After talking with teachers about how students should know more about the time period they are studying, I played around with an idea to help students think differently about the past. It’s not necessarily original or groundbreaking in any way, but it does address the fundamentals of historical thinking we often overlook.
Any inquiry into the past begins with establishing the coordinates of the people, place and time of what we’re trying to understand. Like the longitude and latitude of map coordinates, or the astronomical coordinates of ascension and declination, the historical coordinates of people, time and place help us identify exactly what we are looking at.
Then there is context. This is the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological landscape that helps us understand the people living in that place at that time.
So the idea is to teach students about how historians use “coordinates” and “context” like tools to understand the past early in the year, then to revisit coordinates and context in lessons in every unit that follows.
Below is my attempt to write my way through the idea (without AI, thank you). Perhaps this can be read by students before a brief whole-class discussion or used as notes for teachers to explain coordinates and context to students directly.
I want to help you think about history in a way that you may not have thought about history before, especially if you learned about history in school.
A “What?” and “Why?” of history
History doesn’t mean “the past”, history is the study of the past.
One of the reasons we study the lives of people in the past is to learn about the human experience. As humans, we are living, breathing, thinking animals who are adept at manipulating our environment (especially when a lot of us do it together) and we’re conscious of our own mortality.
As far as we know, that’s an experience that’s unique in the universe, so naturally, we want to know more about it.
We explore the lives of people of the past through the discipline of history to make better sense of our own lives.
We experience emotions just like the people of the past did.
We experience joy and happiness, we get angry and sad.
We sometimes feel fearful and rejected, but at other times we exercise courage and feel proud, just like the people of the past.
If we can understand more about how they lived through all of this, we can live through all of it as well.
We have families, friends and loved ones, just like the people of the past did.
We have parents and people who care for us when we are young, and for better or worse, teach and train us as children to survive as adults – just like the people of the past did.
We fall in and out of love, we fight and we make up, we celebrate and mourn, we laugh and we cry – just like the people of the past did.
History can help us understand all of the facets of the human experience by exploring how people in the past experienced all of the facets of the human experience.
That’s one way to think about why we do history.
The “How?” of history
Now I want to tell you about two things that will help you “do history” – either just for yourself or when you do history for school.
But just like you need a microscope to look at tiny single-celled animals in a drop of pond water, or a telescope to look at the planets of our solar system, you need tools to make sense of what you see in the past.
First, you always need to be aware of the coordinates of the past that you’re looking at – that’s the people, place and time.
Secondly, you need to know the context of the those coordinates, the context of the people in that place at that time.
Whenever you look into the lives of the people of the past, you need to be aware of the coordinates and context of who they are, and where and when they lived.
The Coordinates of the Past
Whenever we look back at a time period we look at the people, the place and the time they lived. These are the “coordinates” of the past.
For example, you may hear a teacher talk about “life in America in the early 1800s” or see the phrase in a reading. But there was no one “life” of “America in the early 1800s”
People who know just a little about history know that the lives of people who were enslaved were much different than lives of the people who were not enslaved.
People who know a little more about history know that the lives of the enslaved people of Virginia were different than lives of the enslaved people of Louisiana.
People who know even more about history know that the lives of enslaved women in Virginia in the 1830s, when Virginia was exporting enslaved people more than tobacco, were much different than the lives of enslaved men in Louisiana in the 1830s, where slaves were imported and the cotton crop doubled.
Have you noticed that in reading just a few sentences, your understanding of “life in America in the early 1800s” changed when you took note of the differences in people, places and time?
That’s how the coordinates of the past can help you do history.
We first took the total population of “America” and split it into two groups of people, the people who were enslaved and the people who were not. Then we took the total population of the enslaved and split it into another two groups, those that were in Virginia and those who were in Louisiana, and further divided them into men and women. We can keep dividing like this, looking at the enslaved who were field hands doing grueling work in forced labor camps with several hundred other enslaved people, and the enslaved who were skilled as cooks or blacksmiths working right alongside the people who enslaved them.
But, even when we’re looking through the coordinates of different people, places and times of the “America in early 1800s”- we’ve only talked about the enslaved.
We haven’t talked about young women working 12 to 14 hours a day in the deafening noise and cotton dust of textile mills in Massachusetts.
We haven’t talked about Cherokee landowners living in a log cabins in northwest Georgia, worried that the state will seize their land.
We haven’t talked about Irish immigrants working 12 hours a day shoveling rocks out of the waist-deep mud of the Erie Canal.
Even though their lives were quite different, all of these people were part of “Life in America in the early 1800s”.
In reading and thinking about this you are becoming educated in how history works, and how your understanding of the coordinates of people, place and time changes your understanding of the past.
You’ll never fall for statements like “life in America in the early 1800s” again.
The historical coordinates of people, place and time are like dials or gauges on a dashboard, they are the knobs you turn to different settings to tune into the context of a period of time and understand the past.
The Context of the past
Context is another tool we use it to understand the lives of people of the past. One way to understand context is to look at the context of your own life – right now.
Because you live in the first third of the 21st century, your life is shaped by media and information technology. That’s just where your life landed in the historical coordinates of place and time.
You read, write and send dozens of messages to dozens of people every day. Some of these people you will see during the day and others you haven’t seen in weeks. You can talk to your family, friends and people you know by phone, at any time, and at virtually any place on the planet.
That is part of the historical context of your life. You live in a time of ubiquitous, effortless communication.
Other people lived in the context of a time when communication was expensive, difficult, and uncertain. Instead of reading a text message sent seconds ago, they might be reading a handwritten letter sent a month ago or wondering whether the handwritten letter they sent months ago was ever delivered.
You’ve seen thousands of videos and pictures, some of close friends, but most of complete strangers. That is as natural to the context of the time and place of your life as the context of the lives some of the people of the past who never saw a photograph, of anyone, ever.
You can listen to almost any type of music, at any time, in any place. For many people in the past, the only music they ever heard in their entire lives was performed live, right in front of them.
With these examples of the context of media and information technology, you are getting a sense of what context is – but historical context can include much more than that. Context is almost everything encountered in the human experience.
The coordinates of history are people, place and time, the context of any period of history includes all of the lived experience of all of these people in the places and at the time they lived.
- What were their families like? What did they want their families to be like?
- What did they think of marriage? How did they meet the people they married?
- What were the various public and private understandings of gender in the time and place were they lived? What roles did gender play in their lives?
- What did they think of old people? What did they consider “old”?
- What did they consider “normal”? What was deviant?
- How did they experience religion? How did they make sense of their lives?
Yet, our lives are much more than our emotions, our family, friends and faith, there is much more to the context of our lives.
Our lives include what we had for dinner last night, or if we had breakfast this morning.
When trying to understand the context of the lives of people in the past we have to look into what they ate. What food was available to them and when and how did they get it? What did they like to eat because they liked it and what did they eat because they had no other choice? How much of their lives were occupied by trying to get their next meal?
The context of our lives also includes clothes.
What clothes did they wear? What did they want to wear and what did they have to wear? How did they get their clothes? How did what they wore show off who they were?
The context of of lives include where we live.
Where did they live? Did they have a house that was their own? Did they live in a crowded city? Did they have heat? What did they have to do to get that heat? Did they have air conditioning? Did the roof leak? Was there a draft? What did it smell like? Where did they sleep?
Of course there’s much. much more to the historical context of the lives of the people at a certain place at a certain time in the past, but you should get the idea by now. Trying to understand the context of a time and place in the past means trying to understand how different people, in different places and at a different times, experienced all of this.
History in school has a lot of reading, writing, assignments, projects and tests, it’s easy to forget that it should be about learning. Before you start looking for causes, or comparing and contrasting and writing thesis statements, remember that the coordinates of people, place and time help us understand the context of the lives of people in the past and in the process, and hopefully, we can learn a little more about ourselves.