SchlagerBlog

I have just finished reading part 2 of William Manchester’s famous biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion: Alone, 1932-1940. As the subtitle suggests, it covers the years leading up to Britain’s involvement in World War I. These were years when Churchill was a political has-been, a powerless MP who was virtually the sole voice arguing that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany could not be negotiated with, that Britain needed to shore up its defenses and military forces quickly, that his country faced a grave danger. By the time the book closes, Churchill has just become prime minister, Germany has declared war on Britain, and the country’s battle for survival has been truly joined.

It’s a terrific book, popular history at its best: witty, engrossing, page-turning. I’ve read plenty about this period in the past, but still I learned a lot that was new to me. For instance, I don’t think I had ever quite realized just how widespread the appeaser viewpoint and policies were among the political and cultural establishment (including the press), and how lengthy the capitulation to Nazi Germany’s repeated aggressions and power-grabs.

As for Churchill himself, I learned much that I hadn’t known, including one huge surprise: He supported himself in these years by working as a freelance writer! His high profile, long experience, and literary gifts made him a sought-after newspaper columnist in the 1930s, and he also toiled away at large-scale book projects, including a massive historical reference work, the 4-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He wrote prolifically, partly because he wanted to, but partly because he had to earn money to support his lavish lifestyle and costly country estate, Chartwell. Manchester recounts how Churchill did most of his writing late at night, after saying goodnight to his usual assortment of dinner guests. His secretaries and researchers would stay up to assist him into the wee hours of the morning. Amazingly–in part because he needed the money–he worked this way even after he joined the War Cabinet of Neville Chamberlain and was beset by duties and responsibilities on all sides.

Chamberlain’s writing prowess got me to thinking about some great American leaders who could wield a wicked pen. Two that come to mind are Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.  The entry on Roosevelt in Milestone Documents in American Leaders shows that he was as prolific in his own way as was Churchill:

Notwithstanding a multitude of grand accomplishments in the realm of public service, a very active family life, a variety of recreational passions, and truly voluminous reading, Roosevelt astonishingly managed over a relatively short lifespan to write approximately thirty books, many hundreds of articles and speeches, and more than one hundred thousand letters.

Among these was a four-volume history of the American frontier from 1769 to 1807, The Winning of the West. (Note, you can download the entire 4-volume set for free to your Kindle, and possibly in other ebook stores as well.) In other words, like Churchill after him, Roosevelt managed to create his own multivolume history reference sets.

In today’s world, it’s almost inconceivable that any president will end up producing the kind of voluminous writings that a Churchill or Roosevelt did. Heck, I’m in the publishing business, and even I can’t imagine taking the time to write a huge reference work all by myself, despite the fact that my life is nowhere as busy as those of the great statesmen of the past. Of course, like so many modern workers, I write all day, every day: emails, instant messages, blog posts, Twitter posts, Facebook updates, etc. But most of those won’t be saved (thank goodness), and that output will likely never result in the kind of sustained body of work that we saw from previous generations.

Do you think we will ever again see a president or prime minister who produces a vast output of long-form writing? If not, will civilization be the worse for it? One thing that Manchester points out when describing Churchill writing feverishly about Oliver Cromwell or the Norman conquest while juggling critical decisions about how to thwart the German war machine is that Churchill’s literary work was not a distraction from his day-to-day responsibilities. Rather, studying and writing about those historical events helped him to clarify his perspective about contemporary matters. It may be that devoting oneself to the exhausting work of writing about something is, in the end, more useful than merely reading about it. If so, then indeed it may be our collective loss that our political leaders no longer write about history.

As we knew it would, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) last week approved new standards for the state’s social studies curriculum. I am hardly alone in lamenting a blatantly ideological process designed to influence what Texas kids learn for the next decade. (Here’s another good post. Also see the #savehistory hashtag for recent tweets on this subject.) It’s obvious that the board members who voted for the changes sought to imprint their side of today’s conservative/liberal culture clashes on the next generation of kids. I am embarrassed and ashamed of our state, and I say that as the owner of the kind of 21st-century, information industry small business that Texas tries so hard to attract.

In my last post on this subject, I wrote that this battle over textbooks obscured some bigger problems in public education in the state. In a comment to the post, Ed Darrell, fairly enough,  took me to task for not taking a formal stand against the SBOE’s efforts. Few people have done more than Ed to fight the good fight against the SBOE’s politicization of Texas science and social science standards. Even though it’s obvious that no comment by me would have stopped the passage of these new standards, I take Ed’s criticism seriously. But the question now becomes: what now? How do those of us who disagree with the new standards–educators and publishers alike–respond in such a way to influence what and how our kids learn in this new environment?

One way, perhaps the chief one, is to follow a nascent trend that is already at work among influential educators around the country: deemphasize the textbook and move toward a document-based, inquiry-based system of learning. Let the kids examine primary sources of all sorts, construct their own questions about how to think about past events, and work toward their own conclusions. If the SBOE thinks that Joseph McCarthy has gotten a raw deal from historians (and cursed “liberal textbooks”), then let kids examine the documentary evidence themselves, from all sides. There are so many primary sources now available on the Web, and so many interesting sites and engaging tools, that this would be the right choice even if there were no political shackles being placed upon teachers and kids by an irresponsible SBOE. It’s simply a better and more effective way to teach and learn history.

So, as a publisher of history education materials, we are asking ourselves the obvious related question: How do we provide tools and materials to support this new form of history education? With MilestoneDocuments.com, we have only begun to answer the question. We’ve gathered, culled, curated, and analyzed a range of primary sources from US and world history (yes, including SBOE pet subjects from cultural conservatives), and our various teacher’s activities and study questions for students all emphasize a “compare/contrast” style of learning. Later this summer we’ll be rolling out new teaching tools for history educators at our site. But in general, we are thinking day and night about where we go from here, and we couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities and challenges in front of us.

Now, I know that it’s naive to think that the traditional top-down textbook/lecture environment is going to end anytime soon. Most public schools in Texas (and elsewhere) will continue to use this teaching style for the foreseeable future.  The damage done by the SBOE is real, and its impact on our kids will be felt. Nonetheless, we have to find ways to minimize this damage, and I am optimistic that the changes already happening in history education can do just that.

Are there other ways that you see to prevent partisan intrusion in educational standards, whether it’s from the right or the left? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve decided to formalize a trend that has begun to dominate my (all-too-frequent) blog posts. Rather than writing about reference industry news and issues, I have been increasingly focused on education and classroom items, especially as they relate to using technology in the classroom. As a result, the new subtitle for this blog: “History. Education. Technology.” won’t surprise any of you. You will also notice some new links in the blogroll.

This evolution mirrors what is happening in our company. While our foundation and core have been in reference publishing, we are increasingly devoting time and energy to educational publishing via our Milestone Documents website. How do we help history educators teach? How do we help students learn? What new tools can we provide to improve history education and to assist the community of passionate teachers and historians? These are the questions that are occupying more and more of our time at Schlager Group, so it’s only natural that they should find their way into my blog posts.

A key word here is “technology.” Just as educators at all levels are struggling to figure out how to integrate technology tools into the classroom to enrich and improve the learning experience, we at Schlager Group are working hard to figure out how to adopt and deploy many of these same technologies in order to serve history teachers and students. This is no easy task. Like so many publishing companies, ours was built on a love of content, and it has been staffed by humanities grads who are steeped in the finest editorial tradition. This has allowed us to turn out award-winning materials of which we are rightly proud. At the same time, however, we have lacked the technical chops to properly position ourselves for the publishing revolution that is in full swing all around us.

To solve this problem, we have sought the expertise of others who can lead us into the future. These include Vector Media Group,  which has built a wonderful new platform for MilestoneDocuments.com and is helping us to refine our vision for the site even now. They also include River Valley Technologies, which has a long tradition in the scholarly journal marketplace but is now branching out to assist us in myriad ways. The company is based in India, but its director, Kaveh Bazargan, is based in the U.K. (I have seen the image of the bald, jet-setting publishing executive, and it isn’t me.) Through associations like these, we are fine-tuning, redirecting, and even revolutionizing our vision for our future.

That’s not to say that we have turned our back on the reference universe or the libraries and librarians that we love so much. Far from it. Even now, we are just days away from the publication of our next multivolume reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, and deep in the trenches of producing a new set for the fall, Milestone Documents of World Religions. Like so many publishing companies, we are finding that we must operate in many spheres, and on many platforms, at once.

I do hope to write more frequent (and more interesting) blog posts, although I’m sure many of you have read that same sentiment on more blogs than you can count. It shouldn’t be difficult, given how many interesting things are happening at the intersection of history, education, and technology.

Today, for a brief moment, I considered making a public comment to the Texas State Board of Education about their proposed social studies curriculum changes, which will presumably be voted on in May. After all, as the owner of a Dallas-based small business that publishes educational materials for history students and teachers, I have a vested interest in these changes for a number of reasons. I care about the history that gets taught to our kids. I care about efforts to politicize teaching standards. And, let’s be blunt: as a CEO engaged in the capitalist free-enterprise pursuit of profit, I have to make sure that our publishing efforts correlate to the social studies standards of a huge state like Texas. That would be true even if we weren’t based in Texas.

However, the urge passed quickly. As I considered posting a public comment to the SBOE, I realized that not only would any such comment be made in vain (the SBOE certainly isn’t going to listen to someone like me on this matter; my company is far too small and inconsequential for me to make a dent in the cacophony surrounding this debate), but more importantly I realized that the battle obscures a larger problem: our public school system–and our society–is failing miserably to adequately equip our students for the future.

Let’s take one example of the proposed amendments to the standards, the one that wants to make sure high school students are able to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” Now, frankly, I think this is a ridiculous addition. While the so-called conservative resurgence is interesting from a political standpoint, I hardly think it’s as important as the committee seems to think. That said, does requiring students to learn about these items do them harm? No, in fact, I don’t. Will learning about the conservative revolution indoctrinate our kids and turn out generations of George W. Bush-loving, National Review-reading patriots? Don’t make me laugh. That may well be the ultimate goal of the committee, but any such effort is doomed to failure in our open, information-overloaded, Internet-era society. Texas students learning under these standards are no more likely to worship at the throne of Phyllis Schafly than they are to swear eternal allegiance to Malcolm X or Mao Zedong.

But more than this, I think the debate obscures the true educational crisis in our society. When the dropout rate is above 30% (well more than 50% in poor, big-city schools in places like Dallas), what difference do a few items in a 42-page list of standards make? By almost every standard, our high schools are being outperformed by those in virtually every other industrialized country. Our system is tied to the past, built to turn out generically educated kids for a 19th-century agricultural society.

I suppose it’s a truism that older generations think standards were tougher when they were growing up, that kids learned more. Still, my own anecdotal evidence leads me to that same conclusion, flawed though it probably is. When we hire entry-level editors just out of college, we often get hundreds of recent graduates applying for a single position. We pick the cream of the crop to interview, and as part of that process we give them a brief exam to test their knowledge of history and current events. The results are always shocking, in a bad way.

Plenty of observers have noted that the hue and cry about Texas history standards influencing the rest of the country because of the state’s pull with textbook publishers is probably overblown. Others have argued that changes in the current era, textbooks are becoming less and less important. I agree with both positions.

Thus, while I lament the stupid political games that the SBOE is playing, I think we’ve taken our eye off the larger picture. We have bigger fish to fry.

With the world’s attention focused on Haiti in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, we are making available for a limited period of time an entry from our forthcoming reference set Milestone Documents in World History: “Constitution of Haiti (1801).” This article discusses the history of Haiti, the slave revolt that became a revolution, and the creation of a constitution in 1801 that is a landmark on many levels. Although the constitution didn’t have a long life as a governing document, it was tremendously important, as it “launched the process of overthrowing European colonial rule in the Americas–rule that extended back some three centuries to the decades after Christopher Columbus’s historic voyage to the New World.” Read more.

As a publisher focusing on history materials, we are always on the lookout for news items that point back to some of the primary documents we feature in our reference sets. An upcoming movie that is getting a lot of attention is Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, about Nelson Mandela urging the South African rugby team to win a championship and help unify the nation in the wake of the end of apartheid. Mandela is, of course, a titanic figure on the world stage from the latter part of the twentieth century. In my mind (and I’m hardly alone in this), his achievement in leading South Africa away from a bloodbath of revenge and reprisal following his release from prison and election to the presidency is nothing short of astonishing. It’s no surprise, then, that his 1994 inaugural address is included in our forthcoming Milestone Documents in World History. The address is a microcosm of the mindset that Mandela brought to his task as president: healing, forgiveness, building toward the future.

“The time for the healing of wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us.”

In his analysis of Mandela’s inaugural address, our contributor Christopher Saunders draws some interesting parallels between Mandela’s address and Barack Obama’s inaugural address. As Chris notes: “When Obama delivered his inaugural address, many commentators in South Africa referred it to a ‘Mandela moment’ and reminded their readers of Mandela’s speech.” Readers who want to study our complete analysis of Mandela’s inaugural address can do so upon publication in a few weeks, provided their library purchases the set. If that’s not the case, readers will be able to download the analysis at MilestoneDocuments.com.

Another historic document that is in the news this week is the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, which broke the final Native American land holdings into individual parcels and essentially completed the dispossession of native landholders. This week,  the U.S. government announced that it had agreed to pay $3.4 billion to settle a longstanding lawsuit over its mismanagement of Indian land trusts–mismanagement that goes back to the Dawes Act in 1887. Anyone studying the history of land struggles between the U.S. government and American Indians should examine the Dawes Act. The full text can be read at MilestoneDocuments.com, and readers can also download our expert analysis for immediate access as well.

This kind of current events tie-in is soon going to get a major boost from us. As we move closer to the relaunch of the dramatically overhauled MilestoneDocuments.com, we’ll be starting a new continuous updating effort that will help readers stay up to date with historic documents in the news as well as new ones that are appearing. This effort will bring a fresh, continually updated face to our Web site and give educators a useful new tool with which to help students explore and understand the past.

Over the weekend, Apple gave quick approval to our newest apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Obama Speeches and Analysis and Lincoln Speeches and Analysis. Each app costs $1.99. In each case, we offer the full text of 4 iconic speeches along with complete expert commentary of the speeches by the Lincoln scholar Paul Finkelman (also the executive editor for our Milestone Documents series of reference books) and the presidential historian Chester Pach (writing about Obama). There are all sorts of cool features with these apps, from note-taking to highlighting to e-mailing to auto-scrolling. Learn more about them at the App store or in iTunes. Of course, both Lincoln and Obama are also included in our U.S. Presidential Speeches app (available in $.99 and $9.99 versions).

Teachers everywhere are gearing up for the start of the new school year. Judging from the tweets I’m seeing from all the history teachers I follow on Twitter, technology is a big concern. What tools should we incorporate into the classroom? How do we engage students in Web-based research? How do we interact with other educators around the globe and learn from what they are doing? From Google Docs to Web-based syllabi to Twitter and Facebook, educators are spending significant time and energy on finding ways to transform the classroom experience for their students and for themselves. Of course, I recognize that teachers who use Twitter are by default likely to be the most interested in using technology to further classroom instruction (”tech ed”).  Still, it’s clear that these educators are the pioneers in a trend that is irreversible. The strategies that they develop in tech ed will eventually be adopted by virtually all teachers everwhere. Technology is only going to be more ubiquitous in our lives as time goes on, and–just as crucial–students will increasingly demand an educational experience that is infused with technological tools and possibilities.

Because we are in the midst of reimagining how we deliver our own content to teachers and students via the Web (I’m referring to the site redesign that is in progress for MilestoneDocuments.com, and the iPhone apps we are developing), I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. And it seems that everywhere I turn these days, other people are thinking and writing about it as well. The article in this month’s Fast Company magazine about how “edupunks” are reinventing higher education through the use of online learning tools at very low cost has gotten a lot of attention in educational and technology circles. Likewise, history educators far and wide are blogging about how they are using technology (see The History Teacher’s Attic and Thinking in Mind for just 2 examples) in new and innovative ways. As often happens, a few select voices are making an outsized contribution. Witness Russell Tarr, a U.K. educator whose Active History site is innovating with gaming and other social Web tools and who has almost singlehandedly built an international networkof history educators via Twitter. (Just search on the #historyteacher hashtag in Twitter to see what I mean.)

Of course,  all the technological bells and whistles mean nothing if student achievement and learning aren’t also being transformed. As the educational consultant Peter Pappas pointed out in this blog post from last month:

“Learning must engage student in rigorous thinking at higher levels of Bloom - analyzing, evaluating and creating.”

Helping students with those very things–analyzing and evaluating primary sources as a way to better understand history–is our entire focus with our Milestone Documents series of reference books and MilestoneDocuments.com. And there is no doubt that in many classrooms around the country, students and educators are engaging with exactly this kind of higher-level learning process. However, far too many classrooms are nowhere near this ideal, either. Recently, managing editor Andrea Betts and I visited an inner-city Dallas high school recently and saw the hallway walls lined with simple posters that the students had created. There were posters about the Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education, and other major primary documents from U.S. history. “This is great to see,” we thought at first. But then Andrea asked the question: “Why are high school students spending their time making posters? Why aren’t they writing lengthy papers (or even short ones, but a lot of them), putting together sophisticated presentations, and the like?” We don’t know that some of this wasn’t happening, but my gut tells me that it wasn’t. I suspect that the “rigorous thinking at higher levels” that Peter Pappas referred to in his blog post was far from the minds of the teachers and administrators at this school. They were probably more focused on keeping kids in school (the dropout rate at the school was above 50%) and imparting some basic level of knowledge hoping that more kids might pass the state exams.

Which brings me back to the use of technology in the classroom. If ever the moment was ripe for a paradigm shift in educational instruction methods–at all levels of learning–it is now. The Internet, social media, and open source tools are indeed revolutionizing entire sectors of society and business (one example: publishing). How do we use them to reinvent history education in particular, and education in general? Is there a way to use them to close the achievement gap for the worst-performing schools and students? And where is the innovation going to come from–will it come from inside the public school system, from teachers, from charter schools, from new forums for online learning?

Certainly I don’t have the answers to these questions. But it’s a hopeful sign to see so many stakeholders thinking about these issues. Our kids deserve a better educational experience than they have been getting.

Arnold Markoe, the editor in chief of the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, sent me the text of a wonderful letter by Harry S. Truman to Paul Hume, music critic of the Washington Post. Hume had made the mistake of criticizing Truman’s daughter, Margaret. Can anyone imagine a modern president writing anything so angry and rash?

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

Dec. 6, 1950

Mr. Hume:

I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come
to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer
pay.”

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he
could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was
in the back section of the paper you work for it shows
conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your
ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new
nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter
below!

Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope
you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection
on your ancestry.

H.S.T.

We are about a week away from publication of our second title, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. The mad dash to the finish line partially explains my silence on this blog over the past few weeks. Today I’m flying to Newark for a sales presentation about the set to our distributor, Salem Press. It’s a great opportunity to offer my vision for the set and the series in general, and it’s a good excuse to brush up on my PowerPoint skills.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some work to get the data for American Leaders in final, pristine XML shape for the electronic database that purchasing libraries get for free, Salem History. (And big news on this front: we’re offering an exclusive online article about Barack Obama’s speeches and writings for those libraries that buy the print set.) While doing that, I’ve realized that there are a number of April birth anniversaries for people covered in our set. Yesterday (April 22), for instance, was the anniversary of Robert Oppenheimer’s birth. (It was also the anniversary of George Washington’s influential Proclamation of Neutrality , which was our Doc of the Day at the Milestone Documents Blog.) Today is the anniversary of the births of both James Buchanan and Stephen A. Douglas, while Saturday is the anniversary of William Brennan’s birth. Next week sees birth anniversaries for Ulysses S. Grant (April 27) and James Monroe (April 28), while we’re just past the anniversaries for folks like Colin Powell (April 5), Allen Dulles (April 7), Frances Perkins (April 10), Henry Clay (April 12), Thomas Jefferson (April 13), and Roger Sherman (April 19).

We are in the early stages of a badly needed site redesign for MilestoneDocuments.com, and one of the things the redesign will accomplish is integration of the content from American Leaders with the content already in place from Milestone Documents in American History. And, above all, we will move closer to making the site an essential stop for information about famous primary documents in U.S. and world history. There is so much exciting stuff happening around the use of primary sources in the classroom, and we look forward to being a bigger part of that conversation in the months and years to come. Stay tuned for more news about our site redesign and new product offerings for students, teachers, and libraries.