Introduction

When we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a Carnegie-sponsored

initiative designed to strengthen teacher training, we thought we knew a
thing or two about our discipline. As we began reading such works as Sam
Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, however, we
encountered an unexpected challenge. 1 If our understandings of the past
constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we distill and communicate
habits of mind we and our colleagues had developed through years of
apprenticeship, guild membership, and daily practice to university students
so that they, in turn, could impart these habits in K–12 classrooms?

In response, we developed an approach we call the “five C’s of historical

thinking.” The concepts of change over time, causality, context, complexity,
and contingency, we believe, together describe the shared foundations of
our discipline. They stand at the heart of the questions historians seek to
answer, the arguments we make, and the debates in which we engage. These
ideas are hardly new to professional historians. But that is precisely their
value: They make our implicit ways of thought explicit to the students and
teachers whom we train. The five C’s do not encompass the universe of
historical thinking, yet they do provide a remarkably useful tool for helping
students at practically any level learn how to formulate and support
arguments based on primary sources, as well as to understand and challenge
historical interpretations related in secondary sources. In this article, we
define the five C’s, explain how each concept helps us to understand the
past, and provide some brief examples of how we have employed the five C’s
when teaching teachers. Our approach is necessarily broad and basic,
characteristics well suited for a foundation upon which we invite our
colleagues from kindergartens to research universities to build.

Change over Time

The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C’s to grasp.
Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with
technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and
that we enjoy different cultural pursuits. Moreover, students also note that
some aspects of life remain the same across time. Many Europeans celebrate
many of the same holidays that they did three or four hundred years ago, for
instance, often using the same rituals and words to mark a day’s significance.
Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change over time.
Students often find the concept of change over time elementary. Even
individuals who claim to despise history can remember a few dates and
explain that some preceded or followed others. At any educational level,
timelines can teach change over time as well as the selective process that
leads people to pay attention to some events while ignoring others. In our
U.S. survey class, we often ask students to interview family and friends and
write a paper explaining how their family’s history has intersected with major
events and trends that we are studying. By discovering their own family’s
past, students often see how individuals can make a difference and how
personal history changes over time along with major events.

As historians of the American West and environmental historians, we often

turn to maps to teach change over time. The same space represented in
different ways as political power, economic structures, and cultural
influences shift can often put in shocking relief the differences that time
makes. The work of repeat photographers such as Mark Klett offers another
compelling tool for teaching change over time. Such photographers begin
with a historic landscape photograph, then take pains to re-take the shot
from the same site, at the same angle, using similar equipment, and even
under analogous conditions. 2 While suburbs and industry have overrun many
western locales, students are often surprised to see that some places have
become more desolate and others have hardly changed at all. The exercise
engages students with a non-written primary source, photographs, and
demands that they reassess their expectations regarding how time changes.

Context
Some things change, others stay the same—not a very interesting story but
reason for concern since history, as the best teachers will tell you, is about
telling stories. Good story telling, we contend, builds upon an understanding
of context. Given young people’s fascination with narratives and their
enthusiasm for imaginative play, pupils (particularly elementary school
students) often find context the most engaging element of historical thinking.
As students mature, of course, they recognize that the past is not just a
playful alternate universe. Working with primary sources, they discover that
the past makes more sense when they set it within two frameworks. In our
teaching, we liken the first to the floating words that roll across the screen at
the beginning of every Star Wars film. This kind of context sets the stage; the
second helps us to interpret evidence concerning the action that ensues.
Texts, events, individual lives, collective struggles—all develop within a
tightly interwoven world.
Historians who excel at the art of storytelling often rely heavily upon context.
Jonathan Spence’s Death of Woman Wang, for example, skillfully recreates
17th-century China by following the trail of a sparsely documented murder.
To solve the mystery, students must understand the time and place in which
it occurred. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brings colonial New England to life by
concentrating on the details of textile production and basket making in Age
of Homespun. College courses regularly use the work of both authors
because they not only spark student interest, but also hone students’ ability
to describe the past and identify distinctive elements of different eras. 3

Imaginative play is what makes context, arguably the easiest, yet also,
paradoxically, the most difficult of the five C’s to teach. Elementary school
assignments that require students to research and wear medieval European
clothes or build a California mission from sugar cubes both strive to teach
context. The problem with such assignments is that they often blur the lines
between reality and make-believe. The picturesque often trumps more banal
or more disturbing truths. Young children may never be able to get all the
facts straight. As one elementary school teacher once reminded us, “We
teach kids who still believe in Santa Claus.” Nonetheless, elementary
school teachers can be cautious in their re-creations, and, most of all, they
can be comfortable telling students when they don’t know a given fact or
when more research is necessary. That an idea might require more thought
or more research is a valuable lesson at any age. The desire to recreate a
world sometimes drives students to dig more deeply into their books, a
reaction few teachers lament.

In our own classes, we have taught context using an assignment that we call
“Fact, Fiction, or Creative Memory.” In this exercise, students wrestle with a
given source and determine whether it is primarily a work of history, fiction,
or memory. We have asked students to bring in a present-day representation
of 1950s life and explain what it teaches people today about life in 1950s
America. Then, we have asked the class to discuss if the representation is a
historically fair depiction of the era. We have also assigned textbook
passages and Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall, then asked students to
compare them to decide which offers stronger insights into the character of
Cold War America. 4 Each of these assignments addresses context, because
each asks students to think about the distinctions between representations of
the past and the critical thinking about the past that is history. Moreoever,
each asks students to weave together a variety of sources and assess the
reliability of each before incorporating them into a whole.
Causality
Historians use context, change over time, and causality to form arguments
explaining past change. While scientists can devise experiments to test
theories and yield data, historians cannot alter past conditions to produce
new information. Rather, they must base their arguments upon the
interpretation of partial primary sources that frequently offer multiple
explanations for a single event. Historians have long argued over the causes
of the Protestant Reformation or World War I, for example, without achieving
consensus. Such uncertainty troubles some students, but history classrooms
are at their most dynamic when teachers encourage pupils to evaluate the
contributions of multiple factors in shaping past events, as well as to
formulate arguments asserting the primacy of some causes over others.

To teach causality, we have turned to the stand-by activities of the history

classroom: debates and role-playing. After arming students with primary
sources, we ask them to argue whether monetary or fiscal policy played a
greater role in causing the Great Depression. After giving students
descriptions drawn from primary sources of immigrant families in Los
Angeles, we have asked students to take on the role of various family
members and explain their reasons for immigrating and their reasons for
settling in particular neighborhoods. Neither exercise is especially novel, but
both fulfill a central goal of studying history: to develop persuasive
explanations of historical events and processes based on logical
interpretations of evidence.

Contingency
Contingency may, in fact, be the most difficult of the C’s. To argue that
history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a
number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in
turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is
that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior
condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently. Lee
could have won at Gettysburg, Gore might have won in Florida, China might
have inaugurated the world’s first industrial revolution.

Contingency can be an unsettling idea—so much so that people in the past

have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial destiny. The
Pilgrim William Bradford, for instance, interpreted the decimation of New
England’s native peoples not as a consequence of smallpox, but as a literal
godsend.((William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison
(New York: Random House, 1952).)) Two centuries later, American ideologues
chose to rationalize their unlikely fortunes—from the purchase of Louisiana to
the discovery of gold in California—as their nation’s “Manifest Destiny.”
Historians, unlike Bradford and the apologists of westward expansion, look at
the same outcomes differently. They see not divine fate, but a series of
contingent results possessing other possibilities.

Contingency demands that students think deeply about past, present, and
future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events
pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome, since people in
the past had no way of anticipating our present world. Contingency also
reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl
Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the United
States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels? To assert that the
past is contingent is to impress upon students the notion that the future is up
for grabs, and that they bear some responsibility for shaping the course of
future history.

Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly, but it suffuses

the stories historians tend to tell about individual lives. Futurology, however,
might offer an even stronger tool for imparting contingency than biography.
Mechanistic views of history as the inevitable march toward the present tend
to collapse once students see how different their world is from any predicted
in the past.

Complexity
Moral, epistemological, and causal complexity distinguish historical thinking
from the conception of “history” held by many non-historians. 5 Re-enacting
battles and remembering names and dates require effort but not necessarily
analytical rigor. Making sense of a messy world that we cannot know directly,
in contrast, is more confounding but also more rewarding.

Chronicles distill intricate historical processes into a mere catalogue, while

nostalgia conjures an uncomplicated golden age that saves us the trouble of
having to think about the past. Our own need for order can obscure our
understanding of how past worlds functioned and blind us to the ways in
which myths of rosy pasts do political and cultural work in the present.
Reveling in complexity rather than shying away from it, historians seek to
dispel the power of chronicle, nostalgia, and other traps that obscure our
ability to understand the past on its own terms.

One of the most successful exercises we have developed for conveying

complexity in all of these dimensions is a mock debate on Cherokee
Removal. Two features of the exercise account for the richness and depth of
understanding that it imparts on students. First, the debate involves multiple
parties; the Treaty and Anti-Treaty Parties, Cherokee women, John Marshall,
Andrew Jackson, northern missionaries, the State of Georgia, and white
settlers each offer a different perspective on the issue. Second, students
develop their understanding of their respective positions using the primary
sources collected in Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents by
Theda Perdue and Michael Green. 6 While it can be difficult to assess what
students learn from such exercises, we have noted anecdotally that,
following the exercise, students seem much less comfortable referring to
“American” or “Indian” positions as monolithic identities.

Conclusion
Our experiments with the five C’s have confronted us with several challenges.
These concepts offer a fluid tool for engaging historical thought at multiple
levels, but they can easily degenerate into a checklist. Students who favor
memorization over analysis seem inclined to recite the C’s without
necessarily understanding them. Moreover, as habits of mind, the five C’s
develop only with practice. Though primary and secondary schools
increasingly emphasize some aspects of these themes, particularly the use of
primary sources as evidence, more attention to the five C’s with appropriate
variations over the course of K–12 education would help future citizens not
only to care about history, but also to contemplate it. It is our hope that this
might help students to see the past not simply as prelude to our present, nor
a list of facts to memorize, a cast of heroes and villains to cheer and boo, nor
as an itinerary of places to tour, but rather as an ideal field for thinking long
and hard about important questions.

Notes
 1. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the
Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. [↩]
2. Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron G. Wolfe,
Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum
of New Mexico Press, 2004). [↩]
3. Jonathan D. Spence, Death of Woman Wang (New York: Viking, 1978); Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York:
Knopf, 2001). [↩]
4. Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall: A Novella (New York: Scribner’s, 2001). [↩]
5. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). [↩]
6. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green,The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents 2nd
ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). [↩]

Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews are both assistant professors of history
and Teachers for a New Era faculty members at California State University at
Northridge. Burke is working on a book for the University Press of Kansas
tentatively entitledLonging and Belonging: Mabel Dodge Luhan and Greenwich
Village's Avant-Garde in Taos. Andrews is completing a manuscript for Harvard
University Press, tentatively entitledLudlow: The Nature of Industrial Struggle in
the Colorado Coalfields.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name,
article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page.
This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by
permission.