Common belief and the cultural curriculum: An intergenerational study of historical consciousness

American Educational Research Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 40-76

  Wineburg, Sam ^a   Mosborg, Susan ^b   Porat, Dan ^c   Duncan, Ariel ^d  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

^c HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM   (Israel)

^d OBERLIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Collective memory; Historical consciousness; History learning; Popular culture; Social studies

Indexed keywords

EID: 34147136517     PISSN: 00028312     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3102/0002831206298677     Document Type: Article

References (131)

1. All proper names are pseudonyms.
2. On Garfinkel's notion of the "cultural dope," see Russell Kelly, "Order! Order! Functionalism, Interactionism, Ethnomethodology - Modernity and Agency," Symbolic Interaction 27 (2004): 573-84.
3. See Maurice Halbwachs, Collective Memory, introduction by Mary Douglas. Translated from the French by Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yasdi Ditter (New York, 1980). The literature on Halbwachs has burgeoned in recent years, For useful introductions,
4. see Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH, 1993);
5. "Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The Problem of Memory in Historical Psychology," History Teacher 27 (1994): 145-58;
6. Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory," in History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford, UK, 1989) 97-113;
7. and Lewis A. Closer's introduction to Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992).
8. See as well Jan Assmann, "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," New German Critique 65 (1995): 125-33. Assmann sees the conceptualization of collective (or "social") memory as independent developments by Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg.
9. This idea is illustrated in Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations,
10. translated by Helen Sebba (Baltimore, 1976), esp. chap. 11, "Problems of Collective Memory," 240-61;
11. see as well Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York, 1989);
12. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations 26 (1989): 1-15;
13. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991);
14. Barry Schwartz, "The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln," in Collective Remembering, eds. David Middleton and Derek Edwards (London, 1991), 81-107;
15. and Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995).
16. The notion that Halbwachs denied individual memory - or denied its primacy -seems to have originated in a misreading by the British social psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett. Bartlett imputed a shaky distinction to Halbwachs between "memory in the group" versus "memory of the group" (Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology [Cambridge, UK, 1932/1995], 296).
17. In several places, Halbwachs explicitly acknowledged the relationship between "internal" (psychological) and "external" memory: "While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. . . . I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this iewpoint changes as my position changes" (Halbwachs, Collective Memory, 48). Despite the overlap in the research programs of Bartlett and Halbwachs, a systematic treatment of their similarities and differences awaits a comprehensive analysis.
18. See Michael Kammen, "Review of 'Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory' by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, New Brunswick, NJ," History and Theory 34 (1995): 245-61.
19. Given the vigor of the literature on memory, even reviews quickly become outdated. Useful orientations include Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations 69 (2000): 127-50;
20. and Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, "Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-40.
21. James V. Wertsch's Voices of Collective Remembering (New York, 2002) provides a magisterial overview of this literature as well as drawing on his own groundbreaking work in the former USSR. The term "collective memory" has itself been the topic of scholarly treatment;
22. see Wulf Kansteiner, "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies," History and Theory 41 (2002): 179-97.
23. Examples abound. For a sampling across different forms of representation, see Maria Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA, 1997);
24. Sara R. Horowitz, "But Is It Good for the Jews?" in Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 119-39;
25. Harry Harootunian, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York, 2000);
26. Steven Dubin, Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (New York, 1999);
27. Mira Engler, "Drive-Thru History: Theme Towns in Iowa," Landscape 32 (1993): 8-18;
28. Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: American's Places of Tragedy and Violence (Austin, TX, 1997);
29. and Charlotte J. Macdonald, "Race and Empire at 'Our Place': New Zealand's New National Museum," Radical History Review 75 (1999): 80-91.
30. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA, 1984);
31. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Essays on Film and Anthropology (Chicago, 2000);
32. and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge, MA, 1992).
33. J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum, "A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History," Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917): 257-74. This quotation appears on pp. 268-69.
34. For the history of large-scale testing in history and the kinds of solutions proposed in its aftermath, see Sam Wineburg, "Crazy for History," Journal of American History 90 (2004): 1401-14.
35. Carol Barnes and David K. Cohen, "Research and Purposes of Education," in Issues in Education Research: Problems and Possibilities, eds. Ellen C. Lagemann and Lee S. Shulman (San Francisco, 1999), 17-41, at 24.
36. By invoking the term "consciousness," we bracket the question of the correctness of participants' claims about the past. For extensive treatment of the term, see Amos Funkenstein, "Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness," History and Memory 1 (1989): 5-26.
37. See the recent volume edited by Peter Seixas, Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Buffalo, NY, 2004), especially Jörn Rüsen, "Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development";
38. see as well the essays edited by Jürgen Straub, Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness (New York, 2005).
39. Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York, 1992), 64.
40. See Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York, 1942);
41. as well as the brief statement by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, "On the Use of the Camera in Anthropology," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 4 (Winter 1977): 78-80.
42. For more recent examples of photo elicitation, see Douglas Harper, "Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision," American Sociologist 19 (Spring 1988): 54-70;
43. and "Talking about Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation," Visual Studies 17 (April 2002): 13-26;
44. Ximena Bunster, "Talking Pictures: Field Method and Visual Mode," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (Autumn 1977): 278-93;
45. and Stuart J. Foster, John D. Hoge, and Richard H. Rosch, "Thinking Aloud about History: Children's and Adolescent's Responses to Historical Photographs," Theory and Research in Social Education 27 (1999): 179-214.
46. Given the logistics in setting up interviews, we adopted the format of interviewing the student in the presence of at least one parent. In almost all cases (with the exception of the Delaneys), this interview took place with the student and one parent.
47. The other three pictures included a battle scene image of an American soldier holding two young children; the iconic picture of nine-year-old Kim Phoc fleeing a napalm attack; and an editorial cartoon showing a row of tombstones flanked by a saintly figure asking Uncle Sam, "What shall I put down as the reason for dying?" The picture of the soldier holding the children tended to elicit narratives of rescue from both parents and their children, with the one exception of Charles Vu, who suggested that this image might depict a kidnapping. The editorial cartoon, coming as the last image, often elicited the briefest response, often an elaboration on a point interviewees had already made. When recognized by participants, the image of Kim Phoc was sometimes the stimulus to describing where she is today - a fascinating topic but one not centrally linked to the issues of collective memory taken up here.
48. For example, when we examined how students interpreted contemporary news stories that had historical implications, such as court cases about prayer in schools, between-school effects loomed larger. See Susan Mosborg, "Speaking of History: How Adolescents Use Their Knowledge of History in Reading the Daily News," Cognition and Instruction 20 (Spring 2002): 323-58.
49. See "The Wall-USA.com": The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Page, http://thewall-usa.com/information/ (accessed December 20, 2005).
50. Robert F. Howe, "Monumental Achievement: As the Vietnam Memorial Turns 20, Architect Maya Lin Strives to Go Beyond the Wall," Smithsonian 33 (November 2002): 91-95.
51. These words are journalist Howard K. Smith's, from the introduction to Scruggs's book. Jan C. Scruggs and Joel L. Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York, 1985), xiv.
52. On varying accounts of how Scruggs has described the origin of the memorial, see Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past," American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991): 376-420.
53. Tom Carhart, The New York Times, October 24, 1981, p. 23.
54. Schlafly, as cited in Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 16.
55. Carhart in testimony before the Fine Arts Commission, October 31, 1981, as cited in Scruggs and Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation, 81.
56. Ward Just, "Remembering Vietnam," The Washington Post, November 11, 1982, p. 27.
57. The New York Times, January 13, 1982, p. 12.
58. Howe, "Monumental Achievement," 92.
59. Scruggs, as quoted in William A. Updike, "War and Remembrance," National Parks 74 (September/October 2000): 20-25: "The controversy of Maya Lin's design is just a footnote to history . . . once the memorial was built it was obvious it was a winning design."
60. While Evans's efforts spurred the creation of the Vietnam Women's Memorial, Glenna Goodacre was the actual designer.
61. We are indebted here to Kristin Ann Hass's comprehensive study of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Carried to the Wall (Berkeley, CA, 1998), esp. 22-23.
62. In her analysis of the Vietnam memorial, Carried to the Wall, Hass occasionally reads human intent from inanimate objects, as when she contends that dog tags left at the site reflect the ambivalence of those who possessed them and are "contradictory symbolically because they represent the tension between celebrating the individual identities of the soldiers and replacing those individual identities with a serial number" (p. 97). This may have been the intent of the person who left this artifact. On the other hand, the offering could have come from a desire to reunite an artifact with its symbolic owner, or a gesture of honor and dignity, or a motivation that neither Hass nor we can fathom. Reading intent from objects is a perilous process.
63. For example, Telford Taylor, the presiding attorney at the Nuremberg trials, issued this indictment in his book, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (New York, 1970): "We have smashed the country [of Vietnam] to bits and will not even take the trouble to clean up the blood and rubble. . . . Somehow we failed ourselves to learn the lessons we undertook to teach at Nuremberg, and that failure is today's American tragedy" (p. 207).
64. David Dellinger, The New York Times, October 22, 1967, p. 1.
65. The Washington Post, October 22, 1967, p. 1.
66. Ibid.;
67. and The New York Times, October 22, 1967, p. 1.
68. Time, October 27, 1967, p. 25.
69. The New York Times, October 21, 1967, p. 8;
70. and The New York Times, October 22, 1967, p. 32.
71. Cited in Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York, 1995), 177.
72. Adam Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York, 1995), 153.
73. The New York Times, October 22, 1967; Dellinger is quoted as saying, "This is the beginning of a new stage in the American peace movement in which the cutting edge is active resistance."
74. The Washington Post, October 22, 1967, p. 11.
75. Martin Jezer, as cited in Anderson, The Movement and The Sixties, 179.
76. The New York Times, May 2, 1970, p. 1.
77. Time, May 18, 1970, p. 13.
78. Time, May 18, 1970, http://www.time.com/archive (accessed January 2, 2006).
79. Anderson, The Movement and The Sixties, 350;
80. Pace Press, Student Newspaper of Pace University, May 15, 1970, "Student Strike Continues: 441 Schools Shut," http:// chnm.gmu.edu/hardhats/bloody.html (accessed August 12, 2004).
81. Chicago Tribune, May 7, 1970, p. 10.
82. Time, May 18, 1970, p. 8.
83. Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1970, p. 1.
84. The New York Times, May 6, 1970, p. 1.
85. Newsweek, May 18, 1970, p. 26.
86. The New York Times, May 6, 1970, p. 20.
87. Time, May 25, 1970, p. 20.
88. In the aftermath of the May 10 attack, Mayor Lindsay ordered an investigation. The New York Civil Liberties Union claimed that "police stood around passively and, in some instances, joining in the assaults." Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1970, http://chnm.gmu.edu/hardhats/bloody. html (accessed December 10, 2005).
89. In 1949, Armed Forces Day was set aside as the third Saturday in May when Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson amalgamated the separate days under the new Department of Defense, thus replacing separate celebrations for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. See R. M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians A re Coming! (New York, 1998).
90. See Joshua B. Freeman, "Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations," Journal of Social History 26 (June 1993): 725-39.
91. Among American-born parents, only Marion Blandings interpreted the picture differently, believing, like many students, that it was a picture of a war protest. Of the four foreign-born parents, two misinterpreted the photo. Charles Vu believed that the photo represented "people against the war," as did Frieda Serber: "People trying to stop war."
92. Andrea's response here shows the resilience of the interviewee in the face of over-bearing characteristics of the interviewer. On how determined interviewees seek to get their story out, blatantly ignoring the social cues of the interviewer, see C. T. Morrissey, "John Hawkes on Tape: The Paradox of Self-Identity in a Recorded Interview," Journal of Oral History 6 (1985): 47-56.
93. Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War (New York, 1989), 111.
94. On the racism endemic to construction workers during this time, see E. E. LeMasters, Blue Collar Aristocrats: Life-Styles in a Working-Class Tavern (Madison, WI, 1975).
95. "Time Citizens Panel: The President Buys More Time - and Some Hope - on the War," Time, June 12, 1972, pp. 16-17.
96. "Amnesia" is widely used across the political and ideological spectrum, from Noam Chomsky to Arthur Schlesinger. See "On Historical Amnesia, Foreign Policy and Iraq, Noam Chomsky interviewed by Kirk W. Johnson," http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/ 20040217.htm (accessed December 12, 2005);
97. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, 1998).
98. For an example of a book-length treatment of historical "amnesia," see Stephen Bertman, Cultural Amnesia: America's Future and the Crisis of Memory (Westport, CT, 2000).
99. Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," American Historical Review 102 (1997); 1386-1403.
100. See Ron Kovic's memoir, which preceded the tempered account in the Hollywood movie, Born on the Fourth of July (New York, 1976).
101. Roger Ebert, "Forrest Gump," Chicago Sun-Times, July 6, 1994, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19940706/ REVIEWS/407060301/1023.
102. Richard White, "History, the Rugrats, and World Championship Wrestling," Perspectives of the American Historical Association 37 (1999): 11-13.
103. See, for example, Larry H. Addington, America's War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 112: "The VVAW's protest against the war was a more convincing argument to many at home than those of protesters who had never been near a Vietnam battlefield."
104. Winston Groom, The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump (New York, 1994).
105. Sam Wineburg, "Crazy for History," Journal of American History 90 (2004): 1401-14;
106. and Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia, 2001).
107. Also Daniel L. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, "No Computer Left Behind," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 24, 2006, pp. B6-B8.
108. On "vernacular memory," see John Bodner, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
109. For examples of recent studies of textbooks, see Diane Ravitch, Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York, 2003);
110. Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 2000);
111. Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (Armonk, NY, 2000);
112. Joseph Moreua, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003);
113. Ralph Lerner, Althea K. Kagai, and Stanley Rothman, Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High School History Texts (Westport, CT, 1995);
114. and Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward, History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray US History (New York, 2004).
115. For a review of how students read history textbooks, see Richard J. Paxton, "A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them," Review of Educational Research 69 (Fall 1999): 315-39.
116. For an exciting and iconoclastic approach to using textbooks in the classroom, see Robert B. Bain, "Rounding Up the Unusual Suspects: Facing the Authority Hidden in the Classroom," Teachers College Record 108 (October 2006): 2080-114.
117. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), 217-52.
118. An article in the May 27, 1999, New York Times titled "Remembering American Soldiers on a Virtual Wall" listed three Web sites that provide a virtual tour of the memorial. Kinko's brochure, 2001, "Put a Face with a Name"; see http://thevirtualwall.org.
119. Schudson, Watergate, esp. 55;
120. as well as Michael Schudson, "The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present," Communication 11 (1989): 105-13.
121. For a recent example of the past's stubbornness in the face of attempts to squelch it, see Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York, 2002).
122. The term "sensitizing concept" comes from Herbert Blumer, "What Is Wrong with Social Theory," American Sociological Review 19 (1954): 3-10. In contrast to "definite concepts" that are amenable to empirical test, sensitizing concepts (e.g., culture, society, institutions, mores) "lack precise reference and have no bench marks which allow a clean cut identification of a specific instance" (p. 7). The usefulness of such concepts comes in their ability to point researchers to phenomena that have been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed.
123. Bernard Bailyn, Education and the forming of American Society (Cambridge, MA, 1960), 14.
124. One would be hard-pressed to find in the voluminous National Standards for United States History (Los Angeles, 1995) any serious examination about how contemporary culture shapes modern historical consciousness.
125. The Sopranos, season 4 (2002), episode 2, in which Tony Soprano is angered by a planned Native American protest to a Columbus Day parade; "Participating 7-Eleven Stores to Offer Commemorative Brochure During Black History Month." Press release from Cathy Heald, 7-Eleven http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/press_release/2003-01-28.pdf (accessed January 23, 2006). For notable exceptions in the educational literature,
126. see Peter Seixas, Popular Film and Young People's Understanding of the History of Native American-White Relations," History Teacher 26 (1993): 351-69;
127. Greg Dimitriadis, '"Making History Go' at a Local Community Center: Popular Media and the Construction of Historical Knowledge among African American Youth," Theory and Research in Social Education 28 (2000): 40-64;
128. John S. Wills, "'Some People Even Died': Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Remembrance in Elementary Classrooms," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2005): 109;
129. John S. Wills, "Popular Culture, Curriculum, and Historical Representation: The Situation of Native Americans in American History and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes, "Journal of Narrative and Life History 4 (1994): 277-94;
130. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan, Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 2000);
131. and Simone Schweber, "Fundamentally 9/11: The Fashioning of Collective Memory in a Christian School," American Journal of Education 112 (2006): 392-417.