Category: HISTORY

Memorial Day.  A three-day weekend that marks the ending of the school year, the beginning of BBQ and pool season, and the unofficial beginning of American summer. However, this federal holiday was created with a different purpose in mind.  Intended to be less a celebratory day off and more of a day of remembrance, Memorial Day is a chance for us to honor the sacrifices of our nation’s soldiers and their families.

While it is hard to generalize the experiences of American soldiers, we’ve chosen the following excerpts to give voice to the humanity of their authors, through sacrifice and glory, perseverance in the face of overwhelming hardship, and across conflicts and centuries. We hope you take the time to read, reflect and share.

Please be aware that the following excerpts contain historical language that is currently considered offensive.

Valley Forge | 1777

The army… marched for the Valley Forge in order to take up our winter quarters. We were now in a truly forlorn condition—no clothing, no provisions, and as disheartened as need be. We arrived, however, at our destination a few days before Christmas. Our prospect was indeed dreary. In our miserable condition, to go into the wild woods and build us habitations to stay (not to live) in, in such a weak, starved, and naked condition, was appalling in the highest degree, especially to New Englanders, unaccustomed to such kind of hardships at home. However, there was no remedy—no alternative but this or dispersion. But dispersion, I believe, was not thought of—at least, I did not think of it. We had engaged in the defense of our injured country and were willing, nay, we were determined to persevere as long as such hardships were not altogether intolerable….

-Joseph Plumb Martin, excerpted in The American Revolution

Washington, D.C. | 1863

Dear Madam,—

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement . . . that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

-Abraham Lincoln

Ambrieres, France |1919

On or about December 26, 1918, General Order No. 40 was issued from the headquarters of the 92nd Division. . . . “Military Police will see that soldiers do not address, carry on conversation with or accompany the female inhabitants of this area.” At the time this order was issued we were billeted in the village of Ambrieres, Mayenne. There were white soldiers also billeted in the same village but they did not belong to the 92nd Division and the order did not affect them, hence it was an order for Colored soldiers only. It was not an A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Force) order. It was a divisional order for Colored soldiers. We were living in the same houses with the French people and under the terms of this order we were forbidden to even speak to the people with whom we lived, while the white soldiers of the 325th Baking Co. and the Sub-supply Depot #10 were allowed to address, visit or accompany these same people where and whenever they desired.

-Charles Isum, excerpted in World War I and the 1920s

Somewhere in the South Pacific | 1943

Last night they said we were about 2½ hours from the Jap fleet, but let them come. I came out here to see action and I hope this is the biggest battle of all time and it is also an honor to be on the flagship so I think this baby will give a good account of itself. Most of the crew would rather keep on going and see action than go back to the States. As for me, I would not trade my place with anyone back in the states. I do not know how I will feel when we run into action, but right now I feel in the pink of condition and don’t care how many Japs I run into.

-James J. Fahey, excerpted in World War II

We at Teaching American History thank all veterans and current members of the armed forces for your service.    

This blog was originally posted on May 12, 2021. We rerun it today on the 179th anniversary.

175 Years Ago Today: Congress Declares War on Mexico, Invoking Manifest Destiny and Destabilizing the House Divided

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the young American republic expanded across the continent at a rapid pace. Purchasing the vast Louisiana territory from France, acquiring Florida from Spain, displacing Native sovereignties in the Southeast, annexing the republic of Texas, and eyeing the far reaches of the Pacific, expansionist-minded Americans considered it their “manifest destiny” to “civilize” North America with democracy, Christianity, and capitalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson voiced this nearly unconquerable attitude when he described the United States in 1844 as “a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations. It has no past: all has an onward and prospective look.”

Manifest Destiny, however, also brought great instability to the federal Union. The acquisition of Texas in 1845 sparked a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Mexico. Both nations contested the location of Texas’s southern border. Americans asserted a border along the Rio Grande, while the Mexicans placed the boundary north of that, along the Nueces River. To defend American claims, President James K. Polk deployed the military to the Nueces and ultimately directed General Zachary Taylor to advance south of the river. In response, on April 25, 1846, Mexican troops traversed the Rio Grande, engaged United States forces, and killed several American soldiers in the disputed territory. President James K. Polk demanded that Congress declare war against Mexico to avenge the “shed[ding] of American blood on American soil.” On May 13, 1846, Congress gave Polk what he had always desired: a justification to invade Mexico, secure the Rio Grande as the United States’s southern border, and seize the Mexican province of California. Sensing that Polk intentionally—and immorally—initiated the conflict, an obscure Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln garnered attention when he challenged the president’s presumption that American blood had indeed been spilled on American, and not Mexican, soil. Steadfast in his criticism of “Polk’s War,” Lincoln lost his reelection bid in 1848, concluding his only term in Congress. 

The newspaper editor and poet Walt Whitman captured the war fever that gripped an American public eager to “chasten” Mexico. “Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!” Nearly 90,000 United States soldiers served during the war, two-thirds of whom were amateur citizen-soldiers. The New York Herald depicted Americans’ romantic view of volunteer military service in the republican tradition: “One of the highest tests of a good citizen, is the readiness or reluctance with which he yields his personal liberty . . . when at his country’s call, he leaves his private pursuit and enters the field to fulfill the highest obligation a citizen owes his country.”

A chauvinistic racism underwrote Americans’ confidence in their Manifest Destiny. One ardent supporter of the war called Mexicans “reptiles in the path of progressive democracy” who could never advance beyond their allegedly primitive Indian and Spanish heritages. Only the strong arm of American military power, so went the argument, could wean Mexico away from what was seen as Catholic religious idolatry and veneration of dictators, replacing these with a stable republicanism. Mississippi volunteer William P. Rogers believed that the United States carried a heavy burden to “greatly improve the condition of the poor Mexico.” For Rogers, the war was a paternalistic crusade “promotive of humanity and the cause of freedom and religion.”

The war nevertheless garnered significant opposition. As a Democrat, President Polk embodied the bellicose assumptions of Manifest Destiny. He sneered at other national sovereignties, considering the United States fully entitled to swift territorial acquisitions across North America. The Whig Party lambasted Polk for instigating what it deemed an unprovoked and reckless war against Mexico. Georgia congressman Alexander H. Stephens condemned the war as “downward progress. It is a progress of party—of excitement—of lust for power—a spirit of war—aggression—violence and licentiousness. It is a progress which, if indulged in, would soon sweep over all law, all order, and the Constitution itself.” Statesman Henry Clay likewise denounced Polk’s militarism as a dangerous harbinger of national destabilization: “War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality.” 

Like many Whigs, Clay assumed that Polk purposely instigated the war to conquer land through which slavery might expand. Though a slaveholder himself, Clay considered the aggressive expansion of slavery a danger to national equilibrium, destabilizing sectional balance, radicalizing political extremes, and, he believed, planting the seeds of race war. Abolitionists expressed an even more earnest opposition to what Frederick Douglass called Polk’s “slaveholding crusade.” Douglass excoriated the Democrats for parading as “the accustomed panderers to slaveholders: nothing is either too mean, too dirty, or infamous for them, when commanded by the merciless man stealers of our country.”

Nervous that “Polk’s War” would yield abundant territorial bounties for slaveholders, Democratic Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed in 1846 that, “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” Wilmot aimed to keep western lands free for white antislavery settlement but also free from African American residents. 

Although Wilmot’s Proviso failed to pass Congress, its implications held great resonance for the future. When Mexico surrendered in 1848, the United States acquired as a prize of war the vast Mexican Cession, stretching from current-day New Mexico to California. The great twentieth-century American historian David M. Potter called this moment “an ominous fulfillment” of Manifest Destiny. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted the trouble that would follow. He anticipated that the United States would “conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which will bring him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” By 1848, the triumph of national expansion had established the conditions of an irrepressible conflict over the question of slavery’s expansion into the western territories. 

As Potter wrote in his magisterial account of the 1850s, “the slavery question became the sectional question, the sectional question became the slavery question, and both became the territorial question.” By 1848, the antislavery movement crystallized into an organized political coalition that insisted that slavery could never spread beyond its current place in the American South. Antislavery adherents maintained that the territories must be preserved for free labor, uncorrupted by the exclusionary oligarchic and aristocratic influence of slaveholders. The incompatible social architectures of the North and South had made the Union a “house divided” against itself.

This blog was originally posted on May 5, 2022. We rerun it today to spotlight teacher Ginny Boles!

Ginny Boles needed to build her content knowledge in American history. Paradoxically, her love of this history had led her to major in classics as an undergraduate at UCLA, so as to read the Latin and Greek texts the Founding Fathers read as they formulated their plans for self-government. Now, having taught social studies for two years at Oakcrest School in Vienna, Virginia—an independent girls’ school in the Catholic tradition—she knew what she didn’t know. She needed more knowledge to answer students’ questions. She hoped to study part-time while continuing to teach.

Living in Northern Virginia, she thought she had options. George Washington University, Georgetown, American University, and even the University of Virginia offer Masters programs on campuses in the District of Columbia. Investigating them, she discovered what is true of most MA programs in history: the courses were scheduled during her teaching day, and the curriculum emphasized methodology, to prepare students for PhD research.

Boles had hoped for in-depth seminar discussions on the eras of history she’d never studied. Discouraged, she almost enrolled in Gilder Lehrman’s program, which is built primarily around recorded online lectures by prominent scholars. “But they paused the program, right when I was ready to start, so I was left without any good option.”

A Program Designed for Working Teachers

Then, in the same week, two different people told her about the Master of Arts in American History and Government program (MAHG). A teacher friend in Pittsburgh came back from a week in the summer residential MAHG program, having audited a course on Lincoln. “This seminar I just took was amazing,” the friend said. “It’s at Ashland University, and they offer a Masters.” Next, her father called. After a busy career in law, he had reduced his practice and taken up teaching history at the high school Boles graduated from in Pasadena, California. He’d just returned  from a multi-day Teaching American History seminar at the Reagan Library, led by Professor John Moser. “This organization offers amazing professional development!” he said. “They also offer a Masters, at Ashland University.”

“Then I got on Ashland’s website,” Boles said. “As soon as I read about MAHG, I realized, ‘This is designed for me! And it’s been the best experience ever. I recommend it to any history teacher I know who’s looking for a Masters.”

She has enjoyed both the online and on-campus experience. “MAHG’s WebEx seminars pretty well simulate in-person seminar classes. But I loved going to Ashland and seeing people I had ‘met’ on the screen. You could bond over having been with someone for those WebEx sessions.” 

She has also enjoyed the hours of private study. “I love being able to say: ‘Oh, sorry. I have to go do my reading right now.’” The readings fascinate her, and they have changed her teaching.

How MAHG Builds Content Knowledge and Confidence

“My first two years teaching American history were fun, but a little bit rough. I was like every new teacher tackling a new course, barely learning enough at night to teach it the next day. Then one of my high school juniors would raise a hand and ask a good question. I had to say: “I don’t know. I’ll check and get back to you.” But there was never time to research extra things!”

After several MAHG courses, she found she had answers. “Last year, my students were asking questions about the daily experience of enslaved people and the attitudes of slaveholders. I could say, ‘I’ve read these letters and memoirs. I think I can answer that.’ I became a lot more knowledgeable and more confident.”

Beginning the program, she lacked the content knowledge of many of her classmates, who had taught for years in public schools. These veteran teachers “are inspiring me to learn more and teach better.”

Learning through Text-Based Discussions

At the time, Boles used primary source documents to a limited extent. This was not for lack of a model in teaching students how to read and discuss texts carefully. She began her teaching career at the Geneva School in Manhattan, where she taught the “great books” of Latin using a simple but effective approach called “Shared Inquiry” (The method was pioneered at St. John’s University and elaborated by the University of Chicago). She found that most MAHG professors applied a similar approach to primary documents. “MAHG classes are discussions grounded in texts.” The professor poses a question based on a document all have read. Teachers respond, using the text as evidence. Anyone offering an opinion based on their own experience or prior beliefs is reminded, “where in the text do you find support for that?”

Seminars conducted in this way teach “how to disagree with others civilly.” Since everyone shares the same piece of evidence, there are no arguments about unverifiable claims. Reading speeches, essays and letters on contrasting sides of a political issue of the past, MAHG students think through the logic of each perspective together. Students learn to “listen closely, responding in their comments to what the person before them said.” MAHG professors clarify confusing points—but “their own politics doesn’t enter the discussion.”

Two years into the MAHG program, Boles began to add more primary source documents to her courses. She now understood which documents illuminated the themes in history she most wanted to teach.

MAHG Helps Teachers Define Their Priorities

By then, the MAHG program had helped Boles define her teaching priorities. MAHG faculty, drawn from universities across the country, are about equally divided between historians and political theorists. The dual perspectives benefit both history and government teachers. “I didn’t really know the difference between the two when I began MAHG,” Boles said. I asked my professors, and they explained it to me.” While she took some “super helpful” courses from historians who emphasized social history, she discovered that she was most drawn to political theory.

In Boles’ judgement, all Americans need to ponder two questions: “‘What is the role of government? And, ‘What is required to create—and then sustain—a free republican government?’ This has become my ‘essential question’ for all the courses I teach, whether it’s sixth grade Ancient History, 11th grade American History or 12th grade Government and Modern World History.”

Boles does not teach AP courses at Oakcrest; she teaches students more inclined to take AP courses in math and science. Without the pressure to cover everything that might appear on the AP exam, she can choose events and topics centered on her theme. The first part of her American history course covers the development of self-governing traditions in the colonial period; the Revolution; the first framework for national government, the Articles of Confederation; and the lasting framework developed at the Constitutional Convention.

Little-Known Documents that Illuminate Big Issues

Then she moves to the controversy over “nullification.” Americans rebelled against the tyranny of George III, and after winning independence worked to create a government that would not fall back into tyranny. But by 1830, some complained that a tyrannous northern majority were imposing tariffs on a southern minority. Boles assigns excerpts of the debates between Senator Daniel Webster (MA) and Senator Robert Hayne (SC); Andrew Jackson’s 1832 proclamation repudiating South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification; and an exchange of letters between Hayne and the elderly James Madison, who’d written the 1798 Virginia Resolutions in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison had claimed the right of a state to “interpose” when Congress overstepped its Constitutional authority.

“Hayne sent his speeches to Madison,” asking him to confirm his arguments in favor of states’ rights. “Madison’s letter back says, ‘You’re completely wrong.’” Students discuss whether Madison’s thinking on state sovereignty and federal authority changed, or Haynes’ and John C. Calhoun’s opinions diverged from the founder’s position. “I love this exchange—and I learned of it through MAHG,” Boles says.

Having considered “the nature of the union” apart from “the obvious moral element of slavery,” Boles’ students see the states’ rights claims made by slave-holding secessionists at the outset of the Civil War with greater clarity. “Lincoln’s First Inaugural takes on”—and demolishes, Boles says, “every single argument the secessionists make.” Later, she presents the Progressive challenge to constitutional provisions “that the founders saw as protections against tyranny. The Progressives had a completely different view of government’s role.”

Thesis Work that Answers Important Questions

To complete her degree requirements for MAHG, Boles is writing a thesis. (Many MAHG students opt instead to take four more course credits, for a total of thirty-two, and a cumulative exam.) The MAHG program invites teachers to write on the questions they most need to answer. Boles will write on the Progressive critique of the founding. “Did the founders establish a government that protects only individualism? Or did they see their limited government taking care of the common good?”

“Everything we’re asked to do in MAHG can be transferred to my teaching,” Boles says. “It’s demanding but doable for someone teaching full time. It is also really fun!”

This blog was first posted on April 15, 2014. We rerun it today in honor of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15th, 1865.

Today, April 15th, is the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Four days before, the president had delivered his last public address. It was his official acknowledgement of the Confederate surrender. But instead of dwelling on the hard-fought victory, Lincoln spent the bulk of his speech outlining his approach to the next difficult task: returning the lately rebellious states to their pre-war status as participants in the democratic governance of the nation. Already the state of Louisiana had applied for recognition of its rewritten state constitution. The occasion was unprecedented and posed numerous practical difficulties. Lincoln had always insisted that the seceding states had done so illegally. He could not treat those applying for Louisiana’s readmission to the union as the representatives of a once independent nation, now a defeated people making peace terms under duress. Yet it was obvious that those making up the new post-war legislature did not represent the sentiments of most of those in Louisiana who had sided with the Confederacy:

Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction. . . .

Abraham Lincoln, April 11, 1865

Some in Congress, who feared that the Southern states would not recognize the national decision to emancipate the slaves, wanted to delay the admission of Southern representatives to Congress while awaiting proofs that the 13^th Amendment would be respected. These voices wanted to impose tests before “readmitting” seceded states. Lincoln, however, did not want to delay restoring the Confederate states to what he felt was their “proper” place within the Union. He details his plans for reconstruction only after asserting that talk of “readmitting” states to the Union would not be constructive:

We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.

Abraham Lincoln, April 11, 1865

It is perhaps not inaccurate to say that Lincoln recommends that the loyal states reintegrate the seceded states in the same way that a loving parent might welcome home prodigal sons. The Biblical analogy fails, however, when one considers that the Southern prodigals did not acknowledge having betrayed the Union when they seceded.

Invited to attend a TAH multiday seminar on the Cold War at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, social studies teacher Cade Lohrding was thrilled. Lohrding—born in the late nineties—has no memory of Reagan’s presidency. Yet he feels nostalgia for the decade which culminated in the end of the Cold War, and for the president whose actions helped end it. Although those politically active during the 1980s recall many partisan disputes, Lohrding sees these fights as less acrimonious than those in the years since. He’s concluded that Reagan’s optimistic, good-humored leadership style blunted partisan fights. Reagan was a leader about whom both parties “could say something positive.” 

Kiowa County Junior High School in Greensburg, Kansas, provided a substitute teacher so that Lohrding could fly on a Friday into Burbank Airport in time for the seminar’s opening reception and dinner that night. Lohrding enjoyed this time of socializing – a chance “to talk with teachers from all over the country who teach different groups of kids. Yet we’re all experiencing the same problems.” Lohrding, who is the only junior high social studies teacher at his rural, K – 12 school, has few opportunities to share ideas with colleagues. The next day, he thoroughly enjoyed discussing primary documents with these new friends. “Then we went to the Reagan Library and learned more about the era. In the next sessions we got to relate what we saw to what we read in the documents. I’d never done anything like that before.”

Contrasting Today’s Partisan Fights with Cold War Unity

At the end of the seminar, an older teacher affirmed Lohrding’s sense that after the Cold War, partisan fights in America grew increasingly bitter. Professor John Moser, the seminar facilitator,  asked the participants if there were aspects of the Cold War era they missed. One teacher responded, “I miss how united we were.” This prompted Lohrding to tell his colleagues,

I’m the youngest person here . . . . All of my life, it has been constant: one side hates the other. . . . It takes a natural disaster or some other horrible event for us to realize we’re not that different from each other, and that it’s really important for us to work together to get positive things done. We might agree or disagree about what that positive change is, but . . . . what matters is that we all recognize something has got to change. . . . Today, the public discussion . . . is negative, negative, negative. That really bothers me.

Lohrding has seen citizens pull together in the wake of natural disasters. Greensburg was devastated by a tornado in 2007, destroying the homes of Lohrding’s grandparents and aunt and uncle. Ranchers in the area immediately drove pickups into town to rescue those trapped under debris. Once the roads were safer to travel, Lohrding—then an eight-year-old, living forty miles away in Protection, Kansas—and his brothers and sister joined their parents in the clean-up effort. “People who live in southwestern Kansas help each other out automatically, expecting nothing in return,” he said. Lohrding did reap one treasure from that time, a photo showing him standing beside President George W. Bush, who visited the disaster site.

Lohrding’s Decision to Teach

With ambitions to run for elective office, Lohrding entered Wichita State University as an undergraduate political science major. He switched to 6^th through 12^th grade social studies education after concluding that politics had grown “too ugly.” Today he works to promote vigorous but civil discussion in his classroom. “There are 60 kids in the junior high, and I teach every one of them, watching them mature,” he says. To sixth graders, he teaches ancient world history; to seventh graders, geography and Kansas history; to eighth graders, US history from early settlement through World War I. Some semesters he also teaches an elective introductory business class.

Following the advice of his mentor at Wichita State, D. J. Spaeth, Lohrding builds students’ interest in social studies by relating lessons to current news and encouraging them to explain their own opinions. Teaching them that healthy politics entails debate, he often responds to students’ arguments with counter arguments. He pushes students to back up their opinions with facts. 

Responding to Students’ Interest in the Election

Yet this fall, as the presidential contest grew rancorous, Lohrding avoided referring to it. His eighth graders protested. “This is US history happening right now!” they said. “Why are we not talking about it?” Changing tack, Lohrding asked students to evaluate the candidates’ campaign effectiveness. He showed videotapes of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, asking students to monitor the candidates’ responses to questions about their policy proposals. After a moderator’s question was answered by both candidates, “I paused the video, and asked the students to write notes on what the candidates said. Then I asked them to discuss which candidate spoke most convincingly about their policy.” Before beginning the exercise, he’d told students not to expect either candidate to “win on every single issue.”

Watching the presidential debate, students saw the candidates deflecting difficult questions and speaking instead about issues they could more confidently discuss. “Students got so annoyed,” Lohrding recalled. “They were like, ‘Just answer the question!’” Later, when they watched the vice-presidential debate, students found the candidates’ responses refreshingly on point. “‘Mr. L, is this what debates are supposed to be like?’ they asked. I said, ‘Yes! The candidates are supposed to be civil, and to base their responses on facts. It’s our job as viewers to check those facts, of course.’”

Although Lohrding never divulges to students his own political views or voting choices, he shares their excitement at the suspense of a close race. “So we talked about the polls every day,” Lohrding said. “We even checked the betting market,” tracking changing predictions on Polymarket.com’s  electoral map. Lohrding also showed students maps of votes in the Electoral College since 2000, asking them to analyze political trends. Just before election day, Lohrding asked students at every grade level to predict the electoral outcome. He showed them polls that made district-by-district predictions, then handed out blank maps, telling them to color each state either red or blue. At first, “students protested, ‘All the polls are close!’ So I said, ‘Use your best judgment. Tell me how the election is gonna go.’

“I had one kid get it 100% right. And a lot of them came close,” Lohrding said. After noting on earlier maps the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, many guessed correctly that, despite predictions, Michigan would vote as the other two states did.

Opening Dialogue Between Students and Parents

Later, at a parent-teacher conference, a father jokingly chided Lohrding for encouraging students’ interest in partisan politics. “Come on, man, you couldn’t put off that discussion? That’s all my kid wants to talk about now!” Lohrding said he understood the wish to forestall adolescents’ entry into partisan fights. “But your kid asked about the election. If they ask, and it’s in my curriculum, I’m teaching it.”

Another lesson plan evoked a positive parent response. To help students understand their own political convictions, Lohrding handed out a chart listing elements of the dominant parties’ ideologies. “Then I said, ‘Go through and highlight five of your main beliefs.’ There were kids who highlighted three on one side and two on the other. When one student pointed out that there was a donkey above the left column, and an elephant above the right column, the other students said, ‘Oh my gosh!’ and asked to mark a fresh sheet. I said, ‘No, you are taking that home to show your parents. Your parents will still love you, whatever you marked. Ask them to mark three of their own beliefs. Then talk with them about it.

“One parent emailed me to say this lesson led to ‘a genuine conversation with my kid.’”

Lohrding hopes to foster “engaged citizens who will register to vote, research the candidates, and find candidates they can support. I hope they develop political convictions they are willing to defend, even to those with different views. I hope they feel, ‘we can disagree, yet still be best friends.’ Our political opinions shouldn’t define our identities.”

For today’s blog, we are highlighting a document that helps students intersect two of the most historically important elements of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. A part of our Cold War CDC volume, this statement by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) clearly and succinctly describes the Johnson administration’s perceived hypocrisy in fighting injustice abroad while tolerating it at home, and demands that Americans reprioritize the expansion and enforcement of democratic norms and institutions within the American south as opposed to southeast Asia.

Read the entire document, our scholarly introduction, and discussion questions here. 

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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has a right and a responsibility to dissent with United States foreign policy on any issue when it sees fit. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee now states its opposition to the United States’ involvement in Vietnam on these grounds:

We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.

We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black peoples’ struggle for liberation and self-determination in this country for the past five years. Our work, particularly in the South, has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders.

We ourselves have often been victims of violence and confinement executed by United States governmental officials. We recall the numerous persons who have been murdered in the South because of their efforts to secure their civil and human rights, and whose murderers have been allowed to escape penalty for their crimes. . . .

We question, then, the ability and even the desire of the United States government to guarantee free elections abroad. We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask, behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United States cold war policies.

We are in sympathy with, and support, the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the “freedom” we find so false in this country. . . .

Read the entire document, our scholarly introduction, and discussion questions here.  And visit our bookstore to get your copy of The Cold War today.

One-Day seminars are the easiest way to engage with Teaching American History in person. These are free to attend for all social studies teachers and can be in historical locations, school districts, and educational service centers. For a few hours, teachers can dive into the content of primary source documents through a discussion with colleagues facilitated by a scholar. Lunch is provided, and at the end of the day you head home with an attendance letter.  

Although One-Days are designed to fit around a teacher’s busy schedule, it is important to spend some time preparing for the day. Here is some advice from teachers who frequent One-Day seminars.

• Complete as much of the readings as possible. Course packs (you can find a sample here) are sent 3–4 weeks ahead to give teachers a chance to carve out some time to read.  This allows participants to prepare their thoughts and questions and join in the conversation to really get the meaning behind the documents.  You have the opportunity to participate in some deep and meaningful conversations and the more reading completed, the more you can jump right to those conversations at the seminar! That can be daunting, however, for a first timer.  “[What I do] is read through the readings that are provided rather slowly,” says Brandon Floro, a teacher in Tontogany, Ohio. “While I read, I highlight or underline answers to the questions provided for each section. I also highlight or underline remarks that I found interesting in the documents that I think would add to the discussions. I also look up words/terms that I know are unfamiliar to me as they help bring context to the documents at hand. Lastly, I will look up maps or visuals that may be of assistance to gain a visual understanding. For example, when reading the Missouri Compromise, it helped to look up a visual of the map where the lines were drawn so I could physically see where it was.” Ron, a teacher in southern Ohio, echoes Brandon’s advice: “I read the packet and highlight things that strike me as important. I then annotate in the margin things about which I may have a question or jot down something that is connected to another reading or to another historical event or concept.”
• Plan your drive and possibly stay the night.  Some of our One-Days are in incredible locations! Whether you’re going to be driving to see the beautiful Smoky Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina or the vast fields in Corning, Iowa you want to make sure to plan your trip to include traffic and sudden weather events.  Perhaps staying in a hotel the night before or planning an early morning might be your best bet. Either way, One-Days start at 8:55 am and end at 2:15 pm to allow busy teachers time to travel. We have One-Days on weekdays and Saturdays.  Book that substitute, and then make sure you come! 
• TAH staff will typically reach out several weeks prior to the seminar to confirm attendance.  Since materials are printed and sent and lunch is offered at the seminars, we want to make sure our numbers are correct. TAH wants to ensure that the seminar is as meaningful as possible!
• Our hope is you leave a One-Day with a better understanding of content and are ready to take it back with you to your students. Steve Kohler, a social studies teacher in Sandusky, Ohio, remarks “[One-Days] have reinvigorated me as a teacher and given me so much to take back to my students….  [They] have made me a better teacher and given me more to share with my students ” We look forward to seeing you at one! 

Interested in scheduling a One-Day at your district? Email us at [email protected]!

Courtney Reiner holds a Bachelor of Arts in Integrated Social Studies degree from Kent State University and a Master’s of American History and Government degree from Ashland University. She taught 14 and a half years in northwest Ohio and is currently TAH’s Teacher Program Manager for Ohio.

In honor of women’s history month, we bring you a reading selection that highlights the upheaval American society experienced in the 1920s as regards gender roles. The media popularized the term “flapper” to describe rebellious young women who rejected conventional notions of proper female behavior, and it became a common descriptor for young women who shortened their skirts, bobbed their hair, danced to jazz music, smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol illegally, embraced their sexuality, or disobeyed their elders. As journalist William O. Saunders illustrates, flappers didn’t just challenge gender norms, but also the dynamics of white middle-class family life.

I am the father of two flappers: trim-legged, scantily dressed, bobbed-haired, hipless, corsetless, amazing young female things, full of pep, full of joy, full of jazz. They have been the despair of me for two or three summers; but if they don’t fly off and marry and quit me before I’m a century old, I’m going to know those girls.

I used to think I knew my girls. A lot of foolish parents make that same mistake; but it remained for Elizabeth, the elder of the two amazing young persons, to open my eyes and show me up in my ignorance.

For instance, I thought my girls were different from the average run of wild young things. My own childhood was spent in a righteous, church-going, psalm-singing little country town, where young folk were taught “to be seen and not heard,” and where a game of croquet on Sunday afternoons was an abomination in the sight of the Lord.

I assume that I am just an average adult and parent. I was fetched up by a modest mother who wore three petticoats and a floor-sweeping skirt, and by a father who kept on his trousers to bathe his torso, and put on his shirt before bathing the rest of him. I never learned from either parent whether I was male or female, or that there was such a division in the human species.

I came up with some old-fashioned ideas about women and woman’s place in the world. There was nothing frank about the age in which I was brought up. It was not even decent to concede that women were bipeds. . . .  Read more

Want more women’s history materials?  Check out these materials from our digital atlas entry on World War I and the 1920s!

The Changing Role and Status of Women

Courting vs. Dating

Early in his first term, President Donald Trump signed the Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017, establishing March 29 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day. The law honored the women and men who served in the military during the Vietnam War, and, as Trump put it, “were spit on and treated like dirt for serving.” It was clear that Trump envisioned himself that day righting an age-old wrong. After decades of neglect and disdain, Vietnam Veterans Day would offer these Americans the heroes’ welcome home they never received.

That is one way of telling this story. But it unfortunately obscures a great deal more than it reveals.

U.S. involvement in Vietnam officially began on November 1, 1955, with the establishment of the American Military Assistance Advisory Group for South Vietnam, and ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon and the departure of the last remaining American personnel. Between these mileposts, 8.75 million American men and women served in uniform around the world, 40 percent of them stationed in Vietnam and adjacent Southeast Asian countries. More than 58,000 of those would die in the war.

The so-called “police action” in Vietnam evolved over time to become the most challenging war in American history. Although World War II resulted in nearly seven times as many American deaths, Vietnam has come to occupy a place of unique anguish in the national psyche. Its vague and conflicting goals, its protracted nature, its ballooning unpopularity at home, and its eventual end in ignominious defeat conspired to make honoring, celebrating, and remembering service in the war difficult and messy.

Efforts at honoring Vietnam veterans cannot be understood apart from the experiences and memory of their parents’ (“Greatest”) generation who served in World War 2. The war their father’s fought was clear in its aims, short in its duration, virtuous in its achievements, and victorious in every sense. Surviving veterans returned home, en masse, to the open arms of a jubilant and grateful nation. American military service in all future wars would be compared to these images and experiences. Anything short of ticker-tape parades would raise questions of honor and gratitude.

This helps us understand how the image of the scorned Vietnam veteran became a mainstay of American oral tradition in the years following the war’s end. This image portrayed him returning home from Southeast Asia not to adoring crowds or fanfare but to derision, anger, and contempt. The notion gained traction through various anecdotal accounts in circulation and was all but “confirmed” thanks to widely read memoirs like Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976) and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983), along with comparable depictions in film including William Devane’s in Rolling Thunder (1977) and Jon Voight’s in Coming Home (1978).

The reality on the ground was more complicated. A Harris Poll commissioned by the Veterans Administration in 1971 found that only 1% of returning veterans described their reception upon their arrival home as “unfriendly.” The best scholarship on the home front amid the Vietnam War has challenged popular depictions of the derided returning veteran. Historians like Jerry Lembcke and Eric T. Dean could find no evidence of spitting on veterans, and very few incidents of ridicule or hostility. They conclude that the trope of the reviled Vietnam veteran is a historically dubious, yet politically useful myth.

By contrast, examples abound of communities throughout the war welcoming veterans home with euphoric celebrations—even parades! Despite the war’s strange complications—and a vocal anti-war movement—Americans, by and large, remained patriotic backers of American military operations in Vietnam, showing particular support for military personnel risking their lives. Richard Nixon understood this dimension of the American public when he appealed aptly to the “great silent majority” in a November 1969 televised speech.

None of these observations are meant to imply that returning veterans didn’t experience challenging, even painful homecomings seasoned with feelings of alienation, loneliness, dissonance, or post-traumatic stress. Many obviously did.  But so too did veterans of previous wars—even the “good” ones. Even so, the feeling that Americans lacked gratitude for Vietnam veterans lingered and became its own cause célèbre.

Because Vietnam veterans never received massive or triumphant homecomings like those fondly remembered from 1945, groups began lobbying public officials to give this younger generation the honor they deserved. No one wrote more letters, lobbied more members of Congress, or traveled more miles on behalf of this cause than Alfonso Sellet, a building superintendent from tiny Pine Bush, New York. Sellet deserves title as the true father of Vietnam Veterans Day.

Born in 1920, Sellet immigrated to the United States from Italy as a small child with his parents just before the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 went into effect. He spent his formative years in Brooklyn. While living an otherwise ordinary American life, Sellet had the rare distinction of serving and seeing action in World War II (earning a Bronze Star), Korea, and Vietnam. He thus experienced personally both the exhilaration of a celebrative welcome home in 1945, and the humiliation of arriving returning (injured) from Vietnam in 1966 to a quiet, abandoned Air Force base. No one there to greet or thank him or his fellow returnees. Something had to be done.

In 1968, he founded the Committee to Honor Vietnam Veterans, and began lobbying state and federal officials to, among other things, observe a special “Honor the Vietnam Veteran Day.” He quickly won over his congressman, Hamilton Fish (R-NY) who would sponsor a bill in 1971 to this end. Despite receiving what Fish reported as “letters and newspaper articles by the hundreds acknowledging the need for recognition of these brave men—AND NOT ONE DISSENT,” it would take until 1973 for the bill to be considered, passed, and signed. Just before Christmas, President Nixon signed a resolution declaring March 29, 1974, “Vietnam Veterans Day,” marking the one-year anniversary of the last American serviceman to withdraw from South Vietnam.

In the meantime, cities and states issued dozens of their own “official” Vietnam Veterans Day, held often on March 29 and sometimes, confusedly, on March 30. While the March 29 was not (and still isn’t) recognized as a federal holiday, various congresses and presidents through the years have episodically recognized the day with their own proclamations of gratitude and honor of the millions who served in uniform during the Vietnam era. In some cases, such as the congressional resolution passed in 2009 and the bill signed by President Trump in 2017, these proclamations were set forth as though the day was being recognized for the very first time.

It is good that Americans honor our military personnel who have served our nation in seasons of both peace and war. And it is especially important that we recognize the sacrifice of those who risked and gave their lives amid a conflict that was complicated and unpopular. But the story of Vietnam Veterans Day is a telling reminder that American memory—especially when it comes to military service—is always tinged with politics. It is also short and prone to amnesia.

Jay D. Green is Professor of History at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he has been on the faculty since 1998.