By: Barry Kritzberg (Morgan Park Academy, Chicago, Illinois)
| IT IS ALMOST AXIOMATIC that my sophomore students, on the opening day of class, prefer the first cartoon to the second. They laugh aloud at the first, but brows furrow over the second. The first cartoon shows a student, flat on his back, arms and legs akimbo, pinned to the floor by his obviously overloaded back-pack. The caption, spoken by his mother in the doorway, says, “Rough day at school today?” Students understand the first cartoon right away, for it relates to their experiences, and it is funny, and that is why they do not hesitate in expressing their preference for the first cartoon. Some even say it is “better.” When I ask them to reconsider the second cartoon, they say it just isn’t funny; they don’t understand it. | 1 |
| The second cartoon shows a man sitting behind a desk, with the name-plate “Tinker” on it. He is handing an object to a standing secretary, and the caption reads: “Give this to Evers and make sure he passes it on to Chance.” Some say the second cartoon is “just dumb,” and, therefore, not worth bothering about. The students are then asked to ascertain as many facts as possible about the second cartoon. They rather quickly establish most of the relevant facts that can be obtained by a visual examination of the cartoon, although there are some who argue that the object being passed to the secretary “looks like a baseball.” (On increasingly rare occasions, one student may recognize the baseball allusion in the cartoon and, if so, I help that student guide the class in the desired direction.) They are now primed for the first lesson in my Chicago History Workshop, a course designed to take students beyond the Gradgrind memorization of facts approach and to introduce them, through a series of critical reading exercises, to the ways that historians actually work. | 2 |
| Students are next given handouts which are designed to take them beyond what they had visually determined about the cartoon. They discover, from the famous Franklin P. Adams poem, “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” that the trio was an almost-legendary double play combination that was the soul of the Chicago Cubs baseball team that seemed to always get the best of the New York Giants. A second handout (taken from a baseball encyclopedia) gives the details about the careers of the three players, and it is established that they played together from 1902 to 1912. Another handout from the baseball encyclopedia shows that, for five years in succession (1906–1910), the Cubs (winning four pennants and two World Series titles) finished higher in the National League standings than the Giants. The students conjecture that the poem, which first appeared in the New York Evening Mail, was probably written some time between 1906 and 1910. (Establishing that precise date becomes an out-of-class assignment.) However, one student still complains, “I know a lot more about Tinker, Evers and Chance, but I still don’t get the cartoon.” | 3 |
| The next document, an excerpt from Warren Brown’s book, The Chicago Cubs, reveals that, although Tinker and Evers effectively played side-by-side, they never spoke to one another. “Oh, I get it now,” one student after another says. Some still don’t find the cartoon funny, but they all are now able to offer an interpretation that eluded them at the beginning of the class. What I have done, in this short-hand way, is introduce students to a process (observable facts + additional knowledge = historical interpretation) which they will use over and over again in the course. | 4 |
| The next lesson involves language. Several examples are given, including this one, taken from a dust-jacket puff-piece, which reads: “Alfredo Segre’s Mahogany is, and I make no bones about it, out and away the best novel in my experience written by an Italian about the mahogany trade in Portuguese West Africa.” Written by Lionel Hale, the words appeared in the The [London] Observer. I tell the class that I bought the book on the basis of the dust-jacket puff-piece and I ask them why I would have done so. “It sounded like a good book,” is a typical response. I reply, “No, I bought the book because I found Hale’s dust-jacket praise absolutely hilarious.” Students look at me as if I were a bit daft. However, in getting them to analyze the sentence, they discover that what may have been intended as praise reduces the book to a category of one. “It is a bit like saying,” one girl explains, “that I am the best red-haired, blue-eyed left handed writer sitting on the West side of room forty-five and using a yellow pencil.” The point of this lesson is simple, but worth repeating: one must read critically to be able to interpret. | 5 |
| A third lesson involves a related point about accepting something as true simply because it appears in print. Students are asked to read a short passage about Pere Marquette from Robert Cromie’s A History of Chicago and a current events article about American Utopian communities. The Cromie passage contains a “miracle,” which almost every student, at that early stage of the course, fails at first to perceive. Marquette is described as setting off on a journey in October 1684. A few sentences further on, however, Cromie states that Marquette died on May 18, 1675. Most have to reread it several times before they discover the “miracle.” The Current Events article has one factual error and one erroneous statement about Brook Farm, although I do not tell them that. | 6 |
| After we discuss the article, I indicate my surprise at learning that Henry Thoreau, the so-called “hermit of Concord,” was one of the founders of Brook Farm. A quick trip to the library confirms that, while there is some variation about the date of the closing of Brook Farm, 1884 is definitely way off the mark and that Henry Thoreau was not involved in Brook Farm in any way. Their initial reaction after this assignment is anger. They feel betrayed by the authors who “lied to them.” | 7 |
| When we return to class, however, I tell them that the erroneous information suggests that they would be wise, in pursuing historical matters, to follow the advice of A. A. Dornfeld, chief of the now defunct [Chicago] City News Bureau (a news agency that gathered information for the four major newspapers in the city). Addressing his reporters, he is said to have emphasized the importance of accuracy by hyperbolically telling new reporters, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” | 8 |
| These are some of the littler lessons students absorb in the early days of the course. They begin to see that history is not a mere collection of facts, enshrined for all time in text books. They begin to see that historians, in gathering facts and drawing conclusions, work much like detectives, that the scholarly adventures can be absorbing and exciting. My goal in all this was to liberate the student from text book history and (to paraphrase American historian Carl Becker) to make each student his or her own historian. | 9 |
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