Teaching the Nation at 250

The nation’s 250th anniversary has offered educators an opportunity to move beyond teaching the American Revolution as a single, familiar story or tedious march through names, dates, and facts. Instead, says Penn GSE historian of education Lauren Lefty, it can spark inquiry, discussion, and civic engagement.

Here Lefty suggests five ways to help students explore the Revolution—and its legacies—with curiosity and critical thinking.

Start with inquiry

“The best history classrooms start with questions, not answers,” says Lefty. At the beginning of the semester, she often shares the following James Baldwin quote with her students:

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

The class discusses the quote and then lets it guide their exploration of the past. She also uses a series of debatable, engaging “essential questions” that challenge students to reckon with the promises and contradictions of our country’s past and present.

“The nation’s 250th anniversary is an excellent time to invite students into these types of critical inquiries,” says Lefty. Especially in our polarized political moment, she encourages teachers to frame their conversations around essential questions: “Let students know there is no one right answer—and that engaging in the conversation is the essence of democracy itself.”

The following questions can spark critical conversations:

• In what ways is the United States an “experiment”? How is that experiment going?
• Was the American Revolution really revolutionary? For whom? What defines a revolution?
• What is a democracy, and what does it look like in our lived experience? Is our democracy healthy?

Teach history as interpretation

History is not about memorizing dates or rehashing well-trod stories from the past. “It's about changing interpretations and revising our understanding based on evidence-driven argumentation,” says Lefty. This approach is called historiographical thinking, and it makes history a lot more interesting for students.

The nation’s 250th anniversary has sparked an outpouring of educator resources for introducing students to “doing history” like historians; here are some that Lefty recommends:

• Organization of American Historians (OAH) History at 250 Project
• National Council for Social Studies, “America at 250: Promises, Paradoxes, and the Present,” Recorded Webinar Series
• The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s special issue of History Now on The American Revolution
• Ned Blackhawk’s “How Native Nations Shaped the Revolution” in The Atlantic’s special November issue “The Unfinished Revolution”
• “Teaching the U.S. Founding: An Inquiry-based Approach,” Facing History & Ourselves On-Demand Webinar
• “America in Pursuit,” Podcast Series, National Public Radio

Rethink the narrative

Too often, updating the curriculum means adding a few more diverse voices but sticking to the standard story. Instead, Lefty invites teachers and students alike to consider what those new voices actually do to our understanding of the story itself.

While researching her book on the history of education in Puerto Rico and New York, Lefty found a reflection on the bicentennial written by a Bronx-born Puerto Rican high schooler in a student newspaper:

“It is ironic that the U.S., supposedly devoted to freedom and liberty, would have a colony during its bicentennial anniversary. Then for whom is the celebration which commemorates the independence of a country, whose government opposes the struggle of a people in their determination to control what is theirs? Pa’quién? [For whom?] Certainly not ours. The bicentennial year will be the time to analyze the history of struggle of our people. . . .”

“If we truly centered perspectives like these—and like Frederick Douglass’s classic What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?—alongside those of well-known figures like Franklin and Washington, how might that alter our understanding of the Revolution and its multiple legacies?” asks Lefty.

Create history

Inspired by the student writing she encountered in the archives, Lefty recommends using projects that make students producers of history—historians, archivists, and curators—rather than just consumers of it.

Have them publish their own special issue of a student newspaper reflecting on the 250th anniversary. Encourage them to make a class archive or time capsule, contributing documents and artifacts that speak to one of your course’s essential questions. Or bring students on a real or virtual field trip to Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, then have them curate an exhibit of their own as a class project.

Build on great resources

Creating thoughtful, inquiry-based lessons takes time. Rather than creating everything from scratch, Lefty encourages educators to build on the excellent work that’s already out there:

• Indigenous perspectives on the revolution:
  • Native Knowledge 360, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, American Revolution Lesson Plans
  • PBS Learning Media, Ken Burns in the Classroom, “Native Nations and British Colonial America: Sovereignty, Diplomacy, and Resistance”
• Gilder Lehrman Institute, Annotated Declaration of Independence
• Slavery, Black Resistance, and the Founding: Bill of Rights Institute, “Slavery and the Founding” Collection of Six Lesson Plans
• Intersectional women’s and gender history: Ms. Magazine, Feminist 250
• Zinn Education Project, Teaching the American Revolution on America 250
• The American Revolution in Global Perspective: OER Project, Age of Revolutions World History Unit
• National Archives DocsTeach, America 250 Collection