Ken Osborne
Primary Sources: A New Old Method of Teaching History
Recent years have seen a move towards making more use of primary sources and documents in the teaching of history. The emphasis on historical skills, on teaching a few topics in depth, on organizing history around issues and problems, the example of Britain's History 13-16 Project and of the national history standards in the United States - all these developments have put the study of primary sources at the centre of history teaching. Indeed, in some jurisdictions the use of primary sources is stipulated by examinations and curricula, most notably in Britain, where it is now common for examinations to include an "unseen" documents-based question that students must answer. As a result, there are now some useful handbooks on these of documents available from British publishers (Fines, 1988; Andreeti, 1993).
In one sense, of course, the idea of using documents is not all that new. We are all familiar with the Jackdaw kits that have been around for more than thirty years now, not to mention assorted other portfolio and facsimile packages. Some thirty years ago, Edwin Fenton produced an American history text, containing nothing but documents. The late 1960s Canadian history textbook, Challenge and Survival, integrated documentary excerpts into its narrative, a practice which has been imitated many times since then. There are many collections of documents available, as well as a wide variety of visual sources of which the best known is probably Canada's Visual History but it is far from alone.
Back in 1960 I came out of my British university and teacher training convinced that primary sources were the very essence of history, and that no-one could be called a student of history who did not have at least an awareness of the centrality of sources. I thought of my approach to teaching history as "teaching against the textbook" and to do this properly sources were essential. I learned from experience that it can be very refreshing for students to be confronted with the realization that the textbook might be wrong, or at least one-sided, and to ponder the question of just how and why what appeared in the textbook did in fact get to appear there. Did Dollard set out to save Montreal at the Long Sault? Was Frontenac a hero? Was Phillip II of Spain a religious fanatic or a dynastic schemer, or both, and does this kind of dichotomy between politics and religion even make sense in a sixteenth century context? Was Peter the Great really great, and what are the criteria of greatness anyway? Was my old tutor, A.J.P. Taylor, right to say that the First World War was caused by railway timetables? How do we know anything about what happened in the past and why should we believe those people who claim to know something about it? Questions like these, and history is full of them, were my bread and butter, and sources, both primary and secondary, were my tools, though I did not then realize that Fred Morrow Fling of the University of Nebraska had trod this same ground a century ago (Fling, 1909).
In high school in England I had been taught well, but my history teachers said nothing about sources or even about historiography. They saw their job as giving us a good grounding in the facts (there were no arguments about what constituted a "fact" in my positivistic schooling, despite the questioning of Charles Beard, Carl Becker and other historians a generation or more earlier), preparing us for national exams, and making history as interesting as possible. I spent my last two and a half years of high school, for example, following the English custom of specialization, taking only three subjects: English literature, French, and history. And in history I took only modern Europe from 1648 to 1870 and Britain from 1603 to 1714. This meant, in effect, that I took history for almost two days a week for two and a half years in a small class of about ten students, which made possible a fairly intensive study. Even so, I was taught nothing about the vigorous and sometimes downright vicious historiographical controversies that were then raging. Christopher Hill's Marxist interpretation of the English Civil War, the rise (or fall) of the gentry, Hugh Trevor-Roper's savage attack on Lawrence Stone - these and other such disputes were a closed book to me until I reached university, even though they were being fought out at the very time I was studying seventeenth century British history in high school.
University introduced me to a very different kind of history, one that posed questions rather than imposed answers, and questions that usually had no simple answer. One of the very first essays that was assigned me at Oxford, where the custom was not to attend lectures, but to write an essay a week and read it aloud to one's tutor so that it served as the basis of an hour's discussion, was whether it was possible to write a coherent account of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain. Here was a very different approach from what I had known at school: not to write an account of historical events but to ascertain whether such an account was even possible and, if so, on what basis and using what evidence. Over the course of the next three years, I grew accustomed to history-as-questions: Who or what defeated Napoleon? Was the Model Parliament of 1295 either a model or a parliament? Was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 either glorious or a revolution? Was the eighteenth century diplomatic revolution really revolutionary? And since one of my tutors was A.J.P. Taylor, who thrived on public controversy, as in the case of his book on the origins of the Second World War, with its notorious thesis that the war began because Hitler launched "on 29 August a diplomatic manoeuvre which he ought to have launched on 28 August," it did not take long to find out that history meant argument, debate, interpretation, though always with a healthy respect for evidence.
As part of the Oxford history degree, everyone had to take a special subject spread over two terms, which involved an intensive study of a narrowly defined topic based on documents. I chose British colonial developments 1774-1834. The only limitation of the course was that the documents we studied were all in printed collections, so that there was no actual archival experience, no working with original materials first hand. That came during my teacher training year at Birmingham University where one of the academic requirements was to write a sort of minor thesis. I knew that in the 1860s and 1870s Birmingham had been the headquarters of an organization called the National Education League, a group of radical-liberals pushing for national, compulsory and secular education that also had a major impact on the fortunes of the Liberal party of its day. I discovered that Birmingham Public Library held many of the records of the League, and though I could not get at all the papers I needed, I had enough to do a respectable job of investigating the League as an educational pressure group. The result was that I spent much of my teacher training year happily pursuing a piece of historical research using original documents on a topic that, so far as I knew, had not then been researched by anyone else. Only recently did I discover that, once again, Fred Morrow Fling of the University of Nebraska was a hundred years ahead of me, with his belief that no-one should teach history until they had done some kind of genuinely original research using primary sources.
Outside university, I had enrolled in a local history group in my home town, Coventry. Coventry is these days best known for the wartime bombing and its modern Cathedral and perhaps Lady Godiva but it is an old town, and in the Middle Ages was one of England's leading urban centres. The group I joined was studying what happened in Coventry during the plague of 1349, the so-called Black Death. Our task was to undertake a house-to-house survey of property ownership to find out just what happened to whom at that time. What we found was that as the plague approached the city from the south, a minor panic set in and people who could afford it sold up and moved out of the city to escape the plague- which gave one of the local guilds plenty of opportunity to buy up property on the cheap and, presumably, emerge from the plague (a guild was a corporate entity, after all, and so could not die, unlike its individual members) substantially richer and more powerful. The work involved reading medieval Latin and handwriting and some small familiarity with legal terms, writing conventions, and the like, but this was relatively straightforward, and was amply repaid by the sheer excitement of looking at records that went back some six centuries and often referred to streets that had the same names then as now.
As a result of such experiences, when I arrived in Winnipeg in 1961, I was determined to incorporate documentary sources into my teaching. During my teacher-training in England I had accidentally stumbled across a book that had been published in 1910, M.W. Keatinge's Studies in the Teaching of History. Despite its uninformative title, the book is in large part an extended argument, replete with practical examples, for the use of documents in teaching history. Keatinge's concern was to make history "scientific," to give it the intellectual rigour and academic respectability that would save it from the taunts of those who saw it as little more than a branch of literature, or as a mickey-mouse subject that needed only a capacity for memory. As Keatinge put it, "The question to be answered is this: 'How can history be made into a real training school for the mind, worthy of no inconsiderable place in the curriculum in schools where the classics are taught, and of a large place in modern schools and on modern sides where little or no classics are taught?" (Keatinge, 1910: 38). His answer was that scientific history depended on the close study of sources and that students were perfectly capable of doing this, and his book was his attempt to show how it could be done.
When I first discovered the book in an English used-book store I saw it as an interesting oddity. With all the arrogance of the young, who are inclined to believe that they are discovering things that no-one ever knew before, I thought that using documents in the classroom was a new idea, the cutting edge of modern pedagogy. That Keatinge had been there fifty years earlier was interesting but not especially significant. He was simply a man ahead of his time. When I arrived in Winnipeg in 1961 I quickly became a frequenter of anywhere that sold cheap, used books and I was mildly intrigued to find copies of Keatinge's book appearing on their shelves from time to time but I did not think anything of it. Only recently did I discover that it was in fact used as a text in the Manitoba Normal School through the 1920s and into the 1930s, so that by the 1960s, as that generation of teachers retired or died, their books appeared with increasing frequency in the second-hand bookstores and thrift shops. In any event, back in the 1920s Manitoba teachers were getting some training in, or at least some acquaintance with, the use of sources in the classroom.
In fact, as I have discovered only in the last few years, between the 1890s and the 1920s historians and educationists agreed that the use of sources was a crucial element of progressive history teaching. Keatinge, it turned out, was not ahead of his time in 1910, but very much of it. As the influential Columbia University historian, James Harvey Robinson, put it in 1904: "No improvement in the methods of history instruction in our high schools and colleges bids fair to produce better results than the plan of bringing the student into contact with the first hand accounts of events, or, as they are technically termed, the primary sources" (Robinson, 1904, Vol. 1: 4). Robinson wrote these words in 1904 but they represented something he had been saying, and practising, for at least ten years before that.
Robinson was not alone and by the early 1900s source-books, designed specifically for classroom use, were fairly widely available in many fields of history. In the words of one such Canadian book, published in 1913: "Experience has conclusively shown that such apparatus is a valuable - nay, an indispensable- adjunct to the history lesson" (Munro, 1913:v). This enthusiasm for using sources explains why other finds on the used-book shelves in Winnipeg back in the 1960s included William Stearns Davis's, published in 1912, and Arthur O. Norton's Readings in the History of Education: Mediaeval Universities, published in 1909. Both typify the substantial boom in the publication of source-books that took place in the early 1900s. One can only assume that publishers were responding to public demand. And, presumably, someone in Winnipeg was buying them, and even reading them, to judge by my copy of Norton's book, which is full of underlinings and annotations. In fact, as I later discovered, it was, like Keatinge, used as a text in the Normal School.
In addition, by the early 1900s most methods books on the teaching of history also recommended some use of sources in the classroom. A book that still shows up from time to time is Henry Johnson's Teaching of History in Elementary and Secondary Schools which was published in 1915 and went through many subsequent editions. Johnson taught at Teachers College, Columbia, and was a frequent and outspoken participant in the debates over history teaching that took place during these early years. He was not as fervent a supporter of the use of sources as some of his contemporaries but he certainly saw a place for them even in the elementary classroom, and argued strongly that students should acquire at least a basic understanding of "the historical method," for which sources, both primary and secondary were essential.
By the early 1900s it had become conventional wisdom that good history teaching involved some use of primary sources and documents. In 1893 an American committee on history teaching recommended some use of sources in the research-oriented history course it proposed for the final year of high school. In 1896 a conference at Columbia University reaffirmed that it was reasonable to expect some familiarity with sources from students entering university. The 1898 report of the American Historical Association's Committee of Seven on teaching history in secondary schools, though it did not endorse what it called the "source method" for schools, which it defined as teaching exclusively from primary sources, nonetheless recommended the use of sources for illustration and interest and for occasional exercises in criticism and analysis. In 1902 a committee of the New England History Teachers' Association, especially appointed to consider the use of sources in teaching, reported to the same effect: "We believe that the study of history is greatly deepened and enriched by a judicious use of original material; that a greater sense of the reality of the past and a wider use of mind result; that from the greater robustness and individuality of the study a deeper and more permanent interest in it is most likely to ensue" (Hazen et al., 1902: 16). Writing in 1907, Fred Morrow Fling, who criticized the 1898 AHA Report's endorsement of sources as too cautious, observed that the fifteen year old debate on whether to use sources in teaching history had been won; the question now, he continued, was not whether to use sources, but how (Fling, 1907: iii). An American book reviewer noted in passing in 1910: "It is now generally conceded that the teaching of history may be deepened through the judicious use of source material" (James, 1910: 676). A few years later, in 1915, the University of Minnesota's August Krey listed sourcebooks, together with maps, pictures and other aids, as one of the "essential factors" in effective history teaching (Krey, 1915: 11).
Across the Atlantic, French historians were making much the same point. Charles Langlois at the Sorbonne even suggested in 1908 that the publication of sources might provide a better service to the general public than the writing of conventional histories: "I am more and more persuaded that the best method of communicating to the public the truly assimilable results of our research is not to write history books, it is to present the documents themselves.... The true role of the historian is to put the people of today in contact with the original documents that are the traces left by the people of yesterday, without mixing anything of himself in them" (Keylor, 1975: 178). In England, 1910 saw the publication of Keatinge's book on teaching history with its endorsement of the use of sources in the classroom.
One of the most ardent advocates of the use of sources in the classroom was Fred Morrow Fling, a history professor at the University of Nebraska. In Fling's version of what was called the "source method" students learned history directly from the sources, albeit in a way that was adapted and suited to their age and immaturity. He criticized most printed source collections for being no more than supplementary readings designed to accompany and add interest to a textbook, designed for teachers' rather than students' use. What was needed instead, according to Fling, were carefully designed exercises in which students would have to compare different accounts of the same subject in order to arrive at the truth, or at least at the greatest degree of probability. The net result, he argued, would be to open students' eyes "to the meaning of proof in history, to create an attitude of healthy scepticism and to put into their hands an instrument for getting at the truth that they will have occasion to use every hour of the day" (Fling, 1909: 207).
Most of his contemporaries thought that Fling went too far. They favoured a limited use of sources, primarily for illustration but also for some elementary and limited work in critical analysis, and always as supplementary to a textbook. As the American Historical Association recommended in 1898: "The use of sources which we advocate is, therefore, a limited contact with a limited body of materials, an examination of which may show the child the nature of the historical process, and at the same time may make the people and events of bygone times more real to him" (AHA, 1899: 104). Most historians believed that the goal of history teaching in schools had to be the transmission of knowledge, not training in method. As Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard put it in 1896, "Of the three offices of sources in teaching- furnishing material, furnishing illustration, and giving insight into the spirit of the times - all are important. It is not to be expected that any but the most highly trained specialist will found all or his chief knowledge of history on sources; but parts of the field may thus be underlaid by actual contact with the material" (Hart, 1896, Vol. 1: 18). The New England History Teachers Association agreed, declaring in their 1902 Report (of which Hart was a co-author) that, in schools, the use of sources, while important and necessary, "must be limited, and be strictly subordinate to that of texts" (Hazen et al., 1902: 7).
Such critics saw Fling as wanting to eliminate textbooks entirely and replace them with source-work, as emphasizing "method" at the expense of "matter." He denied the first charge but affirmed the second. Yes, he argued, method was more important than matter, and at least some topics in a course should be taught entirely through sources. He advised teachers to find examples where textbooks disagreed with each other, so that they could use them to provoke students into wondering which was correct and how they might find out, thus learning valuable lessons about historical method while also dethroning textbooks from their spurious position as voices of historical authority. Fling agreed with his critics that source-work could make history more interesting and reveal to students something of the otherness of the past. But this, he continued, was not enough. To learn history must mean learning to understand and use the historical method.
As for the argument that children and adolescents could not handle source-work, Fling simply denied it. Properly structured and carefully taught, he insisted, as in his own sourcebooks, source-work was perfectly practicable in the school classroom (Fling, 1907, 1913). Throughout his university career at the University of Nebraska, which lasted from 1891 to his death in 1934, he insisted that no-one really knew what students might be capable of, since "most pupils have never had a chance to show what they could do. There is an abundance of evidence," he declared, "to prove that the scepticism of college instructors concerning the inability of pupils in the secondary schools to study sources critically is not founded on fact" (Fling, 1919: 507). Students could work at this kind of level, however, only if they studied sources intensively and according to a particular methodology, as in Fling's own "Nebraska method" (Fling, 1899).
Historians like Fling, Keatinge, Hart, and Robinson, whatever their differences, emphasized the value of sources for producing in students a sort of constructive scepticism, while also familiarizing them with the nature of history as a discipline. As the New England History Teachers Association observed, "Skepticism, not belief, should be the attitude of mind that the use of sources should arouse" (Hazen et al., 1902: 13). To work with sources was to reduce one's reliance on textbooks, or in Fling's case to demolish their authority. Textbooks were usually written at several removes from the sources and failed to make clear the nature of their evidence and how they used it, and to begin to think and question. They reduced history to a memory subject. As Robinson put it in 1904: "When we get at the sources themselves we no longer merely read and memorize; we begin to consider what may be safely inferred from the statements before us and so develop the all important faculty of criticism. We are not simply accumulating facts but are attempting to determine their true nature and meaning" (Robinson, 1904, Vol.1: 6).
Historians emphasized that this ability to question evidence, to realize its limitations and assess its reliability, to take stock of varied and conflicting points of view, was not only an essential part of the historical outlook, but was also vitally important in everyday life, especially in a democracy where informed public debate was supposed to be the foundation of the political process. To quote Robinson again, this time from 1902: "By cultivating sympathy and impartiality in dealing with the past we may hope to reach a point where we can view the past coolly and temperately. In this way really thoughtful historical study serves to develop the very fundamental virtues of sympathy, fairness, and caution in forming our judgments" (Robinson, 1902,Vol. 1: 14). As another sourcebook writer put it a few years later, the study of sources "helps plant in the student's mind the conception of fairness and impartiality in judging historical characters ...." (Ogg, 1907: 11) Indeed, this was what made source-work so educationally valuable, beyond anything it taught about the nature of historical inquiry: "So far as practicable the student of history, from the age of fourteen and onwards, should be encouraged to develop the critical or judicial temperament along with the purely acquisitive" (Ogg, 1907: 11).
In addition, Robinson was convinced that the proper use of carefully selected sources would reduce teachers' reliance on the exotic and the sensational to pique students' curiosity. As a proponent of what was then called the "New History," Robinson attacked the traditional portrayal of history as the actions of great men (and a few women) and the story of great events. Such an approach, he argued, misrepresented history by turning it into a series of headlines, a sort of museum of the bizarre, an old-style cabinet of curiosities. "There is," he wrote in 1912, "a kind of history which does not concern itself with the normal conduct and serious achievements of mankind in the past, but, like melodrama, purposely selects the picturesque and lurid as its theme." Rather, he insisted, in some ways anticipating the annalistes in his dismissal of history as the record of events, history should emphasize the mundane and the everyday, the daily routines that shaped people's lives, the structures that conditioned their thoughts and actions, "the ways in which people have thought and acted in the past, their tastes and their achievements in many fields besides the political." Such a history, he insisted, when properly understood, was just as dramatic as, and far more informative than, any depiction of history as "a chronicle of heroic persons and romantic occurrences" (Robinson, 1912: 9 & 15).
The whole point of history, as Robinson understood it, was "to help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind." And a necessary way to do this was to use history first to understand the past and then to transcend it. "The present," he wrote, "has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance" (Robinson, 1912: 17& 24). For the kind of social history of everyday life that Robinson favoured, sources were ideal: "Every line gives some hint of the period in which the author lived and makes an impression on us which volumes of second-hand accounts can never produce" (Robinson, 1902, Vol. 1: 13).
Moreover, primary sources were inherently interesting, "often more vivid and entertaining than even the most striking descriptions by the pen of gifted writers like Gibbon or Macaulay" (Robinson, 1904, Vol. 1: 5). Fling agreed, arguing that sources were more interesting and certainly more worthwhile than any historical novel, and holding out ambitious hopes for the impact of source-work in ancient history: "If this work is properly done, it may not be difficult to induce the pupil to read a play of Sophocles, the whole of the Iliad, a book or two of Herodotus, the whole of Thucydides, several speeches of Demosthenes, some of the Lives of Plutarch, and even the Apology of Plato, in place of less valuable reading. An enthusiastic teacher, one who loves these things himself and is able to communicate his enthusiasm to his pupils, will accomplish something that is really worth while, even with young pupils." (Fling, 1907: iv). For all his emphasis on "method," Fling was obviously no enemy of "matter."
For Fling, Robinson, and their colleagues, the greatest crime a history teacher could commit was to make history dull. They were convinced that the use of sources in the classroom would not only make history more scholarly, it would make it more interesting. Not the least of the attractions of sources was their ability to convey "atmosphere," to use a favourite word of the time. Far more than any textbook, sources had the power to bring the past to life while at the same time showing how different it was from the present. As Keatinge put it, documents were valuable for "giving atmosphere and stimulating the imagination" (Keatinge, 1910: 26). For Robinson the sheer dramatic power of the eye-witness account and the contemporary record could never be overestimated: "It makes no great impression upon us to be told that the scholars of Dante's time had begun to be interested once more in the books of the Greeks and Romans; but no one can forget Dante's own poetic account of his kindly reception in the lower regions by souls of the ancient writers whom he revered-Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Horace-people 'with eyes slow and grave, of great authority in their looks,' who 'spake seldom and with soft voices'" (Robinson, 1902, Vol. 1: 13). Fling similarly believed in the evocative power of sources, arguing in the case of ancient history that, properly taught, they lead the pupil "to feel the old Greek masters speaking to him out of poem or speech, statue or temple" (Fling,1907: iv). So strongly did Fling feel on this point, that, for all his insistence on the critical analysis of sources, he also recommended that some sources, such as Pericles' Funeral Oration for instance, should be read aloud, memorized, and recited.
A few years ago John Fines, perhaps the leading proponent of the use of sources in England in recent years, added a new element to this argument. He described how as a young teacher facing some recalcitrant students, he decided to "punish" them, three at a time, by making them stay after school to help him with the historical research he was doing for his doctoral thesis on fifteenth century heresy trials. As Fines describes it, "That would teach them a thing or two - after an hour sorting out my card indexes and taking down Latin at dictation as I read from microfilm, they would trot home and reflect mightily on their sins." Such, at least, was the theory. In practice, things worked out very differently. Fines reports that after two or three days of this "punishment" he had twenty students asking to "join the club." He ended up, he says, with a paradox: "I taught History from 9 to 4 that satisfied no-one (least of all myself) and from 4 to 6 there were shoals of boys helping me deal with materials that should by any definition have been way above their heads." His explanation speaks volumes about the power of working with sources and about how we might teach history:
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Slowly I began to realize that the boys were interested in the process of the subject - they wanted to see someone who was doing history, not just telling them about it (perhaps only in woodwork and art did they get a chance at a similar experience of seeing their teacher doing his subject), but more importantly what was happening in the daytime was superficial, lacked the guts of real life, whilst the depth study of the after-school session, baffling as it might be, satisfied the lust for real knowing. Slowly, as time went by, I began to realize also that when we were working on those documents in the evening we were working at the right sort of pace, slowly, deeply and really. In the daytime we were just skimming the surface, turning a page and letting forty years pass as if it didn't matter. In the document work everything mattered, for accuracy was obviously necessary when everything might be a clue (Fines, 1988: 318). |
A hundred years ago Robinson tried to demonstrate how documents generated their own interest. Some of his collections of source-materials differed from those of his contemporaries. Most of them were content to produce compilations of documents, selected by various criteria of accessibility, readability, interest, and informative power. They were designed above all else as pedagogical tools, to be used in the classroom and the study but rarely to be read for pleasure. More often than not, they were designed as supplementary reading for use with textbooks. Robinson produced books like this, and indeed was able to retire on the proceeds of his textbooks and supplementary source-collections, but he also produced some very different source-books, designed not as compilations of sources but as flowing narratives in their own right, in which the sources formed the core of the story, but were surrounded by introductory remarks, transitional explanations and linkages, and contextual commentary. They were designed to be read rather than used, to be enjoyed rather than analyzed, as in the case of his life of Petrarch which appeared in 1898. Others, notably Fling and those who followed his example, produced collections of sources that, while they were designed to be interesting, were primarily intended to provide materials upon which students could sharpen their powers of critical analysis and learn to employ "historical method" (Fling, 1899, 1907; Ogg, 1907). Such, for example, was the series entitled Parallel Source Problems, which appeared between 1912 and 1918, where each volume took a limited number of "problems" (what actually happened at Charlemagne's coronation or at the battle of Lexington, for example), supplied a selection of sources and commentary all accompanied by exercises and questions requiring students to analyze the selected documents and produce their own historical narratives based on them (Duncalf & Krey, 1912; Fling, 1913; White& Notestein, 1915; McLaughlin et al., 1918).
It seems that Canadian historians and educationists never totally shared the enthusiasm of their American and European colleagues, perhaps because the academic study and professional organization of history in Canada in the early 1900s lagged behind the progress achieved elsewhere. With so few historians in its universities, Canada lacked the critical mass needed to spark any kind of pedagogical campaign. Insofar as they had any time to spare for schools, Canadian historians' priorities were more concerned with the state of curricula and textbooks, with the basic historical preparation of teachers, with the conduct of examinations, not with innovative teaching methods. It was not that they opposed the use of sources, but that they had more pressing things to think about. In 1899 Charles Colby, a McGill historian published a collection of sources in British history, while George Wrong of the University of Toronto supervised the production of scholarly editions of source materials, as did other Canadian historians. Little was done, however, to link this work with the schools, presumably because of lack of time and resources.
Normal Schools did something to fill the gap. They introduced their history students to the value of sources in the study and teaching of history. The Manitoba Normal School, for example, used Keatinge's book as a text as well as using source-books in courses in the history of education. During the 1920s Normal School students in Manitoba also had to use a classic work of historical method, Langlois and Seignobos' Study of History, which first appeared in English translation in 1898,and which had a good deal to say about the nature of historical evidence and the analysis of documents. Thus, student-teachers, at least those of them who were graduate history specialists, must have been aware of the potential of using documents in the classroom. The difficulty is to know what, if anything, they actually did once they were teaching. It seems likely that, at best, Canadian teachers used sources for anecdote and illustration but never used them in any systematic way. In the early 1970s, for example, I was moved to a new classroom in the Winnipeg high school where I was then teaching and found a variety of treasures in its cupboards. One of them was a multi-volume set of documents in British history published in the 1910s which had been authorized for use in Manitoba schools in the 1920s. Almost fifty years later the books were still in pristine condition, showing no sign of ever having been used.
In Canada, as elsewhere, despite the rolling wave of enthusiasm for the use of sources in teaching between 1890 and 1920, most teachers remained unpersuaded. Though Fling (1919: 507) denied it, it is difficult to escape the impression that in some ways sources became something of a fad in these years, one of those passing bandwagons to which education is prone to succumb. One historian, himself co-author of a sourcebook, surveyed the teaching of history in 1915 and remarked that teachers were too easily led astray by the glamour of "devices," at the expense of "matter." He argued that too heavy a reliance on devices, which he saw as including source-work, led to students with "a smattering of information" but "only a superficial knowledge of the history for the study of which they have enrolled" (Krey, 1915:10). He concluded that "few causes have operated more drastically to impair the efficiency of history teaching in the past five years than this confusion of device and matter" (Krey, 1915: 10). In 1918, a British teacher referred to the use of sources as a "fever," observing that "The victims of the source book fever have passed through the more acute stages and (he spoke feelingly as a convalescent) most realised that they were personally better for the attack, but that it was more advantageous to take it in small doses, on the analogy of smallpox and vaccination" (History, 1918: 21). Asked to survey the use of sources in schools in 1919, Fling concluded that though sources were here to stay, only a minority of teachers actually used them (Fling, 1919). Many teachers were not familiar enough with history as a discipline to feel comfortable working with sources. As a 1923 report put it: "In history therefore few teachers except those employed as specialists in the larger High Schools and Collegiate Institutes are likely to have any idea of what the writing of history implies" (National Council of Education, 1923: 14). Reports on the state of history in American schools in the 1920s made no mention of the use of sources, describing recitation and lecture as the most commonly used teaching methods, with a minority of classrooms also using various "project" methods (Brown,1929; Kimmel, 1929). Overwhelmingly, the emphasis was on the coverage of facts and the teaching of "citizenship," not training in methods. As one observer concluded in 1926: "Whatever mind to desert the teaching of facts there may be among experimenters, none appears in the official guides given to teachers" (Morehouse, 1926: 118).
In the small rural schools that constituted the norm of schooling in these years, teachers faced working conditions that made the use of sources next to impossible, even had they been inclined to use them. In the words of a 1923 Canadian report, they faced "a hopeless task" (National Council of Education,1923: 14). Shifting attendance, lack of preparation time, minimal training, unsympathetic school boards, language difficulties, lack of resources, crowded curricula, pressure to stick to the textbook and cover the course - these and other problems made any use of sources seem like a Utopian dream. As a Manitoba teacher complained in 1923: "Very little effort is made to deal with the practical difficulties with which every teacher has to cope. Overcrowded classes, mixed grades, lack of equipment- all these are ignored, and young teachers, their minds crammed with vague generalities and idealistic twaddle, find themselves helpless and discouraged when they try to practice, under the grim reality of actual conditions, what has been preached to them from the clouds" (Bulletin of the Manitoba Teachers Federation, 22, April 15, 1923: 353-6).
In any case, Canadian teachers, unlike their British And American counterparts, had few sources at their disposal. So far as I can ascertain, there was in these years only one sourcebook in Canadian history, compiled by a history professor at the University of Edinburgh and produced by a British publisher as part of a series of English history source books. It was James Munro's Canada (1535-Present Day) and it was published in 1913, but it seems to have had little impact on the classroom. There were a few specialized collections of sources in economic and constitutional history; the publications of the Champlain Society; and other such works, but they were intended for academics rather than for schools. The 1930s saw the publication of a few sourcebooks in general history (see Phillips, 1938, for example) and George Brown of the University of Toronto published a Canadian history sourcebook for high school use in 1940 but the publication of collections of documents intended for more general use had to wait until the1960s, spearheaded in Quebec by Trudel and Frégault's Histoire du Canada par les textes in 1952 and in English-speaking Canada by McNaught and Reid's Source Book of Canadian History which appeared in 1959.
Even in city schools with subject-specialist teachers the demands of external examinations and the subsequent need to cover the course and therefore stick to the textbook meant that teachers had neither the time nor the incentive to use sources. In 1923 a University of Toronto historian criticized what he called "the cast-iron examination system, by which pupils are more often than not encouraged to memorize verbally large sections of a text which they do not understand and in which they are quite uninterested." He called for provincial departments of education to "see to it that the tests prescribed are such as to display the ability of pupils for organized thought and expression. Otherwise they bring the whole examination system into disrepute, and expose themselves to the attacks of the educational anarchists" (National Council of Education, 1923: 14). Here, one might think, was an opportunity to develop source-based examinations and in the 1930s Britain experimented with them but they never got beyond the trial stage (Happold, 1932). American teachers, due to the localized nature of the American school system, had the freedom to experiment if they so chose. In Canada, however, the high school curriculum before the 1960s was subject to strong university pressures through the universities' presence on examination boards and the universities valued factual knowledge and the three R's over such fanciful notions as historical method and historical thinking. Most university historians saw such abilities as beyond the capacity of school students at anything beyond the most minimal level, though they hoped that teachers might do something to introduce students to the nature of history. As a Toronto historian reported to the National Council of Education in 1923: "Now while it is admitted that the notion of research by students junior to the higher years of university work is absurd and that in all grades of primary and secondary instruction history must in the main be taught as a body of accepted truths, nevertheless the teacher, if he is to be of real help to his classes, must be able to illustrate the problems which lie beneath history as written" (National Council of Education, 1923: 16). Certainly, history examinations in Canada in these years never set any questions that required students to be familiar with sources, historical method, or historiographical debate.
In these circumstances, even in the larger urban school divisions which could afford to hire specialists, the use of sources required more than average dedication and energy. Nonetheless, some teachers apparently were equal to the challenge, for in the early 1930sthe National Archives reported what it described as "an increasing number of requests for photostatic prints from teachers who have found that the use of such material is of the greatest value in the teaching of Canadian history" (PAC, 1931: 21). In the 1930s the National Archives also did what it could to popularize the use of sources through the use of summer workshops for teachers and the hosting of school visits. It might well be that this kind of work had some effect since in 1940 a publisher found it worthwhile to publish the first source-book of Canadian history for school use since 1913, George Brown's Readings in Canadian History.
In 1961, however, when I arrived in Winnipeg, there was no evidence that sources were being used in history classrooms. In his 1968 survey of Canadian history teaching, Hodgetts reported that the use of primary and secondary sources occurred in the well taught classes that his team observed, but these amounted to only seven per cent of the classrooms visited (Hodgetts, 1968: 53-6). By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, there was increasing discussion of the use of sources. Sourcebooks were increasingly available and the elimination of province-wide external examinations reduced pressure on teachers to cover the course and follow the textbook, leaving them free to adapt their courses as they saw fit.
None of us knew in the 1960s that the use of sources had once been so ardently discussed and promoted. In this respect, as in so many others, we have totally forgotten what our predecessors did, so that every generation of history teachers has to start from scratch, ignorant of what has gone before. One of the most useful things we could do to enhance our teaching is to develop a sense of the history of our craft. If we could locate ourselves in an emerging tradition of history teaching as it has taken shape over the last hundred years, we would be better placed to create a rooted sense of what we stand for so that we might react sensibly to the many demands that are placed on us.
Perhaps as we turn once again to the sources, we might spare a thought for all those who were there before us.
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