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Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Critical Perspectives On The Past)

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Taped to the door of Sam Wineburg's office at the University of Washington's College of Education are paired photos of dogs and their comically similar owners. Professor Wineburg greeted me with a pop quiz: "Which twins look most alike?"

Behind this playful question is an educational psychologist's interest in how people think, especially about history. Wineburg's "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Temple U. Press, 255 pages, [price]) shows that historical thought is not a natural process: it "goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to [understand] the past."

Wineburg told me his interest in this subject first awoke when he took a history class he couldn't ace with his good memory. He learned that histories aren't objective summaries of the facts but interpretations and arguments made out of information that's always incomplete. "But how did historians do that?" Wineburg asked. "Their books seemed like products of naturally systematic thought--which wasn't how my mind worked, but maybe I was just dumb!"

Wineburg's research into history and the mind has won many honors during his 12 years at the University of Washington. Through having students and professors think aloud while reading documents, he found that only novices just read something and decide what it means. "A historian's thought process is full of hunches and reverses, constant self-questionings and I-don't-knows," Wineburg explained.

Standardized history tests inhibit this kind of thinking, besides guaranteeing that students will seem vastly ignorant. "Periodically, starting with the first national survey in 1917, Americans have concluded from factual tests that kids don't know history. The conclusion isn't logical." Wineburg smiled wryly. "Kids have just never remembered the facts that adults sitting around a table making up a test say they should remember."

He pulled a U.S. history text from a shelf. "Why not teach how to question the facts? Here's Rosa Parks: 'Tired after a long day's work, she sat down in the front section reserved for whites.' Actually, Parks sat in the middle of the bus, available to anyone unless the front was full. Other accounts have her saying she wasn't especially tired and wasn't sure why she kept her seat when challenged. Did Parks intend an act of civil disobedience? Why do these historians disagree?"

Comparing documents, Wineburg added, "is detective work that kids are usually deprived of. It shows them that no single authority has the whole story, and it raises real questions of meaning." He paused, considering. "Every topic doesn't need endless debate. Students stay engaged once they realize history's not a fixed story they must swallow whole but a way of thinking they can apply to life."

Americans need this way of thinking, Wineburg told me. "We're deluged by conflicting, fragmented information that tries to steer us in particular directions. We need to raise citizens who ask themselves, 'Is this true? Who's saying so? What's the nature of the evidence?' Taught this way, history is a training ground for democracy."

Is such training too hard for schoolchildren? "We underestimate kids' abilities to think. Or we believe their self-esteem depends on having tasks they easily do. But we feel good about ourselves by doing things we thought we couldn't do, with capable people around to pick us up after a tumble and show us our reach can exceed our grasp."

"Historical Thinking" is an academic book, but not daunting or dry, and full of stories any reader can enjoy. Wineburg describes Primo Levi's moving encounter with the student who swore that if sent to Auschwitz he could have escaped. There's a chapter on drawings that schoolchildren made of their mental pictures of Pilgrims, Settlers, and Hippies for one of Wineburg's studies--readers can bypass the statistical tables and walk right into these young imaginations. The high-school history class discussion that veers off the rails is as gripping as well-crafted fiction.

Wineburg's conversation with me was no merely academic exercise either. "History gives us a kind of humility," he mused at one point. "I can read something written in 1860 but not know what it meant to live in 1860. I never lived in a world where you could wake up in the morning and go to an auction and buy people. Studying history, we think our way into what living in that world was like. It's the only form of time travel that exists."

Small wonder that Wineburg was an early winner of the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award.

As a high school teacher of American history I am constantly searching for ways in which to improve my teaching and student learning. After seeing several references in other works to Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts I decided to read the book for myself, as it turns out that decision has proven to be the single best investment in my professional development and my student's ability to grasp the complexities of historical problems. There has been a long standing debate in the field of history education as to the mission of history educators, are we to teach history as a series of factual incidents over a period of time that can be neatly packaged and quantified on standardized tests or are we to teach the process of "doing history?" That is to teach the analysis of historical events usually through primary source documents not as "stuff that happened" but as the complex interaction of people of varied backgrounds with different goals, desires and points of view. As Wineburg points out in his brilliant analysis of how we think about events in the past, history is messy and the "Historical thinking requires us to reconcile two contradictory positions: first our established modes of thinking are an inheritance that cannot be sloughed off, and, second, that if we make no attempt to slough them off, we are doomed to a mind-numbing presentation that reads the present onto the past." Although Historical Thinking is an academic work Wineburg's writing style is accessible and fluent, teachers of history at all levels from the academy to the elementary classroom will benefit from this well written and relevant study.

I have mixed feelings about this effort. On the one hand, it is clearly one of the more thoughtful discussions of how we learn and think about history. Several of Wineburg's studies raise serious questions about how we know and discuss history. On the other hand, the book is disjointed and offers little in the way of solution. This is fair enough as Wineburg acknowledges both limitations. But for say ... a Social Science Teaching Methods class, the text is too thick with criticisms and too thin with solutions. What is really needed is a text that translates Wineburg's observations into California Social Science Skills Standards (or equivalent). One that takes knowing history seriously, but offers busy young teachers ways to improve their classrooms.

Whatever its limitations, I'd highly recommend the book to all history teachers. While we may not find "The Solution" we will find productive new approaches to creating our own solutions.

[Note: This review appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on June 1, 2001. Go to online copy at the newspaper's website ..., or see the text below:

Taped to the door of Sam Wineburg's office at the University of Washington's College of Education are paired photos of dogs and their comically similar owners. Professor Wineburg greeted me with a pop quiz: "Which twins look most alike?"

Behind this playful question is an educational psychologist's interest in how people think, especially about history. Wineburg's "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Temple U. Press, 255 pages, ...) shows that historical thought is not a natural process: it "goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to [understand] the past."

Wineburg told me his interest in this subject first awoke when he took a history class he couldn't ace with his good memory. He learned that histories aren't objective summaries of the facts but interpretations and arguments made out of information that's always incomplete. "But how did historians do that?" Wineburg asked. "Their books seemed like products of naturally systematic thought--which wasn't how my mind worked, but maybe I was just dumb!"

Wineburg's research into history and the mind has won many honors during his 12 years at the University of Washington. Through having students and professors think aloud while reading documents, he found that only novices just read something and decide what it means. "A historian's thought process is full of hunches and reverses, constant self-questionings and I-don't-knows," Wineburg explained.

Standardized history tests inhibit this kind of thinking, besides guaranteeing that students will seem vastly ignorant. "Periodically, starting with the first national survey in 1917, Americans have concluded from factual tests that kids don't know history. The conclusion isn't logical." Wineburg smiled wryly. "Kids have just never remembered the facts that adults sitting around a table making up a test say they should remember."

He pulled a U.S. history text from a shelf. "Why not teach how to question the facts? Here's Rosa Parks: 'Tired after a long day's work, she sat down in the front section reserved for whites.' Actually, Parks sat in the middle of the bus, available to anyone unless the front was full. Other accounts have her saying she wasn't especially tired and wasn't sure why she kept her seat when challenged. Did Parks intend an act of civil disobedience? Why do these historians disagree?"

Comparing documents, Wineburg added, "is detective work that kids are usually deprived of. It shows them that no single authority has the whole story, and it raises real questions of meaning." He paused, considering. "Every topic doesn't need endless debate. Students stay engaged once they realize history's not a fixed story they must swallow whole but a way of thinking they can apply to life."

Americans need this way of thinking, Wineburg told me. "We're deluged by conflicting, fragmented information that tries to steer us in particular directions. We need to raise citizens who ask themselves, 'Is this true? Who's saying so? What's the nature of the evidence?' Taught this way, history is a training ground for democracy."

Is such training too hard for schoolchildren? "We underestimate kids' abilities to think. Or we believe their self-esteem depends on having tasks they easily do. But we feel good about ourselves by doing things we thought we couldn't do, with capable people around to pick us up after a tumble and show us our reach can exceed our grasp."

"Historical Thinking" is an academic book, but not daunting or dry, and full of stories any reader can enjoy. Wineburg describes Primo Levi's moving encounter with the student who swore that if sent to Auschwitz he could have escaped. There's a chapter on drawings that schoolchildren made of their mental pictures of Pilgrims, Settlers, and Hippies for one of Wineburg's studies--readers can bypass the statistical tables and walk right into these young imaginations. The high-school history class discussion that veers off the rails is as gripping as well-crafted fiction.

Wineburg's conversation with me was no merely academic exercise either. "History gives us a kind of humility," he mused at one point. "I can read something written in 1860 but not know what it meant to live in 1860. I never lived in a world where you could wake up in the morning and go to an auction and buy people. Studying history, we think our way into what living in that world was like. It's the only form of time travel that exists."

Small wonder that Wineburg was an early winner of the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award.

Suggesting ways to get students to think like historians, as an alternative to the regurgitation of historical "facts" is a core theme of the book. Wineburg's book challenges many of our preconceived notions of teaching history, by using many descriptions and illustrations to show how students are thinking currently in their social studies classes and ways that we may improve this.

After teaching high school history and government in Massachusetts for 5 years, Sam Wineburg's book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts was recommended by a friend and professor at Boston University. It had a profound impact on how I look at teaching history and more specifically how I approach history with my students. I found the book so helpful that I shared it with many of my colleagues and most agree that it is an important book that should be read by all history educators.

If you have appreciated books on history education by scholars like Gary Nash, Eric Foner, James Loewen, or Dana Lindaman, then Sam Wineburg's book is a must read to help further the discussion of how to educate America about its past.

This book is great for many reasons. First, the chapters are a sufficient length which leaves you with a lot to consider rather than feeling inundated with too much information. Second, the narrative is pretty good. I found it accessible and not suffering from being overly-academic and/or wordy. Most importantly, it stimulated me to think about what I want my students to get out of their history education. The book raises far more questions than provides answers but that is okay. You quickly find as you read that historical thinking is far understudied and is light years away from a consensus as to what constitutes a good history education. This book may not provide all the answers needed to facilitate historical thinking but certainly illuminates enough issues that will allow educators to move forward in the right direction. If you teach history you owe it to your students to read this.

Sam Wineburg's book hits history teachers between the eyes with ten solid selections from previous studies and articles relating to how teachers, parents, and students relate to and understand history. He offers solid evidence and interesting stories that I found very accurate to what I have experienced as a student and a teacher. With so much emphasis on math and science today it was refreshing to read a book specifically and passionately written that reflects the importance of history and how it is taught not only for students knowledge of the past but for a way of thinking differently about life and decisions they will make in the present and future. There are several good specific examples in the book that have great ideas on how to stimulate thinking in a historical contextual manner and "for teaching students to think and reason in sophisticated ways." (pg. 83). I will definitely use this book and reference it often while adjusting my teaching methods.

I like the ideas in this book and think that the author has presented history professionals with plenty of research about how students and teachers interpret what they learn in their history courses. That said, I don't find this book to be particularly well written. Maybe it's just me, but getting through some of the essays was like slogging through mud... obscure language, lousy sentences, and paragraphs weighed down by too many words. I think most of the essays in this book could have been parred down to two or three pages a piece. So, Sam can think, but he writes like a graduate student who says in fifty words what could be said in ten. In fact, I think I can distill the book down to one (long)sentence: "We can't view or interpret what happened in the past accurately because we weren't there and are too affected by the present; therefore, looking back in time is at best like "looking through a glass darkly."

Great analysis...provides a lot of good insight on teaching history and developing historical thinking within students. I would definitely recommend this for any educator.

This is the way history should be taught. It is soooo refreshing to see substance being touted over the superficial knowledge encouraged by the chase for numbers fostered by NCLB.