The sight of National Park Service employees wrenching historical panels off the walls of the President’s House site in Philadelphia was a disturbing reminder of the aggressive campaign to erase public memory and destroy knowledge.
It’s also great material for a middle or high school social studies lesson.
Don’t think so? Stick with me.
Students have seen historical markers and signs before, some have been to national historic sites. Have they ever thought about who decides where those signs should be and what they should say?
The development of the exhibit at Independence National Historical Park (“President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation”) presents a case study in how historians, the National Park Service and the public can all play a role in designing and writing exhibits at historic sites. The Administration’s attempt to dismantle that exhibit through Executive Orders exposes students to the real-world struggle for public memory and the question of whose voices are included in the national story told at the birthplace of our nation.
This lesson starts with purely open-ended questions.
Who decides where we put historical markers and what’s written on them?
How should they make those decisions?
Then it turns to the story of how the site of the first White House was discovered and the “President’s House” exhibit was debated, designed and developed. The exhibit wasn’t the work of a single entity but rather the result of contention and collaboration between independent historians (like Edward Lawler Jr.), academic historians (the Ad Hoc Historians), archaeologists, the National Park Service, the City of Philadelphia, and aggressive public activism led by groups like the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition.
That story ends with the stark contrast of a silent video showing that exhibit being dismantled, then replaced with homemade signs hung up in its place by the general public the next day.
This sets students up for an evidence analysis exercise where they dive into the arguments offered by some who maintain that historical sites should be “uplifting places” that focus on “greatness and achievements and progress of American people” and others that contend that putting the story of freedom and slavery alongside each other doesn’t diminish the “story of America”, it adds to it.
Just as this debate grapples with the contradiction of freedom and slavery on the very ground where freedom was established for some and denied to others, this lesson confronts students with fundamental contradictions inherent in human character. No other person did more than George Washington to make the United States possible, yet he also enslaved people. This lesson should make students less susceptible to simplistic narratives that focus on either one of those realities at the exclusion of the other.
The real payoff in this lesson comes with the students’ realization that everything we know about the past comes to us through someone else. History is never done, it’s an on-going conversation with the past and with each other to better understand the evidence and what it means. Students should know that some people are working especially hard to control that conversation and silence other voices. They also deserve to be shown how they can be a part of that conversation themselves.
All of the materials needed to teach this lesson are below – give it a shot and let me know how it goes.