• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Membership
  • Log In
  • Manage Your Account
  • Member Assistance Request
  • 🔎
  • Way of Improvement
  • About John
  • Vita
  • Books
  • Speaking
  • Media Requests

Historical thinking is often paradoxical thinking

John Fea   |  March 10, 2023 Leave a Comment

WHYY in Philadelphia recently hosted an interesting conversation between Dolly Chuch, a psychologist, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian. Chuch argues that it is difficult to get people to accept the fact that two seemingly contradictory ideas can exist at the same time. For example, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.

But this kind of paradoxical thinking is absolutely essential to the history classroom and public debates over American identity. The good news, according to Chuch, is that it is possible for our brains to learn how to do this kind of thinking. There is also a lot of good stuff in this conversation on the difference between history and nostalgia.

Listen here. I learned this stuff twenty or more years ago after reading Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts and it has defined the way I teach history.

RECOMMENDED READING

Default ThumbnailOn the slaveholder Jonathan Edwards and the Christians who read him Was Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty Refreshed on January 6th? Government and the Private Side of the Wall of Separation LONG FORM: Frederick Douglass and the Challenge of Seeing Clearly

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: Dolly Chuch, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, historical thinking, psychology

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Footer

Contact Forms

General Inquiries
Pitch Us
  • Manage Your Account
  • Member Assistance Request

Search

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide
Subscribe via Email


Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide