There’s more to history than facts and dates

I was talking with Myra Zarnowski the other day—you may know her from Making Sense of History (Theory and Practice, 2006)—the book that shows teachers how to use literature and hands-on experiences to get kids excited about history.

Zarnowski is chair of the Early Childhood Education department at New York’s Queens College, and she gave her students a copy of my article on the importance of putting things into context just as they were reading Diane Stanley’s biography of Michelangelo. The class, made up of elementary school teachers, wasn’t buying my argument, or the Stanley book. The reason? Inasmuch as they like history, or biography, at all, it is as pure story. And if these students had any interest in context, they’d rather it be relegated to a note at the back of a book.

I suspect that those educators while growing up probably had poor history teachers, dullards who reduced everything to chronology, just names and dates. Truth is, the whole point of a history book for readers of any age—the facts, dates, narrative hooks, stories and incidents, crafted characters, and art—is solely to make readers better understand the context. The history isn’t the person, his character, or experiences. As the saying goes, the past is a foreign country. History is getting to know the language, customs, and culture of a distant locale, so you can see it as the natives do—or see yourself differently through what historian Barbara Tuchman describes as a “distant mirror.”

Thinking like a historian is understanding the past in its own terms. For young readers, of course, we must introduce the facts of the past, the very existence of a past with different givens and assumptions. You can’t begin to think in medieval terms until you know about knights and castles, serfs, and priests. But none of that matters unless the reader also begins to see that period anew, is at home in the context, and sees Michelangelo embedded in his time.

How can you not find it fascinating to enter into other worldviews and different experiences? First, there’s the cool detective work that’s involved, which is like solving a very interesting math problem. That is, you have some terms that you know (geography, chronology, clothes, weapons, and the foods they had available) and others that you do not (what they believed, how they thought, and how they experienced the world). The logical challenge, the detective work, is in solving the equation, filling in the missing blanks. Then comes the satisfaction of knowing, of immersion, of feeling you can swim in a different sea. You can actually see some part of their world through their eyes. You are literally traveling in time.

Fact-checking is crucial because it’s pretty easy to get history wrong. My son Sasha and I just read the old Jean Fritz/Paul Galdone book, George Washington’s Breakfast (Turtleback, 1984). It was terrific. It’s about a little boy, George W. Allen, who shares the same name and birthday as George Washington. When Allen tries to figure out what Washington ate by going to Mount Vernon and communing with the spirits of the past, he gets only vague impressions. But through diligence and luck, he finds the answer in a book from Washington’s time. The facts are just the beginning, precisely as vocabulary is just the start of knowing a foreign language. Allen realizes that the hoecakes Washington ate weren’t very filling, so he begins to wonder what the first president ate for lunch. Young Allen was becoming a historian.

For all the glories of story, readers shouldn’t be satisfied with just historical fiction. History offers more than that. History asks you to step outside of your own time, into another context.