History headaches.

We have a few weeks left in our 18-week literature-based unit study of the Civil War:  up ahead are two weeks on Reconstruction, and two weeks I called "Aftermath" which should take us through Plessy v. Ferguson and lay the groundwork, I hope, for grasping the Civil Rights movement when we study it next year.

 I started out very stressed that I hadn't worked out an exact week-by-week schedule of readings, but as I went on, planning just one or two weeks ahead from a master list I had prepared before the beginning of the year, I relaxed into a routine.  I am definitely getting better at flexibility.  And I am finding that it's far better to pick a few good, lengthy books that go into details, than to try to cram EVERYTHING in.   

 For example, we spent two weeks on one gem of a book about the Monitor and the Merrimack, and two weeks on another book about nothing but Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox -- and let me tell you, I always thought of that latter event as being worthy of one or two paragraphs, as it had appeared in all the American History texts I'd ever read before.  How amazing to read it all fleshed out into a 180-page book -- a gripping read, really.  Notes passed back and forth between the two generals; the constant threat of a deadly skirmish breaking out just as the surrender deal was about to go through; the drama of the negotiation of the terms of surrender; striking and contrasting portraits of the two very different men who met that day; the comical, frantic bidding for souvenirs from Mr. McLean's sitting room after the surrendering was over.

I'm surprising myself.  I always thought I would be the sort to insist on memorization of key dates and things.  Instead, I'm hitting my stride with an approach of "bringing the era to life," the best I can, through good stories and biographies.  The children are really, really interested in it.  History is, after all, a collection of stories, and who doesn't like a good story?   

This leaves me 18 weeks to "do," um, the rest of the 19th century in America.  WOW was it hard to make decisions about that.  Finally I just laid a printout of my book list on the table and moved eighteen pennies around on the pages until it seemed I'd distributed the best books evenly.  So:

• 3 weeks on pre-Civil War leadership and foreign policy.
• 4 weeks on expansion of the United States.
• 3 weeks on immigration, urbanization, and social change.
• 3 weeks on daily life, art, and entertainment.
• 2 weeks on technology and economics.
• 2 weeks on innovations in transportation and communication.
• 1 week on post-Civil War leadership and foreign policy.

The reference spine is Joy Hakim's A History of US.  I plan to anchor the century in biographies, choosing them mostly for the quality of the writing, which leaves me with the lives of Andrew Jackson, Crazy Horse, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Luther Burbank, the Wright brothers, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt.   (How's that for a survey?)*   A handful of other really good books should round it out, covering topics like the Monroe Doctrine, stagecoaches, railroads, captains of industry, labor unions, the Edison-Westinghouse rivalry, settlers in southwestern Ohio, one-room schoolhouses, and European waves of immigration.   Whew.  Even with all this work done, I'm still sort of making it up as I go along... but it's actually working, I think.

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*Don't forget we did spend the first half of the year on the Civil War, which gave us the opportunity to read biographies of Dred and Harriet Scott, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Lee and Grant, and  Abraham Lincoln ... and coming up we have bios of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. 

Comments

[bearing]

By the way, If you're interested in a list of the books we actually read, as opposed to the long list of books I wished I would have the time to read, let me know and I'll pull it out from my records.

[Rebekka]

I'm really liking these posts. I'm just so impressed - I went to public school, and history was always a pain. It always felt like the story part of it was obscured behind all those little paragraphs you noted in the post. Plus, of all the times I've had "American History" we never managed to even get past WWI, so the 20th century is a giant hole for me (up until I can start remembering things on my own, which is in the 90s). That just makes it so much more interesting to "hear" all your considerations as you plan your curriculum.

[bearing]

Thank you, Rebekka! The 20th century is daunting, and exciting to me at the same time, for the reasons you mentioned. It has been SO helpful that I am responsible for teaching not just my own children, but a couple of other friends' children too, and so I am getting lots of feedback from them about the material I'm selecting, and also some help sifting through some of the topics.

In a way I'm sort of sneakily pushing onto my kids, when they're older, the responsibility of memorizing whatever dates and place-names and the like they are going to have to remember for their further educational and cultural needs. But maybe that's actually for the best (given that they are getting practice in what I call "memory work" in other subjects). After all, you cannot memorize EVERYTHING -- and it is they, when they are older, figuring out their life path, who will know better than I do exactly how to specialize, how to "spend" their available memory to best suit their own needs. I'll do my best for now to make sure that they at least learn what order stuff happened in.

[Rebekka]

Personally I think it is much more important and satisfying to emphasize the larger themes of the different time periods than raw memorization of a timeline. I think it can be frustrating (at least for someone like me) to be bombarded with only dates and people in a never-ending stream where all seems to be equally important (or unimportant), whereas by emphasizing the themes synthesis becomes much easier, and the events and people fall into a more natural context. I know that I have forgotten much of the dates and such I learned in my history classes but I still remember things like "WESTWARD EXPANSION!!!" :-)

I'm looking forward to watching over your shoulder when you tackle the 20th century.