Editing and the Teaching of History

As an occasional teaching historian and full-time editor of the Albert Gallatin Papers at Baruch College of the City University of New York, I have won­dered whether there is an effective way to combine my research in the Gallatin correspondence and my undergraduate teaching.

I came to Baruch in 1981 to begin a multi-year effort to prepare a massive computer-assisted index to the micro­ film The Papers of Albert Gallatin (Rhis­toric Publications, 1970, ed. Carl E. Prince) and a six-volume selected edi­tion of his correspondence. Like many other documentary editions, this work is sponsored by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Since the project is located within a research center, The Center for the Study of Business and Government, economists were most closely touched by the research and its questions. Stu­dents were rarely involved. Both these situations had their weaknesses. First, it seemed unfortunate for a long-term re­search project in American history to be completely separate from students and faculty, when both college and editorial project could benefit from a closer union. Second, it appeared to me that there were pedagogical lessons to be learned from methods I used to edit eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American texts.

While analyzing what it is that editors do as they construct an edition, I rea­soned that the editorial tasks could be adapted to the tasks students perform in a traditional history course. The activi­ties that I pursue on a day-to-day basis as historian/editor are commonplace for our field: selection, transcription, and annotation of documents.

In the role of editor, historians’ ulti­mate goal may be the publication of selected volumes of correspondence. In the role of teacher, historians’ main ob­jective is to improve student learning. The goals of the two roles are different, but the methods of one might still work for the other. We are used, however, to thinking of editorial methodology as technical and not necessarily transfer­ able to teaching students. Yet might there be something in my approach to the conceptualization and writing of his­tory that could be transferred to teach­ing history?

In order to answer this question, my goal was to adapt the methodology of documentary editing into a pedagogical tool for use in a humanities curriculum.

I believed that by using editorial methods of the Gallatin Papers project, undergraduate students would be of­fered both a collection of interesting primary texts from nineteenth-century American history and a method of read­ing, criticizing, and writing about them. Beginning with single text from which expanding circles of knowledge would build, the students would learn some American history, learn how to expand their knowledge by starting from a sin­gle focal point, and discover what it means to revise a text over and over again until it is as perfect as possible.

As a supplementary objective, I want­ed the students to expand geographical­ly from Baruch, using the college as a focal point for exploring the historical richness of New York and surrounding area.

While organization cannot automatically produce critical thinking and clear writing, it can be a prelude to it.

With the support and encouragement of the Exxon Education Foundation, I developed a proposal that would pro­vide release time from the project for me and provide extra support for stu­dents if needed (some travel money, xeroxing, research materials, and monthly luncheon seminars). The chair of the history department, Tom Frazier, was interested and eager enough to have some students exposed to the Gal­latin Papers, and was able to use an existing course framework as a vehicle for my experiment.

During the spring semester of 1984, the Baruch History Department offered a course, Historical Internships, that was listed in the catalog and had previ­ously been offered to give students the opportunity to perform historical work outside the classroom in an internship­ like experience. The difference was that in the past they had worked at historical societies, municipal archives, or corpo­rations; this time they would function as editorial assistants to the Gallatin Papers Project.

The six students who elected to take the course did so because they wanted a different kind of history course and were eager to accept the challenge of a nonclassroom, self-directed approach. There were no history majors in the group. Baruch’s students study primari­ly for the Bachelor of Business Adminis­tration degree. Since the college’s his­tory department is one of the strongest and most active in the CUNY system, most of the group members had taken a history course. Their interests were di­verse: one was interested in Russian literature and history; one was a statis­tics and computer major; one was a journalism student. What they all shared was a willingness to work and to put more than an average effort into the course.

Meeting together for our organiza­tional session, this diversity of both interests and abilities was immediately apparent. Consequently, the first goal became to work with what we had in terms of experience and ability and to build an individual program for each student. In a series of group and indi­vidual meetings, Cynthia Whittaker, who had directed the internships pro­gram for the history department, and I helped each student select a topic for  the semester’s work. Topics chosen cov­ered a wide range and were based upon each student’s interests. I wanted them to start with an area of history about which they wanted to know more, stipu­lating only that it draw upon the available Gallatin manuscripts.

Consequently, the students came up with a broad list of topics: Gallatin’s attitudes on slavery, the New York City Banking crisis of 1837, Gallatin’s presi­dency of the American Ethnological As­sociation, a reinterpretation of Gallatin’s role in the Whiskey Rebellion, and the political motivations for his exclusion from the Senate in 1794. One student, desiring to build upon what she studied in women’s history, wanted to study Hannah Nicholson Gallatin.

With topics chosen, the course re­quirements were multiple. In addition to a traditional research paper, the student was expected to transcribe a sub­stantial document and draft a headnote for it, keep a log of time devoted to the course’s work, and prepare a statement of methodology. Both Cynthia Whitta­ker and I  were regularly available for consultations, and we encouraged weekly individual meetings. Once a month we met as a group for lunch to exchange notes and discuss common research problems and methods. The progress of each student’s reading and written work followed fairly traditional patterns. While teaching the methods of editing, we also taught the students basic re­search methods of locating sources in the library, gathering and preserving notes, compiling bibliographies, making an outline, and drafting correct foot­ notes. For some, this exercise acted as a refresher course on writing a research paper. For at least one, it appeared to be the first paper she had written for a college course.

As a result of these course require­ments, did the group’s writing skills improve? Most assuredly they did, and I base this conclusion on comparing drafts of the papers with the final ver­sions submitted. Why their papers im­proved is the central methodological question. In part the improvement was due to the rigor with which we all ap­proached the task. The student-teacher ratio of three to one; the required step­ by-step preparation of note cards, out­line, draft, and final paper; the regular supervision of their written work, and their enthusiasm for doing something “different” all contributed to better writ­ing. Still, the method of read, revise, and perfect is at the heart of the editori­al treatment of documents, and it was this method the students were also adopting (probably without their knowledge) as they strove to craft better writ­ing.

Just as the editor starts with a text, establishes its authority, and works out to the questions that surround and give it a context, so too did the group’s research   efforts lead them from the simple to the more complex. Since each student provided a written assessment of her own methods, I could see this progress. One wrote, “Trying to find information on Albert Gallatin’s view on slavery brought me to many dead ends. Since there were no published works on this topic, I had to look at the primary sources and interpret them as best I could.”

Locating nothing in secondary sources on Gallatin, and finding few documents, she needed to try another approach. She decided to read around the specific topic, looking in the writings of Jefferson and John Adams to determine contemporary attitudes. After reaching the dead ends, she wrote, that it “was about this time when I decided to read more about the slavery question during Gallatin’s time, since I had just about run out of ideas.” From my per­spective, her realization that she needed to learn more about the period and create a historical context for the specif­ic issue offered support for my hypothe­sis. She started with a specific text and went on from it to use her critical abili­ties to broaden her investigation.

She went on to use the certificate of Gallatin’s membership in the Pennsylva­nia Abolition Society m a fairly sophisti­cated manner: she used positive evi­dence to come to a negative conclusion. As a document it communicated one message—Gallatin opposed slavery. But when, after working through hundreds of documents during the semester, she took that particular text in the context of the other interests that he actively pursued, the document conveyed infor­mation which was altogether different. It became clear that the membership was rather a formality than a strong commitment. She learned that he was willing to speak and write on behalf of several causes, but never this one. She had worked outward from the text and had to reformulate her original hypoth­esis. One lesson learned from this was that a particular historical text cannot necessarily be the basis for a definitive conclusion.

Lest it appear that everything worked precisely as I had hoped, not every student was convinced of the usefulness of my method. One found starting with a specific research topic the reverse of what she thought. She noted, “In the beginning, I was reading films in Dr. Oberg’s office. The problem there was that I should not have started there. Where I should have started was with basic readings to give myself a complete understanding of the crisis.” Because this student worked in a New York City bank and had prior experience with microfilm, she chose to work with the numerous letters on the Gallatin film dealing with the financial crisis of 1837 and Gallatin’s role on the committee of New York bankers. I had her plunge right into the transcription of a detailed letter from Gallatin to Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury.

While in the end she was able to work out from that letter to the wider prob­lems, unfortunately there were a num­ber of weeks of uncomfortable floun­dering for her. What this indicates is that some students will need—either from discussion or reading—a better background in the events and persons immediately surrounding the text/topic that they have chosen. If I were to repeat the experiment, I would under­take to provide such students with addi­tional background material at the start. Each student did read the relevant sec­tions of Raymond Walter’s biography of Gallatin, but better general reading in American history is also a prerequisite.

As stated previously, I sought to de­termine whether the methods of docu­mentary editing can usefully be applied to teaching students to think, read, and write more clearly. Underlying the ful­fillment of these activities is a skill we tend to take for granted in the profes­sion, but one that students must learn­—organization.

Any researcher develops organiza­tional skills, but as editors we are partic­ularly conscious of the need. We estab­lish elaborate control files so that we will not “lose” documents and we carefully cross-reference materials that we will need for annotating documents. Since we have publishers waiting to receive the next volume and funding agencies keenly interested in our rate of pro­gress, we are also constantly aware of deadlines. These factors intensify our need to proceed in an organized fash­ion. This, I believe, is also something the students learned from our methods. One student’s conclusion to her meth­odology section emphasizes this, “Orga­nization was another problem that I faced. By doing the project I had to force myself to get and remain orga­nized. A great many times while doing my research, I misplaced something. Then I had to take the time, with the added frustration to find it. Towards the end of my project, I developed a system of  organization. It is not foolproof but it helps. One folder is for finished work, one is for partially finished work, the last one is for copies of letters and other things.”

While organization cannot automati­cally produce critical thinking and clear writing, it can be a prelude to it. I would, therefore, consider the improve­ment in this skill to be a part of what I was trying to achieve.

Whatever the long-term implications are, it would appear that the pilot effort was a successful experiment. It neces­sarily reached only a few students, but those who participated (three turned in a final paper, two were incompletes, and one dropped) gained experience in reading, thinking, and writing, and they worked hard to achieve those results. Certainly five more nonmajors at the college now know more about nine­teenth-century American history and the research methods of historians. Whether they wanted to or not, the group also learned more about Albert Gallatin than most Americans ever will.