Introduction
Students tend to come to us believing that the rule of law is quite rigid. They have accepted a common notion that history is marked in time and can simply be retold and absorbed as fact. Historians routinely like to challenge this conventional wisdom. Appropriately, the College Board tests students on the Advanced Placement exam as to their ability to be young practitioners of the discipline of history. It is at this point that I think postmodernism has a role to play. Postmodernists view language as a rhetorical tool that can be manipulated to challenge any conventional form of truth, as it is always open to interpretation. The very foundation of this nation is built, in some respect, on this principle. James Madison himself argued in the Federalist papers "All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications" (Federalist 37).
In other words, the Constitution would be open to interpretation. This will be the backbone of this unit. What arguments were made to bend the Constitution to Lincolns' will? How could the Supreme Court support a law that limited the freedom of speech?
These are the types of questions my students and I can explore and use to understand that civil liberties are given meaning by the context in which they exist. No laws or sets of rules have meaning in and of themselves. Rather, all are interpreted in ways that give them meaning. In the end students might see that it is only the argument over interpretations that results in what we like to call historical truth, not history itself.
Comments: