Teaching Kansas History from the Archive

The archive is essential to the work historians do. Even when we question its utility or strain against its limits, the archive defines the practice of historical research. And yet, as important as the archive is for us as scholars, it plays only a small role for us as teachers—if any role at all. Given the rise to prominence of ‘historical thinking’ and calls to ‘decode the discipline’ in history pedagogy in recent years, this pattern is all the more curious.

This presentation will outline several methods I have developed to use the locally available archival materials to teach the staple Kansas History course offered each year at the University of Kansas. At one level, my aim was to rejuvenate an old work-horse—local history—and use it to help students develop the habits of mind we value as scholars and citizens. In addition, given the constraints of class size (~50) and student background (most not history majors), these techniques represent my effort to maximize time spent working with archival materials.

The goal of each of these techniques is to put undergraduates in a position to do the kind of work that historians do—ask the kind of open-ended questions, engage in the type of purposive browsing we perform in our research, and undertake the kind of sense-making that we do as scholars. Taken together, they represent a first-draft of an archive-centered history pedagogy. Students in this course are replicating an essential disciplinary practice. In doing so, they are learning about the nature of history—its slowness, the messiness of the historical record, how the stories we tell are built—through hands-on experience. More broadly, I think, they are getting to practice, even master, the kind of sorting and reading essential to making sense of their contemporary moment.