Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue | Not a Peculiar Institution: Challenging Students' Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History | The History Teacher, 41.4

Not a Peculiar Institution: Challenging Students' Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History

Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue
Hayward High, Mount Eden High, and Mills College, California

SLAVERY in the pre-Civil War United States is a hard topic to teach, not only because it raises issues of racism and injustice, but also because students assume so much.¹ Often, they think all northerners were abolitionists or "good guys" and southerners were "bad guys" who enslaved African Americans because they viewed them as inferior. England, if considered at all, is seen as a champion of the anti-slavery movement, having abolished slavery earlier in the nineteenth century. Textbooks form and reinforce these assumptions. A chapter in an A.P. U.S. history textbook, titled "Slavery and the Old South,"² reinforces the notion that slavery was unconnected to life elsewhere

Cathy and Nancy, two high school history teachers, wanted to challenge these preconceived notions and spark students to think more deeply about slavery. While they did not want to erase the students' ideas about connections between race and slavery, they wanted to add an economic perspective on why and how people were enslaved. In addition, they wanted to complicate students' understanding of the relationship between northern and southern people over slavery and to reveal the deep and important connections among the economies of the southern and northern United States and the world.

Cathy and Nancy's goal was in keeping with scholarship framing slavery as more than a "peculiar" institution in the South. As David Quigley notes in his history of the connections between slavery and New York City, "in politics, economics, culture, and social life, New Yorkers—black and white—remained implicated in the slave system down to the onset of the Civil War."³ Similarly, a report examining Brown University's connection to slavery reported that it "was not a distinct enterprise but rather an institution that permeated every aspect of social and economic life in Rhode Island, the Americas, and indeed the world."⁴

Politically, the U.S government treated slavery as a national institution protected by the Constitution, in effect acknowledging and supporting a "slaveholding republic."⁵ Economically, northern merchants profited tremendously from the transatlantic cotton trade. After the War of 1812, southern cotton on northern ships fed England's booming textile mills and spurred greater cotton production in the South. By 1822, half of the goods shipped from New York were produced in the South, almost all by slaves.⁶ Northern ships transported slaves, even when federal and state laws banned such activity. Northern merchants as well as ordinary shopkeepers and tradesmen owned shares in these slave trading voyages. New England mills produced cheap, coarse "Negro cloth" to be used for slaves' clothing, and New England salt cod fed Caribbean slaves. Northerners not directly involved in slave trading, such as boatwrights, blacksmiths, and carpenters, relied on it for their economic survival.

Southern publisher James DeBow wrote in 1860 that New York was "almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself."⁷ Almost 150 years later, historian Rachel Chernos Lin described the Rhode Island slave trade as "literally the business of 'the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.'"⁸ In the twenty-first century, corporations such as bbbbtna Insurance, FleetBoston Financial, and CSX have been sued as the inheritors of northern firms doing business with slaveholders.⁹ While slavery was and is a moral evil, it was also an economic phenomenon not limited entirely to one part of the United States. As a global economic institution, its impact was felt in the North and the South, across the U.S., and around the globe. Non-slave holders—even abolitionists—were caught in its far-reaching web.

In reframing the study of slavery, Cathy and Nancy were following the example of historians like Thomas Bender by placing U.S. history in a larger global context.¹⁰ As part of their participation in Words That Made America,¹¹ a project funded by a Teaching American History grant, they developed a lesson to help students develop more complex understanding of U.S. slavery, and through the project's lesson study component, investigated how their students' understanding evolved. Looking more closely at student work after the lesson, we explored these questions:

- How do high school students make sense of primary source documents presenting a complex economic analysis of slavery, one that departs from the more clear-cut moral presentation of slavery as evil and limited to one section of the United States?

- How does students' understanding of race and slavery as a racial institution shape their reading of and learning from documents about the economic aspects of slavery?

Not surprisingly, we found that no single lesson, no matter how well conceived or executed, replaces students' old understanding with a new one. What we did learn is that students' understanding evolves, and new knowledge and economic perspectives mix with prior knowledge and moral perspectives in a complex process of meaning making. Pentimento, a term used in painting, provides a useful metaphor for understanding this process. Just as pentimento still shows an artist's earlier, differing conception and execution of a subject underneath the final layer of paint, students' new understanding from a lesson challenging prior assumptions still includes elements of those old ideas as they evolve. In this article, we talk about these evolutions in understanding and their implications for teaching about slavery in United States history.

A Conceptual Framework for Reading History

Historians have been called "extraordinary, rather than typical, readers"¹² because of the complex cognitive tasks required to make meaning from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. They balance general document reading knowledge, general historical knowledge, and specific historical knowledge from their area of expertise. As historians read a text, they connect it with other texts to construct a larger picture. Wineburg found that historians bring existing knowledge to reading historical texts, use this knowledge to analyze any new text they are reading, and then develop a revised conception of historical characters, events, and phenomena as they incorporate understanding from the new text.¹³ Having studied the reading processes of three historians, Leinhardt and Young found that, while most readers try to make comprehension as smooth as possible, historians go out of their way to "complicate" comprehension by raising questions, alternative interpretations, and multiple contextual framings for their reading.¹⁴

This complex understanding of reading in history draws on constructivist theories of learning which hold that the meaning is not inherent in the text itself waiting to be "discovered" or "unlocked," but rather is continually constructed and reconstructed through interactions between the reader and the text, drawing on the reader's prior knowledge, past experiences, and understanding from other texts.¹⁵ Texts cannot mean whatever a reader makes of them, however, because their meaning is shaped by the author's intentions and choices in writing. Emphasizing the role of writer and reader in constructing meaning, Paxton writes, "No matter how hard we try, it is impossible to abandon who we are when we sit down to write, or indeed when we sit down to read. A message can not be delivered absent a messenger; can not be read sans a reader."¹⁶

Of course, most secondary school history students do not spend most of their time reading primary source documents, but the most bland of secondary sources, textbooks, which are written by invisible, anonymous, authoritative authors who "typically focus tightly on facts, events, and people, and not the kinds of questions, decisions, and heuristics historians employ in their day-to-day practice."¹⁷ Not surprisingly, such texts impoverish students' understanding of historical complexity and nuance. They may also lead students to believe in "ultimate history"¹⁸ or the notion that the objective historical truth exists and can be known.

By contrast, when students read primary sources or secondary sources with strong authorial voice, they are more likely to read like historians: to engage in metacognitive conversations between reader and imagined or "mock" authors and audiences.¹⁹ Metacognitive conversations bring together affective responses, understanding derived from conversation with others about text, mental processing, and prior and new knowledge of facts, texts, and the disciplines so readers can construct meaning.²⁰ As part of these conversations, readers engage in moral as well as intellectual analysis. As Seixas writes, "it is impossible to construct meaning from the story of the past without making moral judgments, either implicit or explicit."²¹

Theories of how knowledge is generated in history run parallel to constructivist theories about reading. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, social scientists began to challenge the "scientific" or "objective" basis of history and the social sciences.²² Rather than seeing their work as a process of incremental advances leading closer and closer to understanding the "truth" about the past, historians came to see their work as based in the assumptions, values, language, and perspectives (grounded in identities like race, class, and gender) of historians as individuals and a community. In this post-modern era, history is not seen as a positivist report of the past, but a story where historians, intentionally or not, leave their imprint on the telling and where readers make sense of these imprints as part of their process of understanding texts.

Lesson Study

The lesson, artifacts, and interpretations of student learning described in this article were all the product of lesson study, an approach to teacher professional development that is popular in Japan and increasingly implemented in U.S. schools and districts where teacher inquiry, autonomy, and knowledge are valued. Lesson study, a cornerstone of the Words That Made America project, brings together teachers to collaborate on planning, observing, and reflecting on their lessons. It privileges teachers' questions about student learning and the concrete experience of students and teachers in their own classrooms. It brings together wisdom from those inside and outside the school and encourages collaboration and joint ownership of curriculum. Rather than evaluating one person's teaching, lesson study participants claim joint ownership of the lesson and focus on examining student learning, not teacher performance. The goal is not to develop a perfect lesson, but to make visible what and how students learn.

Lesson study differs from most U.S. educational research.²³ It is designed to yield local knowledge useful to teachers who developed the lesson; it does not yield knowledge to be generalized to all contexts, something necessary to understand as one reads the findings in the following sections. We do not suppose that our findings apply to all students or all teaching situations, but we do believe they raise important questions for us and other teachers to consider as we approach teaching one of the most important and difficult topics in U.S. history.

In this case, Nancy and Cathy, both A.P. U.S. history teachers, worked with Words That Made America staff and historians from Mills College to develop the lesson (see Appendix I). At the time they developed the lesson, they had participated in three years of professional development with Words That Made America, including learning historical content, interpreting primary sources, and developing curriculum. Nancy and Cathy taught the lesson, and everyone who contributed to the lesson's design observed Cathy's students' learning in one session, specifically focused on how the students worked to make meaning from nineteenth-century texts and how they considered the economic aspects of slavery. In one immediate and one follow-up session, we discussed our observations, analyzed artifacts including students' written work and our notes on their conversations, and reflected on the implications for re-teaching the lesson specifically and teaching U.S. history more generally. In a subsequent session, we analyzed written responses from 114 students in all four classes. The students were diverse in backgrounds, approximately 55% Asian/Pacific Islander, 20% Latino, 15% White, and 10% African American. About one-third of the students were classified as English learners or were recently reclassified as English proficient. The following sections describe what we observed, present what we think it means for teaching and learning U.S. history, and raise new questions for others and ourselves.

First Encounter: Making Sense of Slavery as a Global Economic Phenomenon

Early in the lesson, students read David Christy's argument that mid-nineteenth-century slavery was a global economic phenomenon from which no one could entirely disassociate, including abolitionists (see Appendix II). Christy paints a world where absolutes do not exist and moral ambiguity defines everyone's participation in a world economy bound up in slavery. Living in a time when slavery is considered morally corrupt and its adherents are characterized as greedy, racist southerners, students struggled to make sense of Christy's economic and global perspective and often applied their schema of slavery as a moral evil restricted to the southern United States.

To make students' thinking visible, we asked them to choose a one- or two- sentence quotation from the selection that summarized Christy's argument and explain why it was significant. About half the students chose the sentences: "KING COTTON cares not whether he employs slaves or freemen. It is the cotton, not the slaves, upon which his throne is based." Their reasons illustrate the power of previous narratives about slavery that students brought to this selection and the obstacles they posed for interpreting complicated texts from another century. Of the students who chose these sentences, only a handful, such as Rob and Eli,²⁴ showed evidence of understanding Christy's argument that slavery was global and even abolitionists could not disentangle themselves from it. Rob wrote, "King Cotton controls the majority of the economy in America and England and no matter who you are, abolitionists and slaveowners alike, you support cotton and the slavery that supports it." Eli stated, "Anyone who buys products that had to do with cotton are supporting slavery, including abolitionists."

More typical were students who misread or understood only part of Christy's argument. We speculate that many of these students had difficulty with Christy's argument because it did not easily fit with their prior schema of clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys" playing out a moral battle over slavery in the southern United States. As Wineburg has noted, when students draw on existing beliefs to incorporate new information, those existing beliefs are powerful forces shaping what, if anything is learned.²⁵

When students discussed the reading in pairs, we overheard many asking each other whether the writer was for or against slavery, indicating they were trying to decide if he was "good" or "bad." Such a perspective may have been shaped by their earlier eighth-grade education and learning from descriptions of debates over slavery that only two perspectives, for or against, are relevant to understanding slavery in U.S. history. Writers such as Christy, who analyze slavery from a different position, send students in a meaning making freefall where their prior knowledge does not help or hinders comprehension.

Ted was representative of students who struggled to understand Christy's essay. Writing about King Cotton, he said, "The quote reveals that slavery was not necessary and it plays a role in making cotton cheap and accessible to others." Val and Richard wrote, "The growing of cotton did not require slavery, therefore King Cotton did not care for slavery but the production of cotton itself... It shows how slavery is becoming less needed in the agricultural system." Having previously understood slavery only in a context of nineteenth-century racist ideology, Ted, Val, and Richard struggled with Christy's idea that slaveowners were motivated by economics and understood Christy to be saying that slavery was not really needed, not following the argument that slavery was viewed at the time as the only economically viable way to produce cotton. Karen, who understood that Christy's economic argument departed from her earlier understanding of slavery only as a racist phenomenon, made this contrast explicit in her comment: "It is surprising because it is trying to tell us that slavery is not based on racial barriers, but solely on economics. It shows us that economics was their excuse for slavery."

Other students, in their written comments on these two sentences, imply that Christy is suggesting a colorblind view of understanding slavery. Charles and Vivian wrote, "The cotton industry doesn't care about color, just as long as the industry prospers. As long as the cotton is produced with or without slaves, the cotton industry believes that slaves have clean hands and pure hearts." Their commentary indicates they misunderstood Christy's characterization of abolitionists, not slaves, as having clean hands and pure hearts. Their comments may also indicate a desire to distance discussion from the racist legacy of the past, perhaps to make the classroom "safe" by denying the salience of race.

As they read, other students brought their prior schema of slavery as a "peculiar institution" relegated to the southern United States and supported by sadistic or greedy planters. Students in all four classes commented on how dependent and essential the cotton market was to the South, even though Christy emphasizes the global reach of King Cotton. James understood slavery in moral terms. He wrote, "This reveals to me the closemindedness of the people back then. People were so cruel and do not consider people's feelings, only money." James's response may have been provoked by the discrepancy between his own strong moral views on slavery and Christy's focus on its economic rationale. The emotional dimension of his response may also indicate the empathy with slaves and others who are oppressed that he brings to this reading.

Some students commented directly on how Christy's argument confounded or contradicted their prior understanding. Chris disagreed with Christy explicitly, writing, "This quote shows how people were fooling themselves into believing slavery was 'OK' or acceptable. They claim it's for the better of the economy. It's surprising because what they say is opposite to reality. King Cotton was who he was because of slavery.... King Cotton made himself ignorant for the sake of his wealth." In this explanation, Chris draws on prior knowledge and moral arguments against slavery. Other students were even more explicit in stating how Christy's text unsettled their understanding. Contrasting what she learned previously with what Christy wrote, Susan commented, "The quote is surprising to be me because cotton couldn't thrive without slaves to pick it. At least that's what we're taught."

Students who quoted some other part of Christy's essay were more likely to have understood a central part of his argument about the global nature of slavery. For example, students who chose the first sentence, "Slavery is not an isolated system, but is so mingled with the business of the world, that it derives facilities from the most innocent transactions," were most likely to understand Christy's argument that slavery was global and not limited to one part of the United States, and that participants in the global economy, not excluding abolitionists, lent at least tacit support to slavery. Laura and Marcy stated, "Slavery is clearly connected with the business of the world" and then listed six specific examples. Caitlyn and Barbara noted connections beyond the economic, including political and geographic:

Slave owners thought slavery merely dealt with cultivating crops and getting work done, but it affected the entire world. The U.S. wasn't united because slave states and free states fought for political power. It also affected the economy because it increased the amount of cash crops that could be exported. It influenced politics because political parties emerged with different views on slavery. It inhibited expansion because of the struggles over which new states would be slave and free. Industries flourished because availability of cotton harvested by slaves allowed the growth of textile mills leading to industrialization.

Caitlyn and Barbara draw on a rich schema to put Christy's argument in context. In this case, their prior knowledge helped them understand his argument that slavery was deeply entwined, politically and economically, in world affairs.

Other students quoted Christy's sentence, "But they, no less than their allies, aid in promoting the interests of Slavery," that focused on the unwitting participation of abolitionists in the global slave economy. Jessica commented, "The irony of this shows how deeply embedded slavery was in the American economy and how... everyone was connected to and affected by the system." Others pointed out the hypocrisy of abolitionists. Ray said the sentence illustrated "that abolitionists are full of it because they try and get rid of slavery but buy the cotton clothes to support it." Other students labeled abolitionists as hypocrites.

While students such as Ray appreciated Christy's argument that the slave economy enmeshed everyone, including abolitionists, they overlaid a moral judgment of hypocrisy missing from Christy's essay, a judgment that reflects their prior schema of assigning people good and bad roles in a fight against slavery. In this case, historical actors they understood to be good shared qualities with others they understood to be bad, causing them to level charges of hypocrisy rather than appreciate the moral ambiguity of having to participate in a national and global economy. Perhaps students were imagining that abolitionists could easily boycott cotton products or identify products connected to slave rather than free labor. As Seixas writes, "The problem of rendering judgments in history is complicated by the fact that historians—and all of us—confront not the past itself but traces and representations of the past from a position in the present."²⁶ From our position in the early twenty-first century, not condemning the moral evil of slavery may seem to leave one open to condoning or appearing "neutral" about one of the gravest human rights abuses in U.S. history.

We see students' reliance on moral frames of analysis for slavery as an example of "collective memory" as opposed to "historical memory." As defined by Wineburg, collective memory, unlike its historical counterpart, relies less on historians' interpretation of evidence and mostly on "crystallization in the media."²⁷ Collective memory about slavery is then based not on documentary evidence as much as the images from film and other forms of popular culture that shape our pictures of slavery. Such images act as a filter for understanding the past.²⁸

Our purpose in closely analyzing students' interpretations of Christy is not to label students as those who "get" his point and those who do not. Indeed, our reading prompt allowed students to talk about what they saw as significant rather than what they saw as the main point or thesis. But as students discussed their ideas about the essay's significance, they revealed the constellation of prior knowledge and processes for making meaning that they brought to a document not clearly "for" or "against" slavery. Christy's strong authorial voice may well have contributed to engagement with the text, encouraging them to tap into prior knowledge and eliciting affective responses as well. As Paxton notes, "Students reading texts featuring high levels of authorial voice tend to engage in mental conversations with perceived authors, resulting in significantly more thought centering on the primary historical subject matter."²⁹ We also believe that the discrepancy between Christy's economic analysis for understanding slavery and students' moral framing may have sparked "mock conversations" that drew on their existing knowledge, beliefs, and values. In this sense, a text with a contradictory moral message elicited more thinking than a text, such as the typical U.S. history textbook, with no clear moral message.

Making historical thinking visible allows us to assess what students know. Rather than see students for what they do not understand, it allows us to see what they do understand and how they make meaning even when that meaning departs from the text. Making thinking visible also allows us to track how their knowledge evolves over the course of a lesson, which we discuss in the next section.

Upon Further Reflection: Making Sense of Slavery as a Global Economic Phenomenon

In this section, we analyze students' final writing assignment for this lesson after looking at additional primary and secondary sources. Their writing illustrates that the majority understood slavery as an economic institution. A closer look at the writing revealed to us, however, that some students still struggled with this concept. Some showed evidence of being able to use economics to analyze slavery, but did not show evidence of understanding it as an economic institution. And many students, perhaps uncomfortable with analyzing slavery only as an economic institution, wrote about how it was also a moral evil as well. Finally, some students still drew on knowledge of slavery as a moral evil in ways that led to misunderstandings of some of the primary and secondary sources.

To determine whether students understood slavery as an economic institution, we looked in their writing for discussion of how slavery affected more than the southern United States, how it was enmeshed in business transactions with varying degrees of transparency, and how not participating in an economy based on slavery was impossible for most people, even abolitionists. Ralph was typical of students who showed such understanding. He wrote:

Slavery is heavily involved with economics for a number of reasons.... The institution provided the south with ample hands to pick cotton and grow sugar. As slavery grows, so does the output of cotton, until the U.S.A.'s main export is cotton. This cotton is not only used by the abolitionistic north to power their businesses and supply their needs, it also goes to England where although abolitionist polices are prevalent, there are no qualms about taking the slave grown cotton to feed the endless hunger for the English textile mills. Back in the U.S., slavery was an important factor in states such as Virginia where the most money was made by raising and selling slaves.... Thus, without the slaves, the economy would have fallen into a heavy depression.

While Ralph's explanation was clearer than those of some other students, we found that more than half (83 out of 114 students) expressed ideas similar to his.

By contrast, most students who did not show evidence of grasping slavery as an economic institution cited economic statistics from the lesson's six other primary and secondary sources and described them in isolation, but not in connection to a larger understanding of slavery as a global economic institution. Iris, for example, explained the meaning of each document but never added the pieces together except for a concluding sentence that showed only vague understanding of their connections to a larger phenomenon. Students such as Iris followed a pattern that Paxton found typical of students' history writing, "an organizational style that essentially amounted to borrowing and slightly rewording excerpts from the source texts, then sandwiching this information between stock introductory and closing paragraphs."³⁰

We also found many students continuing to combine beliefs about slavery as a moral wrong with their new knowledge of slavery as an economic institution. While knowledge of slavery as a moral evil led some students initially to misunderstand Christy's economic analysis, by the end of the lesson, students integrated both perspectives on slavery. Most often, students taking this twin perspective in their essays focused on slavery as an economic institution and concluded with a statement about it as a human rights abuse. For example, Joyce wrote, "Slavery was an economic institution that affected the entire U.S. and world... but it also affected it by having people do manual labor and back-breaking word for sacrifice of something as simple and complex as money."

In some cases, taking a twin perspective led to misperceptions. Magdalena, for example, wrote, "Even abolitionists recognized how helpful [slavery] was to the U.S. They never tried to really enforce laws dealing against slavery because they knew that without slavery, the U.S. economy would fall apart and they would not bring as much money." Sabrina stated, "The issue was not really about slaves or their ethnicity, it was all about money and economic growth." Tina concluded that slavery was "strictly an economic issue and morals played no role in the debate." Magdalena's beliefs about abolitionists' hypocrisy may have led her to misunderstand their position on slavery. We also note that some students, like Sabrina and Tina, when confronted with new information, jettison the old. Rather than understanding that abolitionists had moral and economic arguments against slavery, students saw economic arguments supplanting moral ones.

Interestingly, only one student, Adam, explicitly connected slavery as a global economic institution to similar phenomena today. Writing about how people all over the world supported southern slavery regardless of their geographic location or beliefs, he concluded, "This continues today, except it is not slavery we support, but rather things such as child labor." Perhaps he did not make easy judgments because he recognized himself as a participant in an economy where he could not say with certainty whether his shirt was produced by children in Asia or union workers in the United States. He was also the only student to put himself (as part of the "we" supporting child labor) in his essay. By contrast, many students, mimicking the examples of authoritative textbooks with invisible authors, may have left themselves out of their writing. Again following the model of their textbooks, they relied on a "knowledge-telling" style of summarizing rather than a "knowledge transformation" style of interpreting and analyzing.³¹

Implications for Student Understanding and Teaching History

Cathy and Nancy did not want students to abandon their view of slavery as a moral wrong or human rights abuse. And even if they wanted to, the evidence from this lesson shows that such a goal would be difficult, if not impossible. Historical understanding is not easily changed or replaced. Rather, as students read about new perspectives on the past, they build understandings that represent varying combinations of old and new knowledge, assumptions, and perspectives. In the cases of many students, these new understandings blended moral perspectives with new knowledge of slavery's economic aspects.

Nancy and Cathy did want students to see beyond simplistic notions of good and bad when examining the past, however, and believe lessons like this are an important step. More nuanced understanding of moral ambiguity helps students understand slavery in the nineteenth century and, for example, continuing abuses of child labor in the twenty-first century. Looking at slavery as a global phenomenon rather than a peculiar institution relegated to one section of the United States also helps students see that globalization is not a new phenomenon.

Looking at students' work from this lesson leaves us with several ideas for supporting their development as critical readers and challenging their historical assumptions, two interrelated endeavors. We see the importance of asking students to surface prior knowledge, beliefs, and values before they read, so they can interrogate them in light of their reading and so teachers can point out dissonance between old ideas and new reading if students do not. We also see the benefit of asking students to make their thinking visible to themselves and others as they work to interpret historical texts. Had we not asked students to talk with partners after first reading Christy's essay, we would not have seen how their focus on the moral dimension of slavery was shaping their understanding of his economic arguments about slavery. As students made these initial ideas visible, they questioned each other about how they came to those ideas and what parts of the text supported those ideas. As students engaged in this social process of meaning making, they deepened understanding of the text.

To help students make empathetic historical judgments, we see the value in making connections from the past to the present explicit. Too often, students imagine persons in history living lives that have little to do with their own. Not seeing any connections between others' lives and their own, they are quicker to make facile judgments about the actions of people in the past. Helping students consider how they are enmeshed in global economic systems whose justice is ambiguous at best might have prevented them from rushing to label abolitionists as hypocrites because they could not remove themselves from a global cotton economy.

We also appreciate the difficulty of teaching high school history as historians continually reframe the past. Textbooks rarely keep pace with such developments, and even if they did, the contents of new textbooks cannot erase and replace students' old understanding. Instead, teachers need to make explicit for students that knowledge of history in the profession at large evolves in ways that parallel how it does for individual students in a high school classroom: by revisiting texts with open minds, interrogating old assumptions, engaging in conversations about meaning, and sharing new ideas for critique. By helping students see this parallel, we can give them not only more complex understanding of individual eras and events in the past, but also deeper appreciation of how historical knowledge is constructed.

Notes

^1.� Nancy Ogden and Catherine Perkins contributed equally to all aspects of curriculum, teaching, and research described in this article. David Donahue led the data analysis and writing. All three authors wish to acknowledge and thank Avi Black for so ably directing the Words That Made America Project, supporting teachers as thoughtful professionals, and making possible the work described in this article.

^2.� Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

^3.� David Quigley, "Southern Slavery in a Free City: Economy, Politics, and Culture," Slavery in New York, eds. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (New York: The New Press, 2005), 265.

^4.� Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice (Providence, RI: Brown University, 2006): 13.

^5.� Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

^6.� Quigley, 269.

^7.� Quoted in Quigley, 283.

^8.� Quoted in Brown University, 11.

^9.� Matthew Kauffman, "The Cost of Slavery Was High: But Who Will Pay for It?" Hartford Courant on the Web 29 September 2002, 3 April 2007 <http://www.courant.com/hc-reparations.artsept29,0,5577477.story>. For additional information on northern business connections to slavery, see David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt, eds., The Meaning of Slavery in the North (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998) and Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).

^10.� Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

^11.� Words That Made America, a professional development program to increase teachers' knowledge of history and how to teach it, works in the Hayward and San Leandro, California Unified School Districts with fourth-, fifth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade teachers who, following the state's history-social science framework, are responsible for teaching California and U.S. history. For more information about Worlds That Made America, contact Avi Black, Project Director, phone: 510–670–5239 or email: ablack@acoe.org.

^12.� Gaea Leinhardt and Kathleen McCarthy Young, "Two Texts, Three Readers: Distance and Expertise in Reading History," Cognition and Instruction 14.4 (1996): 441.

^13.� Sam Wineburg, "The Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts," Teaching and Learning in History, eds. Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1994): 85–136.

^14.� Leinhardt and McCarthy Young, "Two Texts, Three Readers," 478.

^15.� Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz, Reading for Understanding (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).

^16.� Richard J. Paxton, "A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them," Review of Educational Research 69.30 (1999): 318.

^17.� Paxton, "A Deafening Silence," 317. For more on author visibility and its connection to student understanding of history, see Richard J. Paxton, "The Influence of Author Visibility on High School Students Solving a Historical Problem," Cognition and Instruction 20.2 (2002): 197–248.

^18.� Edward Hallet Carr, What is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).

^19.� Sam Wineburg, "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy," American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991): 495–519.

^20.� Schoenbach, et al.

^21.� Peter Seixas, "Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting," Curriculum Inquiry 23.3 (1993): 303.

^22.� Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

^23.� To learn more about lesson study, see Catherine Lewis and Ineko Tschudia, "A Lesson Is Like a Swiftly Flowing River: Research Lessons and the Improvement of Japanese Education," American Educator 22.4 (1998): 12–17, 50–52 and James Stigler and James Hiebert, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (New York: Free Press, 1999). For a practical guide to lesson study, see Catherine Lewis, Lesson Study: A Handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change (Philadelphia: Research for Better Schools, 2002). For an example of lesson study in a Teaching American History project, see Stan Pesick and Shelly Weintraub, "DeTocqueville's Ghost: Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America," The History Teacher 36.2 (2003): 231–247.

^24.� Pseudonyms are used throughout to refer to students.

^25.� Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

^26.� Peter Seixas, "Confronting the Moral Frames of Popular Film: Young People Respond to Historical Revisionism," American Journal of Education 102 (1994): 264.

^27.� Wineburg, Historical Thinking, 242.

^28.� Seixas, "Confronting the Moral Frames."

^29.� Paxton, "A Deafening Silence," 329.

^30.� Paxton, "A Visible Author," 233.

^31.� Paxton, "A Deafening Silence," 322.

Appendix I

Beyond Face Value: A Document-Based Lesson on the Economics of Slavery

Abstract:
Students study nineteenth-century slavery in the United States as part of a larger global economic phenomenon. They examine Confederate currency illustrated with images of slavery to begin thinking about slavery's connection to the economy, read primary and secondary sources that examine the economic aspects of slavery, and draw their own conclusions about the role of economics in sustaining slavery in the United States into the 1800s.

Focus Question:
How was slavery a global economic phenomenon?

Understanding Goals:
Through this lesson, students should understand that:

Slavery was more than only a "peculiar institution" related to one section of the United States
Slavery was part of a complex economic system in addition to being part of political, social, and racial systems
Moral ambiguity characterizes participation in complex economic systems

Activities:
Part 1: Money and imagery
Ask students to look at a dollar bill or other currency they brought to class.

What is on the bill?
Why is it there?

Facilitate the discussion so students understand that nations place important political and economic symbols on their currency.

Next, show students examples of confederate currency illustrated with slavery. Examples can be found at http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/BeyondFaceValue/beyondfacevalue.htm, the link to Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery on Confederate Currency, an online exhibit of the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University. The exhibit includes images of over 100 banknotes and accompanying text. Select five to ten examples.

What do you see on these bills?
Why are these images there?

Help students understand that confederate currency included images of slavery because it was a pervasive and important part of the confederate economy.

Part 2: An introduction to an economic analysis of slavery
Ask students to read by themselves David Christy's 1855 essay on the cotton economy (See Appendix II). This is a challenging text, even for A.P. students. To help students unpack the essay's meaning, ask them to discuss it with a partner for 10 minutes. Focus the pair discussion by giving students a 4x6 card. Ask them to quote one or two sentences from Christy's essay on one side. They should quote an excerpt that they believe speaks to something significant about U.S. history. On the other side of the 4x6 card, they should briefly explain why they believe the excerpt they quoted is significant.

After the paired discussion, engage the whole class in a discussion of the article's meaning and significance.

What parts of Christy's essay did you quote?
Why did you choose those parts as significant?
What are Christy's main ideas?

As students share their ideas, encourage them to connect their own quotations or explanations of significance to ideas already shared by other classmates.

Part 3: Going deeper with an economic analysis of slavery
Ask students to read the following documents (See Appendix III for each of the documents):

Document 1: Value of Cotton Exports as a Percentage of All U.S. Exports, 1800–1860
Document 2: Impending Crisis/1860 Georgia Governor's Message
Document 3: Slave Trade as Big Business
Document 4: Price of Male Slave over the Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Document 5: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 1
Document 6: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 2

To guide students' reading, ask them to complete the chart in Appendix IV. The chart helps students connect each reading to Christy's main ideas about the connection between economics and slavery. This part of the lesson can be completed either individually or in pairs.

Assessment:
Ask students to write their answer to the question: How was slavery an economic institution in the United States and the world? OR How do the documents support Christy's claim that slavery was a global economic phenomenon?

Appendix II

David Christy on the Cotton Economy, 1855

Source: James J. Lorence, Enduring Voices, Volume 1 to 1877, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) 242.

Slavery is not an isolated system, but is so mingled with the business of the world, that it derives facilities from the most innocent transactions. Capital and labor, in Europe and America, are largely employed in the manufacture of cotton. These goods, to a great extent, may be seen freighting every vessel, from Christian nations, that traverses the seas of the globe; and filling the warehouses and shelves of the merchants over two-thirds of the world. By the industry, skill, and enterprise, employed in the manufacture of cotton, mankind are better clothed; their comfort better promoted; general industry more highly stimulated; commerce more widely extended; and civilization more rapidly advanced, than in any preceding age....

KING COTTON cares not whether he employs slaves or freemen. It is the cotton, not the slaves, upon which his throne is based. Let freemen do his work as well, and he will not object to the change. Thus far the experiments in this respect have failed, and they will not soon be renewed. The efforts of his most powerful ally, Great Britain, to promote that object, have already cost her people many hundreds of millions of dollars: with total failure as a reward for her zeal....

KING COTTON is a profound statesman, and knows what measures will best sustain his throne. He is an acute mental philosopher, acquainted with the secret springs of human action, and accurately perceives who will best promote his aims. He has no evidence that colored men can grow his cotton, but in the capacity of slaves. It is his policy, therefore, to defeat all schemes of emancipation.

In speaking of the economical connections of Slavery with the other material interests of the world, we have called it a tri-partite alliance. It is more than this. It is quadruple. Its structure includes four parties, arranged thus: The Western Agriculturalists; the Southern Planters; the English Manufacturers; and the American Abolitionists! By this arrangement, the Abolitionists do not stand in direct contact with Slavery: –they imagine, therefore, that they have clean hands and pure hearts, so far as sustaining the system is concerned. But they, no less than their allies, aid in promoting the interests of Slavery. Their sympathies are with England on the Slavery question, and they very naturally incline to agree with her on other points. She advocates Free Trade, as essential to her manufactures and comers; and they do the same,.... England, we were about to say, is in alliance with the cotton planter, to whose prosperity Free Trade is indispensable. Abolitionism is in alliance with England. All three of these parties, then, agree in their support of the Free Trade policy. It needed but the aid of the Western Farmer, therefore, to give permanency to this principle. His adhesion has been given, the quadruple alliance has been perfected, and Slavery and Free Trade nationalized!

Appendix III

Documentary evidence on slavery and economics

Document 1: Value of Cotton Exports as a Percentage of All U.S. Exports, 1800–1860
Source: James J. Lorence, Enduring Voices, Volume 1 to 1877 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000).

By 1840 cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports.

Document 2: Impending Crisis/1860 Georgia Governor's Message
Source: Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, 1857; Paul S. Boyer, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877, 2000.

Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live. There is no legislation except for the benefit of slavery and slaveholders.

In 1860, Georgia's governor sent a blunt message to his constituents, many of them non-slaveholders: "So soon as the slaves were at liberty thousands of them would leave the cotton and rice fields.... and make their way to the healthier climate of the mountain region [where] we should have them plundering and stealing, robbing and killing." There was no mistaking the conclusion. Emancipation would not merely deprive slaveholders of their property, it would jeopardize the lives of non-slaveholders.

Document 3: Slave Trade as Big Business
Source: Paul S. Boyer, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877, 2000.

The profitability of cotton and sugar increased the value of slaves. From the declining plantation states of the Upper South to the booming Lower South became a huge business. "Virginia," an observer stated in 1832, "is, in fact, a Negro raising State for other States; she produces enough fro her own supply, and six thousand a year for sale." Without the sale of its slaves, he concluded, "Virginia will be a desert."

Document 4: Price of Male Slave over the Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Source: Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974).

Document 5: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 1
Source: Steven Mintz, "Was Slavery the Engine of Economic Growth?" Digital History, 2003, 14 November 2006 <http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/con_economic.cfm>.

Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.

In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for the American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.

Document 6: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 2
Source: Mintz, "Was Slavery the Engine of Economic Growth?"

There can be no doubt that opponents of slavery had come to view the South's "peculiar institution," as an obstacle to economic growth. Despite clear evidence that slavery was profitable, abolitionists—and many people who were not abolitionists—felt strongly that slavery degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization, thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery with economic backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic and social stagnation. When the North waged war on slavery, it was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it was because Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation, moral improvement, free labor, and commercial and economic growth.

Appendix IV

Slavery and its economic connections

Document	Main Idea Summary	How does this document support Christy's claims about slavery as an economic institution?
Document 1: Value of Cotton Exports as a Percentage of All U.S. Exports, 1800–1860
Document 2: Impending Crisis/1860 Georgia Governor's Message
Document 3: Slave Trade as Big Business
Document 4: Price of Male Slave over the Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Document 5: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 1
Document 6: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 2

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