The example comes from a review of a book that presents both Palestinian and Israeli perspectives on the history of the shared land. [Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Can They Ever Make a Deal?" (review of Side by Side: Parallel Narratives of Israel-Palestine by Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, and Eyal Naveh), New York Review of Books, 5 April 2012] The reviewer quotes two versions of the same event:

1. One of the most notorious massacres perpetrated against the Palestinians took place in Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948. The Zionist forces killed more than 100 and wounded dozens more.

2. There was a massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem; Irgun and Lehi units attacked the village, and by the time the battle was over, according to most updated historical research, 100 to 120 Arabs had been killed, including women, children, and the elderly.

The first sentence of the first account has a non-human subject (massacres) and a weak verb (took place). But the second sentence offers a human subject (Zionist forces) and strong, active-voice verbs (killed and wounded). It tells us who did what to whom.

The second account starts with a “there was” construction and ends with a passive verb (had been killed). Though it implies that Irgun and Lehi units massacred and killed, it leaves open the possibility that some other actors–werewolves, perhaps–chanced to pass through at the same time and commit mass slaughter.

Perhaps the authors of the second passage are not sure who perpetrated the massacre. Perhaps they believe that the Irgun and Lehi units killed all those people, but are reluctant to say so, for fear of giving offense. Either one of these is a serious flaw in a historical narrative. Rather than using grammatical tricks to paper over such flaws. I would advise students to address them with more research, a discussion of the limits of their sources, or the courage to present their findings.

[Jeff Selingo, "Wanted: Better Employees," Next, 12 December 2011.]

“In the past few months,” Selingo writes, “at conferences, at dinners, and on airplanes, I’ve had the chance to sit next to a handful of recruiters who work for companies large and small, from Zappos to United Technologies.” Asking if colleges were preparing students for corporate jobs, he received responses with four “common themes”: “some students are not college material even with a college degree,” many graduates can’t write well, many lack a strong work ethic, and many have an inflated sense of entitlement.

The second set of responses reinforces my determination to emphasize writing in my courses. As Selingo explains,

We keep throwing around the word “skills,” but it seems the one skill that almost every job requires is the ability to write well, and too many graduates are lacking in that area. That’s where many of the recruiters were quick to let colleges off the hook, for the most part. Students are supposed to learn to write in elementary and secondary school. They’re not forgetting how to write in college. It’s clear they’re not learning basic grammar, usage, and style in K-12.

He could have added that there’s a lot more to good writing than basic grammar, usage, and style, and even students who mastered those in high school can improve in areas like analysis and organization. As a humanities professor, I am glad to use my classroom and this site to help students improve skills that are in such demand.

The report reaches this claim by comparing ” state standards and curriculum frameworks” to “the generally accepted core knowledge about the movement.” But I think the comparison could have been more thorough.

Surprised that Virginia got only a “C” grade, I checked the SPLC report against the Virginia Standards of Learning.

Here’s the SPLC report:

Virginia’s list of notable events is a bit scattershot. It does not mention Little Rock, the Birmingham protests, Mississippi Freedom Summer, the 24th Amendment or the Selma-to-Montgomery March.

And here’s part of a lesson plan from Virginia’s History and Social Science Standards of Learning: Enhanced Scope And Sequence:

Instructional Activities

1. Provide a brief discussion of the following events related to the Civil Rights movement:

• Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Little Rock school integration
• Greensboro lunch counter sit-in
• Freedom Rides
• Birmingham
• Freedom Summer
• Selma

Who deserves the C?

More generally, when the SOLs spend as much time on the Civil Rights movement as the American Revolution, the entire period from 1790 to 1850, or “The United States’ Role in World Affairs from 1890 to 1940,” it strikes me as a stretch to say they “virtually ignore our civil rights history.”

h/t: Sara Mayeux

Unfortunately, the YouTube clip ends before Vonnegut diagrams Kafka and Shakespeare. For the full text, see “Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard,” Lapham’s Quarterly.

Good advice here for historians: scholars unstuck in time.

Why did [person/persons] [do/say/write something surprising]? [Plausible explanation], but in fact [better or more complete explanation].

Though many works of history have theses that can be phrased in this manner, they only occasionally take this exact form. But I recently came across a published work that follows this formula almost exactly:

How did Syria come to this pass? While some observers see in recent events a parallel with 1989, with the break-up of the East European–style system introduced by the Baathists in the 1960s, this is no velvet revolution, nor is Syria like Jaruzelski’s Poland. The regime’s violence is not ideological. It is far from being the result of an emotional or philosophical commitment to a party that long ago abandoned its agenda of promoting secular Arab republican values and aspirations. The regime’s ruthless attachment to power lies in a complex web of tribal loyalties and networks of patronage underpinned by a uniquely powerful religious bond. [Malise Ruthven, "Storm Over Syria," New York Review of Books, 9 June 2011]

I have added this passage to the Thesis Statement Template page.

Unlike economic historians, most historians have, until relatively recently, been reluctant to engage in counterfactuals on the seemingly incontrovertible grounds that what did not happen is not history. But I have come to think that the opposite is, in fact, true: we need to think about what did not happen in order to think historically. Considering only what happened is ahistorical, because the past once contained larger possibilities, and part of the historian’s job is to make those possibilities visible; otherwise all that is left for historians to do is to explain the inevitability of the present. The inevitability of the present violates the contingency of the past, which involves alternative choices and outcomes that could have produced alternative presents. To deny the contingency of the past deprives us of alternative futures, said for the present is the future’s past. Contingency, in turn, demands hypotheticals about what might have happened. They are fictions, but necessary fictions. So it is only by conceiving of alternative worlds that people in the past themselves imagined that we can begin to think historically, to escape the inevitability of the present, and get another perspective on issues that concern us still.

Ironically, Railroaded (though a very fine book in other respects) does not do a particularly good job fleshing out its counterfactuals, particularly the bit about “alternative worlds that people in the past themselves imagined.” Did Gilded Age Americans seriously consider trying to settle the West without any transcontinental railroads? Or with just one? Or with several under public ownership? Or without any public capital? White hints at all of these possibilities, but he does not explain whether there was a significant consituency behind any, or what the country would have looked like had they been pursued.

I do agree with White that we need to explore counterfactuals to understand what was at stake in any given debate. D. W. Meinig’s maps of a Greater and Lesser United States, for example, help me appreciate the gravity of the debates of the mid-19th century.