Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

In Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg, i was really captured by the section about how history should be taught in schools. Textbooks do not inspire the passion needed to be inspired by the past. They are impersonal and only relay the facts. History is an important part of a student's education. A person can learn a lot about themselves and their own lives by learning about the lives of people who have come before them.Students need to be immersed in primary sources and other documents that present the historical facts in a more interesting way. In my own experience in history classes, i have found that teachers often use a variety of different sources to teach about a period in time. i personally have been exposed to many different primary sources, textbooks, articles, and books by historians. So when reading this, I found it interesting that Wineburg thinks that schools teach history mostly from textbooks where students only learn the facts, and therefore are unable to really experience history. These sources give people multiple perspectives of a time period, since no ones experiences are the same.


"... the goal of historical understanding should be to 'see through the eyes of the people who were there'" I found this quote very interesting, because this represents the essence of what the study of history is. People studying history cannot just study the facts of one event. They need to immerse themselves in the time period. In order to truly attempt to understand what a historical person was thinking, historians need to know the social and political aspects of the time period. 


I also found it very interesting when Wineburg talked about how people already have preconceived beliefs about historical events. When people read primary sources and textbooks, they bring these preconceived ideas into the text they are reading. This reminded me of my history class in my junior year of high school. We were discussing Christopher Columbus, and my teacher asked people what they had already learned about him. Everyone in the class only had positive things to say about Columbus and his adventure in the new world. This was because elementary and middle school teachers had neglected to teach their students about the horrible things Columbus did when he discovered America.