When I wrote Historical Thinking Matters and Other Unnatural Acts, I was very much a university-based applied psychologist of learning, publishing articles in academic journals and essentially influencing a very small number of people who happened to read those academic journals. And then I met an extraordinary character who is very much related to the history of your own institution whose name was Roy Rosenzweig. And Roy said to me, “You know, historians are never going to go search for journal articles written by education professors. You ought to write a book.” And that book lead to an incredibly fruitful friendship with the late Roy Rosenzweig where together we created Historical Thinking Matters, which was my first attempt to venture out of the academy in a lot of ways and see if we, with an incredible collaborator, could influence practice.

Why is historical thinking difficult?
You know, historical texts are hard. We as human beings with neurons firing in our gray matter, we read the words, and if the words are familiar to us, we relate them to how we understand them. And so to stop and try to conjure up a world where the same words and the same linguistic constructions had profoundly different meanings. You know, we read, we read about slavery. We read about slave markets. We read about being a slave. No one of us has woken up in the morning and gone down to the market to buy another human being. We simply do not live in that reality. And we can play mental mind games. We can try to engage in an active imagination but it’s extremely- it takes us- it takes an incredible stretch of the imagination to conjure up a world that we have not lived in. And so that I think is the- that’s the primary difficulty of any active historical thinking is to understand different logics and try to imagine worlds that we never even tasted or put our pinky into. That’s the difficult thing.

So, one of, again, one of our lessons that is the most successful is a lesson where we probe Abraham Lincoln’s views on race. And when you, you know, when you begin a class like this, every single middle school and high school student fancies him or herself if they are white or even if they are black or brown that any thinking person would be an abolitionist. Any thinking person would be William Lloyd Garrison. And then you start to present data about the, among the white voting public. How many people in 1845 supported William Lloyd Garrison? And it’s a tiny, tiny percentage. And so, how do you begin to situate someone like Lincoln when you look at some of the things he says and the Lincoln Douglas debates? Have students been lied to that Lincoln was somehow progressive? That he was somehow an enlightened being? Well, when you look at some of the kinds of things that he said, it’s impossible to forswear the conclusion that he was a rank racist. Well, but you know, you begin to recognize that these terms like racism and these terms like progressivism and these terms like enlightened are themselves historical categories that have to be situated in place and time.

So, you begin to understand Lincoln by understanding the range of opinion of people like him in his day. Without that kind of broad biographical context then you just end up- we end up. We end up playing a game of historical hubris, which is that we’re smarter and more moral and better than anybody who came before us in any previous generation. And so the way that we being to cultivate empathy for people in the past is to immerse ourselves in the range of opinion in the day and to the extent possible, again, it’s never going to be perfect and never going to be complete. It’s an epistemological impossibility. But to the extent possible it’s to try to stretch ourselves, and I use that word advisably to literally stretch our imagination and to embrace ideas or logics that seem like anathema, seem like they’re absolutely abhorrent to us. That doesn’t mean that we somehow forgive people. But the whole goal of historical understanding in the same way that it’s the goal of intercultural and global understanding is to cultivate an empathy for logics that we do not possess or share.

Is historical thinking enough for modern sources?
I want to make a bold assertion and that is that historical thinking is helpful but not sufficient for the kinds of ways of reading that are absolutely necessary for making judgments on the internet. In that sense, to think that you can help students with a written document that that will transfer effortlessly to evaluating the credibility of material on the web is a really dangerous and fallacious assumption. And I can tell you that empirically with both historians that we’ve interviewed. I can tell you that with Stanford undergraduates, and I would imagine that if I gave some of our tasks to your very bright George Mason students they themselves would struggle. And so we radically underestimate the sophistication of both cloaked and phantom sites on the internet.