Go West! Then Back to the Future.

Go West! Then Back to the Future.

History is full of narratives and those narratives have a history. As a high school history teacher, I went into my
Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educator fellowshi
p
with a motivation to help my students better understand where popular history narratives come from so they can better predict where they are going. Look to the past to predict the future? Easy peasy, right?
Michael Skomba, 2019 Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educator Award Recipient.
As a mostly world history and
big history
teacher studying at the
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library
, I naturally flocked to the 1893
The Book of the Fair
by Hubert Howe Bancroft. The
Book
was a popular recounting and survey of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a non-critical celebration of American achievement. During my fellowship, I corresponded with a Bancroft authority, Dr. Travis Ross of Yale University, who I believe said it the best and I kept going back to his analogy with my students; the
Book
was analogous to a popular Netflix show as they were both “algorithmically perfected to maximize the market for an expensive work.”
I have been trained to teach in the discipline of Big History.  French Historian Fernand Braudel believed that the most useful historical questions and analysis come from studying the “deep currents” of history; this translates to the study of ordinary people rather than just icons and focusing on transdisciplinary thinking as opposed to solely highlighting political and military history. A source such as
The Book of the Fair
allowed for a popular history that flipped geographic scales and meshed with a big history mindset. A big history pedagogical approach focuses on a cohesive cosmological, geological, and human narrative that goes so deep below the waves that they make Jacques Cousteau look like a vacationer snorkeling with his kids.
Cover of
The Book of the Fair
(1893).
The 2019 fellowship at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library forced a timely self-interrogation for the impending ‘real history’ conversations. As anyone who has picked up a newspaper or turned on a TV in the past couple of years can tell you, the culture wars have come to history class. As a teacher, I have spent barbeques and holiday parties being asked by those on both sides of the aisle if I am teaching the ‘real history.’ I have been prepared for these fleeting moments on the axis of good conversation and self-actualization by staying out of the “waves.” It revealed that despite my global lens, I needed to zoom in and refocus. My American history lens was more of an implicit kaleidoscope– I had been stuck in the waves of American “
Mythistory
.”
I had not yet gotten the memo about the
revisionist thinking about the history of the American West
. I had lived and taught in the Eastern Navajo Nation. I had spent time telling the
Diné Code Talker’s story
. Regardless, some of the old American West tropes remained hidden in my psyche, lodged so…