Investigating Our Own Entanglement with Local History

~ Andrew Dyrli Hermeling, Humanities Instructor

“All history is local.” 

This is both a common aphorism in my field of study and the theme of this year’s annual meeting of the National Council of History Education being held in St. Louis, March 20-22 where I will be presenting on how I teach local history here at Stone. 

As the study of history seeks to dig more deeply into a diversity of historical lives, looking closer to home allows researchers to investigate those who may not have made an impression on the broader national consciousness. But that is not the only reason to localize our research. It also allows students to understand the impact of larger historical currents on their own communities. Perhaps more importantly, it also allows students to see more clearly how their own lives are entangled within those currents.

Such was the case when I taught a class last year centered on Clint Smith’s fabulous interdisciplinary book, How the Word is Passed. Smith, a Black man from New Orleans with the well-honed eyes of a historian, is seeking to reconcile his upbringing with what he has come to understand about the violent inequity at the heart of the American experience. As Smith notes: 

New Orleans is my home. It is where I was born and raised. It is a part of me in ways I continue to discover. But I came to realize that I knew relatively little about my hometown’s relationship to the centuries of bondage rooted in the city’s soft earth, in the statues I walked past daily, the names of the streets I had lived on, the schools I had attended, and the buildings that had once been nothing more to me than the remnants of colonial architecture. It was all right in front of me, even when I didn’t know to look for it.

Simply put, for Smith, the local scars of the cruel history slavery were simultaneously omnipresent yet seemingly unseen — at least until he opened his eyes.

From this starting point, Smith then traveled to a “mix of plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, historical landmarks, and cities” around the United States as well as in Senegal to see how a similar process, in which public memory and the contestation of that memory, is written into other communities. But he concludes his book with an apology, noting that,

the most difficult decision involving this book was the question of which locations to include in its pages. There are thousands of places I could have visited, as the story of slavery is etched into every corner of this country and far beyond. There are dozens of places I visited that did not make it into the book, though each visit informed the way I wrote about the place you find here. I am mindful that someone else’s experience visiting one of these sites depicted in this book might be different from my own. 

While Smith may see this as a shortcoming of his work, as a teacher and designer of educational experiences, it is a gift. It presents a ripe opportunity for guiding students to do their own research and open their own eyes just as Smith’s were opened as he viewed his hometown. If “the story of slavery is etched into every corner of this country,” then surely we could find those etchings here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

This was the task I set before two advanced senior history students last academic year. Guided by the Big Question, “How has the legacy of slavery left its mark on the United States?” these students spent the majority of the Mod replicating Smith’s approach through their own investigation. Because both students had experience with audio recording, they chose to present their investigation in the form of a podcast, an especially judicious choice as it allowed them to root their research in interviews with caretakers of historical memory at some of Lancaster’s most cherished sites of historical preservation. They began with an investigation into the changing role for Rock Ford plantation and its famous historical occupant, the Revolutionary War general Edward Hand. Hand’s memory, as an enslaver, has been undergoing a reassessment in our community, as made most evident by the School District of Lancaster changing the name of “Hand Middle School,” naming it instead after the district’s first female African-American teacher, Hazel I. Jackson, who taught at the school in the 1960s. 

Senior students (Class of ‘24), Liam W. and Diego P., speak with Pat Clarke, Director of Lancaster History

But the most dynamic part of their investigation came when they brought together two of the most important yet diametrically opposed figures within the story of the Civil War: President James Buchanan and U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens. The former, the only United States President from Pennsylvania, holds the dubious distinction of being feckless as the national crisis over the question of slavery reached a boiling point, thus leading to the bloodiest war in American history. Conversely, Thaddeus Stevens was one of the architects of Radical Reconstruction and a full-throated advocate for the full equality of both African-Americans and women within civic life at a time when many ardent abolitionists still held racist and patriarchal beliefs. However, Stevens’s firebrand reputation made him an easy target for a cottage industry of Civil War memory that sought to resuscitate the reputation of the Confederacy as an honorable “Lost Cause,” rather than a nation founded on white supremacy. By their telling, he was a vengeful radical who sought to destroy the South. Only more recently has Stevens become celebrated as a visionary seeking to hold the United States accountable for its racist foundations. 

To unpack these tensions, my students conducted interviews with the director of Buchanan’s historic home, Wheatland as well as the director of research and community outreach at the still-under-development Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy, located the historic home of both Stevens and Smith. They were honest interviews that not only highlighted the lives of these historical figures, but also dug into how our city tells their stories, and why those stories are so vital in the twenty-first century. As such, while their work gave me an opportunity to assess deep and original historical research, I found that the real value was the way it provided my students with an opportunity to think reflexively. Too often, I fear that our commitment to teaching students to create academic distance between who they are personally and the subjects that they study puts up unintentional barriers between them and their understanding of the profound impact past events have on who they are and the communities they live in. The best way to fight against that tendency is to let them investigate their own entanglement with local historical memory themselves. Because as we say here at Stone, “students learn best by doing.”

Senior (Class of ‘24), Diego P., interviewing onsite at Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy in Lancaster.