Why teach history in school?

by Rebecca Poulson

Why teach history in school?

The study of history gives our kids key skills we want them to have at graduation, and beyond: critical thinking skills; creativity; and communication skills.

 

Sitka, 1805 (Urey Lisiansky, A Voyage Round the World
in the Years 1803, 4, 5 and 6)

To study history, you must learn how to sort through the mountains of information out there from and about the past, and determine what information is reliable and relevant. Then, you must organize it into something meaningful, that you can communicate to others.

When you write a history paper, you can't rely on "in my opinion . . ." or "I think I heard once . . . ." You have to back up your statements with research and sources.

Information Literacy is an increasingly vital skill for young people. We are bombarded by information, or more accurately, data. When we research history, we have to learn how to decide whether what we find is reliable or relevant; we have to learn how to find the information we need, and be open to new ideas, without getting sidetracked. And, the information we need might not even be on the internet.

To write a history paper, you have to be creative. You can't copy what someone has already done. Fortunately, in even the most popular subjects, like the Civil War, the topic is so vast, and so many people were involved, that there is no end to research you can do that is interesting and relevant to our lives today. In Alaska, historians have barely scratched the surface. Watershed events like the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act happened in living memory.

And finally, we have to learn how to organize our research, and to communicate. We communicate through stories. The human brain cannot deal with data any other way. The historian cannot just compile a bunch of information – the historian must have a thesis, and organize her paper into a narrative to persuade her audience that this thesis helps explain the events and their meaning. We create narratives. If our young people are going to succeed in life and work, they have to be able to shape and communicate their work as a narrative that others will be interested in and understand.

So those are just the "hard" skills you gain from the study of history. Perhaps as important are the "soft" skills: learning about other people and how life works, how one person’s story is affected by historic events, and how one person can influence history. How generations are affected by events like famine, war or recession. How battles are lost, or won. How people crack, or are resilient in tough situations. How love, ambition, competition, and ingenuity affect historic events. The motives and interactions behind corruption, great acts of heroism, survival, political movements. The way the actions and decisions of one generation profoundly affect the next.

But mainly, history is the study of people in the past doing interesting things. When we learn about other cultures – whether it's the history of people on the other side of the planet, or our own ancestors – we learn about what makes us different, and what we have in common as humans. We learn who we are.

If history class is dull, we are doing something wrong! What could be more interesting than thousands of English soldiers going over the top, walking into enemy machine gun fire? The Trail of Tears? The Fenians attempting to take over Canada, so they could trade it for a free Ireland? The indigenous Tlingit halting Russian, and English, territorial advance?

As our public schools rely more on standardized testing – in Alaska, 50% of a teacher's rating will soon be based on how well their students do on standardized tests - there is more and more pressure to teach what can be tested and to practice taking tests. Due to the nature of standardized testing, the Common Core-based curriculum places great emphasis on the skill of "close reading" of a text, getting all your information from the text itself, not from its context. Here is a piece about a sample unit – from the creators of the Common Core standards –  for the Gettysburg Address. It's no coincidence that the chief architect of the Common Core standards is now the head of the College Board (the people who bring us the SATs).

Not only does this approach make any text frustrating and dull, it means that the children who succeed have gotten their knowledge, and confidence, outside school. Rather than engaging all children, whatever their previous knowledge, with interesting content, so that they are rewarded by learning itself, school becomes a filter, a sort of nine-month standardized test.

And writing skill, as measured by standardized tests, is all about grammar and vocabulary, not about persuasiveness, clarity, or even credibility. 

This is why history is not emphasized in public schools today - and why it must be taught, and taught well, if we want our kids to graduate as competent, knowledgeable, curious young adults.

The Buildings of Sheldon Jackson College

by Rebecca Poulson

The five buildings of the Sheldon Jackson College quadrangle were built in 1911. The school began in 1878 as a Presbyterian mission, and retained its Presbyterian affiliation even as it became an independent four-year college. We came close to losing these buildings, when the college closed in disarray in 2007. (For the story of how they were saved, see the Sitka Fine Arts Campus Website.)

I love these handsome buildings, especially the light-filled spaces of the Richard H. Allen Memorial auditorium building.

But that’s probably not how they were ever seen by the college.

In 1946, the school planned to demolish the Allen building (saving all useful materials) and replace it with a new, two-story, reinforced concrete classroom and administrative building. (1)

Thank God, the Allen building was not replaced. But this may have been because just a year later they had a plan to redo the entire campus.

 

Sheldon Jackson College (E. W. Merrill)

What was it about these buildings that made the Presbyterians hate them so? The new design would have demolished all five of the central buildings, and put in an oval drive, with an informal arrangement of new one-story classroom buildings. That plan was never fulfilled, either. The campus today would have been mere real estate. But that was probably already how the college saw it.

Presbyterians are Calvinists, a particularly stern branch of Christianity. Human nature is hopelessly depraved. We deal with this deep sense of guilt through work; discipline; modesty; thrift; and fulfilling our civic duty. Pretty things, booze, makeup, social dancing, and fancy architecture were just not part of the program.

Native culture was also not part of the program of this Native school. This is also manifest in the architecture, which has no trace of anything remotely indigenous.

While they never appreciated what they had, this philosophy also made them lousy fundraisers. Professor Molly Ahlgren once told me, “They can’t succeed. It’s not who they are.” When they wanted to tear down Allen Hall in 1993, they couldn’t even afford the dump fees.

It also kept them from messing them up with trendy remodels. The buildings were preserved – under layers of plain and functional sheetrock, acoustic tile, and plywood.

In this way, these buildings’ very existence, their fanciful gothic-tudor-craftsman exteriors, and severely plain interiors – express a complex story of Presbyterian faith and works.

Photos from the International Fur Trade Exhibition, Leipzig, 1930

In summer 1930, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce offered a display at the International Fur Trade Exhibition in Leipzig, Germany. Under the banner “America’s Fur Industry Is On a Firm Foundation,” the exhibit featured the following display of fur seals (from the Pribilofs perhaps?):

Credit for all photos: Records of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, RG 22,

Entry P-92, Box 21, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

The exhibit also highlighted international treaty protections that “saved the seal from extinction”:

The records of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the archival collection in which these photographs are found—are held at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and include documents related to Alaska’s fur seal industry from the late nineteenth century forward. Historians such as Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Sarah Crawford Isto, and John Bockstoce have done great work on this topic in recent years. Works by Lydia Black, Richard Pierce, and James Gibson covered the earlier Russian America period. Despite this attention, there are boxes and boxes of documents at College Park that an enterprising scholar could no doubt mine for a new perspective.

The 'Tom & Al'

By Rebecca Poulson

A number of years ago, a photographer working with the E. W. Merrill collection at Sheldon Jackson College made photographic prints from some of the glass plate negatives; this summer, Sitkan Lynne Chassin donated this print, of the Tom & Al careened on the beach of Sitka Channel, to the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society.

The Tom & Al on the beach at Sitka. (E. W. Merrill)

The location is the beach of what is now Katlian Street in the historic Indian Village of Sitka. In the background is Japonski Island, which at the time was a military reserve. The two large buildings, one of which is still standing today, are for storing coal for government ships, such as the revenue cutters.

This photo was shot some time after 1907, which was when the radio towers visible in the background were constructed.

The Tom & Al is a sort of sister ship to the famous King & Winge, a classic halibut schooner built in 1914 by the West Seattle firm of the same name, owned by Thomas J. King and Albert L. Winge. According to the “King and Winge Shipbuilding Company” page on Wikipedia, the Tom & Al had been built as the Ragnhild in 1900, and later acquired and renamed by the company.

The King & Winge, on the other hand, was a classic, dashing, modern halibut schooner. Her first voyage was an arctic expedition, where she was also used to pick up survivors of the Karluk expedition from Wrangell Island. She was a fishing boat, possibly a rum runner, a Columbia Bar pilot boat for three decades, and finally a fishing boat from 1962 until sinking in the Bering Sea in 1994.

(The Tom & Al was used for a short time as a whaler in the early 1960s, according to the Offbeat Oregon History blog, which also has a good image of the King & Winge.)

The Tom & Al was probably a halibut schooner in this photo. In the heyday of the cod and halibut schooners, the men went out in the dories – flat-bottomed boats we see here were stacked on deck – to fish, and would return to the mother ship with their catch.

It was brutally hard and dangerous work, with fishermen in small boats on the open ocean, vulnerable to fog, storm, and any mishap that might occur when you're working with hooks, knives, and fish. The yards and the fishery were dominated by Scandinavians, most of them immigrants: Albert Winge was a native of Norway.

Eventually, the schooner itself was used to set and pick up gear, the way it's still done today: the boat sets out long lines, of lengths of line known as “skates” for the shape of the canvas squares some boats still use to tie up the coils of line. Each has an eye spliced into each end, and they are tied together end to end with sheet bends (or more properly, beckett hitches). This is a knot that you can untie even after it's been pulled brutally tight. Each end of the ground line gets an anchor, a float line and a float and flag pole to mark it.

Baited hooks are attached to the ground line with gangions (pronounced gan-yun), a word that seems to come from the fact that they are ganged or grouped along the main line. One end is fastened into the ground line, and the other end is attached to the hook. The knot used for the loops on the ends of the gangion, the gangion knot, seems to be unique to this purpose.

Several of the classic halibut schooners, built a century ago as the latest in marine technology, are still actively fishing. These include the Republic, built in 1914, the same year as the King & Winge. She is home ported here in Sitka and looks ready for her next 100 years of service.

The survival of halibut schooners is a testament to the stout construction standards of the yards, and to the value placed on these aesthetic and functional vessels by their owners. It is also testament to the success of fisheries conservation programs, so that we have a viable halibut fishery today.

Fairbanks Event – “Gold Rush Ice Train” by Chris Allan, Wed 1/15

The Tanana Yukon Historical Society presents “Gold Rush Ice Train: George Glover and the U.S. Government’s Unlikely Attempt to Conquer the North by Steam,” a lecture by Chris Allan, National Park Service historian.

Wednesday, January 15

7:00 p.m.

Pioneer Museum at Pioneer Park

Fairbanks

The Klondike gold rush stimulated the imaginations of thousands of Americans and people around the world. Some of them set out immediately to face the snow-chocked Chilkoot Pass or White Pass with a heavy pack on their backs.

An 1897 drawing of George Glover's "ice locomotive" choo-chooing its
way from Skagway to Dawson City. Originally designed to haul
logging sleds in the American Midwest, Glover's invention was
supposed to haul 150 tons of food for starving miners in the Klondike,
50 Army soldiers to protect the cargo, and 200 private passengers.
The whole plan turned out to be a fraud and an embarrassment to the
McKinley administration.  Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society.

Others dreamed of a mechanical solution to the problem of reaching the distant gold fields. And when rumors began to circulate that the Klondike stampeders would soon run out of food, Secretary of War Russell Alger put his faith in a steam-powered, all-terrain “snow and ice locomotive” to solve this emerging humanitarian crisis.

In retrospect, the story of the inventor George Glover and the U.S. government’s rescue mission is a comedy of errors. The machine could scarcely function under the best of conditions; its inventor seemed to have his head in the clouds; and high-ranking government officials were hoodwinked by scoundrels and flim-flam artists.

However, the short-lived and ill-fated Klondike Relief Expedition offers us a glimpse of a moment in the nation’s history when greed ran rampant, the Far North seemed tantalizingly beyond reach and, for a time, it appeared a steam-powered marvel could accomplish the impossible.

For more information about this and other lectures sponsored by the Tanana Yukon Historical Society, please call 488-3383, or e-mail <tyhs@alaska.net>.