The Art of the Tale: Story-Telling and History Teaching

Abstract

ideas or about vast impersonal forces. What's more, it's about people who face dilemmas and make choices, people who may be caught up in large tides of change, but are still able to swim, to shape the lives they lead, and to take responsibility for them: in the modern phrase, people who have agency. This deceptively simple principle translates into some demonstrably successful teaching techniques: Slavery taught not simply as a moral outrage, but as the life story of Olauda Equiano or Frederick Douglass; the Civil War taught This content downloaded from 157.55.39.224 on Sun, 17 Jul 2016 06:10:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 466 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 1998 not as an irrepressible conflict but as an agony of decisions by men like Webster and Calhoun and Stephen Douglass and Lee and of course Lincoln; the Great Depression not as a gray economic catastrophe recorded in inert tables of statistics, but as Russell Baker's childhood, or Lorena Hickock's or Walker Evans's and James Agee's journeys of discovery through 1930s America; World War II not as a numbing list of battles and confusing diplomatic dances, but as a test of wills between Hitler and Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin; the civil rights movement not as the inexorable triumph of justice, but as the perilous adventure of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the still more dangerous paths taken by the ordinary folk who followed his lead. Or the situation of women in the early-twentieth-century United States, taught not as a recital of finely-parsed theories of gender differences and oppressive laws and customs, but as the mundane yet richly instructive story of the events that ensued when a customer appeared in the Grand Laundry in Portland, Oregon, on the evening of September 4, 1905, deposited a load of soiled clothing on the counter, and politely asked the establishment's foreman, Mr. Joe Haselbock, if he might have his finished laundry back by the next morning. Now, since I am discussing characters and characterization, I should forewarn you that, as it happens, both the customer and Mr. Haselbock, though they appear in this first scene and put in motion the plot line that will carry my story through to its conclusion, figure scarcely at all in the rest of this narrative. That observation leads me, in a roundabout manner, to the matter of