American History through American Lives

Introduction

At the time I am writing this unit, the world is fairly shut down because of the Covid-19 virus.  By now, the effects on our daily lives have accumulated—from how we work, travel, dress, shop, educate, socialize, and maintain our physical and mental health. Lives that were already challenging are more so. We realize that the events during which we live can have deeply seated effects on ourselves and our communities. We can learn life stories through history, and we can learn history through life stories, whether biography memoir, autobiography, or fiction.

Toni Morrison’s Sula is a novel that has enough rich literary craft to stand on its own in a classroom, but also to lend itself to exploration of an additional context—that of the influence of history on setting, theme, and especially character.  Beginning with the development of black towns and communities and moving from World War I through the Forties then to 1965, the civil rights movement, Sula looks at a selection of black-fought “battles—the veteran, the orphans. . . the laborers, confined to a village by the same forces that mandated the struggle.” In her foreward, Morrison acknowledges the connection. Referring to World War I, Morrison mentions the “traumatic displacement this most wasteful capitalist war had on black people.”  Still, the novel is a testament to the characters’ strategies for survival, for the creative ways they respond to “discriminatory, prosecutorial racial oppression.”¹ As with the effects of Covid-19 on us today, the lives and motivations of the characters cannot be separated from their historical context.

In our seminar American History through American Lives, we didn’t just study history, we focused on ways to contextualize individual life stories—real or fictional. We explored methods of teaching “intellectually honest” history in an age when we have immediate access to information through our phones. The facts at our fingertips may be accurate, or they may be intentionally or inadvertently false; regardless, rather than knowing a compendium of facts, our students are better prepared as historians and critical thinkers if we teach them to ask the right questions of a variety of sources. Sam Wineburg’s book Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) was our introductory guide.

Over a four-week period, my ELA students will read the novel and study it for its literary sense while also using a historical-critical lens. As we progress through the novel, we will study primary and secondary sources that give us varied and challenging perspectives on each historical event or problem relating to the lives of our black characters. Sources include letters, news stories, political cartoons, war posters, photographs, civic documents, and real and fictional personal narratives.