History Is Not Primarily About Documents
An article of faith may narrow understanding
If there is one thing that students leave high school history class knowing it is that history is divided into primary documents and secondary interpretations.
This is the social studies version of the scientific method, a junior duplicate of professional practice, boiling down historical thinking to its basic elements. The premise is that to think like a historian is to set aside preconceptions and engage evidence for itself.
Advanced placement tests in history present document-based questions, or DBQs, to test proficiency in the skill of analyzing a suite of documents in 45 minutes. Those tests determine whether students win college credit or at least accelerated placement for the year’s work. The percentage of students who register high scores is taken as a direct reflection on the skill of their teachers. With such tangible stakes, document-based exercises become equated with historical practice and understanding. What began as an innovative assessment tool grew into an article of faith. Other ways of approaching and appreciating the past, more aesthetic or emotional or creative ways, gave way.
When combined with the need to “cover” a vast expanse of history through multiple-choice questions, DBQ’s offer the illusion of engagement without giving students the opportunity to see past the surface. Perhaps not coincidentally, many students want to “get a 5” on the test so they can “get out of having to take history” in college. Advanced placement has become, too often, the displacement of deeper learning.
The division of history into primary sources and secondary interpretation has a long history of its own, stretching back more than a century. Academic historians differentiated themselves from antiquarians by their command of original sources in a culture of scarcity. Much of the early work in the profession turned around the acquisition, corroboration, and dissemination of primary materials. Indeed, some historians ridiculed the new profession’s fixation on the gathering of facts and documents as early as the 1920s. In a witty presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1931, “Everyman His Own Historian,” Carl Becker offered a parody of the notion that documents explained themselves. Historians chuckled over the piece and continued their work as they had before.
Historians who cared about teaching in the schools worked to democratize what they saw as the core principle of the discipline. In the 1960s, the Amherst Project produced dozens of pamphlets of primary evidence devoted to topics in American history, carefully selecting documents and offering introductions. In the digital era, a focus on demonstrating “how to think like a historian” has led to a vast multiplication of documents. While many of the documents are free, many have been gathered and resold for a profit as components of teaching packages, often tied to expensive textbooks and prescribed programs that remove teachers’ initiative. The process and rationale of the documents’ selection remain hidden, the nature of the miniature archive a matter of faith.
Reading the words and seeing the images of people in history is indeed a powerful way of touching the past. But we drain much of that power when we tame that evidence to fit testing and reselling. Documents should ignite inquiry and curiosity, but when reduced to rudimentary exercises they can kill any interest in seeing more of them.
Primary documents reveal their true colors in their natural habitat. A single issue of a magazine from the past reveals history as more than a series of problems to solve. History abandons its script and steps free from the stage set. People as real, complicated, funny, and sometimes as stupid as ourselves confronted times as confusing as our own.
Historians, it seems, do not think “like historians.” The definition of historical practice by the American Historical Association never mentions primary sources. Instead, it presents history as “an interpretive account of the human past — one that historians create in the present from surviving evidence.” That evidence does not appear in symmetrical patterns, in balanced opposition, in preselected suites. Instead, the unruly heterogeneity of partial, broken, and deceiving evidence demands that we “collect, sift, organize, question, synthesize, and interpret complex material.” Historical understanding must “welcome contradictory perspectives and data.”
Because the evidence of the past never explains itself, historical understanding must “identify, summarize, appraise, and synthesize other scholars’ historical arguments,” requiring that historians “revise analyses and narratives when new evidence requires it.” Revisionism is not a flaw created by opinion and bias but a necessary and welcome part of increased understanding. Thinking like a historian, above all, means thinking contextually, synthetically. Historical understanding advances through addition and juxtaposition, not subtraction and simplification.
Fortunately, as the digital world throws ever more history before us in ever more forms, it also provides us with new tools to deal with a superabundance of evidence, devices that allow us to see structures, processes, and events in new ways. Rather than reading a few preselected documents for embedded clues, students can look for patterns themselves, across many documents. They will see that history is all context all the time. Students discover that primary sources do not explain themselves. Every source opens new questions that demand explanation and illumination. “Secondary materials” help the evidence make sense.
Thanks to librarians and archivists, millions of pages of newspapers, magazines, cartoons, video, music, and ephemera now live online, history weaving in real-time. Teachers can guide students in the reading of newspapers from their own communities’ past, thanks to the Chronicling America project from the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thousands of students are helping to transcribe the archives of Rosa Parks and Walt Whitman, translating cursive analog documents into digital documents everyone can read.
The division of history into stark categories of primary sources and secondary interpretation serves students poorly when they leave the carefully constructed exercises of the classroom for the unfiltered experience of the world. Claim and evidence swirl together. Deep fakes create the illusion of evidence even in video. Secret sources, supposedly hidden beyond view, claim to document conspiracies and cover-ups.
Interpretation of sources takes many forms other than footnoted scholarly discussions, the usual classroom invocation of secondary sources. Students confront historical interpretation in video games and graphic novels, in campaign slogans and Facebook postings, in hip-hop lyrics and streaming television series. Such representations of the past seldom make claims on primary sources; instead, they are interpretations of interpretations, translations of vague and often mistaken notions. History is deployed every day to do political and cultural work, seldom with disinterested standards of scholarly interpretation as its standard. Students need to see and understand this history all around them.
The tools of New American History are designed to work in this digital environment. The 5,000 digital resources in Bunk, drawn from more than 500 sources, spark questions across the expanse of history and the full range of the people who make and interpret that history. The dynamic maps of American Panorama reveal otherwise invisible patterns on the nation’s landscape and through time. Hundreds of segments of BackStory tell hidden stories from the American past that speak to the present. The episodes of The Future of America’s Past show how people live with the past in the places where events, many of them challenging to think about, occurred. All these tools are built to flex and adapt, to work in unanticipated contexts, to help answer questions that have not yet been asked.
Our capacities to see, explore, and comprehend history have grown exponentially. Binary divisions of primary and secondary, of source and interpretation, do not mirror the world or how historians think about that world. The best preparation for this world is to explore past worlds with our eyes wide open.
