Sam Wineburg Historical Thinking And Other Unnatural Act Summary

“Why study history at all?” asks Sam Wineburg in his essay, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts” (5). This is the all-encompassing question that we have been trying to understand in this English 101 class. We are trying to find out how history as a knowledge domain, provides much needed perspective in our ever-changing world. We first started our journey by delving into what we already knew about history when we took that quiz at the beginning of the semester. I was able to accurately answer approximately half of those questions and that really made me start to doubt whether methods of teaching history were really effective. During this same assignment, we were also asked some questions to encourage deeper thinking. Questions

In other words, history should not just be known as a jumbled mess of facts and names. Instead, we should take important lessons from history and apply them to our own lives. However, with this idea, there are quite a few nuances as well because unfortunately, not all history is easy to apply into our daily lives and a lot of the time, certain history is not taught at all. Other times, history can be taught with a bias, and while this is difficult, teachers need to try to prevent bias as much as possible. One extremely important idea is the idea about the “strange and inaccessible past, whose applicability is not immediately manifest” (6). Often times, we ignore things that are too complicated or cannot help us in the now. However, this history can in fact be the most helpful because we aren’t just reaffirming thoughts that we already know, instead, we are gaining new knowledge and perspectives. Hands down one of the best lines in the essay would be Wineburg’s comparison of unicorns and rhinoceros at the end of his essay, we naturally incline towards unicorns – they are prettier and more tame. But it is the rhinoceros that can teach us far more than we could ever imagine” (24). This

One key idea that Wineburg discusses is how history affects our judgement. I definitely think that reading and discussing this autobiography can help with my ability to make good judgements because of the way that Maya describes her childhood. When we are children, most of us are innocent and have no prejudice against one another, however, it is often said that we obtain prejudices and learn stereotypes through our environment. Maya experiences extreme racism and prejudice throughout the novel, but it is especially disheartening when she is a child and doesn’t understand how the world worked back then. Especially since Maya was an unattractive child, her world was that much worse. Angelou states this about Maya’s childhood, “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat” (4). This shows how out of place Maya must have felt, however, if there were people in her life that made her feel more wanted, then her childhood much better. Just from this section of the autobiography, we can learn lessons on judgements and how deeply they can affect someone. Personally, I consider myself to be quite judgemental of new people that I meet, because I have had many bad experiences of people trying to take advantage of me. I will