Wineburg And Gaddes: Historical Analysis

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One of the hardest things to do as a history teacher, especially at the high school level, is to get students to understand what it means to be “doing history.” It isn’t just to have facts and dates thrown at you to parrot back, but to come up with an understanding of what the people of that time were thinking and doing and why the document that is being analyzed even exists and what it did for this country, if not the world. In the books Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, and the Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, authors Sam Wineburg and John Lewis Gaddis, respectively, try to make sense of the field of history in several ways: As a body of knowledge, research field, political …show more content…
He states that “…history went beyond particular stories and names to achieve its highest aim…” before quoting Woodrow Wilson who said that history, “…endows us with the invaluable mental power which we call judgement.” Sadly, while this is a good quote, this is by the same man who believed what he saw in the film “Birth of a Nation” to be true. It is within the context of those “wars” that the debate became “so fixated on the question of ‘which history’ that we have forgotten a more basic question: Why study history at all?” (pp. 4-5) Further down the page, Wineburg asks other important questions: “What is history good for? Why even teach it in schools?” It is through his logic and reasoning that he answers, “…history hold the potential, only partly realized, of humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum…” and that “each generation must ask itself anew why studying the past is important, and remind itself why history can bring us together rather than – as we have most recently seen – tear us apart.” Each author shows in his own way how he has used his logic and reasoning in creating his approach and questions to be answered. The deeper understanding and answering of these questions comes in their approach towards evidence, which is also how the two differ in their

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