Similar efforts in our own time have resulted in an exodus of Christian families from government schools with the concomitant expansion of home schools and private schools. In particular, the rapidly spreading classical modality of education presents a sound response to the issue of propaganda as history: an emphasis on the use of primary sources of history which put students in direct contact with sources that have not been elided, bowdlerized, or totally suppressed.
For the purposes of clarification, a couple of definitions might be in order before going further. The term primary source refers to the actual historical document itself as opposed to a secondary source, which is a book or article about that source. For example, the Declaration of Independence is a primary document of American history. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by leftist author James W. Loewen is a secondary source which showcases the author’s personal spin on history. I must hasten to add that not every secondary source in libraries and classrooms across the country is problematic or propagandistic. Most of them are quite good, and it never hurts to take a look at what the “other side” is saying even if it contains a distortion. Nonetheless, primary sources offer great advantages to students and should not be overlooked. Other examples of primary sources would be speeches, letters, papal bulls, government records, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts of historical events, biographies written by an acquaintance of the biographee, and primary works of philosophy or theology which might normally be only excerpted in a high school text. Just a few years ago, it would have been a laborious effort to dig much of this material out in a public library, but with the availability of virtually all historic documents on the Internet nowadays, the sources are literally at one's fingertips.
Other than the obvious motive of resisting propaganda, what are the advantages of primary sources? First and foremost is that reading eyewitness accounts of history is actually pleasurable. I often explain this type of reading to my students as the closest thing they have to a time machine. Reading the actual words Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, studying his preliminary drafts and revisions, and digging out comments Jefferson made in his personal correspondence—all these activities create for students the sense that they are sitting in Monticello sipping tea and having conversation with the great man himself.
Secondly, primary sources give students the tools they need to engage the culture regarding current hot-button issues in our country. One example in the post-9/11 world has been the handling of material related to the religion of Islam. In 2002, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a state-funded university, attempted to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Qur’án: The Early Revelation, a collection of excerpts from the Muslim holy book with commentary provided by the translator, Michael Sells. University Chancellor James Moeser defended the decision, saying, “This was a book chosen in the wake of Sept. 11. A fifth of the world’s population subscribes to the Islamic religion and yet it’s not a well-understood religion. This is a great opportunity to have a conversation on the teachings of one of the world’s great religions” (Park). Though the Chancellor’s motives may have been altruistic, critics were not sure why his goal of “having a conversation” did not include requiring incoming Muslim students to read the Bible. Moreover, the problem with this particular translation of the Koran was that it contained, just as the title states, only the “early revelations,” those parts of the Koran that were written, as David Biema noted in Time magazine, “before the Prophet's takeover of the Arabian Peninsula, and so omits lines arguably forged in combat, like 9:5, the Sword Verse: ‘Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them.’ From such verses emerged the Muslim concept of holy war.” In other words, instead of simply requiring the students to purchase a copy of the complete Koran, the university was promoting what many conceived as a bowdlerized version of Muhammad’s teachings which, in effect, censored the very verses that would have helped people understand the motivation and the mindset of the terrorists. In contrast, students who make themselves aware of the complete primary version of a controversial work are in a far better position to engage in debate with those who have a hidden agenda or simply a lack of knowledge about the issue.
Thirdly, working with primary sources helps a student understand the complicated decisions involved in the writing of history, including the challenges that all historians face when deciding which of several accounts of a given historical event is the most reliable. A case in point involves the chronicles that recorded the events of the Wars of the Roses in England. This war, which extended from 1460 to 1485, was a dynastic struggle between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty: the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Chroniclers on both sides would write accounts of the various conflicts, manipulating the facts to put their own partisans in the best light possible. One example comes from the arrest and imprisonment of King Henry VI, a Lancastrian, by Edward IV, a Yorkist, an event which led eventually to Henry’s murder. The anonymous author of the Fleetwood manuscript, a Yorkist, clearly states that King Henry was handed over to Edward by the Archbishop of York (Chronicles 60) while John Warkworth, a Lancastrian, recorded that Edward seized and imprisoned both Henry and the Archbishop (Chronicles 123). The former account makes Edward’s action less extreme; the latter, more. Confronted with such divergent accounts, historians—and students reading the primary sources of the historians—must weigh the reliability of each account and look for additional material to corroborate one or the other, a valuable activity which heightens students’ awareness of how historians handle their sources. Such an awareness pays off not only in the study of history, but also in critical analysis of news articles, political debates, and legal arguments concerning the guilt or innocence of a crime suspect.
By reading contradictory accounts of events, students also come to realize the limits even of unbiased eyewitness accounts. In 1995, the University Press of Mississippi published a book entitled We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts by Timothy S. Good. The accounts are arranged chronologically, beginning with those by persons who were present at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It concludes with accounts written down as late as 1954. Even among those earliest accounts the details diverge from each other. Most witnesses recalled that, after shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”), but they differed as to whether he yelled it before or after his leap from Lincoln’s box. Similarly, some said Booth limped off the stage, suggesting he broke his leg in his leap; others maintained he ran off the stage, leading to the conclusion that he must have broken his leg elsewhere after his escape. Though it may sound like an unimportant detail, it was nonetheless one that would have mattered very much to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country doctor who treated Booth’s injury for which he was tried and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate the president. In a court of law today, attorneys for the prosecution and defense would, no doubt, consider the timeline of events key in convicting or acquitting Dr. Mudd. (By the way, he was eventually pardoned in 1869.) As in the case of deliberate distortions, these vague disagreements in the accounts of the assassination lead a student to understand why reputable historians employ tentative language, concluding that an event probably happened, seems likely to have happened, may well have happened, and so on. By becoming familiar with the disparity that can emerge from primary sources, young people are less likely to swallow an author’s interpretation hook, line, and sinker and to judge the acceptability of an account by seeing to what extent the information is presented in absolute or tentative language.
In short, then, much is to be gained from the reading of the primary sources of history. At one and the same time, they are capable of providing students with the facts and revealing the validity of the source—and ultimately the secondary accounts which depend on them. With primary sources, students become empowered to engage the culture, to expose editors who bowdlerize, and to challenge the smug. They also enhance the learning experience by allowing young people simply to enjoy a few hours in their own personal “time machine.” The primary source is a rich resource and worthy of being mined.
References
Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: SUNY, 1985.
Chronicles of the White Rose of York. Reprint ed. Dursley, England: A. J. Sutton, 1974.
Fu, Zhengyuan. Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Available online at Google.com Books.
Good, Timothy S., ed. We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Park, Michael Y. “University’s Quran Reading Stirs Controversy.” FoxNews.com. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57205,00.html> 8 July 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud, 1999.
Van Biema, David. “A Kinder, Gentler Koran.” Time. Online edition. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003050-1,00.html > 19 Aug. 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
