Advanced Placement United States History Summer Reading Guide

Transcription

1 1 Advanced Placement United States History Summer Reading Guide Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger (Norton Critical Edition) (ISBN ) AND The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson 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

2 2 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 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 books 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 can also be seen in the tale of the Columbian Exposition of Gilded Age Chicago was a confusing mess of a city. No one was objectively observing the city s development and writing down what was happening. The was no omnipresent force capable of seeing the big picture being created out of the interactions between the millions of lives that spent time in that city. For these reasons (and others) a serial killer could operate largely in the open for two years. The book you are to read about this is the recreation of a historian in the 21 st century. Where there was no documentation (and serial killers seldom keep accurate records or journals), 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 or the story of a serial killer (or for some reason the 1893 Columbian Exposition). 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 verses 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 Erik Larson says about his book, I present only one possibility, though I recognize that any number of other motives might well be posited.

3 3 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 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 summer reading selections deal with a broad and significant topic, the shift from a largely rural to a largely urban country in the late 19 th century and people s reactions to this shift, but they are very different in how they approach this topic. Essentially they are both tales of young people going to the city: a fictional boy (Dick) going to a real city (New York) and real people going to a real city (Devil in White City). I think both books, one is a novel written for children during the period being considered and the other is a popular history written for adults and published only a few years ago, contain truths about this important event (the rural to urban transformation) and people s reactions to it. By focusing on these events, we can uncover a great deal of knowledge about the demographic transition, and political, economic and social changes occurring in the United States during the late 19 th century. By focusing on small patch(es) of ground, I believe that these books reveal the structure and dynamics of the larger world in a way that is more immediate and vivid than any general survey of United States history could.

4 4 Essay Two: Argued into Existence As the previous essay established, doing history is essentially doing detective work. Detectives from Sherlock Holmes to those on the latest procedural police drama on TV essentially consider evidence and make arguments about its meaning. That is exactly what we do in history. What I want to do now is explain a little bit about what argument is. 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. The two most important things to keep in mind when considering argumentation is who the audience to whom the argument is directed is and the inherent uncertainty about that which we argue. The goal of an argument is not to confirm to some perfect form but to persuade an audience. The audience to whom the argument is targeted teacher, fellow students, an audience in an auditorium, my fellow Americans, etc. should be the focus of the argument. The reasoning that supports an argument is deemed effective, not because it conforms to an absolute category, but because the audience accepts it. Additionally, we can only truly argue about that which we are uncertain of. If we are certain about a statement, there is no need to argue over it, as the correctness or truth of the statement is already accepted. Because the truth or correctness of the statements over which we argue are always uncertain, our conclusions are measured in probability we can never be certain that they are correct, only that they are proven probably correct in the eyes of the audience by their acceptance of the reasoning we provided. An effective argument is one that gets audience s adherence to its probable 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 made in an argument are not universal timeless truths but are subject to the acceptance of an audience. All arguments have an audience. For the most part, the audience your argument will have in AP History will be other history students and history teachers (as in Mr. Kelley and those who will assess your AP 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 a critical listener 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 probable. 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).

5 5 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 for me to win, you 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 detail s are omitted and to test claims and reasoning so that the probability that we can have a high level of confidence in our conclusions is high. 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. 5. Because Argument Takes Place Under Conditions Of Uncertainty, It Always Entails Risks to Its Participants. You could be shown to be wrong or incorrect. This is why so many are afraid to engage in argument. It has been said that the United States was a country that argued itself into existence. (I wish I could remember who said that first.) So it only seems logical that we will be arguing US History into existence. Remember history is the product of a historian and it is composed of arguments. Remember that these arguments are aimed at gaining the adherence or agreement of an audience (me, your fellow students, the AP examiners), that arguments are derived from claims that are justified by evidence, and that the end purpose of an argument is to resolve a controversy or solve a problem. If you remember these things and are able to perform them, you will do very well on this assignment, in the course, and on the AP US History Examination. Guides to the Books--Instructions I begin by asking you to do some background research. Identification. The following all play an important role in the books. You should write a brief explanation of what each is. Look each up on the internet before reading the books. After you have read the books, briefly explain how each term relates to the stories told in the books. Jane Addams and the Hull House Susan B. Anthony Frederick Law Olmstead Francis Willard and the WCTU Clarence Darrow Thomas Edison George Westinghouse Philip Armour Samuel Gompers and the A.F. of L. Frederick Jackson Turner George Pullman, Eugene Debs and the Pullman Strike of 1894 Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show

6 6 Questions. Answer each of the following as completely as you can. Remember you answers should be structured as arguments. Take a little risk be creative, but remember the audience you are trying to persuade is me. Please type your answers. 1. Consider the following quotations by 20 th century literary critics. Only fools laugh at Horatio Alger, and his poor boys who make good. The wiser man who thinks twice about that sterling author will realize that Alger is to Americans what Homer was to the Greeks. (Nathaneal West and Boris Ingster, 1940) Anyone who wants to know his country should get acquainted with Horatio Alger. It is dangerous to ignore a man whose ideas hang on so stubbornly. (Rychard Fink, 1962) Each of the above quotes tell us that Alger is important to understanding something essential about America, but they don t tell is what that is. Like Homer s epics, Alger s books have been interpreted to have very different meanings over the years since they were published. Although written for young teen boys in 1868, Ragged Dick, is now mostly read by adult scholars. Your task is to explain what it is that Ragged Dick reveals about the United States that makes the above scholars think it is such a critical book. Assert this in a thesis and then used examples from the book to support your assertion. 2. The Urban environments of late 19 th century America offered more opportunities for young women than they had ever experienced before, yet they made them vulnerable to more dangers than women had ever been susceptible to previously. Determine the validity of the above statement by asserting a thesis that addressed it and using evidence from both books to justify your thesis. 3. The American Dream is the belief that anyone, no matter how humbly born, can through hard work, achieve whatever he or she can dream. There are four major characters in the book who are chasing this dream: Ragged Dick, Daniel H. Burnham, Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, and Dr. H.H. Holmes. Explain how these men s lives exhibit both the positive and the dark side of the American Dream. 4. New York in the late 1860s was a more civilized and desirable place to live than Chicago in the 1890s. Determine the validity of the above statement by asserting a thesis that addresses it and using references from BOTH books to justify your thesis. 5. What factors enabled Dr. H.H. Holmes to get away with his crimes for as long as he did?