Notes on Critical Analysis of History Teaching and Sources

Key Questions

• What should history teach?
• How do we evaluate competing visions of historical education across time?
• How do biases, power, and culture shape historical narratives and the teaching of history?
• How should we handle sources (primary, secondary, tertiary) in constructing historical understanding?
• How can deconstruction and critical analysis help us understand history more inclusively and accurately?

Two Perspectives on History Teaching (1925 vs. Engel & Ochoa)

• American Legion (1925) resolution on history teaching:
  • Must inspire children with patriotism.
  • Must tell the truth optimistically.
  • Must dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson.
  • Emphasizes success and moral growth through national pride.
• Engel and Ochoa (promoted more than half a century later):
  • History should confront students with important questions and problems for which answers aren’t readily available.
  • Should be organized around an important societal problem studied in-depth.
  • Should use data from multiple sources, including history, the social sciences, literature, journalism, and students’ firsthand experiences.
• Prompt for reflection:
  • Thinking back on your own lived experience, to what extent did your history lessons align with the American Legion viewpoint or with Engel & Ochoa?

Why Study History? The Role of Past in the Present

• Carl Sagan’s view: “you have to know the past to understand the present.”
• Purpose of knowing history:
  • Understand how past events shaped our society and continue to impact us today.
• Notion of objectivity in history:
  • Written history is not free from bias; dominant cultural norms and values shape the writing of history.
  • Dominant narratives often arise from people in power who control a given storyline.

Dominant Narratives, Discourses, and Culture

• Dominant discourses:
  • Patterns in which narratives occur within the dominant culture and how other perspectives are dismissed as irrelevant or unsophisticated.
• Culture:
  • Relates to a society’s beliefs, ideas, and practices at a given point in history.
  • Tied to commonplace attitudes, assumptions, and prejudices reflected in social hierarchies based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and other identities.
• Traditional US history bias:
  • Historically constructed largely from a white, male perspective.
  • People of color and women often played secondary roles rather than as powerful historical actors.
• Open possibility of multiple histories:
  • There are as many ways of writing and remembering history as there are diverse groups who live those histories.
• Critical stance:
  • As we examine sources and versions of history, we should deconstruct them to understand biases and power dynamics involved.

Deconstruction of Historical Narratives

• What does deconstruction mean?
  • Pay close attention to historical accounts and critically analyze how accurately a narrative describes an event within the limitations and biases of the author.
  • Look for gaps and question the authenticity by comparing with alternative or diverse accounts.
• Primary vs secondary vs tertiary narratives:
  • Primary sources: created at or near the time of the event by someone involved or connected to it.
  • Secondary sources: interpreted or analyzed events after the fact, using primary sources.
  • Tertiary sources: index or summarize other sources; good for background but not ideal as sole sources for a research paper.
• Understanding types of sources:
  • Primary sources include but are not limited to letters, objects, tools, clothing, art, diaries, photographs, eyewitness accounts, social media posts, videos, and news reports from the time of the incident.
  • Primary sources can be plenty (e.g., researching the history of a city yields many potential sources).
• Reliability and authenticity:
  • Primary sources can be compromised (e.g., copies of copies, translations, destruction, or reliance on a prior historian’s account).
  • Verification often requires tools from other disciplines (anthropology, biology, chemistry, ecology, geology, etc.).

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources in Depth

• Primary sources:
  • Objects (physical remnants): building fragments, road layers, pipes, trash, etc. They may reveal how people lived and how environments changed.
  • Human accounts: diaries, letters, photographs, archival films, newspapers, architectural plans, biographies, and even modern digital records (e.g., social media posts, viral videos, YouTube walking tours).
  • Collaboration across disciplines (archaeologists with historians, sociologists, engineers, anthropologists) to interpret material culture.
• Secondary sources:
  • Accounts of events created after the fact by someone not directly involved.
  • Build interpretations by using primary sources and other secondary sources; typical of what fills many history sections in bookstores and libraries; include footnotes and reference sections.
• Tertiary sources:
  • Index or summarize other sources; aim to provide background information rather than new interpretations.
  • Examples: textbooks and encyclopedias.
• Autobiography vs. Biography:
  • Autobiography: a primary source; a person’s own account of their life.
  • Biography: secondary source; someone else writing about a person’s life.

Applying These Concepts to Your Experience

• Revisit the initial questions about your own historical education:
  • What did you learn, and whose perspective did it primarily reflect?
• Deconstructing the question:
  • Consider that the American Legion emerged post-World War I as a veteran organization; at that time, women had just gained the vote, the military remained segregated, and Black servicemen faced unequal treatment.
  • The 1920s context involved ongoing imperial actions and colonial presence (e.g., in Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines).
  • These contexts may influence the kind of history the Legion would want taught (patriotism, optimistic narrative, alignment with national interests).
• This reflection demonstrates:
  • History is complicated by biases, motivations, and contexts.
  • Understanding history requires drawing on multiple sources, perspectives, and approaches to avoid a single, narrow narrative.
  • History is an ongoing process: new evidence, discoveries, and inclusive methods can change interpretations of even well-studied events (e.g., the American Revolution).

What Should History Teach? Final Reflection

• The opening prompt invites you to consider what history should teach:
  • Should it primarily inspire patriotism and moral lessons from failures, or should it engage students with unresolved questions and diverse perspectives?
  • Should teaching highlight dominant narratives, or actively deconstruct those narratives to include marginalized voices?
• Ethical, philosophical, and practical implications:
  • Balancing national memory and critical inquiry.
  • Ensuring inclusive representation of different groups and voices.
  • Providing students with critical thinking tools to evaluate sources and narratives.

Takeaways for the Module

• History is a contested field shaped by who writes it and for whom.
• Critical analysis and deconstruction help uncover biases, gaps, and power dynamics in historical narratives.
• Primary sources offer direct windows into the past but must be evaluated for reliability and context; secondary and tertiary sources help synthesize and contextualize, but they also carry interpretations.
• The study of history should connect to real-world relevance, ethical considerations, and ongoing scholarly refinement as new evidence emerges.
• Your own beliefs about what history should teach are part of an ongoing dialogue about memory, identity, and the responsibilities of education.

$1925$ and $1980$ are anchor years in the discussion of teaching history; think about how the values and power structures of those times influence what is considered desirable or necessary in history education. Consider how your own lived experience intersects with these visions and how you would design a history curriculum that is both truthful and transformative.