Juliet claimed that which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. Does that work for history as well? Maybe we should think about this a bit.
Most teachers use the same historical vocabulary that was used to teach them, its easy not to think about it too much. Before the information revolution, the labels used to identify people and events came from one unimpeachable resource, the textbook. Copying each of the bold and blue terms and the sentences surrounding them, we didn’t think about them much beyond using them in a sentence of our own for homework. Many students today are still copying and memorizing “points of mastery” lists of people, events and concepts without having a second thought. Students who are successful in the classroom version of history know how to process terms like “Manifest Destiny” and “Muckrakers” and easily ace the matching and multiple choice questions on unit tests.
But teachers could expose those same students to the disciplinary version of history, which goes beyond the memorization to explore how it was that answers to these questions were determined in the first place. Who wrote the answer to this question for us?
John Hancock, Joseph Warren and other patriots named the Boston Massacre themselves. Long before “framing” became a standard public relations tactic, the Committee of the Town of Boston published “A short narrative of the horrid massacre in Boston” just a few weeks after the event. They were so successful that 250 years later we are still using the same word they attached to it. The standard take on the Boston Massacre is a DBQ lesson that has students sorting through trial testimony to determine just what happened. Why not focus on how the event was used for propaganda instead?
I stumbled on this thought reading Amitav Ghosh’s Nutmeg’s Curse. He uses Alison Games’s book Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory to contrast the 1621 killing of hundreds of Bandanese natives by the Dutch with the 1623 killing of 21 Englishmen by the Dutch East Company, showing how the word “Massacre” only applied to White Christian martyrdom. The killing of natives didn’t merit such attention. Whether or not that’s accurate, whether or not any of the patriots in Boston were aware of it, the naming of the Amboyna Massacre shows how the word “massacre” was practically invented for propaganda.
Thinking about how the names for events were developed opens different perspectives and different ways of thinking about the past.
Like the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party was named by the patriots, but the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion and Pontiac’s Rebellion were labeled by the people who suppressed them. Labeling people, events and eras marks a difference between the history as it operates as a discipline and history as it appears in the classroom. The vocabulary we use to talk about the past has a historiography all its own. Exposing students to the power-plays that advanced one label over another is admittedly harder and more abstract than memorizing a list of terms, but it is far more rewarding.
Sometimes, its a lot easier than you think – just throw this up on the screen as a discussion prompt.
Millions of people had their humanity erased with just one word, which is amazing in and of itself – but that dehumanization continued for centuries afterward in the discipline of history as well as the classroom version. Like the common use of the term “plantation” rather than “enslaved labor camp”, casually using language without thinking distorts the past beyond recognition. There are many sources labeling what happened in Tulsa in 1921 a “Race Riot”, yet in remarks commemorating its anniversary, President Biden made it clear – “My fellow Americans, this was not a riot. This was a massacre”. More and more sources are moving in that direction with regard for similar events in East St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Rosewood Florida through the same period. Adam Hochschild turned the tables completely by calling the violence in Chicago in 1919 a “white riot”.
Once you notice how we use labels without thinking, you’ll never stop finding more.
Jefferson himself framed his first election to the presidency the “Revolution of 1800”, securing that name in the discipline and the classroom ever since. We have the Federalist Benjamin Russell to thank for the “Era of Good Feelings” and probably Old Hickory himself for the “Age of Jackson”.
Maybe we should think more about these terms rather than just repeating them. How many “Runaway Slave Ads” lessons have you seen? Just because enslavers called the people who manage to escape their bondage “runaways” doesn’t mean we have to use the same word. Aren’t they escapees? If you want to explore that idea with students, just ask them what they would call their friend who left their abusive household. Should their friend be considered a “runaway” or and “escapee”?
What’s the difference between “colonization” and “conquest”? How about “Manifest Destiny” and “Lebensraum”? Wasn’t the “Compromise of 1850” an armistice? Wasn’t World War I’s “Armistice” a “surrender”? Calling the 1918 Influenza Pandemic the Spanish Flu is as bad as calling Covid-19 the China Flu – at least the Spanish government was being honest with its people.
If there were a Hippocratic Oath in teaching history that admonishes us for doing harm, we’re breaking it by not highlighting the provisional nature of our historical vocabulary.
When we tell students that people were segregated because of their race aren’t we contributing to the idea that race is a thing beyond what we say it is? Ibram Kendi claims the word didn’t appear in a dictionary until 1606. The 1920 Census acknowledged that white and black census workers did not classify people as “negro” or “mulatto” consistently. Both The American Society of Human Genetics and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (and likely many more organizations) describe race as a social construct but how often does that fact surface in classroom discussions, teacher slideshows and commercial products. There’s a chasm of misunderstanding beneath the term “race” which we perpetuate when we use the word in the classroom without any explanation.
We also promote slopping thinking when we use causally use the classroom version of history’s language. Consider this mainstay; “The colonists opposed taxation”
Really? Who were “the colonists”? Farmers, blacksmiths, and silversmiths were all colonists, so were the idle rich. Thieves, alcoholics and deadbeats along with priests, missionaries and religious zealots were all colonists, as well as single women, grandmothers, children, indentured servants and the enslaved. Czech-speaking Moravians were colonists, as were French Huguenots, German-speaking Austrians, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, and Scots-Irish.
When we tell students about colonists are we referring to someone whose great-grandfather was a separatist who left Holland to create a religious utopia in Massachusetts or someone whose grandfather was forced to migrate to Virginia and lived in a colony that was run by a joint-stock corporation? Are you talking about someone whose grandfather grew up in the Carolinas, which was more like Barbados than Virginia? The same thing happens when we talk about countries as people, as in “Germany was angry after World War I” Germany is not a person, it is millions of people.
We should show students how vocabulary was intentionally developed and manipulated. Before the United States entered World War I, the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Gray used the phrase “German militarism” continually to ensure that Germany would be seen as the aggressor. FDR transformed the attack on Pearl Harbor from a date in World History to a “Day of Infamy”, changing the way we’ve talked about the attack ever since.
People in the past specifically chose words to change how others in their time saw understood and the world. Some of them were so good at it those words are still used today. In the late 1960s, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird promoted the term ‘Vietnamizing’ to label Nixon’s policy in Vietnam and now Vietnamization appears on notes, study guides, and unit tests.
Some of these efforts were not as successful, but they still deserve attention. George Wallace used the word “freedom” six times in just four paragraphs to justify segregation in his 1963 “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” speech. Nixon campaign memos show how Pat Buchanan and others tried to tag George McGovern with “acid, abortion and amnesty”. Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” gave Republicans a shorthand list of words to be used for “us” and “them”. Our students would benefit from lessons that explore the use of language over time because they are growing up in a world where vague terms like “woke” and “critical race theory” are used to turn people against each other.
Before Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, Edward Everett emphatically answered Juliet’s question. “I call the war which the Confederates are waging against the Union a “rebellion” because it is one, and in grave matters it is best to call things by their right names”.