Advanced Placement United States History Summer Reading Guide

Transcription

1 1 Advanced Placement United States History Summer Reading Guide 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Introduction: Please read these two essays first. Essay One: What Does it Mean to Do History? There was never, for me as teacher and writer, an obsession with objectivity, which I consider neither possible nor desirable. I understood early that what is presented as history or news is inevitably a selection out of an infinite amount of information, and that what is selected depends on what the selector thinks is important. Those who talk from high perches about the sanctity of facts are parroting Charles Dickens stiff-backed pendant in Hard Times, Mr. Gradgrind, who insisted his students give him facts, facts, nothing but facts. But behind any presented fact is a judgment the judgment that this fact is important to put forward (and, by implication, other facts may be ignored). Any such judgment reflects the beliefs, the values of the historian, however he of she pretends to objectivity. (Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader, 16) History, is changing all the time. When I attended high school in the late 1970s, there was little mention of the South, slavery, sharecropping or racial relations in any of the history books I was assigned to read (and I went to high school in south Georgia!). Of course, slavery was briefly mentioned in the unit leading up to The War Between the States, and there was a chapter that mentioned something about the Civil Rights Movement (of course, we never got that far), but the South and these related topics were treated as outside of the theme of all of the history textbooks: the rise to greatness of the American nation. When I got to college in the 1980s, I begin to read a lot of history. I discovered, free of the constraints imposed by the State of Georgia s required curriculum, that the South wasn t thought of in a very favorable manner by much of the rest of the country. At best, the South was an embarrassment, a deviation from the supposed progress that characterized the history of the United States. At worst, the South was a place of downright evil, the dark underworld to the North s goodness and virtue. But, being a Southerner, I didn t want to be an embarrassment or evil, yet I knew that what I was taught in high school wasn t the truth either. Although I wasn t a history major, I decided to take a few history courses and see if I could discover a way out of this dilemma. A class with an excellent history teacher and an encounter with a book called The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Van Woodward provided me with the realization that Dr. Zinn articulates in the quotation above: neither what I was taught in high school nor what I read in college was truth; all were selective

2 2 recreations of the past. Although all of the histories I had been exposed to were based on facts, the facts were not the most important factor in any of the histories. The selection and interpretation of facts is what history is all about. This selection and interpretation is based on a historian s judgment as to what is relevant and what is not. Tell it like it was, runs a common American phrase, echoing, no doubt unconsciously, Leopold von Ranke s famous injunction to write history wie es eigentlich gewesen how it really was. But this is neither as simple nor as easy as it sounds. What happened, what we recall, what we recover, what we relate, are often sadly different, and the answers to our questions may be difficult to seek and painful to find. The temptation is often overwhelmingly strong to tell it, not as it really was, but as we would wish it to have been. (Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented, 71) As the summer reading book make clear, it is simply impossible to know how it really was. The truth about the movement of populations across the continent most certainly differed according to who was moving, when they were moving, and where they moved. Additionally, our ability to know this truth is limited by the evidence that we have generally oral legends, written records, and archeological reconstructions. Memories are unreliable, recoverable data is always incomplete, and events that are painful are often repressed. This is especially true when dealing with the time-period called pre-history, generally meant to refer to period before writing existed. A preference for written records is a prejudice of a literate culture, ours, which would not have been held by people who lived during most of the time that humans existed, as for most of this time there was no written form of any language. Where there is no written documentation, the historian imagines what must have happened or what was going on in the minds of the people involved based upon the best evidence and theories he can access. The histories I read in high school as well as those in college were selected or written too often to tell the past as we wish it to have been. In high school, the history curriculum simply decided to not select painful and embarrassing events from the South s history. It also ignored the story of most of the people in the South, as they left no written records. This curriculum imagined a world where all events contribute to the march of positive progress. In college, the books I read had to explain the crimes committed against the Civil Rights Movement and so made the South an aberration, thereby excusing the rest of the United States from complicity. In other words, they imagined a story of good versus evil, and someone had to be evil. But even if this Manichean tale has validity, it is only one of many possible tales that could be told about the same events. Or as historian Erik Larson says, I present only one possibility, though I recognize that any number of other motives might well be posited. Historians are in the business of reconstruction. if historians are builders, they must decide at the outset on the scale of their projects. How much ground should be covered? A year? Fifty years? Several centuries? How will the subject manner be defined or limited? (.) The lure of topics both broad and significant is undeniable

3 3 The great equalizer of such grand plans is the twenty-four hour day. Historians have only a limited amount of time, and the hours, they sadly discover, are not expandable. Obviously, the more years that are covered, the less time there is available to research the events in each one. Conversely, the narrower the area of research, the more it is possible to become immersed in the details of a period. Relationships and connections can be explored that would have gone unnoticed without the benefit of a microscopic focus. Of course, small-scale history continuously runs the risk of becoming obscure and pedantic. But a keen mind working on a small area will yield results whose implications go beyond the subject matter s original boundaries. By understanding what has taken place on a small patch of ground, the historian can begin to see more clearly the structure and dynamics of the larger world around it. (James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, 22) The lack of time to consider all possible evidence, a bias toward written documentation, and the cultural and personal biases of the historian all play a major role in producing history. No history is completely true and no history is complete. As the summer reading book makes clear, historians have generally ignored pre-colombian America because it didn t seem all that important to the narrative of European expansion and there were few written documents from that time (and no historians who knew how to decode the ones that existed). In making these decisions, historians promoted what may be the longest sustained erroneous interpretation of history. Essay Two: Argument as a Way of Knowing As the previous essay hypothesized, doing history is essentially doing detective work. Detectives from Sherlock Homes to those on the latest TV procedural drama essentially consider evidence (and favor certain types, are limited by time, and allow bias to affect their judgment) and make arguments about its meaning. What I want to do now is explain a bit about what argument is. My view is that argument isn t something one does as much as it is how one does something. I believe that argument is the process by which a well-developed mind thinks. My favorite definition of argument comes from David Zarefsky of Northwestern University. He defines argument as the use of effective reasoning to justify claims in seeking the adherence of an audience. In other words there are three essential components to argument: reasoning, claims, and an audience; and three tasks that are performed in making an argument: using reasoning, justifying claims, and persuading someone else. Probably the most important things to keep in mind when considering argumentation is who is the audience to whom the argument is directed and the fact that there is always an inherent uncertainty about what we are arguing. The audience to whom the argument is directed teacher, peers, jury, general public, should always be the focus of the argument. The goal of an argument is not to confirm to some perfect form

4 4 (sorry Greek philosophers) but to gain the adherence of an audience. Reasoning is effective if and only if the intended audience accepts it as justifying whatever claim is made. Additionally, we can only truly argue about that of which we are uncertain. If we are certain about a claim, there is no need to argument over it, as the correctness or truth of the statement is already accepted. The argument that the ancestors of Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, existed mainly in small, nomadic bands, and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness when the first Europeans arrived, was aimed at an audience largely of Europeans or of European ancestry, and matched that audience s world view very well. It was so seldom challenged, that it became the accepted truth and thus most people believed a history that never really happened. As we can only really argue about that of which we are uncertain, then argument allows for the constant scrutiny and testing of all statements. Anyone making an argument has to justify claims through effective reasoning and persuade an audience. But persuading an audience does not prove an argument true, but rather that the audience found the argument a more probably representation of the truth than any alternative explanation presented at the time. Because the truth or correctness of the statements over which we argue are always considered uncertain, our conclusions are always measured in probability we can never be certain that we are correct, and therefore there is always a reason for further argument and testing. An effective argument is simply a claim that gets and audience s adherence to its probably correctness or truth. Zarefseky says that there are five underlying assumptions that we must accept in order to argue effectively. 1. Argument is Audience Dependent. As stated above, claims in an argument are not universal timeless truths (UTTs) but are subject to the acceptance of an audience. All arguments have an audience. For the most part, the audience you arguments will have in AP US history is the other students in the class, Mr. Kelley, and eventually those who will score your essays on the AP US History Examination. 2. Argument takes Place Under Conditions of Uncertainty. Uncertain claims are controversial in that there are genuine differences of opinion that could matter to the audience. In making an argument, you must make an inferential leap from the known to the unknown and persuade your audience to make the leap with you. 3. Argument Involves Providing Justifications for Claims. Justifications are reasons given that an critical listener (or reader) would accept. A critical listener is one who is skeptical but willing to be convinced through sound justifications. These justifications are not proofs in that you are asserting truth statements, but should provide enough support that the audience is willing to accept your claims and act on them. Claims can be rated from plausible to highly probably. 4. Argument is a Fundamentally Cooperative Process. The goal of argument is to reach the best possible decision about an area of controversy (that is uncertainty).although the form of argument is often adversarial, this does not mean that those engaging in argument see it as a zero-sum game (that is a situation that for one side to win, the other must lose), but see the adversarial form that argument takes as a means to improve the cooperative process of making better decisions or reaching better conclusions. The adversarial form is designed to decrease the likelihood that critical detains are omitted and to test claims

5 5 and reasoning so that there is a strong probability we can have a high level of confidence in our conclusions. But to engage in argument, the participants have to cooperate. They have to agree on the framework of reference (goal or outcome of the argument), a common system of meaning (definitions), shared procedures and norms, and must show respect for the process, their opponents, and the audience. Argument is adversarial but it should not be, at its highest level at least, competitive. 5. Because Argument Takes Place Under a Condition of Uncertainty, It Always Entails Risks to Its Participants. You could be shown to be wrong or mistaken. This is why many are afraid to engage in argument. But if this (being proven wrong or mistaken about something) is seen as part of a process and not the goal, and argument becomes a truly cooperative endeavor, then there should be far less fear. I expect us to engage in rigorous argument, not to prove some kind of superiority, but to collectively improve our grasp of US history. It has been said that the United States was a country that argued itself into existence. (Someday I will find out who fist said that.) It seems only logically that we will spend the year arguing US history into existence. We will begin at the beginning by constructing some arguments about what the first civilizations in this hemisphere were like. The assignment. Read the book and answer these questions. I would strongly suggest that you type out and save your answers. Introduction: Holmberg s Mistake 1. A View From Above. In this chapter we learn some common mistakes made by historians, scientists, and most everyone. Among these are the belief that history is inherently progressive, cultural bias, and a confusion of cause with effects. Even great scientists make these, as we shall see, with tragic consequences. a. Who was Allan R. Holmberg and what was his mistake? Why did he make this mistake? b. How did historians such as Bartolome de Las Casas, George Bancroft, Alfred Krober and Samuel Eliot Morison describe Indian culture? How were these examples of Holmberg s Mistake? c. What was the Neolithic Revolution? Why was this revolution different in the Western Hemisphere than in the Eastern Hemisphere? How was it different? Part One: Numbers from Nowhere? (Indian Demography). This section analyzes how scientists and historians have attempted to understand how many Indians were in the Western Hemisphere prior to Why Billington Survived. New England was the site of the most famous and most immediately successful English colonies. It wasn t by accident. a. How did early contact with Europeans affect the life and fortunes of various tribes in New England before there was any permanent European settlement? b. Why did Massasoit agree to form an alliance with the Pilgrims? Why did the Pilgrims agree to an alliance with Massasoit?

6 6 2. In the Land of Four Quarters. The Inka or Inca are among the most famous of pre- Colombian societies. Their legacy lives on in Peru, Bolivia and other South American Andean nations. a. The Inka s built a mighty empire (controlling an area bigger than the Roman Empire) based on a system of agricultural production called vertical archipelagoes. Describe what this system was and how it made the Inka empire different from any other in the ancient world. b. How were the Spanish able to conquer the Inka? 3. Frequently Asked Questions. The Triple Alliance (mistakenly called the Aztecs) are another famous pre-colombian civilization. Their legacy lives on in that the name of the most important of the three nations in the alliance, the Mexica, has given its name to the third most populous country in the Western Hemisphere. a. Indians were more susceptible than Europeans to foreign microbes and viruses in two distinct ways. Explain these two ways. b. Indians had few domesticated animals. Why was this? What consequences did this have when Europeans brought their domesticated animals to the Western Hemisphere? c. The Indians of the Triple Alliance (especially the Mexica) are among the most famous of pre-colombian groups. The legends of human sacrifice associated with them are well know. What are two myths about this practice that are often accepted as fact? Why were the Spanish able to conquer them? d. The histories of the Spanish conquests of the Inka and the Triple Alliance have changed greatly over the past 50 years. What evidence has produced these changes? Why was this evidence previously overlooked? Part Two: Very Old Bones (Indian Origins) This section considers where Indians came from and how we know this. 4. Pleistocene Wars a. Why did contact with Indians cause Europeans considerably more consternation than contact with Europeans caused Indians? b. How have bones, teeth, language, and mitochondrial haplogroups influenced how scientists and historians have determined where Indians came from and when they came to the Western Hemisphere? c. What is the Clovis Thesis and how have discoveries at Monte Verde challenged this thesis? 5. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I) a. What are some of the most important accomplishments of the Norte Chico civilization ( BC)? Why were these overlooked until recently? b. What is the MFAC hypothesis? If true, how does this hypothesis mean that Andean civilizations were different than any others created in world history? c. Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations created maize and the milpa? How did these inventions enable them to thrive?

7 7 6. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II) a. What are some of the most important accomplishments of the Olmecs and Zapotecs? Why were these civilizations unknown until the 1930s? Part Three: Landscape with Figures (Indian Ecology). How did Indians treat the environment? 7. Made in America a. Explain the ways Indians used fire and earthen mounds to alter the natural environments? b. What was Cahokia? Why is it not a part or most US history classes? Why did Cahokia collapse in the 1300s? c. How did the Mayans alter their environment to make it more hospitable? Why did their great cities collapse? 8. Amazonia a. How did Gaspar de Carvajal describe the Amazon area in the 1500s? Why did no one believe him? b. Who was Betty J Meggers and what is the Megger s Thesis? c. Anna Roosevelt and Charles Clement have refuted the Megger Thesis and produced a far different history of the Amazon. What evidence did they use to attack the Megger Thesis and to support their conclusions? 9. The Artificial Wilderness a. How did Indians transform the environment of the Western Hemisphere? Why did European explorers and most historians until recently fail to notice this? Coda 10. The Great Law of Peace a. Europeans have often noted that modern Americans are quite different in their cultural assumptions and outlook than Europeans. How might the ideas of the Haudenosaunee be responsible for these differences? Why have most historians ignored this explanation?