Category: HISTORY

Bill of Rights day—December 15—commemorates the day in 1791 when the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were ratified. To celebrate Bill of Rights Day, we offer below a condensed version of the introduction to the Bill of Rights core document volume, available, as are all the document volumes, in the TAH bookstore. Our late colleague, Gordon Lloyd, edited the volume and wrote the introduction. References to documents in parentheses are the documents in the Bill of Rights volume.

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Americans were concerned about rights, especially religious rights, long before the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Unlike the Constitution written by the delegates to the 1787 convention, all the state constitutions written during the Revolution established three particular rights: the right of conscience, or free exercise of religion; the right to have one’s case heard by a local impartial jury; and the due process rights of the common law. In addition, seven states attached a prefatory declaration of rights to their frameworks of government: Virginia (June 1776), Delaware (September 1776), Pennsylvania (September 1776), Maryland (November 1776), North Carolina (December 1776), Massachusetts (March 1780), and New Hampshire (June 1784). There was a remarkable uniformity among the seven states with regard to the kinds of civil and criminal rights they sought to secure. The four states that decided not to preface their constitutions with a declaration of rights (New Jersey, July 1776; Georgia, February 1777; New York, April 1777; and South Carolina, March 1778), nevertheless incorporated individual rights in their constitutions (e.g., The New Jersey Constitution).

The issue of a Bill of Rights arose as the Constitutional Convention drew to a close. To explain his decision not to sign the Constitution, George Mason distributed to his fellow delegates a list of ten objections to the document they had agreed upon. The list began: “There is no declaration of rights”. In particular, “there is no declaration of any kind for preserving liberty of the press, the trial by jury in civil cases, nor against the danger of standing armies in times of peace.” Mason thought the addition of a federal bill of rights  to the Constitution not merely worthwhile; he considered it imperative. He was concerned that Congress might abuse the supremacy and the necessary and proper clauses of the Constitution (Articles 6 and 1, section 8, respectively). The supremacy clause made federal laws “paramount to the laws and constitutions of the several states.” Thus, “the declaration of rights, in the separate states, are of no security.” The necessary and proper clause enabled Congress to “grant monopolies in trade and commerce, constitute new crimes, inflict unusual and severe punishments, and extend their power as far as they should think proper.”

Throughout the nine-month ratification campaign, proponents of the Constitution defended the absence of a bill of rights. James Wilson’s State House Speech, delivered in Philadelphia three weeks after the Constitutional Convention adjourned, articulated what came to be known as the Federalist position: a bill of rights would be unnecessary and dangerous. Wilson argued that at the state level, a bill of rights was necessary and salutary because “everything which is not reserved” to the people, “is given” to the government; but that it was “superfluous and absurd” at the federal level because “everything which is not given, is reserved.” Wilson’s speech became the foil for the Antifederalist opposition literature in the fall of 1787. Near the end of the ratification campaign, Federalist 84 repeated Wilson’s insistence that a republican form of government had no need for a bill or rights, because such bills “are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince.”

By early January 1788, the ratifying conventions in Delaware (voting 30-0), Pennsylvania (46-23), New Jersey (38-0), Georgia (26-0), and Connecticut (128-40) had ratified the Constitution. The Report issued by the twenty-three Pennsylvania opponents had a considerable impact on the subsequent campaign. The Report proposed two different kinds of amendments. One set, if adopted, would have re-established the principles of the Articles of Confederation. The other set proposed that a declaration of rights be annexed to the Constitution. The report outlined rights that were later incorporated into the Constitution as its first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth amendments.

The fate of the Constitution was determined in the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New York ratifying conventions in the first half of 1788. Antifederalist literature in the Fall of 1787 had had an adverse effect on the campaign for ratification. A compromise – “ratify now, amend later” – was needed in each of these four states to secure ratification. In Massachusetts, ten delegates switched their votes and a 187-168 majority ratified the Constitution. A switch of five votes ensured ratification in New Hampshire (57-47), and Virginia (89-79). In New York, the Antifederalists outnumbered the Federalists by a margin of 46-19 going into the convention. In the end, the Constitution was ratified by a vote of 30-27.

There were two different kinds of recommendations made by both the opponents and friends of the Constitution. Some called for an alteration in the very structure and powers of the new federal government. Others sought to protect the rights of individuals with respect to the federal government. All nine of Massachusetts’s recommendations are of the first kind. New Hampshire was the first to add a brief declaration of the rights of citizens to the list of amendments. In Virginia and New York, the two kinds of amendments were explicitly separated.

With the ratification of the Constitution, James Madison (1751-1836), who had done so much to bring it into existence, supported the adoption of a bill of rights, while objecting to amendments that would radically alter the new government’s structure and power. He did so for reasons of both principle and prudence. Wilson had argued that any list of rights might be seen as definitive, thus limiting the rights of citizens rather than protecting them.  Madison proposed a new principle: the enumeration “of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This eventually became the Ninth Amendment. From a prudential point of view, Madison wished to conciliate “honorable and patriotic” opponents who wanted to “revise” the Constitution to include a bill of rights. Revising the Constitution would entail calling a second convention that might “abolish” the Constitutional framework that had been so carefully negotiated during the summer of 1787. Madison’s underlying purpose in making his arguments was to prevent a second Constitutional Convention.

In his first Inaugural Address (April 30, 1789), George Washington spoke of only two particular legislative issues facing the new Congress: the question of his compensation, which he declined, and Congress’ “exercise of the occasional power delegated by the fifth article of the Constitution,” the power to amend the Constitution. He asked that “whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question, how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted.” Madison took Washington’s point. He needed to propose a bill of rights that did not alter the work the Constitutional Convention had accomplished. Figuring out how to do that became Madison’s challenge in the First Congress.

The House of Representatives’ debate on Madison’s proposed amendments is not without irony. Madison thought that his bill-of-right additions might be “neatly” incorporated within the body of the Constitution. Roger Sherman, arguably Madison’s leading and most persuasive opponent during the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, objected to this. The original work of the framers, he argued, should remain intact. Sherman’s view prevailed.

The Senate reduced the number of proposed amendments from 17 to 12. In doing so, the Senate narrowed Madison’s House-backed proposal to protect freedom of conscience and the press at both the state and national levels, restricting it to the national level only. The Senate also combined the protection of conscience and the press into one amendment. The Senate version was adopted, with slight revision, by the whole Congress and submitted as twelve amendments to the States for approval. Ten were ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures and became the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights was adopted through a process that included both discussion of principle and political negotiation. It did not just fall from the sky in one whole and intelligible form. True, the Bill of Rights incorporated much of the English common law and the colonial due process tradition, but it also shed much of this tradition’s feudal and monarchical features. It also showed that between 1776 and 1791 Americans had developed their own, broader understanding of rights. By supporting freedom of conscience, free speech, and enhanced rights of due process of law, Americans appealed beyond their traditions to their own distinctly American ideas.

Teaching American History is excited to announce the release of our latest core document volume, the second edition of Free Speech.  Edited by Joseph Fornieri, this reader contains a collection of twenty-six landmark court cases, an introductory essay, case introductions, a thematic table of contents, study questions, glossary, and suggestions for further reading. Take a peek inside the volume below!

Volume Introduction

While the language of the First Amendment seems straightforward, its text conceals as much as it reveals. Although “Congress” alone is mentioned, the First Amendment applies to any agent of the national government, including the president. As originally framed, the Bill of Rights guaranteed immunity only from the actions of the federal government, not the states. This changed in the twentieth century with the “doctrine of selective incorporation,” which applied the First Amendment to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause . . . The incorporation doctrine authorized the Supreme Court for the first time in its history to review state laws that potentially infringed upon the First Amendment. Moreover, the liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment should be understood primarily in terms of protection from government control. Thus, it may come as a surprise to some that the First Amendment does not apply to private institutions—those social, political, civil, and religious groups, associations, and corporations that are not units of the federal or state governments. So, while a state university is bound by the First Amendment, a private college or a religious association may restrict free speech or religious exercise as it sees fit, in accordance with its own mission statement.

With regard to free speech, a literal reading of the word “speech” is likewise misleading, since the Supreme Court has gradually extended the First Amendment’s free speech protections to include symbolic, nonverbal expression such as flag-burning, visual imagery such as pornography, commercial communication such as advertising, and children’s entertainment such as video games. Finally, although the First Amendment says “no law,” the right to free speech is not absolute. As Justice Holmes famously said, it does not give one the right “to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater.” Indeed, one of the enduring issues faced by the Supreme Court has been where to draw the line between protected speech and punishable speech. The goal of this documentary volume of landmark cases is to provide students with the basic texts and tools for understanding the Supreme Court’s evolving jurisprudence on freedom of expression. . . . 

In conclusion, while these landmark cases contain many pearls of wisdom about free speech, history teaches us that we cannot always rely on the Court to safeguard our liberties. The Court’s decisions may be sidestepped or ignored. The Bill of Rights is only a parchment barrier unless sustained by habits of heart and mind that give it life. Some of the more recent challenges to the First Amendment have involved the control of media platforms, hate speech, cancel culture, political-corporate collusion, foreign disinformation, and campus protests, as well as debates over curriculum, broad antidiscrimination laws, and speech compelled by public and private bureaucracies. Wherever one stands on these controversial issues, free speech can only be preserved through a “First Amendment culture” that understands, cherishes, and jealously guards its preferred place in our democracy. This volume hopes to contribute in some small way to that worthy cause.

Sample Documents 

Study Questions

25. Morse v. Frederick (2007)

A. Do you think Frederick’s message on the banner was entitled to First Amendment protection? What are the conflicting interests in this case? How did the school setting influence the Court’s reasoning in this case? To what extent did Frederick’s pro-drug message influence Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion? Explain Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion. Do you agree? Explain Justice Thomas’ dissenting opinion.

B. How have the precedents of Bethel v. Fraser and Morse v. Frederick narrowed Tinker v. Des Moines? How do the facts of these cases differ? Was the Court’s reasoning in Frederick consistent with Tinker, or do you agree with Justice Thomas that Tinker should be overturned?

 Purchase or download your copy today!  Interested in bulk purchasing?  Email us at [email protected] to discuss pricing.

Sojourner Truth died on November 26, 1883, aged 86. Yet reports of her death began circulating decades earlier. Abolitionists and women’s rights advocates had built Truth into a prophetic figure, wise and therefore old. Truth, who never learned to read and write, relied on her abolitionist and feminist allies to put her life story into print, primarily through the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Although based on Truth’s recollections, it was written by Olive Gilbert, conveying Gilbert’s interpretations and misstating some facts.

If aware of her friends’ inventions, Truth was perhaps too grateful to them to object. Sales of her Narrative provided much of her living during an activist career spanning forty years. And perhaps Truth to some extent reshaped her past as she recalled it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe called Truth “the Libyan sybil,” an epithet that stuck.  Truth had a tall, erect figure and deep, authoritative voice. She enlivened her speeches by singing. Her direct colloquial style entertained audiences but also touched hearts. To abolitionists and women’s rights advocates, Truth was a godsend. They supported—and used—Truth in their advocacy. Truth cooperated while maintaining her own independent perspective.

Contemporary biographer Nell Irvin Painter, speaking of Truth’s homespun wit, says it masked deep outrage. Had Truth critiqued 19^th century America without the screen of folksy humor, she would have repulsed her largely white audiences.

In a sense, Truth died and was reborn several times during her long life. She escaped from slavery in her late twenties, becoming a free person. During a religious vision, she died to sin and fear and was reborn into faith.  When about 45, she adopted the name by which we know her today, along with her new profession as an itinerant evangelist and reform advocate.

From Slavery to Freedom

She was born into slavery in about 1797, on the farm of a Dutch family in Ulster County, New York, and named Isabella. As a child and adolescent, she was sold three times. She thought the slaveowner who last held her more trustworthy than the others. When New York legislators voted to begin graduated emancipation on July 4, 1827, she made a deal with him. If she did extra spinning work, he’d free her a year before the law took effect. The slaveowner reneged after she injured her hand and fell behind in the work. Isabella kept at her spinning, and several months later, having finished the promised work, she walked away from the farm before dawn. She found protective shelter and work at the nearby farm of a pious couple who despised slavery, Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen. When the slaveowner called to reclaim Isabella, the Van Wagenens paid him $25 to leave her in freedom.

From Fear to Faith

As a young child, Isabella was taught by her enslaved mother to pray for protection to a god in the sky. Yet her ideas of God remained vague, until, during her first year of freedom she received a vision. She saw God angrily accusing her of sin. Then she felt the presence of a spirit who had always loved her, who protected her from God’s wrath. She called this spirit Jesus, seeing him then as a perfect being God created and endowed with immortality. (Her religious views continued to evolve, for a time causing her to join a communal cult.)

First Public Battle For Justice

In 1828, Isabella—although poor and illiterate—won a lawsuit. Escaping slavery, she had taken with her only one of her five children, her infant Sophia. Her older children would spend many more years in slavery, since New York law established a graduated emancipation. Adults born before 1799 would be freed in 1827; males born later would be freed at age 28, and females at 25. Some slave owners, to recoup the financial loss the law caused them, sold the still enslaved children to Southern traders—a violation of the emancipation law. When Isabella learned that her 4-year-old son Peter had been sold in this way, she resolved to bring him back. With help from local Quakers, she entered a complaint with the Ulster County grand jury. She also borrowed money to hire a lawyer, who located Peter.

The child had been passed from one owner to the next and repeatedly beaten because he was too young to do what they expected. When his mother came to claim him, he protested, fearing yet another beating. Finally reassured, Peter went home with Isabella, who was horrified to find the many scars under his clothing.

Becoming Sojourner Truth

In 1843, Isabella adopted the preaching profession and a new name. She chose “Sojourner,” seeing her life as a journey toward communion with Jesus, and “Truth” for her conviction that a divine spirit spoke through her.

Truth first gained fame for an impromptu speech she made at a woman’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. Some had questioned the inclusion of black speakers at women’s rights events, claiming their presence blurred the cause with that of abolition. Uninvited, Truth walked onto the stage to assert her sisterhood with all women demanding their rights:

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? . . . I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. . . . As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint and a man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much—for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.

Then Truth gave a feminist reading of the Bible. “And how came Jesus into the world?” she asked. “Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?”

Sojourner Truth in Historical Memory

The convention’s secretary, Marius Robinson, transcribed Truth’s speech in his report of the proceedings. Today, it is remembered for a refrain supposedly woven through it: “Ain’t I a Woman?”  These words were invented twelve years later by Frances Dana Gage, who had presided over the convention. In 1863, when she profiled Truth for the New York Independent, Gage probably needed the commission her article earned. (During the Civil War, both she and Truth volunteered to help those fleeing slavery to protection behind Union lines. Gage worked on Parris Island, South Carolina; Truth collected food and clothing for freedmen in Washington, DC.) In Gage’s account, audience members hissed when Truth approached the podium, but roared with applause when she finished speaking. Gage also rendered Truth’s speech in stereotypical Southern slave dialect—an idiom foreign to her.

Another story about Truth became famous when embellished by Harriet Beecher Stowe. At a meeting where Frederick Douglass spoke of his despair that white Americans would ever outlaw slavery—and his growing sense that black Americans would have to win their freedom through force of arms—Truth responded in disapproval: “Frederick, is God gone?” According to Stowe, Truth’s question was the more startling, “Is God dead?’ Stowe also transposed the scene from a small gathering in Ohio to a great meeting in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, saying that Truth’s intervention ended discussion of violence. To Painter, Stowe’s story simply threw another veil over African American outrage. Douglass himself, in his 1892 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, recalled answering Truth’s question with the words, “No, and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.” And in fact, it was civil war that brought abolition.

Truth did refute claims that discredited her. In 1858, at an antislavery meeting in Indiana, a group of pro-slavery Democrats disrupted the end of her speech, saying the deep-voiced Truth was a man in woman’s clothing. They demanded that some women take her aside and examine her, to see if she had female breasts. Truth stood her ground, saying that while in slavery she had suckled white children when her own children needed her milk. Then she undid her bodice, exposing her bosom and asking her male hecklers if they, too, wished to suck? After emancipation, Truth worked among the unemployed freedmen in Washington, DC, helping them find work and exhorting them to orderly habits. Aware that the defeated Confederates intended to keep the freedmen in servitude, she sought funding for them to migrate to the Midwest and develop their own independent communities. Few supported her in this effort. Meanwhile, Truth’s friend Frances Titus oversaw the printing of expanded editions of Truth’s Narrative, sales of which supported Truth. She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, an invalided former celebrity, visited by the curious, to whom she whispered, “Be a follower of the Lord Jesus.”

“To be a good member of your community, you really have to understand why people do the things that they do,” says Bryan Little, who teaches both on-level Government and AP Government at McPherson High School in McPherson, Kansas. “That’s why good teaching about citizenship involves students in an intentional study of human behavior.”

For Little, government class entails “constitutional study and human behavior study side by side.” Little’s study in the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program prompted him to think carefully about how the Constitution’s structure reflects the founders’ understanding of typical human behavior, or what they called “human nature.” Documents from the founding reveal the framers’ acute awareness that human self-interest inclines those in politics to exploit any opportunity to gain power. For this reason, as James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, the design of American government connects “the interest” of each public official to “the constitutional rights” of his office. This, Madison argued, ensures that each branch of government guards against encroachments by the other branches.

After Little’s students read an excerpt of Federalist 51, he asks them whether Madison’s view of human nature is correct. “That’s not something I would have thought to ask students before MAHG,” Little says.

Games that Reveal Human Nature

Little also uses games to prompt reflection on human behavior. “My favorite is an exercise I borrowed from a trainer ten or fifteen years ago,” he said. “It’s called “Primitive Politics.” Each  student gets a stack of fake money, places $10 in a central pool, and then bids on a chance to win all the money there. Whatever a player bids is forfeited to the central pool, unless his bid is highest—in which case he wins the pool.” The game proceeds in successive rounds, with a pay-out at the end of each. “Early on, a player says, ‘I’m gonna put my whole pile in—Yay! I won!’ Then in the next round two or three of them decide to work together, gaining advantages. Players may also propose rules that players vote on—some practical, some just for revenge.” After the game ends, “we unpack the reasons why players did what they did.” Students talk about the winners’ behavior. Most succeed through communicating and cooperating well with others. Perhaps this game teaches a less pessimistic view of human behavior than Madison’s.

Another game would seem to confirm Madison’s view. It explores a vice in our political system—gerrymandering—that the founders did not manage to prevent. Students are assigned to either an X team or an O team, then given cards on which a series of Xs and Os are arranged in a grid. Told to draw district lines around adjacent letters, they draw reasonable boundaries at first. Little then tells them to repeat the exercise, this time designing districts that give their team as much electoral advantage as possible. They learn it is quite easy to do this. Afterwards, they examine successive iterations of the district maps for Kansas, talking about demographic data in each period that probably led party leaders to redraw the lines.

Human Nature Vs. Data Collection

Today, political pundits don’t mention the founders’ thinking about human nature when  discussing Americans’ electoral choices. They talk about correlations between demographic data and voting patterns. Little pushes students to analyze demographic data “intelligently.” Political analysts use data to locate the “nudge factors” that move a group of citizens to vote one way or another. Little asks his students, “Is this correlation a coincidence? Or is there a causal relationship?”

Earlier this year he taught a lesson on political socialization. “Let’s analyze the factors that cause groups of people to trend in one political direction or the other,” he said. Students  generated a list of demographic factors presumed to influence voting choices—age, gender, ethnic group, occupation, education level, religious affiliation. Little wrote the list on the board, then placed  next to it laminated photos of citizens whose genders, features, dress styles, etc., suggested the demographic categories in which they fit. Students guessed the political orientation of each citizen.

“‘Then, as a last example, I put a big picture of my face on the board, and I said, ‘Okay, analyze the demographic data for this person.’

“Students said, ‘You’re an old white guy.’

“‘Okay, where does that trend?’ I asked.

“‘But you teach,’ a student said.

“‘All right,’ I said, ‘where does that trend?’

“‘Are you from Kansas?’ another asked.

“By the time we got to the end of the analysis, students said, ‘None of the data helped!’

“‘Perfect!’ I replied. ‘Data offers indicators, but it doesn’t say for sure how things are going to work. People are more than data points. They are complex animals. Their decisions are not based exclusively on their situations.”

Helping Students Discover Their Own Political Views

Little’s students find it more productive to trace the influences on their own political orientation. They take an online “political compass” test to figure out their political views. Their test results place them at various locations on a graph divided into four quadrants by two axes: one for social issues, with “libertarian” at the extreme left and “authoritarian” at the extreme right; the other for economic policy, with “left” and “right” marking the end points.

“Most years, students call out to me when the test delivers its results: ‘Sir? My test’s broken—it put me on the wrong team!’ And I reply, ‘Maybe you put yourself on the wrong team!’” This year, however, there were fewer such cases. Many students saw their results and recognized not only their accuracy but also the family and social influences that fostered their opinions. “They did some really nice, very short, but very analytical writing on where their ideologies are coming from. They were very thoughtful, maybe more so than usual.”

Why did students this fall take the self-analysis so seriously? Little speculates that the election campaign made them curious. They wondered, “Why are the adults going out of their minds over this election?” They themselves occupy less fixed positions than their elders. “They’re not entirely sure what they think or why they think it. But the election made them aware that their political views matter.”

Human Nature and Political Development

All citizens need to think not only about the sources of their own opinions; they need to think about the founders’ opinions, and how our constitutional system reflects their understanding of human behavior. “This is true for both conservatives and liberals,” Little said. “The conservative who wants to maintain the current structure of government needs to know why that structure exists. The liberal who wants to change aspects of that structure needs know why they’re not working the way they were intended to work.”

Some changes in our political system have produced results no one intended. Little recalled a Sunday evening lecture given in the MAHG residential program this past summer. Professor Joseph Postell told the history of our political party system. Parties formed even though the framers did not expect them to. The parties provided mechanisms for moderating the bills that passed in Congress and for filtering out extremist or obviously unqualified office-seekers. Electoral reforms, including the introduction of party primaries, weakened these mechanisms. Then the introduction of TV cameras in congressional chambers allowed junior legislators to subvert the authority of party leaders even further. Politics became more performative than constructive. “Postell led with the thesis that we need stronger parties,” Little recalled. “Everybody in the room—we’re all social studies teachers who feel we’re experts in history—we all thought, ‘No, that’s stupid.’ Yet by Friday, everybody was saying, ‘Yeah, he’s on to something.’”

Asked what he hoped his students understood to be the greatest threat to the continuity of self-government, Little replied, “Hopefully, us! People are the weakest part of the whole process.

“But I tell students about a book I read, Fears of a Setting Sun, by Dennis Rasmussen. He describes a feeling of pessimism that overtook the founders as they aged. They were saying to each other, ‘Well, guys, it’s been a good run. We thought self-government would work, but here we are.’ And here we still are, 250 years later.”

When  Deputy Provost Marshall Silas Soule left his home late in the evening of April 23, 1865, to investigate reports of gunfire, he did not know it would be his last day on earth. Perhaps he was thinking of Hersa, his wife of twenty-two days, as he patrolled the streets of Denver. Maybe he was rethinking his recent testimony before a Congressional committee investigating the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado. Maybe his thoughts focused on his duties as Denver’s newly appointed territorial law enforcement officer. Regardless of his thoughts, he walked the streets, drew his weapon, turned a corner, and confronted a gun-waving man named Charles Squier and his companion, Williamson Morrow.

Soule fired first, wounding Squier in the arm. Squier’s bullet struck Soule in the face and lodged in the back of his brain, mortally wounding the young Provost and ending the promising career of an idealistic, charismatic, and courageous officer. Squier escaped and was later captured but was never convicted. Morrow disappeared forever. No one was ever brought to justice for the death of Silas Soule.

Before touring History Colorado Center’s exhibit, The Sand Creek Massacre: The Betrayal That Changed Cheyenne and Arapaho People Forever, in Denver this summer, I had never heard of Silas Soule. I knew the massacre was one of the worst atrocities committed against native people by the United States Army during the Indian conflicts of the late 19th century. I did not know the pretext for the attack, nor did I know that two officers, Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, refused to engage their troops in the attack. Many of their fellow officers, including their commanding officer John Chivington, considered Soule and Cramer cowards and traitors for refusing to fire on Indian women and children. Those feelings may have led to the murder of Silas Soule.

The story of the Sand Creek massacre is a tragic but familiar one of broken promises, cultural misunderstanding, political ambitions, rumors, racial hatred, poor communication, and greed. It is a story of attack, retaliation, and revenge. It is an all too familiar story of white settlement encroaching on native land in numbers too large to resist. In the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, vast portions of Colorado and Nebraska were set aside for the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. But after gold was discovered near Denver in 1858,  white settlers flooded the region seeking their fortunes. Congress established the Colorado Territory in February 1861. The Treaty of Fort Wise of 1861 reduced the Cheyenne/Arapaho lands to one-third of their original size. Yet nothing stopped settler encroachment on the Cheyenne and Arapaho land.

Most of Colorado’s white settlers and their leaders did not understand tribal government. When they negotiated with a tribal leader, they assumed that leader possessed the power to enforce treaties. The reality was very different.

Plains Indian Tribes such as the Cheyenne and Arapaho were not united under a governing alliance. For example, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were enemies of the Comanches and Kiowas. They could not submit to Territorial Governor John Evans and his militia commander John Chivington’s  insistence that they surrender their weapons unless the Kiowas and Comanches did the same.  And no Cheyenne or Arapaho leader had any influence over the Kiowas or Comanches.

Indeed, even respected chiefs like Black Kettle of the Cheyenne and the Arapaho chief Left Hand could not dictate surrender for all of their own warriors. A significant group of Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors did not accept the treaties of 1851 and 1861. Known as the Dog Soldiers, they left Black Kettle and Left Hand’s bands and formed a distinct band unwilling to surrender to the American calvary. The Dog Soldiers raided several white settlements, once killing a family of four. White settlers were either unwilling or unable to recognize that a renegade band of Cheyenne and Arapaho had committed the atrocities— not the warriors under the leadership of Black Kettle and Left Hand.

Sensationalist journalism by William Byers, owner of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, fueled white fears. Byers and others spread rumors that local tribes were allying with one another to launch an attack on Denver. This fearmongering led the Colorado Territory’s Governor, John Evans, to issue a “shoot on sight” order to the Colorado militia. Any Colorado calvary officer encountering Indians, even an Indian traveling alone, was to execute them immediately, regardless of whether they were sighted on native land or elsewhere.

Other Cheyenne and Arapahos were tired of fighting. Buffalo were disappearing from their traditional hunting grounds, and their people were hungry. Black Kettle and Left Hand sent emissaries to Fort Lyon, CO, to express their willingness to surrender in exchange for the Army’s protection, along with provisions of food and other supplies. Major Edward (Ned) Wynkoop ignored the order to shoot every Indian he saw. He agreed to meet with the Native leaders and convinced his superior officer to give Black Kettle and Left Hand’s bands a chance at peace. Black Kettle and Left Hand’s people were told they would no longer receive rations from the Army but should seek land on which to hunt near the Army’s protection. So, they settled along Sand Creek, approximately 20 miles from Fort Lyon, where they could safely hunt for food. They were given an American and white flag and told to wave the flags if they saw US Calvary.

The divisions between peaceful and warlike bands within native tribes mirrored the feelings of the white population of Denver. Some, like Major Wynkoop, Silas Soule, and Joseph Cramer, saw the distinction and argued for a flexible response: to attack warlike Indians but leave those seeking peace alone. Others, like former Methodist Minister John Chivington, thought all Indians posed a threat to white settlement in Colorado. Chivington was granted permission to organize a new calvary regiment, the 3rd Colorado Calvary.

Chivington received Governor Evans’s permission to countermand Wynkoop’s peace efforts and march on the encampment at Sand Creek. He marched in secret and arrived in Fort Lyon on November 28, 1864. Colonel Chivington ordered the fort closed. No one was allowed to enter or leave the fort before the attack. The Indians were not to be warned. He would launch a surprise attack the following morning, and there would be no mercy. Soule protested. He told Chivington that “any man who fires on those Indians is a cowardly son of a bitch.” Chivington threatened to cashier Soule and promised to see him hung. Despite Chivington’s threats, Soule ordered his men not to fire when the attack began and moved them to a safe position from which they could observe the attack.

Chivington praised the outcome of the Sand Creek attack, which he called a battle and not a massacre. He claimed he inflicted heavy casualties on a well-armed group of warriors. An estimated 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho were murdered. However, the vast majority of them were women and children. The citizens of Denver welcomed Chivington’s propaganda. They cheered as the soldiers paraded through the streets carrying scalps and booty claimed from the victims. After the assault, Soule wrote his mother and his friend Major Wynkoop and described the horrors he witnessed at Sand Creek.

“The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized’” wrote Soule.  “One squaw was wounded, and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, … One squaw with her two children, were on their knees begging for their lives of a dozen soldiers, … when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children, and then killed herself. … Some tried to escape on the Prairie, but most of them were run down by horsemen. I saw two Indians hold one of another’s hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together. They were all scalped, …. They were all horribly mutilated.”

Soule’s account circulated throughout Denver. Some soldiers were ashamed of what happened and began telling others what they witnessed. Others, tongues loosened by liquor, bragged about their actions. A military investigation heard testimony from Soule, Cramer, Wynkoop, and natives that survived the attack. The investigators concluded Chivington knew “of their (the Indians at Sand Creek) friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security,” yet  “he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenseless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.” Chivington was neither court-martialed nor prosecuted.

Today, the descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people of Colorado continue to testify to the horror of November 29, 1864, and commemorate the events with a Healing Run from Sand Creek to Denver. The run is meant to “heal the land and heal the spirit” of the people who died that day. The City of Denver honors the calvary officer who refused to fire on innocent people. A historic plaque stands at the site of Silas Soule’s murder. Courage comes in many forms. Sometimes, it dwells within the heart of a soldier who disobeys orders. Sometimes, it dwells in a people’s long struggle to survive and thrive.

Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.

Every presidential election year revives questions about our system of voting through the Electoral College. Teachers tell us that students find this the most perplexing feature of our constitutional system. Below, we offer an explanation of why the Electoral College exists, how it works, and what happens when the electoral count in any state is contested.

What is the Electoral College?

Americans do not vote directly for the President of the United States. Instead, they vote for presidential electors, who then vote for the president and vice-president. This process is called the Electoral College.

Why does the Electoral College exist?

The Electoral College process respects the federal character of the United States, giving certain roles to the states and others to the federal government. Much of the discussion during the Constitutional Convention revolved around measures needed to balance the powers of the state and national governments. The Electoral College process was proposed and accepted as one of these measures.

How does the process work?

The process occurs in three stages: the selection of the presidential electors; the vote of the electors for the President and Vice-President; and the counting of the electoral votes.

Step 1: Choosing Presidential Electors

Each state has the same number of electors as the combined number of its Representatives in the House of Representatives and its two Senators. The number of representatives each state has depends on its population. Delaware, for example, with a population of a little over a million people has three electoral votes because it has one Representative in Congress and two Senators. California, which has a population of almost forty million, has fifty-four electoral votes because it has fifty two Representatives and two Senators. According to the twenty-third Amendment to the Constitution, the District of Columbia, the national capital, has three electoral votes, even though it has neither a voting member of the House of Representatives, nor Senators.

To win the electoral College vote, a candidate must receive 270 votes, which is a majority of the 538 available votes.

In each state, the political parties who have candidates running for president and vice-president choose electors at some point before the general election, the election at which the people of each state vote for president. The process for choosing electors varies according to state laws because the U.S. Constitution, Article II, section 1, specifies that each state will appoint its electors “in such Manner as the Legislature” of the state “may direct.” (In addition to these state laws, a number of constitutional provisions and federal laws govern aspects of Electoral College procedures.) The electors chosen are called a slate of electors. When the people in each state vote for a presidential candidate, they are voting for his or her slate of electors.

Step 2: The Vote of the Presidential Electors

Following the general election, the Governor of each state (and the mayor of the District of Columbia) signs what is called a Certificate of Ascertainment. The Certificate must be ready at least six days before the electors meet. The certificate lists the slates of electors for each candidate, the votes each slate received, and specifies the slate chosen as the state’s electors for that election according to which candidate received the most votes. Here is an example of a Certificate of Ascertainment.

Article II, section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress determines the day on which the electors cast their votes. Where they cast them is up to the state legislatures. The votes are cast on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December after the general election, usually in the state capital. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor any federal law requires that the electors cast their votes according to the popular vote in their state. The vote of the electors is recorded on a document called the Certificate of Vote. The Certificate of Vote contains a list for the President and another for the Vice President of all the electors who voted for each. All the electors sign the Certificate of Vote, which is then attached to an original of the state’s Certificate of Ascertainment. Both documents are then sealed up and sent to the National Archive.

In 37 states, the state official in charge of overseeing the state electoral process is the Secretary of State. The other states except one have a Board of Elections or a Commissioner of Elections who does this. In one state, Utah, the Lieutenant Governor is the chief election official.

Step 3: Counting the Electoral Votes

Electoral votes are counted at a Joint Session of Congress (the House and Senate meeting together) that takes place on January 6. This day is determined by federal law. The Vice President of the United States, acting in his or her role as the President of the Senate, presides over the counting and announces who has been elected president and vice-president.

Key Dates for the 2024 Presidential Election

November 5, 2024          Election Day

By December 11, 2024   Presidential Electors Appointed – Certificate of Ascertainment

December 17, 2024         Electors vote – Certificate of Vote

December 25, 2024            Electoral votes delivered to the President of the Senate and the Federal Archivist no later than the fourth Wednesday in December

January 6, 2025               Congress counts the vote

January 20, 2025             Inauguration Day

What Happens in Contested Elections?

Disputes over who won an election may occur in the states or at the Joint Session of Congress when the electoral vote count takes place. Some states have laws that require a recount if the election is particularly close or if, under certain circumstances, a candidate requests one. Candidates may go to state or federal court depending on whether they think the election process violated state or federal law or state or federal constitutional provisions. In 2000, the dispute over the election reached the Supreme Court. In 2020, Arizona’s Certificate of Ascertainment included information about court cases over the 2020 election that were decided or still pending.

When the Joint Session of Congress meets to count the electoral votes and declare who the next President and Vice-President will be, any objections to the electoral votes of the states must be made by at least one-fifth of the members of the House and one-fifth of the Senators.

If an objection has that level of support, the House and Senate meet separately to consider the objections. According to federal law, Representatives and Senators may consider only two objections to the electoral vote: the electors were not certified legally by a Certificate of Ascertainment or the vote of an elector was irregular in some way. An objection is sustained only if both the House and the Senate vote to do so.

If objections to the electoral vote leaves no Presidential candidate with at least 270 electoral votes, or if this is the result of the election, then according to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the House of Representatives decides the Presidential election. The House chooses from among the top three vote getters in the Electoral College by majority vote. Each state has one vote. The District of Columbia would not have a vote because it does not have a voting member in the House. If no Vice-Presidential candidate wins at least 270 electoral votes, then according to the 12th Amendment the Senate elects the Vice President. The Senate chooses between the two top vote getters by majority vote. Each Senator has a vote.

Check out this related blog: A Conversation with John Dinan, Editor of our core document collection, Federalism.

The polls and pundits say this presidential election will be a close one, perhaps decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of states. Both the pollsters and pundits may be wrong, of course, but in case they are right, we might recall our first contested presidential election, the one that occurred in 1800.

The first thing to recall about that election is that in 1800 the American people did something no people had done before. They carried out a peaceful transfer of contested political power with a democratic election. For almost a decade prior to this unprecedented event, Republicans and Federalists had waged a bitter partisan contest that split Americans into hostile factions and destroyed personal friendships. Each faction accused the other of treachery and treason. Newspapers and pamphlets spread falsehoods and slanders, not sparing even President George Washington. At one point during the decade, threatening partisan crowds gathered outside Washington’s home in Philadelphia. As the election approached, the Federalists, the party in control of the federal government, passed laws that limited free speech. Editors were thrown in jail. After the election, some partisans claimed the election was invalid, while others sought to change the procedures by which the votes, including electoral college votes, would be counted. Two states even put their militia on alert, as partisans talked of a resort to force.

Before the adoption of the 12^th Amendment (1804), electors in the Electoral College cast votes for candidates without regard to whether they were voting for the candidate as president or vice-president. The candidate with the most votes was elected president, while the second-highest vote-getter was elected vice president. While the Republicans proposed Thomas Jefferson for president, and Aaron Burr for vice president, they failed to arrange for at least one of their electors to discard his second vote. As a result, Burr ended up tied in the Electoral College with Jefferson. As the Constitution provided, the election went to the House of Representatives. After many ballots, the House finally decided in Jefferson’s favor. This happened because Alexander Hamilton, the leader of the Federalists, supported Jefferson rather than Burr. Hamilton was strongly opposed to Jefferson’s political principles, but he believed that Burr had no principles at all. Hamilton thought that self-government would survive under Jefferson, and the Federalists would have another day. He was only half right, as it turned out. Self-government did survive, but Jefferson’s manner of governing, a growing and changing America, and the obstinacy of many Federalists put an end to the Federalist party.

Despite all the contention and difficulties, on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson peacefully assumed the duties of president, as prescribed by law. Self-government had proved itself—as it would have to do again and again.

The story of the election of 1800 is told in John Zvesper’s From Bullets to Ballots: The Election of 1800 and the First Peaceful Transfer of Political Power. It is the best short—perhaps simply the best—account we have of these events. It is available in the tah.org bookstore as a paperback or as a free download.

Zvesper’s book explains why the peaceful transfer of power occurred, despite all the partisan acrimony—and worse—of the decade that preceded it. To do this, Zvesper recounts the political history of the 1790s with admirable clarity and concision. He not only relates the events that unfolded, but also analyzes the principles and political calculations of Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. Central to the history Zvesper relates is the emergence of the first political parties. As he tells the story, Zvesper explains the necessity of parties, their advantages and disadvantages, and their relation to public opinion. The topic of public opinion leads Zvesper into an insightful discussion of the rhetoric and actions of the key political figures of the day. This discussion in turn brings the reader to a deeper understanding of principled partisanship and its limitations, in light of the foundational principles of American politics announced in the Declaration of Independence. Zvesper’s account is enlivened with telling anecdotes and quotations. Behind his striking command of the historical materials, however, is a firm grasp of the profound significance of the election of 1800, and what it means for the possibility of self-government today. The election set a precedent for the peaceful transfer of power so authoritative that it has been broken only twice in our history, after the elections of 1860 and 2020.

What lessons can we draw from this story? We mention three. Self-government survived the contention of the 1790s and the complications and uncertainties of the election of 1800 because of the intelligence and character of the leading politicians of the day, principally Jefferson and Hamilton. (Burr was intelligent, but a scoundrel.) In addition, many who were involved in the drama of 1800 had been active in 1776 and after, and were proud of the achievement of self-government. They understood the sacrifices it required and did not take it for granted.

As we know, we are not always fortunate to have politicians of such intelligence and character involved in our presidential elections. So, the second lesson is just as important. In 1800, our institutions and electoral mechanisms were new and untried. Now, they are well established and have been adjusted as our experience has suggested they should be. Most recently, for example, Congress modified the Electoral Vote Count Act to make a repeat of 2020 less likely.

Ultimately, of course, in a fitting tribute to self-government, on election day and after, the survival of self-government will depend on thousands of Americans, elected and unelected, who faithfully execute their duties. From secretaries of state to ballot counters, from faithful electors to congressional clerks, from election day to the certification of each state’s electoral votes, these Americans will carry on our tradition of free and fair presidential elections.

Many students enter high school government classes knowing very little about the way the American constitutional system really works. If given only a textbook account of American government, they leave the course still unaware of what self-government requires. What happens when teachers ask students to read the primary documents of our founding carefully, constructing their own account of our system? Lightbulbs suddenly turn on above their heads, teachers who’ve studied in TAH programs tell us. They realize our Constitution is not self-enforcing. Citizens must understand and support it.

This summer we asked five teachers attending the residential program of the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) how they convey to students what self-government requires. All of these teachers were drawn to MAHG by its focus on primary documents, and most began teaching more consistently from primary documents after beginning the program.

How Fragile is This System?

Casey Enright, who teaches at Mesa High School in Arizona, recalled a lesson he’d taught on the separation of powers. Students worked in small groups as they combed through Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution, trying to answer the questions: What provisions keep the three branches of government separate? Are these provisions adequate? A young woman raised her head from the text, looking with surprise at the other members of her group. “I didn’t realize how fragile this system is!” she said.

“This led to a really interesting conversation,” Enright recalled. Gradually, students realized that the written Constitution needs institutional support. “It takes people doing what they are supposed to do, working within the confines of the Constitution, to preserve our system of government. Many countries with great written constitutions have fallen into autocracy. I told the kids that they needed to hold officials accountable, and to act themselves so as to uphold the Constitution, not to erode it.”

Learning What the Constitution Says

In the words of Amy Vara Robertson of Aventura, Florida, what self-government requires is an accurate understanding of what the Constitution says.  Robertson teaches her government courses entirely from primary documents. When her students begin reading the Constitution, Robertson hands them a list of 250 questions about our Constitutional system. “They have to read the Constitution line by line to find each answer.” As they work, they repeatedly express surprise.

“My students have assumed the Constitution says that the President can do whatever he wants—that he can make laws unilaterally. They’ve assumed that there’s an age limit for the justices, or that the justices have to have a law degree. When they say these things, I say, ‘Well, find it in the Constitution.’ In both my regular level government and AP Government classes, students react with surprise to what they find.”

An Understanding of Human Nature

Bryan Little of McPherson, Kansas noted that teaching government through primary documents helps students see our constitutional framework as a design based on an understanding of human nature.  “I keep my whole stack of MAHG class binders on my classroom desk,” Little explained. “When the kids ask a question, I say, ‘Do you want the textbook answer? Or do you want the real answer?’”

Little tells students that he can point them in either of two directions. The textbook will offer a simplified description of the Constitutional provision itself. But within his MAHG binders, Little can find documents written by the Constitution’s framers. These documents explain the framers’ thinking. If a student wants the “real” answer—and almost all students do—Little reads from the framers’ own words. Then he pushes the student to think through the framer’s logic. “Does this author, in your view, actually understand typical human behavior?”

For example, a student’s question might prompt Little to read from Federalist 51. Here, Madison explains that in order to maintain a separation between the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government, those who administer each branch must be given incentives for resisting “encroachments of the others”:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?. . . If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Little asks his students whether Madison describes human nature accurately. Few of them have thought about the human tendency toward self-serving behavior. If Madison is right, did the Constitution’s framers devise adequate measures to guard the independence of each branch of government? “That’s not something I would have thought to ask students before MAHG,” Little says. The question leads students to a crucial realization. When assessing a theory of government, you may make inferences based on experience, but you will not find exact answers. “I work on the same hall as the math classes. My students ask, ‘Well, what’s the right answer?’ I tell them it’s a matter for interpretation. Right answers are across the hall.”

Citizen Action Toward a More Perfect Union

But if there are no certain answers in civic life, students wonder, how can they participate in it? Enright responds by quoting the Constitution’s preamble, in which the founders say they hope to achieve “a more perfect union.” He explains that “any legislative solution we find to address the problem we have right now may no longer seem a great solution ten years from now. But at that point, we can revise it. That’s why it’s important to keep progressing as a society—and why it’s important that students see themselves as potential change-makers. Students think that government leaders are on a different plane from them. More often, they are ordinary people who just have had enough” of the problem they act to solve. “We need to form citizens willing to go out and bring about the change they want to see,” Enright said.

“They need to support the stability of our constitutional system without feeling like everything is locked in concrete,” Little added.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to say with a straight face to students that their vote counts and their voice matters,” interjected Ashley Vascik, who teaches at Boonsboro High School in western Maryland.

Little agreed. “Students today feel disenfranchised by institutions and processes and distant, old politicians. They’re also nervous about the elevated tension in the public sphere.”

Vascik continued, “They need to know that their voices do count. But just teaching what’s in the textbook is not going to convince them. Through primary documents, students get a better understanding of how far we’ve come and where we still have to go. Then they can be convinced to participate.”

Encouraging Confidence in Our System

But teachers can do more to reinforce the lessons primary documents teach, the group told us.  Little said, “My students volunteer at the polls,” learning how votes are carefully counted. “You need more than strong feelings—you need institutional knowledge to engage in civic life effectively.”

Robertson teaches in a charter school serving many immigrant students “who came here because their parents have hope for America. I can’t squander that hope,” she said. “I don’t say, ‘Your vote might not matter’; I say, ‘your vote matters the most!’ I tell students that historically, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 have voted less often than older citizens. ‘If you don’t like what’s going on, make a change when you go to vote in November!’” she exhorts.

Allison Collier teaches the children of hi-tech workers at the FedEx technology center in Collierville, Tennessee. Many are South Asian immigrants. Collier said she views herself “as my students’ ‘republican mother,’” using the phrase applied to early American women who educated their children in the habits and dispositions self-governing citizens need. “Eighty percent of my APUSH students’ parents were not born in this country. They don’t learn at home the stories of the Revolution and Founding. They don’t imbibe a reverence” for American institutions.

“So, it falls on my shoulders to cultivate those values. . . . Lincoln said it at Gettysburg: it’s our responsibility to teach and preserve the principle of human equality. And Jane Addams”—who spent her career among the immigrants working industrial jobs in Chicago—”said in ‘The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements‘ that the good you secure for yourself is not secure until you secure it for the people around you.”

Teachers can help students rise above the behavior they too often see in elected officials, Vascik added. “I preach the importance of civil discourse. It’s not just about speaking to others; It’s about listening to them. . . . It takes great strength to say, ‘I see you and I hear you and I respect your position.’”

Building students’ confidence in our constitutional system is the teacher’s job. That requires bringing a high level of “energy” to the classroom,” Robertson and Vascik noted. A political system dedicated to liberty and equality, Little added, “doesn’t mean anything unless we all believe it does. Our country began because normal people came together and said, ‘Let’s go do this thing.’” “Ordinary people like us,” Enright said.

In the next few days, those who have completed all coursework for the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program may begin writing their qualifying exams, so as to graduate with their degrees this December. The next iteration of the exam, which is offered three times a year, will be released on Friday, October 18.

For most teachers, the end of MAHG coursework brings a mixture of pride, relief, and wistfulness. Online coursework during the school year entailed many afterwork hours reading the assigned primary documents. Yet discussing these documents in the interactive online class sessions energized their teaching practice. Many speak of bringing into their classrooms excerpts of the primary documents they discussed in seminars the night before. “Everything I learned in the program has proved immediately useful to my teaching,” they often say.

Still, the final hurdle between coursework and the degree presents a new challenge. Teachers have three options: they may write a traditional master’s thesis, complete a capstone project, or take the qualifying exam. For those students—the majority—who choose the qualifying exam, we offer in this blog a preview of the exam’s structure and advice on how to perform well on it.

The Structure of the Exam

The exam is always released to students on a Friday, and students are allowed a little over two weeks to submit their final answers. It is an essay exam with two parts:

• The first part asks students to analyze a short text.
• The second part consists of four questions on a variety of topics, eras, or themes in American history and government. Students answer two of these questions.

The links above take you to sample exam questions, with successful responses, for both parts of the exam. You’ll see that both questions contain document excerpts that you are asked to analyze. To do well on the exam, you must understand that Part I is asking for a different, more focused, kind of document analysis than Part II is asking for.

How to Succeed on Part I

In the first part of the exam, all that is required is that you give an accurate and thorough account of the argument in the document. What program of action, view of a policy question, analysis of a social issue, or other claim is the author presenting? How does the author make his or her case? Focus on the steps in the author’s argument. Don’t try to explain the historical situation that caused the author to write. Don’t try to recount other arguments being made by other authors writing at the same time.

When teachers fail on this part of the exam, it is usually because they have tried to write about the historical context of the document and forgotten to provide this basic analysis. What you need to do is to walk the person reading your exam through what the document actually says. The prompt for Part I will ask specific questions that should guide you in your analysis.

How to Succeed on Part II

The questions on the second part of the exam vary. One question may present you with a single document excerpt, asking you to relate it to a larger issue in history or government. Another may present you with two document excerpts, asking you to compare and contrast them as you discuss the larger issue. In either case, your analysis should be broader than in Part I of the exam. Since your aim here is to comment on a topic or theme in American history or government, you will need to place the document excerpts into their historical contexts. You should explain:

• the purpose the document was written to serve;
• the document’s intended audience;
• the overall message of the document.

Then you might answer other questions:

• What effect did the document have on its intended audience?
• Did it achieve its author’s purpose?

Above all, be sure to do what you always tell your own students to do: Answer the question asked in the prompt!

Remember also that when we read primary sources, we try to understand their authors as they understood themselves. Their writings may not persuade us as we read them today. Even at the time they wrote, their writings may not have persuaded everyone. While you may mention these effects of the documents, be sure to explain what the authors hoped to accomplish.  

Strategies for Success

Sometimes teachers run out of time to complete their essays. We encourage you to take full advantage of all three weekends between the release of the exam and its submission deadline. Start right away to give yourself time to proofread, revise, and edit.

Save your notes from class! If you’re not a pack rat and can’t save them all, consider saving notes from the core or required courses in our program (501, 502, 503, 505, 506, and 507). All of the qualifying exam questions are drawn from issues you discussed while taking the core courses.  These courses lay an excellent foundation for a deep understanding of the history and government of America.

Take breaks in your writing; rest and revisit it later. It may feel like you don’t have time for this, but you’ll benefit from looking back over your work with a fresh set of eyes. If you start writing that first weekend after the exam is sent to you, you’ll have a chance to try out your first ideas. Later, after you’ve had time to reflect more on the document excerpts and what you’d like to say about them, you might decide to rewrite what you wrote before. You might open with a new thesis statement. Or you may want to add more analysis, give more examples of the points you want to make, or rewrite sentences that are not clear.

Get feedback from the friends you’ve made in the program. We always encourage our students to form study groups for their classes on campus, so as you work on the exam, continue to make use of the connections you’ve made. Someone familiar with our classes will help you see if you’ve strayed into irrelevance in your answer.

It can also be helpful to ask people with no knowledge of the topic to proofread your essay for you. English teachers you work with can offer valuable feedback on the coherence of your answers without getting lost in the technicalities of the content. Additional sets of eyes reading back through what you wrote will help you know whether you’ve fully addressed the prompt and thoroughly analyzed the document.

Take Pride in the Process!

The Qualifying Exam may seem intimidating, but it’s a rewarding way to finish your studies. It will remind you how much you learned over the years in our program. You’ll leave with a magnified sense of the pride you felt after finishing each course. You may push your brain to its limits, but you will synthesize much of what you’ve learned about the recurrent challenges of life in our self-governing nation.

Teaching American History has recently published World War I and the 1920s: Core Documents, a collection curated by Professor Jennifer D. Keene, Professor of History and Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Chapman University. Keene, a specialist in American military experience during World War I, has published three studies of this subject, along with numerous essays, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. Keene also edited our collection of core documents on World War II (2018, 2^nd ed. 2022) and teaches courses on the World Wars and Modern America for the Master of Arts in American History and Government program at Ashland University. We asked Keene to highlight some of the most interesting documents in the collection.

• Some of the documents you curated for this volume are well-known but perhaps not well understood. Would you discuss a document that merits more careful study?

I’d recommend the excerpt of Wilson’s speech to Congress on “The Fourteen Points” (January 8, 1918, Document 14). Textbooks and document collections often give us very brief excerpts of the speech, including only Wilson’s fourteen proposals—or only some of them. In this collection, I try to contextualize the document to help teachers and students see all of its implications.

The parts of the speech that frame Wilson’s proposals—his introductory and concluding remarks—remind us that he’s giving the speech at a very important moment in the war. Lenin and the Bolsheviks have just taken control of the Russian Revolution.

When Wilson gave his war address on April 2, 1917, the first, democratic revolution in Russia had just occurred. Wilson was very hopeful that democracy would take root there. Now, as he thinks about negotiating an end to the war, he’s confronted with the possibility that this will not be a war to safeguard democracy, but rather to promote communism. At the same time, the new Bolshevik government is engaged in peace talks with Germany. Once Russia exits the conflict, Germany will be fighting a one-front war and may be able to defeat the Allied powers before American troops can join the fight.

These new circumstances don’t dampen Wilson’s idealism. He still hopes to devise a plan that will eliminate future causes of war. The Fourteen Points outline what Wilson believes are the war’s causes—territorial borders that disregard traditional national groups; colonial ambitions; violations of the freedom of the seas; the stockpiling of armaments. Yet the speech also shows Wilson offering an olive branch to Germany. He envisions a peace in which Germany retains a place of “equality” with the other nations involved in the current conflict.

Most scholars and textbooks contrast the Fourteen Points speech to the Versailles Treaty, which did not treat Germany leniently. Yet when you compare the Fourteen Points speech to the speech on the Charter of Atlantic Freedoms that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers in August 1941, you see that Wilson’s ideas live on.

• Wilson’s idealism seems unrealistic given the imperial ambitions of most of the combatants. Yet later, when he defends the Versailles peace treaty (Document 24), Wilson claims to have brought to the negotiations at Versailles nothing more than the views of his American constituents. Is he reflecting American opinion, or projecting his own ambitions as a peacemaker?

Yes—he does project a messianic attitude. And yet the ideals he expresses are those that persuaded Americans, for the first time in their history, to enter a war in Europe.

• Would you comment on some less well-known documents you included, ones that widen our understanding of World War I and the 1920s?

The documents I love are those with rich connections to other documents and historical issues. Such a document is Charles Isum’s letter to W. E. B. Du Bois (Document 21). Isum is a Black veteran, a sergeant in the medical detachment of the one fully functioning African American combatant division in the US Army. Once home, he reads Dubois’ editorial, “Returning Soldiers” (Document 20) in The Crisis, which Du Bois edits for the NAACP, and decides to write a letter in response. Du Bois’ editorial called for resistance to racial discrimination and harassment, and one might wonder whether the editorial made an impact in the Black community. In my research on the African American soldiers’ experience during and after the war, I found this response to Du Bois. It demonstrates the editorial’s importance. Isum’s letter begins by saying, in effect, “I read your editorial—and let me tell you what happened to me in France.”

In France, Isum is quartered with a French family and warmly welcomed by them. They see him as an American ally who’s helping them in their struggle against Germany. But his white American Army officers object when he accepts an invitation from his French hosts to attend the wedding of their daughter. Isum’s story illustrates both the sense of widening social possibilities that black soldiers experienced overseas and the attempts of white superiors to suppress this awakening. France, which held colonies in Africa, was not a colorblind society; but the French saw the African American soldiers not as colonial subjects but as American allies and liberators. In fact, the liberating experience African Americans enjoyed in France helped to galvanize the modern Civil Rights Movement. Isum’s letter recounts the indignities he suffered at the hands of white Army officers, but it also shows him successfully fighting back against their attempts to punish him for accepting social invitations from the French by pointing out the rights associated with his rank. What underscores the impact of this World War I experience on later Civil Rights efforts is the lineage between Charles Isum and his daughter Rachel, who watched and learned from her father’s activism. She eventually marries Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. Jackie and Rachel Robinson walked in the footsteps of Charles Isum. We often forget that it took the efforts of earlier generations to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In America, we like unequivocal success stories. We tell the Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King stories; but we don’t celebrate the activism of the generations before them, whose success was incomplete, but nonetheless important.

• How about a document on the 1920s?

I love the essay “Me and My Flapper Daughters,” written by the journalist William Oscar Saunders (Document 35). He assumes the persona of a father who’s perplexed by the behavior of his two daughters, who adopt the behavior patterns and fashion styles of the “flappers” of the 1920s. The first-person narrator of this story (it is fictionalized, at least in part) attempts to reconcile the youthful rebellion of his daughters with his hopes that they’re going to be safe and happy in later life. During their adolescence, these young women are smoking, drinking, and going out on unsupervised dates with young men who drive them in cars to lovers’ lanes. The document gives you some insight into the youth culture of the 1920s, the generation that would grow up to experience World War II as adults. It describes the generational conflict that occurred in the 1920s, but resolves the tension by concluding that this youth rebellion is really just good clean fun. The narrator confides his certainty that in the end, his daughters will settle down and get married.

When I use this document in seminars, teachers always want to talk about it. It’s written in a light, humorous tone, but it also offers some insight into what actually happens after women achieve the vote. Like the letter exchange between a soldier deployed to France and his working wife (Document 17), and the letters from women printed in the Home Companion excerpt (Document 31), Saunders’s essay shows that women still find their opportunities limited by gender expectations. There is a narrative that war liberates women. That story is misleading, yet really hard to shake. We have to be careful not to attribute too much transformative power to war.