Linda A. Cicero, Stanford University

Why
Historical
Thinking

is Notabout
History1

By Sam Wineburg

E d i t o r ’s N o t e : This is an adaptation of Sam Wineburg’s keynote address to the 2015 AASLH annual meeting in Louisville.
For full audio of his talk, go to http://on.aaslh.org/Wineburg2015.

TDavid E. Knapphe point I want tomake today might
initially soundpeculiar for thoseof you familiar with my work.
My claim is that historicalthinking is not about history.
To illustrate, let me tell you a story abouta news item that appeared back in October2010. The Washington Post broke a story about
a fourth-grade textbook in Virginia called Our
Virginia, Past and Present. The book contains
a description of the role played by AfricanAmericans in the Civil War.2
Now, if you are a movie aficionado, andhave seen Glory and the stories of the 54th
Massachusetts, and the 180,000 AfricanAmericans who served the Union forces, constituting over 10 percent of the Union forces,
then you might expect that to be the focus of
this section.
Wrong. Our Virginia, Past and Present presented Virginia fourth-graders with little known
historical information: “Thousands of Southern
blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two battalions under the command of
Stonewall Jackson.”3

Now this had to be at the height of the Civil War because,
as y’all recall, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson died fromfriendly fire by his own troops on May 10, 1863.
It has long been known that the Confederate army forced
slaves into service as cooks and laborers who provided backup
support for weapons-bearing troops. We know of dozens ofcases like this. We even have some scattered photographs ofslaves suited up in uniform sitting next to their masters.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking
about the formal mustering of thousands of black soldiers
under Jackson alone, and by extension, thousands more
under other generals, who trained them in weaponry andtaught them to fight for the South. All at a time when the
North was still debating the issue of enlisting black troops.
What evidence supports these claims? The only documentthat we have from the Confederacy about drafting African
American soldiers comes in the waning days of the war, alast-ditch effort less than three weeks before the surrenderat Appomattox. If thousands of blacks were already bearing
arms for the Confederacy, why did the South have to enact
General Orders 14, on March 23, 1865, a proposal so controversial that its drafters felt compelled to issue a disclaimer
at the bottom: “Nothing in this act shall be construed toauthorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shallbear toward their owners.”4
Where would Our Virginia, Past and Present find backing
for a claim rejected out of hand by every reputable Civil War
historian we could think of? There is no documentation
for these claims, no records, none of the sources we would
expect make mention of them. We can find no evidence for
H I S T O R Y N E W S 13

Today, when practically everything
has changed about how we get our
information, what does informed
citizenship mean?
claims that so contravene common sense and, I might add,human nature. What would slaves be fighting for, anyway?
Their “right” to remain shackled?
When the Washington Post asked Joy Masoff for her
sources, she reported that she turned to the Internet for
research. Her publisher, Five Ponds Press, sent the Post threeof the links Masoff used, all of which traced back to the same
source: the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, “A patriotic,
historical and educational organization, founded in 1896,
dedicated to honoring the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier and sailor and to preserving Southern Culture.”5
Our first inclination might be to have a little chuckle at
Ms. Masoff’s expense. And I don’t think any of us would
dispute that it’s unfortunate that her assertions ended up ina textbook for fourth-graders. But I want to strike a serious
note and suggest that Ms. Masoff is not so different fromyou and me.
We live in an age when going to the library means turningon our laptops and making sure that we have a wireless connection. Being on the Web and searching for information isabout being in a fundamentally new relationship to information from how anyone who learned to do research a generation ago went about it.
Back in the uncomplicated pre-Web days, libraries andarchives were places of quiet stability and authority. At
age ten, when I did my first research paper (a report on
the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle), going to the librarymeant being inducted into a sacred order where one learned
hieroglyphics in order to decipher the Readers Guide to
Periodic Literature.
It was obviously never the case that just because something was printed meant that it was true. At the same time,
we often ceded authority to established publishers. We reliedon them to make sure that what we read was accurate, that it
had gone through rounds of criticism before it reached oureyes. Only a small number of us were actual authors. Mostof us consumed information that others had produced.
The reality we inhabit, that our children inhabit, thatthose kids who come on field trips to our institutions
inhabit, is a very, very different reality. The Internet has
obliterated authority. You need no one’s permission to createa website. You need no papers signed to put up a YouTube
video. You need no one’s stamp of approval to post a picture
on Instagram. You can Tweet to your heart’s content—someof you are doing so this very moment. We live in an age
when you can practice historiography without a license. Go
ahead—Be an author! What determines whether you goviral is not the blessing from some university egghead, butfrom the digital mob.6

14 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6

Think back to claims that our president was born in Kenya.
This was a claim embraced by many prominent people, including a current Republican candidate for president. And there on
YouTube was an actual tape, a tape of Sarah Obama, the president’s grandmother, being interviewed by an American clericabout the circumstances of our president’s birth.7
So I wanted to do an experiment with the generation often
referred to as digital natives. I was asked to give a talk at ahighly regarded independent school. The administration
had assembled their sophomore and junior classes, over 100
students. I asked these kids how many of them had heard thatPresident Obama had been born in Kenya. Sophisticated andwell-healed, they looked at me as if I were from outer space.
But then, knowing teenagers as I do, I appealed to theirbravado. “I assume,” I said, “that if you are so certain, you
all must have examined the evidence. I assume all of you
have heard the tape of Sarah Obama, the president’s paternal
grandmother, talking about being ‘present’ at her grandson’sbirth. Just so I can be sure, please raise your hand if you’ve
listened to this tape.” No hands went in the air. “Soooooo,”
I taunted them, “you’re judging a claim without looking
at the evidence?” And then—those of you who work withteenagers will recognize this move—I asked them, “Are you
open-minded or closed?” I’ve yet to meet a teenager who
admits to close-mindedness.
I played the tape. Sarah Obama, a woman who had neverleft Kenya, claimed that she was “present” at her grandson’sbirth. Someone’s a liar. Either an 86-year-old woman or the
President of the United States. Now, with a little bit of nudging, students started to motivate some questions. Had thetape been doctored? No, it had been examined forensically.
It was authentic. What about the material that comes before
and after the part I played--a lovely question, very pertinent
to historical thinking. Another wanted to know if the translation into English was correct, an astute question because
Sarah Obama was speaking Swahili, not her native language.
What happens to this word “present” as it moves from Luo,
Sarah Obama’s native language, to her broken Swahili andthen into English? Does it mean she was physically present?
Or, that she merely heard of her grandson’s birth?
“What else would we want to know about the tape?” I
pressed on. But it seemed that I had exhausted the bank ofstudent questions. Despite the fact that many of these digital
natives were headed to top colleges, they were still babes in
the woods when it came to asking rudimentary questions ofhistorical thinking: Who authored this tape, how did it cometo be? Who was this Bishop Ron McCrae, the head of the
Anabaptist Church of North America, the man heard speaking to Sarah Obama’s interpreter? How would we find out?
Such questions-the A’s, B’s, and C’s of historical thinking—were anything but intuitive to this group of bright teenagers.
Let me suggest, then, that it is one thing to be a digital
native and quite another to be digitally intelligent. Long
before the Internet, Thomas Jefferson argued for the wisdom of the yeoman farmer, a person who would think,discern, and come to reasoned conclusions in the face of
conflicting information. Today, when practically everything
has changed about how we get our information, what does
informed citizenship mean?

The most critical question facing young people today is
not how to find information. Google has done a great job
with that. We’re bombarded by stuff. The real question iswhether that information, once found, should be believed.
And according to some recent studies young people are notdoing so well in that department.
The most extensive work on this question has been doneby Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues at Northwestern
University. Hargittai engaged dozens of college students—
her total sample was over 100—in a study of how young
people determined the trustworthiness of information theyencountered on the Web. She gave college students a seriesof questions and sent surfing, recording their screen shots
and comments as they searched.8
The upshot of Hargittai’s work was that students ceded toGoogle questions of credibility. The higher up in a Google
search, the more credible the entry. Sometimes students
would remark that they considered the qualifications of theauthor before believing what they found, but in no instanceof the screen captures could the researchers find evidence
that author credibility steered students’ decisions.
The first thing that historical study teaches us is that there
is no such thing as free-floating information. Information
comes from somewhere. And if you think I’m exaggerating
the gravity of the situation, let me tell you about an incident
that happened in May 2014 in Rialto California, a community
outside of San Bernardino. It is not an incident about students. It is about an assignment put together by their teachers.
Teachers gave their middle school students a written
exam inspired by the new Common Core State Standards.
Teachers went on the Internet and culled what they believed
were credible documents, each one presenting a different
view. The issue under debate was the Holocaust. Students
were told to review a set of historical interpretations and tocompose an essay arguing whether the Holocaust was realor whether it was a “propaganda tool” concocted by world
Jewry for “political and monetary gain.”9
One of the “credible” documents teachers put into children’s hands claimed that the Diary of Anne Frank was a
fake; that piles of corpses from Auschwitz were murdered
Germans, not Jews; and that there are are “compelling reasons why the so-called Holocaust never happened.”
Dozens of eighth-graders found this document the mostcompelling. As one wrote, “The Holocaust is a propaganda
tool. So Israel can make money for Jews. The Holocaust is a
Hoax because the gas chambers in concetration [sic] camps
were faulty. Another reason why this event never really happened becuase [sic] the Diary of Anne Frank is a hoax too.
This is why no Jew has ever been gassed to death in thesegas chambers.”10
When an investigative reporter for The Sun (SanBernardino) contacted the school district, officials said
that this type of essay was an exception. But throughCalifornia’s version of the Freedom of Information Act, theindefatigable Beau Yarbrough, who won an award from the
Associated Press for his muckraking, obtained the essaysthat students wrote. It turns out that dozens and dozens of
middle school students became Holocaust deniers throughtheir teachers’ efforts.

When the story got out, the Rialto school board held
emergency meetings and decided that students and teachers
should visit the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in
Los Angeles and receive sensitivity training to ensure that anincident like this never happened again. But in my humble
opinion, this is a gross misdiagnosis of the problem. I don’t
believe these teachers were racists or prejudiced or bigoted
or benighted or living in sin. I do not think that they needed
mandatory sensitivity training. I think that they— like theirstudents, like Joy Masoff, like us—are living in an age where
technological changes of how information is disseminatedand distributed far outpaces our ability to keep up with it.
The tools we have invented are handling us—not us them.
Throw in for good measure the Common Core, and thefact that a few years ago we were telling teachers to write
standards on the board and to quiz students on facts, andnow we are telling them to give students multiple documents
representing conflicting positions (but providing little or no
professional development for new ways of teaching), and you
have the recipe for a perfect storm. That’s what happened in
Rialto. A perfect storm with the ingredients amply suppliedby the Internet.
That’s where we’re at. Slaves to the machines we havebuilt. And when we pause to gather our thoughts and ask,
How in the world do we get up to speed?, we can again turnto the Internet. There we can download thick PDFs packed
with dozens of activities to teach Information Literacy. Thesematerials come with extensive checklists that list rows ofquestions for students to ask every time they surf a website.
If we had all of the time in the world I’d applaud. Let’s
use these PDFs, let’s do scores classroom activities. But oursituation is dire. We’re the guy on the emergency room floor,
hemorrhaging profusely, blood spilling on the linoleum, andthe nurse comes in and instead of attending to our woundasks us to examine a booklet with thirty-seven possibilities
for how to staunch the bleeding. By the time we figure it out,
we’re goners.
So here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re acarpenter and you have to go to a work site where you willfind plenty of wood. But you have no idea of what you will
be asked to build. You can only bring two tools. Not power
tools. Hand-operated.
Which tools will you choose? A saw. A hammer. A chisel,perhaps?
What’s in our digital toolbox? What are two—not fouror six or twenty—but two tools that every student and every
middle school teacher should have before we let them looseon the Internet?
I’ll make it a bit more concrete. We’re doing a webquest
with our students, researching Adolph Hitler. We put“Hitler” in the search bar and up comes the “The Adolf
Hitler Historical Museum.” Since we know that students
assess credibility by how far up an entry is on a Google
search, we see that this one is way up there. Moreover, the
URL is not a dot-com site—which our guidebooks say isbad—but a more respectable dot-org site. Our students press
on the link and find this explanation of Hitler Museum.
“The teaching of history should convey only facts and be
free from political motives, personal opinions, biases, propaH I S T O R Y N E W S 15

We teach students how to evaluate
sources by asking questions about
the author and the context, andby raising questions about othersupporting evidence.
ganda and other common tactics of distortion. Every claimthat is made about history should also be accompanied bydocumentation proving its basis.”11
Not a bad start, I’d say.
I recently showed this site to a group of college students in
a U.S. History survey class. It was in one of those old-styleamphitheater lecture halls, where the professor stands in theorchestra pit and looks up at rows of students. I saw a sea of
baseball hats turned three quarters to the side and laptops
open at nearly every seat.
I showed the students the site of the Hitler Museum.
“How many of you use the Internet for research?” I asked.
All hands went up. “Keep your hands up if you can comedown here and in one click, one, show me who owns thissite.” Like the wave at a sporting event, the hands collapsed(including those of the faculty in attendance). My crookedbaseball hat-wearing college students, all with laptops
open—probably grazing Facebook, Twitter and ESPN as I
was talking—were rendered click-less.
The answer is not a mystery. “Whois,” which can bereached by circumventing your browser and using yourcomputer’s terminal (or can be accessed via a variety of sites,
like whois.net), provide a quick answer. In this particularinstance, whois leads you to not some big organization, but
to a Gmail account and a post office box in a strip mall. In
other words, a fly-by-night operation.
That’s my hammer. What about a saw? The next question
I asked students was the same question my mother asked mewhen I was seventeen and going out on weekends. Mom,
“Where are you going?” Me, “Out.” Mom, “Out with whom?”Me, “People.” Mom (about to scream), “Which people?!”My mother wanted to know “which people” because
we are known by our associates. In a digital world, we’reknown by our digital pack: who links to our site. I asked thestudents to tell me how I would find out who links to the
Adolph Hitler Historical Museum? I waited. For Godot. (Asimple Google query, www.website.com, solves the problem.
In this case, the digital pack includes sites associated with
Aryan hate groups.)
Simple questions. Who owns a site? Who links to it?
Forget about power drills and pneumatic nail guns. Can westart with a hammer and a saw?
As some of you might know, my colleagues and I have afree digital curriculum that we distribute at sheg.stanford.
edu that focuses on ways of reading historical sources that
we call Reading Like a Historian. The curriculum, which to
our amazement has been downloaded three million times,

16 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6

poses legitimate historical questions and provides teachersand students with original sources that shed light on thesequestions from different perspectives. We teach students
how to evaluate sources by asking questions about theauthor and the context, and by raising questions about othersupporting evidence.
But it’s time for me to come clean about the real intentionof the Reading Like a Historian curriculum. Our materials
have nothing to do with preparing students to be historians.
If our curriculum has any pretense of career preparation, it isfor the vocation of citizen.
Back in the analog stone-age we could rely on factchecked newspapers to stay well-informed. Watching thenews at night, we could rely on the major outlets and theiranchors to save us from error. Peter Jennings. Tom Brokaw.
Brian Williams. (Okay, maybe not Brian Williams.)
What once fell on the shoulders of editors, fact-checkers,
and subject matter experts now falls on the shoulders of eachand every one of us. But there’s a problem with this new
reality. As the journalist John H. McManus reminds us, in a
democracy the ill-informed hold just as much power in theballot box as the well-informed. The future of the republichangs in the balance.12
Reliable information is to civic intelligence what clean
air and clean water are to public health. Long before theInternet, long before blogs, before Instagram, before Twitterand Yik Yak, James Madison understood what was at stake
when people cannot tell the difference between credible
information and shameless bluff. “A popular government,”
Madison wrote, “ without popular information, or the meansof acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy;or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance:
And a people who mean to be their own Governors, mustarm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”13 t
Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of
Education and a professor of history, by courtesy, at
Stanford University, where he directs the doctoral program in history education as part of the Stanford History
Education Group.
Talk given to the annual meeting of the AASLH, Louisville, KY, 17 September,
2015.
1

2
Kevin Sieff, “Virginia Fourth Grade Textbook Criticized over Claims on
Black Confederate Soldiers,” Washington Post 10 October 2010.
3

Ibid.

4

See www.freedmen.umd.edu/csenlist.htm.

5

See the fact sheet at www.scv.org/documents/edpapers/blackhistory.pdf.

6

Karen Nahon and Jeff Hemsley, Going Viral (Polity: Cambridge, UK), 2013.

7

See www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGWcD5OHm08.

Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, and Kristin
Yates Thomas. “Trust online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content,”
International Journal of Communication, 4: 468-494.
89Beau Yarbrough, “Rialto Unified Defends Writing Assignment on
Confirming or Denying Holocaust,” San Bernardino Sun, 4 May 2014.
10
See s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1274350/rialto-usd-document-prod4-of-4.pdf.
11
I am indebted to T. Mills Kelly for this example. See his important, Teaching
History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).
12
John H. McManus, Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in
Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web (Sunnyvale: CA: Unvarnished Press, 2012).
13
James Madison, writing to W. T. Berry, 4 August 1822, downloaded from The
Founders Constitution, press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s35.
html.