Islands in the Stream: Teaching History with Primary Sources
If history is, in the strictest sense, simply that which has occurred in the past then history is truly a vast and unfathomable ocean. From that time your great aunt fell down the steps at the family reunion (an episode in history) to the Storming of the Bastille (an episode in history) to the time a tree did, in fact, fall somewhere in an Albanian forest (and no one was around hear it), this is all history. God alone can know all of history. In order to teach history, then, it is obvious we must narrow things down just a bit.
Historiography is the science and art of writing about history. The scientific aspect of historiography urges writers of history to be cautious, to prove their claims, to work upon good evidence, to distinguish levels of certainty about their sources of information, and to try to be aware of their own biases when writing a given piece of history. As a science, historiographers should loathe propaganda and intentional slants on history. Just as a natural scientist should stick to recording his methods, materials, observations, and be conservative with his inferences, so should a good historiographer do the same. To claim as absolute that which cannot be proven by science is irresponsible and shameful among true scientists of every sort. It is always better to simply admit what we do not know than to assert more than we can reasonably demonstrate. One should avoid conjecture and stick to the facts and that which reasonably and logically follows upon those facts. One should be clear and delineate whenever he is stating an opinion or hypothesis as opposed to simple fact.
The artistic side of historiography comes into play by the mere act of selection. Just as a painter of realistic landscapes or portraits must begin by selecting his scene or subject to paint, so must the writer of history choose what he will and will not endeavor to capture about history with his words. The art of historiography is further manifest in the writer’s ability to capture well that which he has chosen to relate. Can he not only accurately convey the information he desires, but can he place that information into a flowing and sensible narrative without getting bogged down by the unnecessary? Can he delight his readers with beautiful words which are not too plain while also avoiding confusion based upon a need for overly flowery diction? Can he paint with words alone the scene of Normandy Beach and make his reader feel the reverberation of the increasingly violent plinking of the bullets as they begin to make contact with the landing boats drawing near to the German machine gun fire? In short, can he not forsake the scientific accuracy of historical writing while still drawing the reader into the fascination of historical events? Good historiography is always akin to resurrection as the writer makes something long gone live again before our mind’s eye.
There are, of course, many other things we could discuss in relation to writing histories. To what degree, for instance, is it appropriate to attempt to explain how one event caused another? Can this reasonably be done or proven and is it the job of the historian or the philosopher to try? I’ll not attempt anything so foolish as trying to decide all of this for you in a short article like this one, but these are worthy things to ponder on. For now it is enough to simply acknowledge the above basic truths concerning good history writing. It is highly desirable to read history written by people who love the truth more than their own opinion and we want to read history from people who have an artful method so that it is no drudgery to learn from them.
The subject matter of a piece of historiography can be either deep or wide. By deep I mean to say that a historian might pursue a very particular niche such as, say, the history of automobile manufacturing in Michigan. The more narrow the topic the more in depth one may go into it. Imagine the difference between writing a history of manufacturing automobiles in Michigan versus the manufacturing of automobiles in the United States or in the whole world. By limiting one’s scope one can say a lot more about a lot less. Again, it is like a landscape artist taking in a mountain top view of a whole forest versus coming up close to a particular tree and trying to paint the minutest details of that one tree. If one wants to write about the development of Western Civilization then he will have to take much broader strokes upon his canvas than if he tries to capture the history of Exeter in the second half of the 18th century.
Hopefully all I have said up to this point is clear enough and perfectly sensible. History is, to borrow a vulgarism, ginormous. Good history writing has a scientific base and an artful method. In choosing the subject of writing history one always has to exclude more than he includes (no matter what), but the more niche he chooses to be the more he must exclude. Contrariwise, the more broad the topic a historian chooses the more he must “brush over” many things without detail.
Now, I write all of this as a preface to what I would particularly like to address in this article. I want to discuss not so much the writing of history, but the teaching of history. In order to discuss teaching history, though, I deemed it helpful to be clear on what we mean by the term. When we teach history what we are really doing is selecting which works of historiography should be placed before our students. Unless we are committed to the exclusivity of the oral transmission of history, or unless we think history courses are best served by only watching documentaries, we must present our students with texts.
But which texts?
Before I answer this important question I want to clarify whose history education I have in mind in this article. I intend to address the teaching of history to students in grades 7-12 or roughly from 12 to 18 years of age. I do think that the collegiate level, and certainly graduate level, of studies in history should take on some different elements than what I am about to recommend, [1] but I want to discuss what may rightfully be called the general education which all people ought to receive. In other words, I am addressing the way history should be taught for those being given a foundational classical Liberal Arts education.
Somewhere along the way it became commonplace to teach history with textbooks. By textbooks I mean to refer to what is generally a large single-volume book covering some specified area of history. It might be an American history textbook, a Western Civilization textbook, or (much worse) a Social Studies textbook, [2] etc. Whether a given text book is good or bad, generally, depends on many things. I am not outright saying that all history textbooks are worthless or that one cannot learn a lot of true and good things from a textbook. For what it’s worth, if you just must have a history textbook, Spielvogel’s Western Civilization has much which is worthy of commendation.
The obvious positives of textbooks ought to be addressed first. When they are well written (many are not) they create a nice seamless understanding of history (or some part of it). Textbooks also, though typically expensive, are convenient because everything one needs for a class is all packaged together. Further, one can easily reach the cost of a textbook (or exceed it) by purchasing many smaller books in the place of the one volume all inclusive text. For these reasons (creating a seamless narrative of history, convenience of resources all in one place, and in some cases reduced cost) it’s not hard to see why textbooks became all the rage.
All of this being said, I believe it is highly ill advised to lean entirely on textbooks for a student’s primary history education. I offer two primary reasons for this claim. First, all historiography is biased (no matter how commendably a historiographer may attempt to account for and counteract his bias). Secondly, all historiography suffers from contemporary blindness.
To this first point, it is a simple fact that we are all deeply stained with certain biases. By biases I mean we have strong affections for some things and definite prejudices against other things. Some biases are perfectly legitimate. I have a bias for truth and against falsehood, and I don’t care who knows it. Some biases are not so good, such as a person who so prefers his own country and people to the point that he can admit nothing good whatsoever about any other country or people. I am a Christian and I have, therefore, a bias toward things which seem to support the truth and value of Christianity just as much as an atheist has a bias towards information that seems to support his own conclusions and a prejudice against that which undermines it. One’s bias does not necessarily mean their conclusions are wrong, but a person might tend to ignore (consciously or unconsciously) information that doesn’t seem to support their presuppositions if they are not very careful and very honest. Everyone is prone to this, religious or non religious, every nationality or ethnicity, everyone who has a personal interest in any matter whatsoever whether it be fiscal, emotional, religious, nationalistic, etc., etc. None of this, however, means that we cannot write excellent histories or that we cannot ever legitimately confirm our own biases by the facts. If we work to cultivate a love for truth first and foremost then we become correctable when our presuppositions are exposed to be false. If all our biases (or at least some of them) turn out to be the truth then we are vindicated. Some have complained that certain history books cannot be believed because they were written by people who had benefited from the claims made therein. It would be silly, however, to reject everything a person wrote on the basis that he or she actually believed it. Would you rather believe someone who tells you to believe something which they do not believe themselves? Nevertheless, biased we all are and it has an effect on the writing of histories.
To the second point, we are simply and unavoidably too close to our own time. We are quite wedded to the present moment. Though this is not a matter of bias or prejudice in itself, it is something which gives a fixed vantage point to our writing of history. Here I stand, I can do no other. No, really, it’s not a matter of the will, I can’t help it. Every moment that goes by puts me further away from every past event. Every time someone writes a new history about the Trojan War or the Kings of Rome or the Mayflower’s journey to the New World, they do so further away from that event in time than ever before. Not only do we have a growing void of time between us and events in the past, but we see them with contemporary eyes and interpret them with contemporary thoughts. We think like modern people. As C. S. Lewis pointed out in his essay On Reading Old Books, we actually share far more assumptions with our contemporaries than we might expect. Even our worst enemies, if they be contemporary enemies, see things much more like we do than people from 500 or 1,000 or 4,000 years ago would have. With all of our modern conveniences of transportation, electricity, and unprecedented access to information (I do not say wisdom), we live in a very different world and much of what we take for granted would be completely unknown and foreign to our ancestors.
You might well object, “Does not everyone in history also suffer from these same drawbacks?” In other words, everyone was contemporary in their own time and every human throughout history has had his biases. This is true, but the material point is that writers of the past did not share our contemporary vantage point and though some of their biases may have been the same or similar, many of them were also quite different. They had a whole different list of assumptions, political problems, economic concerns, daily routines, views on the metaphysical and natural makeup of the world, etc. In short, their biases and contemporary blindnesses can be seen by us today because we are apart from them and they, in a way, can penetrate our blindnesses and biases and see through us as well.
It is for this reason that we ought to adopt the process of teaching history through the reading of “primary sources.” Primary sources are simply old books. These books were written about many things. They were written about what was history to them then (though not as far removed to those events as we are now) and about what was contemporary to them at the time (though history to us now). By reading these old books we cut out the middleman, by which I mean the textbook authors. By reading primary sources we sacrifice some convenience and perhaps some seamlessness in our learning about history, but we gain unfettered and unadulterated access to the past without it first going through the filter of a contemporary scholar or group of scholars. Primary source reading takes us ad fontes (to the source). It allows us to encounter what has been said by past thinkers and to wrestle with their words and perspectives personally rather than being told by a third party contemporary what it all means.
We will, of course, find that these old books are full of biases and blindnesses of their own, but they won’t be the same biases and blindnesses we have. Not only will these books provide different perspectives than our own, but they provide different perspectives from each other as well. For we are as different in our situation from Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Cicero, Livy, Eusebius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and Shakespeare as they are to each other. None of them share the exact same vantage point of history and none of them share the exact same biases with each other or with us. In the reading of many vantage points through the study of primary sources we begin to gain a truer sense of history, what can truly be known and what cannot, than what we would gain if we only read what someone else tells us about these sources. Textbooks, by their very nature, are the boiling down of many sources and vantage points into one view of things from a contemporary perspective.
Even granting, for the sake of argument, all of the best intentions, methods, and skills to a history writer it must be noted that every time we write a history we synthesize various sources and pour them through the filter of our own contemporary understanding. So, when a history class uses a history textbook students do not have the opportunity to take in various and independent sources and come to a synthesis of their own about history, they must receive someone else’s ready made view and whatever biases and blindnesses they may have. But, let us be honest. Many times histories have been written with less than honorable intentions. Many times they have been written with malicious intent to control information, to shape a narrative, and to persuade people to believe something false for the advantage of some particular interest held by the writer (or commissioner) of the history. George Orwell has plenty to warn us about on this front and we can look at the practices of North Korea and China in our own day to see how strictly information can be controlled and how a whole people can come to believe falsehoods thereby.
We should not think this same kind of attempt to control the narrative of history cannot happen here in America or even that attempts have not already been made to do so to a certain extent. It can happen and it has been (or is being) attempted. How might we best be safeguarded from this kind of danger? All historiography involves bias, but the best defense to getting an unbiased view of history is to read primary source literature. This is not because primary sources lack bias, but because the biases are various rather unified. As the student reads the various and different vantage points throughout history he is allowed to process the disparity, find the grains of continuity, and construct a sincere narrative of history for himself without simply and passively receiving from a single authority “what history says.”
The primary sources and the events they record are islands of rock in the stream of history. Time demands that we cannot read everything and so we must pick and choose (and even this selectivity can bias the readers if we intentionally exclude views that we disagree with), but we have the fortunate recommendations of the ages. The Great Books are those which have survived the ages having been handed down by one generation after another because they have been found so valuable that their preservation and passing on was deemed essential to the good of posterity. What we read in our history classes should be representative of just these kinds of books, many and various, spanning the ages, biases of all sorts, perspectives of all sorts, recording events of all sorts. As we read them we find a surprising thing, namely, a conception of the depth and flow of history begins to form in our mind.
The Great Books are the common property of all people. They belong to YOU and to ME and to our children after us. By reading them, preserving them, sharing them, and discussing them we guard ourselves from the kind of naivete that has so often taken in unwitting fools who believe every modern claim about history and every attempt to “control the narrative.” Great Books readers are the right kind of ungovernable people. At least they are ungovernable when standing before unscrupulous and unjust men who would manipulate the masses to their own benefit.
A good curriculum of primary sources guarantees the student will encounter a great variety of times, cultures, religions, political theories, etc., and it promises to present students with many contrary ideas, contrary to each other and to their own thinking. That disagreement creates a demand in the reader to think, to weigh, to reason through and to conclude what is true based upon the evidence. Even more blessed than the contrary ideas of the Great Books are all the things that these many and various books agree upon, like all men are ultimately in pursuit of happiness, that some form of government is always necessary and any form is better than none, that war is always costly but some things are worth fighting for, etc., etc. As you march through the ancient kingdoms of Sumer and Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and Israel, on into the empires of Greece and Rome, and further yet into medieval and modern European states right down to early America, reading the best books ever written (those books which our ancestors made sure continued to exist another day so you could read them), you will find that you have developed a free mind and gained much in understanding.
We will never be done learning. Though we as teachers cannot put every worthwhile book in front of our students in just the few short years we have them with us we can instill in them the means and methods for discovery and give them a pattern of learning to follow for the rest of their lives. We can teach them where to go to gain wisdom and help them avoid becoming enslaved by modern manipulators.
The major detraction I hear against the primary source approach to teaching/learning history is that it creates gaps in a student’s understanding of history. In other words, the textbook approach creates a seamless narrative and the primary source approach is just like landing on islands in the stream [3], unconnected. I fully admit that there is some truth to this, but the greater truth is that all historiography is incomplete. All of it chooses countless things to leave out. We can spend the rest of our lives augmenting our historical knowledge (which is a blessing and not a curse), but it is better to have an incomplete view of history (as all views of history really are) than to be deceived by a seamless narrative which is not altogether true and/or which is biased in one particular direction. The former invites further inquiry, the latter entrenches the student into believing the textbook narrative is the only possible, and official, story of history.
In part we can counteract the problem of disconnectedness by constructing a simple timeline of historical events which gives students a structure to their historical investigation. Which events? It’s admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but let them be notable and dispersed somewhat evenly across history and let them serve as markers for the passage of time. Once this is done then students need but to continue to fill in more and more information and place it on the timeline where it goes. Never complete, always more to learn, always a new book with new information to place on the timeline, but sensible and connected allowing us to tell a true story of history even if never complete. History is never complete. Let us sacrifice completeness for competence, understanding, and thinking for oneself.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Study the Great Books and is republished here with permission.
Endnotes
[1] Primary sources should still play a vital role, but I would accept that there might be more of a mix of the philosophy of history and classes on historical investigation itself, etc.
[2] Can you think of a more ambiguous term than “social studies?”
[3] If you are singing a Bee Gees song right now…you might be old.
