Rationale
The goal of my unit, Poetry in Notion: The Hartford Wits and the Emergence of an American Identity, is to teach my students to use historical inquiry skills in conjunction with a variety of poetic primary sources to consider how the events set in motion during the colonial period resulted in the emergence of an American identity. Given that there is less time and emphasis devoted to poetry in these frenetic times of pacing calendars and Common Core, this unit will help broaden the scope of my curriculum by introducing poetry into the range of evidentiary analysis that my students encounter in my U.S. History class.
An all-too-convenient misconception has been that early American authors and poets had little cultural impact on the times in which they lived. To counter this, my students will come to understand that, although their cultural contributions have been dismissed by modern literary critics, the Hartford Wits served as invaluable witnesses of the times in which they lived. Most of their work was keenly focused on the perceived injustices that gave rise to their discontent. In this light, it is understandable and expected that these men would be focused on things patriotic, at the expense of making well-crafted poems for the salon. The two genres upon which this unit will focus most closely will be on satire at one end of the spectrum, a useful tool of protest, and panegyric, as either celebratory or apologetic, at the other. This unit will accomplish this by analyzing a few works of the Hartford Wits to discern how their collective body of work would become the basis for the narrative of the rise to rebellion and the ensuing eras of Constitutional Crisis and Federalism.
This curriculum unit will enable me to teach seventeenth-century American history to my eighth-graders at a much deeper and more objective level than hitherto. By navigating the complexities and ambiguities of verse through close readings of particular works from the Hartford Wits, students will gain an understanding of these poets’ underlying sentiments, and then connect the passages they read to what we are studying about the historical impact of these times. The works that we will sample during this unit will be: David Humphreys’ Address to the Armies of the United States of America (Build Up to a Revolution unit of study); John Trumbull’s M’Fingal, satirizing the loyalists during the revolution (Build Up to a Revolution unit of study); Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus, a hymn of praise to the promise of the American experiment (Build Up to a Revolution unit of study); and The Anarchiad, a collective work by the Hartford Wits criticizing the obstructionist agenda of those opposing the ratification of the U.S. Constitution (Historical Foundations of the U.S. Constitution unit of study). It is expected, even hoped for, that students will have to grapple with these issues, for the highest level of subject mastery comes as a result of productive struggle, and this is an aspect of literature with which the students will most assuredly struggle.
Since the early adoption of Common Core pedagogy in San Jose Unified School District five to six years ago, my students have grown to appreciate the process of historical inquiry. Under this methodology, each unit of study introduces an open-ended “Unit Focus Question” (UFQ) in response to which the students gather and analyze evidence from an array of primary and secondary sources, and then take a position in agreement or disagreement with the UFQ. This process has proven quite valuable because it requires the students to go beyond mere rote memorization of dates and facts, and actually interrogate the text in pursuit of the relevant pieces of evidence that help them formulate and defend their position in an historical interpretation, in this case their response to the unit focus question. Moreover, because each UFQ dovetails with the overarching course level question, by the end of the year, students will compile their various historical interpretations into a major essay that forms the basis of a summative assessment seeking to answer the question, An American Identity: How has the definition of being an American changed over time?
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