PDK International | Phi Delta Kappan: Wineburg 0805 Online Exclusive

Author Sam Wineburg talks about his personal journey as a researcher and shares the back story of the study he and Chauncey Monte-Sano wrote about in the May 2008 issue of the Kappan ("Who Is a Famous American? Charting Historical Memory Across the Generations").

Also, an expanded list of high-schoolers' choices: The Top 100 Famous Americans

Famous Americans: How the Study Came to Be

By Sam Wineburg

The study reported in the May 2008 Kappan represents a sharp turn from the kind of research I ordinarily do. Over the past 20 years, I have used a micro lens to understand how people think about history, conducting intensive interviews and long-term observations. How, then, did I come to find myself buried beneath 4,000 survey responses and stacks of computer printouts?

The story has an unlikely beginning. In 1997 the Spencer Foundation awarded me a grant to explore how a small group of young people and their parents in the Pacific Northwest understand American history. Over three years, my research team and I intensively studied 15 families. This research formed part of my 2001 book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. To my great surprise, a book about learning and teaching history went on to be featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post; has been translated into Greek, Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian; and is used in courses on dozens of college campuses.

In many ways Historical Thinking parallels my own journey as a researcher. I started my career as an educational psychologist conducting small-scale studies that tracked how historical interpretations are formed in the mind. As my own children grew, I became interested in how their sense of the past was being shaped by movies, TV, and popular culture. My reading in relation to this interest took me far beyond the psychological tradition in which I'd been trained as a graduate student. By the mid-1990s, I found myself knee-deep in the cultural studies literature on "memory" -- not the long-term/short-term memory of grad school, but memory as a metaphor, embodied in monuments, street signs, postage stamps, celebrations, museums, and national parks. Names I'd never heard of -- Maurice Halbwachs, Serge Moscovici, Michel de Certeau, and others -- became my intellectual companions as I wandered into the multidisciplinary field known as historical consciousness.

Historical consciousness is one of those wispy ideas that are hard to hold onto if not given concrete form. For someone like me, that means turning a wooly concept into a data collection task. For example, one activity I developed with kids and parents was to give them a questionnaire asking who, "since the time of Columbus" have been the "most famous figures in American history." The only ground rule was that none of them could be a President (or a President's wife). This activity was one small part of a broader interview on family history that itself was one interview out of many conducted across three years.

One of the questions I wanted to answer with this study was how the family serves as a context for young people's developing historical consciousness. I hoped to better understand the various influences -- home, school, the broader culture -- that shape young people's notions of history. The "Famous Americans" survey was an easy-to-analyze tool that allowed me to compare kids with their parents.

What struck me even in this small sample of kids and parents was not the proverbial "generation gap," but its lack. Many of the same names appeared on both lists. I filed away this curious finding with other loose threads, and mostly forgot about it. That is, until Ariel arrived.

Ariel Duncan was a history major at Oberlin College who appeared in my e-mail inbox one day to ask whether she could travel to California, at her expense, for her "Winter Experience," a month when Oberlin students escape icy Ohio to pursue their passion. When Ariel arrived, I briefed her on my various research projects, and the Famous Americans survey came up. I shared my curiosity but explained in my professorial tone that such a small sample was "only suggestive." Ariel asked what I would need to do before I thought that there was a "there there." My mini-lecture continued, touching on statistical power, national samples, regional representation, and the rest. Impatient, she declared, "I want to give out some surveys at my old school in Knoxville. And I tutor in a high school near Oberlin."

Not one to douse youthful enthusiasm, I gave her the go-ahead.

Intrigue Mounts

For my part, I sent bundles of surveys to my old high school in New York and also to friends teaching in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver. Before I knew it, Ariel and I had 500 responses from a dozen states. Preliminary analyses stunned us. Not only did the original Northwest patterns hold up, but the findings were robust -- irrespective of region, socioeconomic status of the school, and gender of the respondents. Before Ariel returned to Ohio we already had the outline of another grant proposal, this time to complete a large-scale survey that represented a sharp right turn from everything I had done before that point.

Over the next year and a half, aided by an amazing graduate student, Chauncey Monte-Sano, the most organized human being on the planet and now a professor at the University of Maryland, we gathered survey results from every state in the country, entered piles of data into a computer statistical program, and began the process of analyzing what it all meant.

Historical Consciousness

The popular wisdom regarding history in school is that kids don't learn much. "Kids Get 'Abysmal' Grade in History," wailed the Washington Post after the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which led commentators to conclude that today's students represent "a nation of historical nitwits" who are as "dumb as rocks." Yet, if the results of our study suggest anything, it is that we may have spent so much time (and money) figuring out what kids don't know that we've overlooked the powerful things they do know.

Don't get me wrong. Monte-Sano and I do not equate names on a survey with students' ability to think about historical evidence or their skill in forming an interpretation after reading conflicting documents. But if we are right, we have stumbled across a profound shift in how people across the generational divide understand the meaning of America. For today's teens, America is represented by people identified with the struggle for civil rights. Irrespective of the skin color of the respondents, the figures they select most often to tell the American story are African American.

When I gave a talk about this study before a group of 200 educators in Los Angeles, some in the audience responded with disbelief. One person in particular, an elementary school teacher from Compton, came up to me, asking incredulously, "Does this mean we really are having an effect?"

The findings of this study point to an effect of the curriculum never mentioned in the sky-is-falling commentaries that come in the wake of national tests. In the course of a generation, black Americans have moved from being blurry figures on the edges of the national narrative who get briefly inserted into the history curriculum during February to heroes embraced by Americans of all colors. If this doesn't represent a shift in historical consciousness, I don't know what does.