Strategies/ Solutions
What follows are the kinds of considerations students must make to complete this project successfully. Lots of these things are all wrapped up together, but there are distinctions, and I will do my best to make those clear. These subsets in the overall strategy are put together as a way to help my students get prepared to do the work of building an MBE.
Subject
It will first be necessary to choose a life. There are some qualifications that I will insist be a factor in that choice. There must be a direct connection between the person and the curricular requirements for the AP US History exam. This does not mean that the person has to be terribly famous. For example, Massasoit, Sachem chief of the Wampanoag tribe in the early 1600s, is never going to appear in any multiple-choice question on the exam and to many he might seem a rather obscure character. However, his diplomatic dealings with the pilgrims in Plymouth colony give us vital insight into early colonial-native relationships. He was clever in the sense that he realized there were elements of European culture that could use to help to aggrandize his power. He used the colonists to build trading partnerships that gave him enormous material wealth in the form of wampum and gold. Simultaneously, he hired agents within his tribe to learn the English language. This assisted him once he traveled to Europe. He made great sums of money by hiring out his underlings for display in shops and restaurants. He was also able to acquire guns that could be used to fight off his native rivals, making him one of the most powerful sachems in New England. But he never wanted to give up landholdings that he believed were sacred to his people. After he died, his son, Metacomet, tried to halt the progress of colonial movement west, an act of preservation as he saw it. The resulting King Phillip's War was the most deadly of Native American wars in that area of colonial America, and was the final attempt by natives to curb European dominance there. 2 So if a student were to write an MBE concentrating on Massasoit, it would be necessary to use that essay as a way to help students understand the consequences of colonization to Native Americans, a substantial obligation for students looking to meet the AP standards.
Time/ Purpose
The second and third parts of this will be choosing chronology, the space in time that students will focus on for their research, and then deciding upon a purpose for writing. Although I think the process for determining both chronology and purpose can happen in a couple of different ways, I want to give two examples as a way to demonstrate the conjunction between them.
First, let's make it clear that a full-fledged, whole life biography is not appropriate for this exercise even on the modest scale of a student essay. So if the subject chosen for biography is Andrew Jackson, there are several points of focus within his life that a student might draw out for their MBE. This is to say that there are some very pivotal moments that a student might choose to write about.
He was of course the President of the United States and one of particular note. Any President that has an era of time associated with him, the period of Jacksonian Democracy, is going to be full of possibilities in this project. But as a way of clarifying let me give you an example of the kind of choice students might make. Jackson was also involved in the American Revolution. Though he was not a soldier and not regularly associated with this event, he was part of a subversive resistance movement in South Carolina that gathered and stockpiled weapons in the case of a British invasion in the South. He was scarred by the sword a British officer in an incident where he was captured but refused to divulge any information. The British did eventually invade out of an erroneous belief that loyalists in the region would join them in quelling the independence movement. That never came to pass as Southerners united in all sorts and forms to oust the British presence. 3 So an MBE might focus on Jackson's youthful escapades as a way of telling the story of the American Revolution in the South. It is also the case that this same MBE might dwell a bit on colonial life in the south or immigration patterns to the south as they pertain to Jackson, his family, and others of the region. All of these elements are significant to our class and worthy of consideration. In other words, the purpose of the MBE is to use Jackson's life as a young man to provide the lens by which students can peer into late eighteenth century America. To be clear, it would not be feasible for one of my students to tell the life of Andrew Jackson, because it would become so cursory in its approach as to give readers very little in the way of useful information (especially with relation to the AP test). But with a keen eye to the standards of the curriculum and a realization that lives put into proper context teach us both about those lives and the lives of others, we can accomplish our stated objectives. However, I think there is another way to arrive at the same place with regard to time and purpose.
Imagine that students aren't necessarily interested in a person but in a time period. Maybe they want to dig deeper into the time of the New Deal and the Great Depression. So they have decided that the purpose of their MBE is to take a unique look at a period that then requires the student to decide subsequently on a person whose life will help fulfill that purpose. Let's explore that example.
Lyndon Johnson became a famous character in this country once he had ascended to the Senate and was later elected Vice President under John Kennedy. His Presidency has been the greatest focus for historical scrutiny since it was the time of so many important American transformations. It was the time of the counterculture that was related to, among other things, the very unpopular Vietnam War. It was the culminating moment of the civil rights movement with the signing of the civil rights and voting rights acts. Lyndon Johnson as president committed our country to an unprecedented growth in the federal bureaucracy with his war on poverty. And it was a time of serious social upheaval that included protests, race riots, and assassinations of some of our nations most important figures. But in his youth Lyndon Johnson also played a vital role in carrying out programs associated with the New Deal. He was not yet a politician, but after serving as secretary to a Texas member of the House was asked to run the National Youth Administration (NYA). This program provided contracts to local businessmen to do work for the federal government that included an incentive to hire those out of work. Johnson was a regular champion of New Deal programs and campaigned himself for the House using buttons with the words "Me and Roosevelt for Lyndon Johnson." 4 Thus a student might find an enriching story of the New Deal and the Depression by focusing on Lyndon Johnson's life in the 1930s.
I suppose that the examples I have given might seem rather obscure in the sense that they take the standard learning of history somewhat off the beaten path. We don't normally associate Jackson with the Revolutionary War or Johnson with the New Deal. The point of the MBE is not necessarily to retell the stories we have already heard, nor is it to find the kinds of things I have described here. Rather the MBE is to tell some story of a life that gives us insight in to the bio-subjects themselves and simultaneously brings greater depth to our study of the time through which that life was lived. The aim is to develop the through-line; which is to say, the focal point for research can come from lots of angles. What I have offered here are two plausible angles students might use to arrive at a subject.
Argument/ Knowledge
Once a time and purpose have been negotiated, it will then be the student's job to decide upon a thesis or argument for the piece they will author. Additionally, I will ask that they carefully delineate how the MBE will add to what we have already learned in the class over the course of the year; I need to know how their biographies will add to our existing knowledge. One caveat here: I don't mean to suggest that time and purpose are automatically to precede the establishment of an argument and/or the sought after knowledge to that argument. It is possible that any of these may occur to students before the other since they are intrinsically related to one another and so the MBE may have many points of origin.
Hermione Lee writes that for authors of biography and history "the form of the narrative may have to be a steady and unsurprising, solid scaffolding of the blocks of facts". 5 I would be remiss not to mention that Lee's considerations of biography in this text are far more complex and wide-ranging than what I mention here; nevertheless, the quotation gives us a very familiar point from which the perception of history writing/ teaching commonly begins. Indeed, I wouldn't expect any push back from public school teachers if I claimed that the telling of history in our textbooks, and sadly sometimes in our classes, resembles something akin to a mere timeline of banal events rather than a thoughtful set of provocations that deal with causality and perspective and that challenge students to think more deeply about the meaning in history. Lee has it right that a scaffolding of historical facts is undeniably at the core of the biography. But that is merely a tool by which we begin to engage history and not the sum of the story. Virginia Woolf writes that the writing of biography implies "two incompatible things…(the) sterile and fertile." 6 In this case, the timeline is the sterile and speculation the fertile. I want my students to include both. Here is an example.
Let's return for a moment to Andrew Jackson. But in this case let's use the period of his life when he served as a General in the American military. Specifically, let's say that a student chooses to write about Jackson beginning from the War of 1812 to his first bid for the Presidency in 1824. It is a perfectly suitable subject for our purposes as outlined earlier and gets the student past phase one of the MBE. However, I am going to insist that students at this juncture choose an argumentative line through which the essay will develop. Students shouldn't merely say that something happened but are required to make a historical judgment about those events, as any historian would. For example, students would write more about details of the Battle of New Orleans and Jackson's role in defeating the British than they would about the War of 1812 as a historical phenomenon. The War would be the context of the bio, but discussion of Jackson, as a prime mover in the War would consume the essay. I will ask that students go beyond what we may have covered in our class discussions during the year and expand, by way of the thesis, on what is said on the subject in the text. For instance, after having done research, a student might conclude that Jackson was something of a rampaging murderer. He did fire relentlessly on British forces in New Orleans even as victory seemed well in hand. He also nearly exterminated the Creek and Seminole tribes in Florida, burning their villages to the ground, and often taking no prisoners.
According to the rules I have described, a student would have at this point established time, purpose, and argument for the MBE. The final stage is to add new knowledge. This is not to say that the student will not have learned anything in the process thus far; however my goal for this project is that he or she builds on previous understandings held by the group at large. For example, Jackson's exploits described here fall into a broader category of American foreign policy better known by the 1820s as "Manifest Destiny." This is a major concept in College Board standards though specific information about Jackson either as it relates to the War of 1812 or the Florida Indian battles is not required in the AP US History curriculum. But because it falls into the scheme of our understanding of history and builds on a major concept, it has value for the readers (and ostensibly to other students of US History). This student has now completed four of the major stages of MBE writing. But there is one more major piece to this puzzle.
Sources
No student will be successful in his or her writing without having found and used several credible resources. This too can be problematic but not overwhelming. The problems are threefold. First, one of the central roadblocks articulated earlier in this unit: history books and other biographies are often massive works and can be hard to navigate for young people. Second, the ability to surf the Internet has in some cases diminished the thoroughness with which students approach their work. I will call it the "cut and paste" generation. Third, students may not know exactly how to tell if a source is worth their attention. Here are my suggestions for each problem.
Students are going to have created a narrow framework within which they will work. This can be tricky because they will need only a few chapters of any work to help them along. So I will need to insist and assist on being focused. They will need to avoid the vastness of the works I described earlier by being calculating in what parts they choose to read (selecting only the parts that specifically relate to their topic). I think I can help them by sharing some of the same examples I shared earlier in this unit (Massasoit, Jackson, LBJ). Additionally, my classes will be working in teams, and the labor will be divided (an explanation about this will be in the classroom activities section to follow). I suppose one way to deal with "cut and paste" is to have a meaningful conversation about plagiarism. I know warning does not always prevent this kind of action but maybe a demonstration of what warrants copyright infringement will do the trick. Last, a simple rule for using the Internet is to look only to sources that are from URL's that end in org or edu. I am not positive that this will totally solve the problem but in my experience these kinds of sources give researchers the best kind of information to use. Our textbook can also be a nice resource. There are lots of great books listed as sources in the back of the text and could easily serve as the starting point for students.
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