection. I could browse through titles in each of these collections, but the search didn't seem to let me narrow to a collection-- I could choose to confine the search to one or more paper titles (though only more than one if they were next to each other in the alphabetical list), so I just compared the list from here to the list of options here and searched within a few that looked promising. 

I decided the word "coldest" was the most likely candidate to look for in the papers I examined-- The Champaign Daily News, the Daily Illini, and the Urbana Daily Courier. Below are a few favorites-- all titles link to the originals, with PDFs available of the full issues. 

Amongst two pages of reporting on a tragic 1903 theatre fire in Chicago, this brief article adds a bit of levity. D.C. Long, a local Civil War Veteran who appears a few other times in the Urbana paper, claims that exactly forty years ago was the coldest in the history of the nation, with animals killed by the chill. "I don't know what the thermometer registered, but it was cold, I know that," he concluded. 

"Cold Forty Years Ago Today," Urbana Daily Courier, Jan. 1, 1904.

These stories appeared a page apart in a 1929 issue of the Daily Illini. I like the focus in each on the role of the "weather man"-- the AP reporter accords him a lot of power! 

"Brrr! Thermometer Dropped to 8 Below Yesterday Morning" and
"Weather Man Has Touch of Kindness," Daily Illini, Dec. 4, 1929. 

This 1959 report of an unusually cold November features a student giving a far better demonstration of proper scarf usage than her modern counterpart distributed by the University of Illinois yesterday. 

"Winter Hits Area Before It's Due," Daily Illini, Nov. 18, 1959. 

It was a lot of fun sorting through these sources. I'll likely find a way to incorporate a similar activity into a history course, especially one on media or an intro to historical methods. The benefit is similar to unstructured research time, with more of a defined, if small, endgoal-- to figure out some connection to a modern event in the past. It's a nice practice run before students jump into trying to find sources for a large research project, with lots of directions to run in and few ways to really fail. It could also lead into a discussion of shifts and continuities in how the topic is discussed in the press-- how have we been informed about the current weather as compared to those informed of cold weather in the past, for example? How do the headlines present the story? 


Related Links: 
Some comparisons of recent stories on the Big Cold Day: Daily Illini, News-Gazette. And, if you're hungry, the modern Urbana Daily Courier. 

Some historical Illinois Weather Trivia for January. 

If you'd like to see more old newspapers freely available, check out Chronicling America at the Library of Congress, which features more varieties of newspaper than you can shake a stick at.

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.

What's History: In Praise of Extra Credit

Extra credit is the practice of the mission of this blog: connecting teaching history with everyday life. Today I was sending my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class some information about upcoming extra credit when this neat little observation struck me-- the reason that offering extra credit opportunities is so appealing to me, and why it in fact goes perfectly with the kind of history I try to teach. 

I've often been a bit mystified by the takes on extra credit I've seen floating around the Internet's education hubs. It seems that every teacher has a complicated relationship with extra credit, and they express it in a way which seems to go beyond a statement of method directly into a defense of their worthiness to mold inquiring minds.

There is a vocal contingent who find extra credit an exercise in grade inflation, gleefully proclaiming, "No Extra Credit for You." There are those who offer extra credit but seem compelled by this negative faction to argue its rigor, such as Deborah J. Cohan in her post for Inside Higher Ed. Cohan notes that her policy has changed; whereas years ago she did not offer extra credit assignments, she is now a regular user even though "it almost feels embarrassing to admit." Despite the fact that many instructors offer it in one form or another, it's also widely criticized; the general mood of the room is perhaps best summed up by a forum post in the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, which begins a query about what extra credit activities others recommend by saying, "I know that wise professors don't offer extra credit."

Detractors of extra credit suggest that it can encourage some to neglect the central requirements of the course in favor of the seemingly easier task of extra assignments. They point out that extra credit options can be inaccessible to those who have other obligations. And they are inordinately fond of bringing up hypothetical doctors and architects who passed their classes through extra credit and are thereby so lackluster at their job that you will wind up misdiagnosed/crushed by your house/generally, dead.

Each of these critiques have a basis in possibility, of course. Yet I think the benefits of extra credit not only outweigh the disadvantages, but also have positive effects for the class even beyond the people who actually receive the extra points. The way I approach extra credit highlights the values I find in history teaching as a whole-- making connections between what students are learning and the world around them, and using the information and skills of our classroom as tools to understand and approach other media, other people, other stories, other times.  

Permission to Engage

The most common extra credit options are related to attendance at events on or around campus. This makes particular sense, obviously, when the themes of the talk relate to the themes or content of the course-- hence, I will offer extra credit for attending and responding to the upcoming Lincoln's Body lecture (Spurlock, Thursday, 4 pm) as our unit on the Civil War approaches, but not a lecture on the history of dogs, much as I may wish to promote both events (if anyone knows of any upcoming canine-related programming, drop me a line).  I also like to incorporate some sort of written response for these events, both to encourage reflection on what actually happened at the talk and to avoid the awkward methods of establishing proof of attendance at such events.

The pessimistic reading of this sort of practice is that it is solely designed to boot attendance by strongarming grade-grubbing students into filling seats. The more people in attendance at events, the more "successful" events are. Some suggest that encouraging students to attend events should be unnecessary, as they should be doing those things of their own volition anyway. One commenter on Cohan's post claims that students' unwillingness to go to events of their own volition marks the "bankruptcy of education today." Those darn kids!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I want to offer an alternate reading, one that I've talked about before in thinking about how I structure assignments. In my post on assigning unstructured research time, I noted that doing so  "gives students permission to invest in the course in ways that many of them would like to do, but feel that they shouldn't." If one is duty-bound to work toward grades at the expense of all else, attending events related to course themes might feel like a needless luxury, an intellectual investment that will not pay off. This is not because students don't care about adding to their knowledge but because they are constantly forced to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of decisions that pull them away from other work. Adding some incentive to the event may help students justify their attendance in the face of many pressures pulling them in all directions.

Extending Class Themes 

Buzz Aldrin on the moon with an American flag, 1969. From BBC.com, "First Man flag row: How selective should Hollywood be with history?"

Most of the extra credit opportunities I assign extend what we have done in class and encourage applying familiar ideas in a new situation. Additionally, there's generally an aspect of connection to the world outside the classroom that informs these assignments. It's very similar to the purpose of this blog-- highlighting the connections between what we've talked about in class and what is going on outside of it.

For example, event-related opportunities allow students to explore ideas outside those you have time to cover in class-- ones that are connected, but not central to the core topics. The upcoming free screening of the historical fiction First Man promises to be an interesting extension of why the ideas about history and fiction we've been discussing have some everyday relevance, especially with the heated discussion surrounding its depiction of the American flag. It's an especially appealing choice for an extra-credit opportunity for Fiction and the Historical Imagination because it falls within themes of the course but outside of the time period-- making it truly "extra" in the sense that it encourages students to stretch what they already know into a new area and see what they can make of it. Students don't have to make this analytical leap, but if they want to think about a new application of these ideas, there's an opportunity, and an excuse, to do so. 

In the absence of fortuitously timed events, there are a variety of other ways to encourage connecting class ideas to matters of wider relevance. For example: After several days highlighting the role of maleficium in witchcraft trials in colonial New England, I realized that the Wikipedia entry for maleficium is woefully underdeveloped. I decided to develop an extra credit opportunity about this-- if anyone wanted to edit the page, improving its discussion of the topic and citing our course materials, they could receive points toward their weakest grade. 

What if no one does it?

As with anything else you decide to do in class, there's the danger of not getting buy-in. I don't find this a particularly compelling reason not to incorporate extra credit, though, because announcing extra credit opportunities like the ones I've described can further your goals for the course and benefit students even beyond the few who complete it.  

On the most basic level, announcing an event can inspire attendance even without completion of the assignment associated with it. I anticipate that many of my students will eventually see First Man and consider its relationship to our course whether or not they do so for this assignment. People who aren't sure they need the additional points might check out a suggested lecture just to see what they can make of it.  

Even when people don't attend the event suggested, knowing that it exists and has some connection to course themes encourages students to make connections between the class and broader issues. For example, noting that the author of a book you're reading is doing a local reading may suggest to students that the book has audiences outside of "people forced to read this for class." Non-event assignments, like Wikipedia editing, could have a similar broadening effect-- it encourages students to consider the limitations of Wikipedia and the ways in which they can use even a bit of knowledge to shape others' understanding, even if they ultimately decline to complete the edits.

Finally, like many other parts of my teaching, having extra credit assignments available is an indicator of particular standpoints on teaching and history. It suggests that I as a teacher value taking advantage of the learning opportunities that are around you, and that I have an approach to academic success which values flexibility and multiple chances to do well. It suggests that history is widely relevant and highly connective; that the skills and ideas you're working with can be usefully applied to other times, places, and topics; and that it might even be a decent way to spend a Thursday afternoon or a Monday night. These indicators communicate with all of my students, not just the ones that take me up on the extra points. 

Do you use extra credit, and how? Let me know! 

Related Links:

You know what other Wikipedia page could use some editing? The one for "extra credit." I'll offer extra credit on your blog-reading grade if you improve this. 
Incidentally, ColourPop promises you'll "look like 110% in this vivid orange-red" Extra Credit lipstick. (No, for some reason this is not a paid advertisement.)
Part of the weirdness of extra credit discussions is that everyone seems to have a different interpretation of what extra-credit is. Here, a post making a distinction between in-syllabus and ad-hoc extra credit (my approach is more "adding to the syllabus as I go).

What's History: Inappropriate Beach Reads and Finding New Perspectives

A woman reading near a pool. 

This New Yorker article has thoughtfully laid out the qualifications for a good summer read, but I must admit that I have frequently broken these reading rules at the beach and/or pool. I'll go for some classic beach fare, sure-- an issue of Cosmopolitan, a book with a beach on the cover or centered around a "crustacean-centric eating party." However, I have historically (haha) also heavied it up with some hefty reading for research, teaching, or--horrors-- exams. I once memorably spent a day at the beach in Santa Monica reading A Short History of Reconstruction.

This is not because I am so darn studious but rather because the pleasant setting makes work more palatable. If I'm going to read, why not do it outside? The change of scenery works wonders for my mood and often my concentration, and the weird timelessness of lounging beside pool or ocean often stirs my brain to come at ideas in a more patient fashion than it might otherwise. Don't worry, there's always a backup magazine nearby in case of emergency.

So recently I took this approach to new heights. I printed out pages of the Michigan Hospital School Journal that I've been using for dissertation research and read them in the pool while on one of those floaty things (yes, they got a little damp). I was pleased with the success of my method-- I took a few notes on the pages and got through the day's reading rather quickly.

The next day I came across an interesting letter in an issue of this Journal. The Journal was published by a convalescent home in Farmington during the 1910s-1930s which reported on the goings-on of the institution, but it also had wider appeal as a passionate call for the education and rehabilitation of children with physical disabilities. Among other material, the editor frequently included letters from all sorts of readers-- state officials, children at the hospital-school, members of other progressive organizations, and disabled adults expressing support and encouragement for the Journal and its mission. 

The letter that so caught my attention was from Percy Angove, State Supervisor of Industrial Rehabilitation, published in the Nov-Dec 1922 issue. He began his note by saying:

I am on my vacation and my greatest enjoyment at the present time is looking through and reading articles in my treasured bound volume of The Hospital School Journal. This is the greatest compilation of its kind or anything similar that I know of…

"My greatest enjoyment at the present time"-- strong words! What a glowing review of a periodical called The Hospital School Journal, and which frequently featured items I find dry, hard to plow through, or repetitive. Surely the Journal has brought me joy as well-- some of the calls to action that editor Joe F. Sullivan delivers are still stirring almost a century on-- but sheesh! I had a sudden image of Angove sitting on a porch overlooking a Great Lake, sipping iced tea and thumbing through his hardbound volume with delight.

I realized this was not such a dissimilar image from what I had been doing the previous day. The combination of the letter and the laid-back setting helped me see the Journal from a perspective other than the straightforwardly critical lens that serves as default. I tried to put myself in the shoes of this Progressive-minded man on vacation, enjoying his recreational reading, taking a week away from supervising industrial rehabilitation to sit and read a magazine which is, at it's heart, about children's orthopedic treatment.

When I came back to the Journal, I thought about what might make the magazine so joyful in Angove's mind. Certainly a shared pro-rehabilitation leaning between reader and material was at play, but with my new frame of reference I could also appreciate how light the material could be-- notes on picnics and parties, photos of happy children, short poems and tidbits, and reader letters on a variety of subjects, which are interesting in the way that reading someone else's correspondence can be. The language of most of the articles is pleasantly straightforward. And of course, as the publication hoped to drum up support for what they called "crippled children's work" as well as reconstructive surgery and training more generally, the Journal printed plenty of stories of satisfied customers-- happy children who had grown into employed, articulate adults. This was probably also part of Angove's enthusiasm, akin to the human interest stories and videos which still capture public attention and make us feel hopeful about people.

As teachers of history, we focus a lot of attention on teaching students how to read "like historians"-- from a scholarly, analytical mindset. However, reading like historians also involves reading like historical actors, pulling out not just what we can see in a text but also what might have stood out to the people who read it when it was first produced. Perhaps our teaching could incorporate this more explicitly-- not just asking "what would X group say about this document?" after all have read it but also encouraging students to read documents with a particular mindset. I aim to explore, in future, how to incorporate multiple methods of reading sources into classwork, looking not only for what the text itself is saying but what might have provoked interest, pain, or--yes-- greatest enjoyment of its early readers. 

Related Links:

For more on Sullivan and the Michigan Hospital-School, see Brad Byrom's work in Disability Discourse, Children with Disabilities in America: A Historical Handbook and Guide, and The New Disability History: American Perspectives.