Am I the only one out there who thinks that if you don’t judge historical figures using the moral values of today you aren’t really learning anything?
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Context? Is that sarcasm? I am confused by the double-negative structure.
I kinda think “judging” is often beside the point of studying history—eg, with Jefferson (since he recently hit the news/blogs, though I have not yet read the NYT article), the trick is to move classes past villifying him as a slaveowner to a place where they understand the context and his words such that we can comprehend not only the hypocrisy and how he might have rationalized it, but also how owning slaves might have affected his philosophical writings on liberty, etc.
Dance:
This is getting interesting. I have the exact opposite Jefferson problem. My students refuse to condemn him as a slave owner, and if they know any context they use to suggest that everybody condoned slavery back then. At this point, I usually bring up the Quakers.
If you are going to make me get less cryptic and sloppy about my question, I’d change it to something like, “Why does everybody seem to be so scared about condemning historical figures when that’s a sign that the class is thinking and engaged?”
Hmm. Generally I think that using today’s standards to judge (good or bad) historical figures is more a sign of lazy thinking than deep thought. E.g., when the enslaved mulatto children of white plantation owners came up in discussion, my students couldn’t get much past an uncomprehending “the father must be crazy”—a condemnation, and engagement, sure, but not the kind of engagement I see as the ultimate goal of a discussion. The “Jefferson problem” you describe sounds to me like a good first step—you get to bring up the Quakers, abolition in the northern colonies, move onto the inconsistency between his actions and what he said about slavery, etc.
Condemnation, in my view, operates on a somewhat different level—historians may provide the fodder for moral judgments but I don’t consider making those judgments the main job of historians, and shoot down student essays that argue “X was really evil” or “Y was really enlightened”.
Ultimately, I think this boils down to both of us trying to do the same thing and that’s stopping students from shutting down the conversation. It sounds as if your students are (for lack of a better term) liberal enough to assume that everyone hates racism and hypocrisy, then let it end there. Mine aren’t.
Either way, I won’t accept condemnation of anyone without an explanation. Ultimately, I think the stronger the position someone takes in class, the more likely they are to back that argument up with reason and facts.
In the end, it’s all about getting them talking. When an argument breaks out in class I know I’m doing my job well.
Oh, agreed 100%.
I’m sorry I missed this day! I just worked with a group of folks who got into a great discussion of the problems of “historical presentism.” One comment that stuck out most went along these lines: “To me it doesn’t much matter if you think George Washington was a bad person for owning and maintaining slaves so long as it is understood that there were a good number of people opposed to the idea of slavery and we can all understand that Washington has meant a great deal to the foundations of the country.” I took his point (partially because I respect him as former historian of the United States House of Representatives) as he further talked about the historical irrelevance of a “blame game” as it rarely helps us understand what happened and why. I do have a problem with the idea of the “product of their time” argument as well, especially when it is not entirely true.