History teachers are always playing against the clock and the calendar, and we always lose. There’s simply too much content, too many standards and not enough class time. We can’t escape what Grant Wiggins called “The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance“. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying, it just means we have to keep working the problem, adding, subtracting, shifting, rearranging and reorganizing names, dates, events, stories and concepts, while interlacing reading, writing, & thinking exercises to develop important skills.
The history we teach the least is the history that people live the most, that is, the history of families, parents, partners and children, the most significant elements of the lived human experience. We rush so quickly through the lives of the people who populate our courses or generalize them beyond all human recognition that we can’t fault students for not seeing the people of the past as real people, just like themselves. It’s tough to convince students that the people of the past were, in the words of the Museum of the American Revolution “real people who did not know the outcomes or what the future would hold”.
Could Thomas Jefferson and John Adams ever imagine that they would die on the very same day, exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence’s date of July 4th? The coincidental deaths of Adams and Jefferson on July 4th, 1826 stretch the bounds of believability, as does the fact that at the age of 26, Teddy Roosevelt had to deal with both his mother and wife dying on the same day in the very same house. It seems incongruent to take a moment away from the political cartoon lesson featuring Teddy’s “Big Stick” diplomacy of imperialism to show his diary entry for Valentine’s Day 1884, but it does show his humanity and the way tragedy can invade anyone’s life at any time.
We should prioritize personal stories to bridge the gap between the past and students’ experiences, helping them also see history as deeply human. Fortunately—and tragically—there are more than enough examples.
Although John Winthrop gave us the phrase “City on a Hill”, he was father to 16 children with four different wives. Paul Revere, who rides his horse through a quick reference in a Revolution lesson, was father to 16 children himself, though nine of them died before he did, five of them before their second birthday. Queen Anne of Great Britain, who lived with the best medical care anyone could manage at the start of the 18th century, was pregnant 17 times and did not have any children that lived into adulthood, only five of her children were born alive.
Thomas Jefferson’s second family didn’t make it into public consciousness until the 1990s. Three decades later, Sally Hemmings finally made it into some high school classrooms. Teachers infusing her story and using it to explore the awful complexities of enslavement could include a brief glance at Martha Jefferson’s short, tragic 33-year life. Her mother died a week after she was born and her father remarried twice and each of these stepmothers died also. Martha married when she was 18, and had a son – who did not live long enough to reach his first birthday. Then her husband died, she was a widow at the age of 22. She then met and married Thomas Jefferson with whom she had six children, only two of which lived into adulthood. Every one of her pregnancies brought her closer to death – she died at 33 years old. Death was an ever-present fixture in the lives of the people who lived at that time. Martha Washington’s first husband died, she buried each of her four children, Abigail Adams buried three of her six.
How did people survive such personal tragedies? How did they make sense of them? Some say that Andrew Jackson blamed his wife Rachel’s death on her critics, which may have been easier to see in that she died between his election and the inaugural. Franklin Pierce and his wife Jane lost two of their sons before he was elected, though they lost their third son, eleven year-old Benjamin, in a train accident after being elected – in a train they were also on, while traveling to Washington for the inaugural. Both Mary Lincoln and Jacqueline Kennedy had their husbands murdered while sitting right next to them. And Mary buried three of her sons, Jacqueline lost two of her own in their infancy.
When Richard Nixon was 12, his brother Arthur died of tubercular encephalitis. When he was twenty years-old, his older brother, Harold died of tuberculosis. He was called home from college and arrived just as the hearse was pulling up to the house. Some people believe that these losses made him think he could ease his parent’s pain by being successful. Others say that his inability to express grief in a normal way also played into his personality.
When James Garfield was just two years old, his family’s cabin in Cuygahoga county Ohio caught fire, and his 33 year-old father died trying to save it, leaving Garfield’s mother as a young widow with four children. She sold off nearly everything they owned in order to make their farm work. Garfield himself did not have any shoes until he was four years old. But by the time he was 16, he was working on the Erie Canal, and nearly died himself, almost drowning after falling in the water. He later explained how he saved himself by holding on to a rope and climbing back into the boat, only to discover the rope wasn’t tied to anything else. For the rest of his life he believed that he was saved for something important – so that his mission was to get an education and be successful.
The ever present finality of life, the joys and tragedies woven into the lives of the past, remain one of the most universal, yet overlooked, aspects of the human experience. Including these stories, or at the very least being aware of them while we teach, allows us to connect the past to our students’ understanding of what it is to be human. History then ceases to be a parade of distant events and becomes a deeply human endeavor, a mirror reflecting lives as fragile and complex as our own.