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Good storytelling has much in common with good history teaching. Most first-rate stories engage readers through the conflict generated by characters acting against the designs of other characters. In such narratives, each person is driven to act by personal motives. Readers become involved in the story because they want to see how the characters' clashing inner drives steer events toward a resolution of the conflict. Historic narrative is the same, except in the instance of history the characters are real people and the conclusions have a ripple that directly affects the students. As with good stories, history captivates students through its interpersonal tensions and the revealing of actors' motivations. It is, in fact, these tensions and inner dramas that connect historic actions into a causal flow of events, creating a story.
Take for example the period right after the Civil War, the era of Reconstruction. A teacher might present it in the following way: The redefinition of relations between white southerners and African Americans lies at the heart of the Reconstruction narrative. Each group defined freedom for the ex-slaves differently, and these differing perspectives created frictions that remain today. The fight in the U.S. government over how to reconstruct the South reflected the stress produced by these two perspectives. A good teacher might convey this theme as an "advance organizer" and then go on to fill in the details of the tale. To illustrate tensions contained in the story, teachers might talk about the clash between white planters and freed slaves over work contracts, white violence against African-American political and social assertions, the North's efforts to mediate race relations through the Freedmen's Bureau, and the fight between Congress and President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction plans. The teacher helps students weave these events in and out of the theme so that students see the conflicts driving the narrative forward (1).
Margaret McKeown and Isabel Beck remind history teachers that students are likely to learn history better when it is presented as a coherent narrative (2). In order to better understand the inner workings of characters in the narrative, students can delve deeper into the historic conflict through the use of primary documents. Samuel Wineburg, an educational psychologist and historian, has likened the historian's work to that...