Content area
Full Text
Historical empathy functions as the ability to understand the past from the perspectives of the historical agents. Achievement in this regard necessitates dunking in-time to conduct advanced, contextual interpretations of primary sources. In mis study, four seventh-grade history students examined primary material - thereby deciphering texts as specified by the criteria of the texts' representation of the events and of the subtext (Wineburg, 1994).
EVERYMAN HIS OWN HISTORIAN
In 1931, Carl Becker (1935), President of the American Historical Association, addressed an audience of professional historians with a speech titled "Every Man His Own Historian." In his speech, Becker used the anecdote of Mr. Everyman, "an ordinary citizen without excess knowledge" (p. 236), who wakes up one morning to discover the record of an old coal bill of 20 tons, priced at $1,017.20. Instantly, a series of historical events flashes through his mind. He imagines himself ordering the coal last summer from Mr. Smith, who arrived with wagons of coal to deliver to Mr. Everyman's cellar. Later that afternoon, Mr. Everyman visits Mr. Smith to pay his coal bill. Upon greeting Mr. Everyman, Mr. Smith then reviews his business records and announces: "You don't own me any money, Mr. Everyman. You ordered coal here all right, but I didn't have the kind of coal you wanted, and so turned over the order to Mr. Brown. It was Brown who delivered your coal: he's the man you owe" (p. 238). In response, Mr. Everyman visits Mr. Brown, who examining the records of the Private Coal Office, confirms Mr. Smith's testimony that Mr. Brown did indeed sell and deliver the coal. Mr. Everyman then pays his bill, and upon returning home, he scours his own documents and finds Mr. Brown's bill, for 20 tons of stove coal, priced at $1,017.20.
In the story of Mr. Everyman, the purchase records helped solve the question of the unknown coal delivery. Like a historian, Mr. Everyman first mentally reconstructed the occurrence through "the formation in his mind, by artificial extension of memory, of a picture ... of a selected series of historical events - of himself ordering coal from Smith, of Smith turning the order over to Brown, and of Brown delivering the coal to his house" (Becker, 1935,...