The Use and Misuse of History for Life

How history helps us know the world but also distorts our

knowledge of it

Sense of an Ending

• What are the three main criticisms of history in this excerpt?

• But also, the potential solutions to these problems?

What is this object?

What if this was all that was left of the US in a thousand years?

And an alien archaeologist falls down a cave and finds this mysterious room--in a structure the ancient Americans called a “hotel?”

So, how would you interpret this?

So, what is this thing?

How would you go about trying to figure it out?

Anyone guess this?

And what might this be?

What then are the challenges of doing history, and how do we

overcome them?

What must we be aware of as we try to understand the past?

Why bother if it is so hard? How does history actually

contribute to our knowledge of the world?

"The whole country exalts, laughs, and gleams with merriment/because children live joyfully/the country is marvelous for them/and each hour, whether study or leisure/has become unusually joyful/because, for us children/our great Stalin is our best friend."

Alexander Rodchenko's book Ten Years of Uzbekistan was published in 1934. During the Great Purges it became illegal and Rodchenko was compelled to deface it. Akmal Ikramov (left), first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, and Yan Rudzutak (right), former Party member from Latvia, were shot in 1938.

Two undated photographs of Voroshilov, Molotov and Stalin, with Nikolai Yezhov, commissar of water transport, in the picture (top) and deleted (below). He was shot in 1940

Italo Calvino

“…the real Stalinist sin I was guilty of was precisely this: in order to defend myself from a reality which I did not know, but did not want to articulate, I… presented as…a picture of serenity and smiles something that was trauma and tension and torture. Stalinism was also the…cheerful mask which concealed the historical tragedy taking place.”

Sources

The advantages and disadvantages of primary sources

Read “A WPA slave narrative”

• What does she tell you about her life as a slave or as freedwoman?

• What surprises you about her recollection?

• What is useful to us about this narrative?

What however is problematic about this resource? What do we really know? Why should we be careful about using it to enhance our understanding of this era?

Tell me to my face right now what you think of me as a

teacher?

What is problematic about this request?

One more activity

• Read Hernan Cortes and Moctezoma (at the bottom of the TOK History page)

• What seems true about this account, what seems “fishy?”

Read An Aztec Account of the Conquest

What have we learned? What seems true, what seems fishy?

Now What?

Sources

The advantages and disadvantages of secondary

sources

The writing of the Constitution?

• Read the following excerpts from two different textbooks regarding the creation of the US Constitution:

• America’s Pageant, ps 179-181

• Created Equal, p 281

Causation

• What are the challenges to building a causation theory to explain past events?

• Exhibit A: Hitler's Takeover of the German Government in 1933

• Go to Resource 5 and click through the links

Summary

• Write a paragraph explaining the role of emotion in gaining knowledge through history.– Or

• Write a paragraph suggesting the role memory, intuition or imagination might play in the pursuit of knowledge through history