In the summer evening luxury of reading on the back deck, I’m enjoying John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke. It’s the latest in a series of books I’m tearing through to help write high school US History lessons for an updated curriculum that helps teachers get students through the early 2010s. Yes, not only is it possible to expose students to the history of last fifty years, it’s vitally important. I’ll save that screed for another post.
My grandfather’s books are stuffed with clipped newspaper articles, tucked into the relevant sections like a hard-copy version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex. In the pre-laptop and internet age when I was living through the era I’m now studying, I read through books with color-coding highlighters, pencils and a ruler.
Reading today is different.
I’ve got one audio copy of the book, filling my two-hour a day commute to summer on-campus work days. I also have a kindle copy, which is currently sharing my laptop screen with Evernote. On the back deck with a cool beverage and a sinking sun, I use this set-up to write notes, clip phrases, check quotes, and link to notes in other books I’ve read.
So when Ganz refers to an 1982 New York Times article that reported that the 1980s were “a good time for the very rich”, I can search out and grab that article and put it alongside the book text in a note.
For those who think this is an eccentric investment of time, you’re right. On the other hand – this took less than 60 seconds to search, find, clip, copy and paste.
Shifting back and forth between the book and the primary sources upon which its drawn often yields interesting results. Not only does this capture dozens of primary sources for lessons, along with side stories and powerfully illustrative quotes, this practice also exposes a book’s mistakes.
Consider this paragraph from the book:
Almost a third of farmer respondents to a survey voiced some fairly stark anti-Semitic opinions, that blew my mind. So I tossed “1986 Harris poll Jewish bankers” into a search and got a NY Times article that came to very different conclusions about the very same Harris survey when it was released in 1986:
Efforts by extremist groups to exploit farm problems with anti-Semitic propaganda, a trend widely noticed in recent months, have been generally rejected in the rural Middle West, according to a poll by Louis Harris & Associates.
That’s an entirely different take. Ganz attributes rising antisemitism among midwestern farmers to a campaign of various organizations while the NY Times described that propaganda campaign as a failure.
As I was clipping that paragraph into my notes and pairing it with a .pdf of the NY Times article to add it to a collection of almost 150 book mistakes I’ve come across the same way, I hit that last sentence of the article.
When a key modifier was added, only 27 percent agreed with a statement that farmers had been exploited by ”international Jewish bankers.”
Now what do I do? The 27% statistic referenced by Ganz checks out – but the article’s direct contradiction of the book stands. Another minute’s worth of searching and scrolling convinced me that I’m not going to find the the original copy of the 1986 Harris Poll results, which is key to unlock this contradiction, so this is where the rabbit hole ends.
The question on the interpretation of that Harris Poll referenced in one paragraph of a 400+ page book is not as important as the implications this type of reading has on our understanding of the past and how we teach students to understand it themselves.
My grandfather could never fact-check in real-time as he was reading, and neither could I before the internet. Our understanding of the past was more certain, but it was also very limited. Although we shouldn’t have, we often accepted what we read at face value.
Today, with almost unlimited resources to explore and understand the past, we’re much less certain. Everything you read is suspect, guilty until proven innocent.
We used to build our understanding of the past with big, sturdy and solid books, piled one on top of the other. Now we have to have to do that with thousands and thousands of articles, cross-references and links, which like defective legos, never seem to fit perfectly into each other.
Don’t get me wrong – When The Clock Broke is an excellent book, highly recommended to help teachers understand this pivotal era in US History which, despite its direct influence on our world now, is virtually ignored by state history standards and remains absent from the taught narrative canon.
Of the many insights he provided, Ganz also introduced me to Richard Nixon’s “How to Lose the Cold War“, written after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992. Teachers should make sure to add it to their collection of primary sources after they recover from their shock at how clearly he saw the future.
