Bohan, Chara Haeussler. (2004). Go to the
Sources: Lucy Maynard Salmon and the Teaching of History.
N.Y.: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
Pp. xix + 165
$29.95 ISBN 0-8204-5504-0
Reviewed by Brett A. Berliner
Morgan State University
December 25, 2004
In the nineteenth century, history came into its
own as a discipline, breaking away from philosophy and
philology. If there was a paramount goal of this evolving
field, it would be that of the great German historian Leopold von
Ranke who claimed he only sought to write history "as it actually
happened." By the end of the century, Ranke and his successors
defined a science of history that had a rigorous methodology and
an obsession with objectivity. Thomas Gradgrind, the absurd
positivist who opened a school in Charles Dickens's Hard
Times and who exclaimed, "facts alone are wanted in life,"
would have been at home in this scientific history. So too are
the likes of Diane Ravich and her ilk today who subject students
to "objective" exams and contemptuously point out what they do
not know and then disparage our public schools and teachers.
Predictably, those who are now obsessed with high
stakes testing of content only look to the most traditional
approach to academic history. But they and their opponents, not
to mention all of our students, would be well served to examine
the work of Lucy Maynard Salmon (1853-1927), a progressive era
educator, reformer, and proponent of the "new social history."
Salmon, like so many women, has long suffered from the
condescension of our collective memory—but perhaps no
longer. She is now sympathetically championed in Chara Haeussler
Bohan's Go to the Sources, a thin biography that ably
sketches Salmon's life and innovative approach to the teaching of
history.
Salmon's life was remarkable in many ways and yet
typical of a few middle class progressive woman of her
generation. Born in upstate New York, Salmon was well educated,
graduating from the University of Michigan in 1876, one of only a
dozen women. Fresh with a degree in history, she went into
teaching and administration in a rural high school in Iowa.
Depressed and not looking for a marriage, Salmon returned to
Michigan for a master's degree. Her education enthralled her,
but the degree bought her a dissatisfying experience teaching in
a normal school, so much so that she came to believe normal
schools should not exist. Despite what Bohan argues was a
sincere democratic ethos, Salmon fled from the masses and
returned to her studies, this time as a fellow at Bryn Mawr under
a young, pedantic and misogynistic Woodrow Wilson. One year
later, in 1887, Salmon accepted a teaching position at Vassar,
the elite woman's college, where she would remain unmarried and
totally dedicated to her students and profession for the rest of
her life, a not untypical choice for educated and professionally
minded women of her generation.
Despite the gender barriers she faced, some of
which Bohan details, Salmon made significant contributions to her
profession and American education. She was an institution
builder, helping to establish the American Association of
University Professors and the American Association of University
Women. In addition, she was an early member of the American
Historical Association (AHA), and it was through the AHA that
Salmon's ideas had their first and, perhaps, widest impact on
public education. In 1896, Salmon joined the AHA's Committee of
Seven and was charged with examining the actual teaching of
history in the secondary schools and making recommendations for
reform. The Committee did not recommend the memorization of
facts; rather, history, it argued, was to inculcate a
"'sympathetic knowledge of… [the] political and social
environment.'"(p. 79) The Committee's progressivism went even
further, claiming history should give rise to a "'broad and
tolerant spirit.'" (p. 79) More than just establishing a uniform
four-year history sequence, which, Bohan suggests, shaped our
school's curricula for decades and still influences them, the
Committee recommended, in part, how history should be taught.
Here, Salmon had her most influence, arguing that students should
be introduced to original sources and taught "how to analyze the
relationships between evidence and historical statement." (p.
80)
The Committee's recommendations, like most
committees, were born from compromise. Salmon's own beliefs
about history and education, Bohan argues, were much more
progressive. Dissatisfied with the limitations of scientific
history and its emphasis on facts, high politics, and military
engagements, Salmon and a number of her colleagues, like
Frederick Jackson Turner, James Harvey Robinson, and Charles
Beard, expanded the grand narrative and developed "the new social
history" around the turn of the century. This new social history
was revisionist; it employed a wide variety of sources and
disciplines to construct a history of ideas, culture, and social
change, topics largely omitted from the nineteenth-century
historical paradigm. Moreover, for history to be useful, it had
to be continually rewritten, updated and made useful to
contemporary society. Indeed, Salmon, for one, wanted to reveal
the stories of the common person and thus researched domestics,
not just for its own sake, but to improve the condition and
status of this profession.
In writing this biography, Bohan sought to demonstrate that
Salmon's work is relevant today. Indeed it is, especially for
her beliefs about facts. Salmon stated in no uncertain terms
that facts in themselves were useless: "'no fact is in and of
itself either important or unimportant; its importance is due
altogether to its association with other facts.'"(p. 60) The
consequences of this rather simple truth are profound for the
teaching and testing of history. Historical understanding is not
to be gained by pouring "important" facts into the empty vessel
of our students, nor is to be assessed on fact-based multiple
choice exams. Rather, content must be taught and learned through
the historical process where one constructs the relative
importance of a fact only in relation to other facts—the
historical context.
This belief informed Salmon's own teaching and could be
instructive for ours today. Central to her teaching was her
belief that history must be constructed from all available
sources—and that virtually everything, not just archived
government documents, was a historical source. Indeed, Salmon
would have students look at a fence and then challenge them to
ask questions about this ostensibly insignificant source, which
in Salmon's hands led students to discuss property rights,
isolation, and privacy. Furthermore, she would ask her students
how the very city of Poughkeepsie could be used as a historical
source in the absence of any other written records. Or she would
use her own kitchen as a material artifact of history. Salmon's
teaching was, obviously, process based; simply put, she asked her
students to "go to the sources" and construct history. The doing
of history and the emphasis on process was not, however, without
rigor; in fact, it is arguably more rigorous than memorizing
great names and battles. Indeed, she assessed her student's
knowledge by having them answer open-ended questions that
required not just factual information, but also the process of
constructing knowledge and the ability to articulate an argument,
what "objective" examinations rarely or poorly assess. Thus her
students suffered-or perhaps exalted in such questions as: what
is a better use of sources, "'to reconstruct or to illustrate
history.'"(p. 91) Or in 1915, Salmon asked her students to
compare the Revolutionary War to World War I. And in 1912, in a
question we still grapple with today, she asked, "'Who is an
American?'"(p. 92).
Bohan's biography succeeds in making the case that
Salmon's thought is still relevant today. But this brief
biography, based on Bohan's dissertation—and sadly reading
like one—falls short of her subject, a not uncommon problem
in writing biographies. Bohan did her research, studying the
volumes of published and unpublished sources Salmon left, but she
was never able to give voice to Salmon. We do not hear what
truly animated her, nor are we privy to the depth of her
thought. Perhaps most maddening is that we do not know who truly
influenced Salmon's education. Did she read Rousseau? Freud? Or
Dewey? We know she met Dewey once, but we do not know of her
intellectual influences. Some progressive reformers rebelled
against the nascent creeping social Darwinism in public policy;
did she? We simply do not know. Nor do we really know how
Salmon’s experience of gender informed her research or
teaching. Moreover, a good biographer should challenge Salmon's
own beliefs. She was democratic in spirit, clearly, but perhaps
in a limited way. Indeed, there is not a single reference made
to Salmon's understanding of race—something she could not
have been unfamiliar with, given that she lived through
Reconstruction and Jim Crow. These criticisms are merely to
suggest that after being forgotten for so long, Salmon deserves a
much brighter spotlight, as do many women written out of history,
now just brought in from the shadows.
Despite these shortcomings, this work—or
rather Salmon's life and work—is a useful corrective to our
present ills. Livy, the great Roman historian once claimed that
"history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you
have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly
set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for
yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things
to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to
avoid." Perhaps we should attend to our history, all of it.
Among the ills our schools suffer from today is a preoccupation
with scientific, fact-based history on our tests, while we mouth
the importance of higher order thinking skills in our
curriculum. Salmon, and her colleagues, presciently saw these
ills a century ago and recommended a tonic that, sadly, only the
elite truly received. It is also instructive today to return to
our exemplar of a businessman who had political ambitions:
Thomas Gradgrind and his fact-based education. It was only when
Gradgrind discovered that his own kids suffered from his
positivism that he was thrown into a state of cognitive
dissonance, and he ultimately rejected his facts for a more
humanistic approach to life—and his children. Similarly,
today, some are rejecting our testing mania because their own
kids—not some one else's—are not measuring up. If
one searches for alternatives and precedents in history to remedy
our ills, one need search no further than Lucy Maynard Salmon who
not only taught history and rigorously tested her students but
also taught students to think historically and rethink accepted
truths, something crucial to the functioning of a democratic
society. Even Gradgrind would have ultimately approved.
About the Reviewer
Brett A. Berliner is an Assistant Professor of History
at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He teaches
World History and Western Civilization, both from ancient times
to the present. Trained as a cultural historian, he researches
interwar exoticism, racism, and marginal movements and
peoples.
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