History Doesn’t Follow Formulas. Why history can’t be reduced to static… | by Ed Ayers | New American History | Jul, 2020 | Medium
This is perhaps too long for high school students to read, though just the same it might be worth the effort. It might more easily be adapted by having teachers read it and present a short explanation of it to students. At the very least, this is a "must read" for teachers not only because it describes how the understanding of the Civil War has changed over time, but it shows that the teaching of "how the story is told" is much better for students than just teaching a story
The key element in the equation used to be tariffs, but tariffs were barely mentioned in the fullest debates by the largest slave state in 1861 over whether to secede. A digital transcription of those Virginia debates shows that the word “tariff” appeared only eight times in weeks of debates. Words with the root of “slavery” in them, by contrast, were invoked 1,434 times. Virginia did not secede because it was agrarian, but rather because its economy was based on the buying, selling, and laboring of enslaved people.
The formula that we have taught for nearly a century is wrong. And it is wrong precisely because it is a formula. Formulas violate what history teaches us. Formulas replace people and their acts with pseudo-scientific abstractions such as “industrial” and “agrarian,” or “modern” and “traditional.” Formulas replace context, contingency, and change with fixity and predictability.
