In the fall of 1965, I became a teaching assistant in the Western civilization course at the University of California, Riverside. I held that position for three years.
As it turned out, I never went into academia as a history professor.
Now, at the end of my career, I want to produce a four-year course on Western civilization for high school students.
I got sidetracked for 56 years: my work on Christian economics. I could not afford the time to do both projects. I chose the one in which I thought I had a competitive advantage. I do not regret that decision, but now I am attempting to make up for lost time.
Communications technologies today are spectacular for teaching history. Documents are available for free on the web. So are maps. There are videos that are extremely useful, such as how inventions work and how wars were fought. But videos are not so good on dealing with ideas.
I produced over 1,200 lessons for the Ron Paul Curriculum. Here is the model. About 25 minutes will be a screencast lecture. Reading assignments that will take 25 minutes to read will accompany each screencast.
Teaching history is like sculpting. Start with a block of marble. Then chip away whatever isn't important for the final product.
Two things are necessary for the effective teaching history. One is a narrative: a story. Movements compete against each other in terms of their stories. The second factor is a theory of historical causation. Without this, history becomes what Lillian Bell said life is a century ago: one damned thing after another.
The greatest narrative historical writers were Will and Ariel Durant. But they had no self-conscious integrating framework to guide their interpretations. The book they wrote as the capstone to their monumental history of civilization, The Lessons of History (1968), is eminently forgettable.
TURNING POINTS
Historical causation is rather like life. It is mostly day-to-day activities, but then one day, a single activity changes everything that follows. Things are uneventful. Then something becomes a turning point.
Lots of things are interesting. Lots of things are curious. But only a few things are indispensable to a narrative. The length of the narrative determines what is indispensable.
I use a metaphor to describe my theory of historical turning points: a pistol. There is the pistol itself. There is a round in a chamber. The hammer is cocked. Somebody pulls the trigger. The bullet must hit a narrowly defined target.
The pistol is the broad historical context of an event: the big picture. The round has the capacity of disrupting this context. The hammer is the specific context of the event. The trigger is what an individual pulls, either deliberately or accidentally. It could also be an unplanned action, such as a flood or an explosion, but these are exceedingly rare as turning points. The Black Death was one. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was another. The bullet must hit a target. If any of these factors is missing, the historical event is irrelevant to the vast number of potential historical narratives.
THE FIVE W'S
A compelling narrative of the past should discuss these aspects of turning points in history: what, where, when, who, and why.
Then there is H: how?
The most difficult of these to describe is why. It does no good to discuss why until you cover the other five. "Why" is the issue of intention. A specific person or group of people have intentions. They carry out actions in terms of these intentions. Except in rare cases when a group of conspirators has a member or perhaps two members who have left written accounts of their conspiracy, the historian deduces the "why" from the other events. The "why" is the most problematical of all, but it is at the heart of historical causation.
FOLLOWING THREE TRAILS
To understand how societies change from the old to the new, the historian must follow three main paths.
Follow the confession.
Follow the money.
Follow the media.
Every movement has a worldview. This is its confession of faith. Historians should take seriously a movement's confession of faith. This is what members of a movement are willing to sacrifice their lives and their fortunes to attain. For a movement to transform a society or a civilization, its worldview must be compelling.
Then there is money. There are no free lunches. We do not get something for nothing. There are costs to be borne, prices to be paid. Who puts up the money? Where did these people get their money? To whom is the money paid? What do the recipients of the money do with the money?
Finally, we must discuss media. How do a movement's leaders get their message out to targeted audiences? This is the issue of recruiting. In Christian terms, this is evangelism. What is evangelism? Conveying the good news to specific individuals. Ultimately, the message is conveyed by words. The King James Bible puts it this way: "Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God" (Romans 10:17).
This process of evangelism is self-conscious. It is not random. Specific people have plans to disseminate the message. Every movement begins with a handful of people. Most movements fail to gain a sufficient number of disciples to become major factors in the development of civilization. But a few of them do.
MY PROPOSED OUTLINE
There will be four courses. Each will have 144 lessons: 4 per week. Day five is for writing a paper.
Israel, Greece, and the Roman Republic (776 B.C. to 28 B.C.)
Pax Romana to Christendom (27 B.C. to 1347)
Renaissance to the Modern World (1348-1753)
The Modern World (1754 to today)
Why these dates?
776 B.C.: first Olympiad
27 B.C.: Augustus becomes Caesar
1348: The Black Death
1754: The Battle of Jumonville Glen
WHAT I MUST COVER
I am asking you to think about your understanding of the history of the West. Everybody has some vague understanding of historical causation, but the number of people who have studied in detail even a tiny segment of historical events is always limited.
There are two major topics that Americans are willing to study in detail. One is the Civil War. The other is the Kennedy assassination. The number of books and articles on each of these topics is immense.
Any historian who writes about a battle in the Civil War had better do his homework. There will always be somebody who reads his book who finds an error in the account of some battle. Yet there is remarkable disagreement about the causes of the war. The causes of the war are the heart of the matter.
There is no agreement about who shot Kennedy. There is no agreement about why because there is no agreement about what and when. We are talking about a few seconds, but there are disagreements about what transpired during these few seconds. My metaphor of the pistol becomes applicable to the event: rifle(s), round(s), hammer(s), trigger(s), and target.
I would appreciate it if you would sit down with a sheet of paper and write down what you think are the indispensable topics for my courses on Western civilization. I am thinking of topics such as these:
Movements
Leaders
Ideas
Documents
Events
Battles
Discoveries
Inventions Art
Literature will be covered in a chronologically parallel series of 4 courses.
Some inventions have indispensable roles in our lives, yet they can be skipped over in a course on Western civilization. I have in mind something like toilet paper. If we did not have it, our lives would have to change. On the other hand, it would be impossible to discuss the 20th century accurately without discussing radio and television. It would be impossible to discuss accurately the first two decades of the 21st century without a discussion of the Internet.
I have created a forum for you to express your opinions.
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