Historiography As Pedagogy: Thoughts About the Messy Past and Why We Shouldn't Clean It up‪.‬

Historiography is vital to our teaching about the past and to our understanding of the present, though you would not always know as much from the practices of K-16 history educators. (1) When I began my first full-time position as a college history teacher, in Wooster, Ohio, in the fall of 1990, a well-meaning colleague gave me some advice: "Avoid historiography like the plague," he said, adding that students just did not care about the changing views and perspectives of historians over time. Rather than avoiding historiography "like the plague," though, I have ended up making it the foundation of my teaching over the years. I teach a graduate course dedicated solely to the historiography of the American West. But beyond that specialized class offering, historiographical contexts serve as a backdrop for all of my courses, graduate and undergraduate, including the second half of the introductory U.S. survey. (2) If you want students to understand the dynamism and the relevance of the past, then you have to let them know that the past is and always has been the subject of debate, not just for politicians and historians, but for all people who want to understand their world. I try to illuminate contemporary issues by emphasizing how scholars have viewed historical trends and events differently at different moments in time. This is historiography--the history of historical writing and thinking. Or, to offer a more vital explanation: Historiography is the study of the dynamic past, a past that is always messy, ever changing, never resolved, and always relevant to the present. The past is contested terrain and the historiographer is the explorer of that interpretive battlefield. Unless we can get students to understand the messy and exciting truth about history, they are in danger of subscribing to stereotypes that pervade public understanding of the discipline.