President's Day
It’s Presidents Day here in the U.S. and a holiday for us at Schlager Group. Many of you have probably seen the news of the latest ranking of presidential leadership by 65 historians conducted by C-Span. No surprise that Lincoln is at the top (followed by Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Truman); at the bottom is James Buchanan. There has been a lot of interest in where George W. Bush would fall in this survey: he comes in as the seventh worst. I wonder how this position will change in future surveys?
Meanwhile, we continue to see a lot of traffic at our “milestone inaugural addresses” page over at MilestoneDocuments.com. I assumed that the traffic would fall to a more normal level pretty quickly after Obama’s swearing-in, but that’s not the case so far. It would appear that plenty of teachers and students are still studying the great addresses from the past.
I’ve spent some time this weekend going through various history periodicals, and I wanted to highlight two articles of interest. First, the February 2009 issue of the OAH Newsletter features an article by James Percoco titled “Doing What I Do.” Jim is the consulting editor for our forthcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders; in his spare time, he teaches history at West Springfield High School in Virginia, gives history education workshops, teaches part-time at American University, and leads history groups on overseas trips. The article offers an interesting glimpse at the busy life of our country’s best history educators. For Milestone Documents of American Leaders, Jim wrote eight detailed Teacher Activity Guides; although anyone with access to the print set (and free online database) will be able to get these guides for free, we will also make them available as an e-document for immediate download on Amazon.com, just as we did with the activity guides from Milestone Documents in American History.
In the January 2009 issue of Historically Speaking, the bulletin of the Historical Society, renowned historian Theodore K. Rabb has written an article titled “Teaching World History: Problems and Possibilities.” (Sorry: the article doesn’t appear to be available online.) Rabb remarks that although the teaching of world history at the middle school and high school levels has increased since the World History Association was founded in 1982 (in well over half the states, students must take one year of world history in order to graduate from high school), that teaching has encountered many difficulties. These problems include differing standards from state to state as well as poorly articulated and unreasonably ambitious goals. A fundamental issue is simply the enormity of it all: how do you possibly do justice to the vast sweep of history across multiple civilizations and eras in the short amount of time available? Not surprisingly, many secondary school world history courses become a mad dash through the highlights, one that never allows teachers to pause at any one place or time to truly engage their students. Rabb calls for a relaxing of the notion that every world history class must cover all of human history, saying “it is a chimera at best, and imposes a needless burden.” He continues:
Within an overall structure, there has to be room for a class to take off a week here and there in order to dig more deeply into Renaissance Florence or Ming Beijing, the encounters of conquistadors and colonists with Native Americans, or the golden age of Timbuktu. Unless the endeavors of individuals and peoples are exposed in some detail, it will be impossible to suggest why history can be so appealing.
Indeed, there are so many fascinating stories to tell from world history. We’ve encountered that same dilemma while putting the finishing touches on our entry list for Milestone Documents in World History. It’s good to see our leading historians and educators continually grappling with how to improve history education.