Historical Thinking and Historical Empathy

1
Historical Thinkingand Historical Empathy
2
Historical Thinking is. . .

• Not
• Recall
• Mere reenactment
• Mere process or method with no facts
• Instead it is
• Question-driven
• Analytical
• Applied knowledge
• Evidence-based interpretation

3
To quote Bruce Lesh

• History is about the debate between competing
  interpretations of events, individuals, and ideas
  of the past based on the utilization of
  historical evidence.
• Bruce Lesh, Why Wont You Just Tell Us the
  Answer? Teaching Historical Thinking Grades 7-12
  (Portland, ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2011), 4.

4
Essential Skills

• Posing historical questions/framing historical
  problems
• Establishing significance
• Correlation from disparate sources
• Sourcing
• Contextualization
• Citingsupporting claims with evidence
• Critical engagement with the other side
• Recognizing limitations to knowledge

5
Historical Empathy is NOT

• Putting students in positions where they will
  have the same beliefs or experience the same
  emotions experienced by people living in the
  past.
• An exercise in imagination over
• Being (imagine you are an Apache warrior)
• Identification (identify with Adolf Hitler)
• Sympathy (sympathize with victims of slavery)
• Being the person in the past

6
Historical Empathy IS

• Understanding the past as making sense in light
  of the way people saw things.
• Asking why did an individual or group of people,
  given a set of circumstances, act in a certain
  way?
• Judging past actors in their own historically
  situated context and on its terms.
• Cultivated as an observer of the past, not as an
  actor in the past.
• An exercise in a specific type of
  imaginationHistorical imagination.

7
Historical Imagination is. . .

• Not
• Fictional or fantasymaking up information
• Detached from evidence or context
• Imagining myself in the past as I think today
• Instead, it is
• Rooted in students understanding of context and
  their analysis of evidence
• An intellectual leap between information in
  historical sources and gaps within the evidence
  trail.

8
Asking Questions and Framing Problems

• An unnatural act
• Moving beyond the facts to significance
• Six honest serving men
• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why
• How

9
Establishing Significance

• What is the historians purpose in investigating
  a given event?
• Was the event a catalyst for great, enduring
  change?
• Can the event or figure be linked to larger
  processes to
• Illuminate some aspect of past experience poorly
  understood
• Illustrate the impact of larger events

10
Correlation

• Identifying key information in multiple sources
• Supplementing information from one source with
  additional information from another
• Corroborating claims in one source with
  additional supporting assertions from another
  document

11
Source Criticism

• Identifying the source
• What kind of source (e.g. letter, diary, military
  order, official record)
• Who, when, where, why, how produced?
• Adjusting for bias
• What evidence of bias is present (in purpose of
  document, internal vocabulary or tone?
• What information may be gleaned from the bias?
• How can the bias be corrected (e.g. correlation
  with other sources, reading against the grain)

12
Contextualization

• Identifying time of production
• Recognizing the social and cultural setting in
  which the document was produced
• Evaluating the documents information, claims,
  and biases with reference to its cultural context
• Purpose to understand
• Not to give a moral pass
• Not to impose present values and prejudices

13
Citing

• Linking a historians claims with the primary
  evidence supporting those claims
• Footnotes with information allowing others to
  find and check the source
• The historians equivalent of scientific
  repetition of experimentation

14
Critical Engagement with the Other Side

• Identifying the range of rival interpretations of
  a historical event
• Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of rival
  arguments
• Positioning ones own argument within the range
  of rivals and explaining its advantages over
  rival arguments.

15
Recognizing Limits to Knowledge

• Acknowledging the silences in the sources
• No comprehensive records of the past
• Some information lost
• Some information inadvertently omitted
• Some information deliberately suppressed
• Acknowledging imperfect understanding of context
• Acknowledging inaccessibility of some information
  (e.g. psychological motives)