Historically Thinking

The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to?

In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World, my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revolution as the Oswego, New York school system. And she takes the story into politics, advertising, and racial segregation.

Her book is study of intellectual history and of intellectual culture. But Sarah's book, and this conversation, is also about asking questions of things which cannot speak. Sarah's interest in objects comes not simply from her training as an intellectual historian, but as a curator of museums. She is curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, and is passionate about teaching people the history behind the objects that museums contain.

For Further Investigation

Object lesson videos from Chipstone

Table 

Chair 

Cabinet

Video from the Chipstone Foundation: "20 Questions to ask an object"

The Tangible Things project at Harvard created a series of videos featuring eminent historian Laura Thatcher Ulrich, and Sarah Anne Carter. The third of these is "Look at the Fish", and tells the story of Louis Agassiz and Samuel Scudder.

Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot … Episode 101: Yippie-Ki-Yi-Yay Read More »

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot some of his companions, and took him prisoner, accusing him of bringing infected cattle into Kansas. Escaping, the teenager found his cowboys, rounded up the cattle, and then brought them to market.

Some of this story is true, and the true parts are probably the strangest. Cowboys were on average incredibly young. Only small numbers of them were able to drive immense numbers of cattle, and drove them for hundreds upon hundreds of miles. And, in the wake of the Civil War, there was always bad blood between “Yankees” in Kansas, and former Confederates in Texas.

But there is much else counterintuitive about cow drives, that didn't make it into the movies. Cowboys liked vegetables, for one thing. For another, they were one part of continent-spanning industrial economy. That didn't make it into Lonesome Dove, as best as I recall.

With me to discuss the great cattle drives from Texas is Tim Lehman, author of Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon, published by Johns Hopkins Press as part of their series “How Things Worked.”

For Further Investigation

E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott, We Pointed Them North

Richard Grant, "Recollections of a Cowpuncher"–an article on Teddy Blue Abbott

Joseph McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest

J. Marvin Hunter, The Trail Drivers of Texas

Jacqueline M. Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men

Christopher Knowlton, Cattle Kingdom

Lewis Atherton, The Cattle Kings

It seemed appropriate on the 100th episode to talk with the guest from our first episode, my friend and former colleage and co-writer Lendol Calder. And to make it even better, we’re joined by Sam Wineburg. When Wired magazine first began, on their masthead they listed Marshall McLuhan, the communication theorist, as the magazine’s “patron saint”. […]

It seemed appropriate on the 100th episode to talk with the guest from our first episode, my friend and former colleage and co-writer Lendol Calder. And to make it even better, we’re joined by Sam Wineburg. When Wired magazine first began, on their masthead they listed Marshall McLuhan, the communication theorist, as the magazine’s “patron saint”. If McLuhan was patron saint to Wired, than Sam Wineburg is patron saint of Historically Thinking. In real life, Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and History at Stanford University. He is the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, and most recently Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), and we’ll be talking about that book—and a few other things.

Why is Sam so great? Contemplate this quote, and hopefully realize why:

In its deepest forms, historical thinking is neither a natural process nor something that springs automatically from psychological development. Its achievement goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates and stories than it is to change the fundamental mental structures we use to grasp the meaning of the past...Mature historical knowing teaches us to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we've been born. History educates ("leads outward" in Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects in the secular curriculum it does the best in teaching those virtues once reserved for theology–the virtue of humility, in the face of our limits to know; and the virtue of awe, in the face of the expanse of human history.

- from Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press (2001)

And who is the lady reading above? Well, she's Homer's muse, according to the artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. I like to believe that she is Clio, the patron muse of historians, and therefore the muse of this podcast.

For Further Investigation

Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

–Why Learn History (When It's Already On Your Phone)

The Stanford History Education Group

Lendol Calder, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey"

Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it

In an essay on Plato, the German philosopher Josef Pieper suggests that for Plato "the natural habitat of truth is conversation. Truth is enacted in dialogue, in discussion, in discourse: in other words, in language and the word."

Russ Roberts is not a philosopher but an economist, as the many listeners to his extremely popular podcast Econtalk can attest. But he strives, I think, to enact truth in dialogue. He is not afraid to proclaim his own opinion, but seeks to understand as best as he can the opinion of those he's talking with. And he's also reticent to proclaim that he knows things that he doesn't actually know, as this recent post on his blog reveals:

A journalist once asked me how many jobs NAFTA had created or destroyed. I told him I had no reliable idea. Certainly jobs had been lost when factories closed and moved to Mexico but other jobs had been gained because Americans now had more resources and increased their demand for products that would not be easy to identify. Why not? Because thousands and thousands of jobs are created every month and it is very difficult, perhaps impossible to know which ones are related to NAFTA allow

ing Americans to buy less expensive goods from Mexico. I also told him that I believed that trade neither destroyed nor created jobs on net. It’s main impact was to change the kinds of jobs and what they paid.

The journalist got annoyed. “You’re a professional economist. You’re ducking my question.” I disagreed. I am answering your question, I told him. You just don’t like the answer.

Nor is Russ afraid to change his mind, or admit how his previous views have been rendered uncertain. That's the story behind his essay Gambling With Other People's Money, an essay he wrote in 2010 about the financial crisis of 2008. Ten years on from those events, he's written a new introduction to the essay. We discuss the financial crisis, how far one's mind can be changed without rejecting everything you previously believed, and intellectual humility–among other things.

For Further Investigation

Russ Roberts, Gambling with Other People's Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis

Russ Roberts on the Information Revolution, Politics, Yeats, and Yelling

The Sachs Saga:

Nina Munk on Poverty, Development, and the Idealist

Jeffrey Sachs on the Millennium Villages Project

Think, Read, and Write: Jeffrey Sachs on the Millennium Villages Project

Russ Roberts' Postmortem on the Sachs Episode