Yesterday's History, Today's Current Events

One of the highlights of the Gilder-Lehrman seminar was the opportunity to hear from Dr. Pauline Maier from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If you have watched the Liberty series on PBS, you couldn’t have missed her…she is the historian who truly becomes enthusiastic and animated when asked about the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the Constitution. She confirms my belief that if students understand The Declaration, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights, they will understand how the rest of American history unfolds. Yesterday, President Bush nominated Federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts, Jr. to the Supreme Court and today, the Senate began the “advice and consent” process. To understand what is happening and the influence the Court will have on this country, you need to understand the Constitution. History and current events go hand in hand.

Dr. Maier presided over an animated 90 minutes of discussion on her latest project, a book on the ratification of the Constitution. Dr. Wood peppered her with questions and challenges and she responded promptly and convincingly. The book will discuss how the ratification process was fraught with doubt and dirty tricks. Primary sources are few and far between, but Dr. Maier plans on supplementing her research with newspaper accounts from 1787 and 1788. Anti-federalist news accounts are further limited since the Federalist took to burning down papers that opposed the Constitution. Having an audience of teachers, gave Dr. Maier the opportunity to caution us on teaching the ratification as a neat and orderly process. Disaster could have struck at any point in the process.

Dr. Maier is also adopting a new style of writing for this book, one that she labeled as narrative. David McCullough, champion narrative history writer, recommended that she adopt this style as a way to reach a wider audience. McCullough know what he is talking about as his latest book “1776” continues to be the top seller on The New York Times best seller list. Dr. Wood mentioned that McCullough’s book on John Adams sold over 1.6 million copies while most traditional history books sell around 1,000 copies.