Reading Across Time: Helping Students Think Like Historians
Imagine this with your students: If someone was to read about your life 50 or 100 years from now, what would they need to know to understand you and your choices? Something about your family—where your parents or grandparents or great grandparents came from? Where they lived, when and why they moved? Did you know them or was your family estranged from one another? And how about you? Have you moved a bit or stayed in one place most of your life?
The future reader would also need to know something about you as a member of society—Were you married? Divorced? Did you work? Who did you vote for? Did you have enough money to live comfortably or did you struggle? Did you give money to certain causes or…you get the idea.
Every time you read something on our blog, try to think about what you read in a broad context. Where, for example, does the information fit into the economics of the time? Or where might it fit into the history of race in the Hudson Valley? (See, for example, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history-timeline/
Return to timelines as you read about characters mentioned on this website. For example, in the post entitled “Refusing to Wait, Freedom Seekers from Hurley,” we find Brom and his mother Susanna who escaped their enslavement in 1803 (We do not know whether or not they were found).
Use your mental timeline to think about dates. If in 1803 Brom was nine, that means that he was born in about 1794. He, like his contemporary Sojourner Truth, was born into bondage, probably spoke Dutch and most likely had few prospects for a better life.
When Brom was a toddler, New York State passed a law proclaiming that children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 were to be gradually emancipated. But Brom missed the date by five years! The law went on to state that these newly “freed “children would be indentured servants until age 25 for women and 28 for men, at which point they could leave their enslaver’s home or farm. In other words, even if Brom had been born 5 years later, he would not be considered a free man until he was of an age to marry and have children. And then what would he do unless he had learned a trade while indentured? In 1827 when slavery was legally abolished, where would they go and what would they do?
It is also amazing to realize through census data that almost 30 years before slavery technically ended, relatively near Brom and Susanna in Marbletown, an African American named Cornelius Robinson, a free person of color and his family owned land. We don’t know much about how the Robinsons acquired that land, but we do know something about Cornelius's children and their children and their children's children who continued to live on Lapala Road and Eagle’s Nest roads.
My point here is that thinking about dates allows readers and historians—amateur and professional—to think both “vertically” (chronologically) as well as horizontally (what else was happening then?) in order to make information come alive.
Said differently, context, comparisons and evidence of change help us make sense of what we read on this blog and elsewhere.