Teaching the Survey Course

Pedagogy

Children, War, and the Survey Course
Lisa L. Ossian

“Book orders are due!” That call can strike panic when you think about the survey course you will be teaching next semester. Textbooks, of course, are readily available; you have only to examine your library of publishers’ desk copies accumulated over past months. Choosing supplementary readings, however, poses a different set of issues. These readings must hold the instructor’s interest and appeal to student reading tastes, as well as illustrate themes to be developed in the broad surveys of U.S. and European history. I have found that the survey course dilemma can be resolved by adding monographs that explore history from the perspective of the child. This essay describes my efforts to incorporate the history of childhood into the first half of the US history survey and the second half of a western civilization course sequence. My choices for each course were books that looked at war – that perennial marker of the survey class –through the eyes of children. Using books from the history of childhood, I want to suggest, not only provides students with a unique view of past, but also gives them the opportunity for a personal examination of patriotism and propaganda.

My freshmen students sometimes ask why historians seem so obsessed with war. Are historians simply fascinated by sheer violence, or is there more to their interest? Wars, I tell them, are the markers of our centuries, but they are also the disrupters of our daily lives. War shakes society at all levels with fear, terror, hunger, pain, pride, and perhaps revenge. Children’s experiences and memories of war can help students come to grips with the physical and emotional elements of war.

For Western Civilization II I chose The War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel (University Press of Mississippi, 2002). Samuel’s book consists of twenty-seven recent interviews with German adults who were children (ages three to twelve) during the Second World War. Each story begins with a childhood snapshot--usually smiling, healthy children standing by their parents or playing with their siblings. These photos deeply contrast with their personal accounts of wartime and post-war loss. I ask my freshman and sophomore students to read the entire text and write about a certain thread or theme that at least five to six of the interviews revealed, exploring such topics as the roles of mothers, food, and survival skills.

“I had a hard time eating Thanksgiving dinner this year,” a kind and rather shy young man wrote in his paper, “because I kept thinking of the German children after World War II and their absolute starvation conditions. What would I do for food? Could I endure that? Would I survive?” About half of my small class questioned their own ability to survive in these wartime conditions—not only to endure the bombings and the desperation of seeking shelter and safety, but also to live with the memories left from the witnessing wartime atrocities. In a Booklist review, Samuel stated that many of those interviewed are “still troubled by the sounds, sights, or smells that remind them of war, bringing back the dark moments of childhood, and that few have shared completely their memories with their children.” But now my American students have considered and respected these German children’s tenacity to survive despite increasingly desperate wartime odds.

The book I chose for United States History I was James Marten’s The Children’s Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). I wanted to end the semester with a book about the Civil War but I found that the tactics and strategy of most military accounts were too detailed and the social histories were too regional for a U.S. survey. The Children’s Civil War, in contrast, is a homefront account based on diaries, newspapers, and family letters, sources that cross regional boundaries.

I drew my inspiration for an assignment from the book’s cover illustration of a child solemnly composing a letter. What would a child write to her father if she thought she might never see him again? What advice would a father wish to impart to his children if he thought he might not survive the battleground? With these questions in mind, I asked students to create three different scenarios and write imaginary letters from child to father. I encouraged students to include a variety of regions, backgrounds, genders, ages, and experiences within their letters. But I also asked them to incorporate historical facts gained by reading the text—to be true to the historical context of the mid-nineteenth century. And then I turned them loose with the book and their own creative ideas. Their letters detailed children’s lives filled with work, fear, love, honor, and patriotism as they explained why children grew up far too quickly in times of war. Their letters also described gory Southern battlefields, grief-stricken, exhausted mothers, and the increasing workloads for children on farms and in homes. Always present was the, fear, pain, grief, and pride the Civil War children experienced when fathers, uncles, and brothers went to war. In a Publishers’ Weekly review, James Marten’s work was described as exploring “the various ways children (black and white, rich and poor, male and female, North and South) encountered and understood the war.” The review also praised the research, which describes “the ways in which the war shaped an entire generation of American youth, for good and for ill.”

The wars of the last two centuries have maimed and killed an increasing number of civilians, including children, and this new century may prove to be even more devastating. Students and historians should strive to remember these facts--to read and imagine children’s lives within the context of war--and then promise to incorporate both the inspiring strength of children and the horrifying devastation of war into our survey courses.

For the summer 2004 issue of the Newsletter the editors would like to invite submissions from others who have successfully integrated the history of children and youth into their survey courses. Contact Kathleen Jones or Jim Marten with suggestions for articles or lesson plans. Material for the summer issue is due June 15.

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