Eric Foner Talks About Teaching His OnLine Civil War Course

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Many of you are taking Eric Foner's course on the Civil War Era. He was interviewed by The Nation Magazine's Mike Konczal about an array of topics, but he was asked about what it was like to teach the course. Here are some of his responses:

For thirty years, Professor Eric Foner has been teaching his popular Civil War and Reconstruction history class to undergraduates at Columbia University. Foner has written seminal books in the field, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, on the ideology of the Republican Party before the war, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of that time period, and The Fiery Trial, about President Lincoln and slavery. The themes running through his work—race in America, the influence of radicals on history, and economic oppression as a force of ****—have never felt more relevant.


He is also an amazing lecturer. I know this because I've been following the class via a massive open online course (MOOC). Foner wanted to document his last time teaching the course, and he's teamed with edX to present it as three online classes. The first, The Coming of the Civil War, is over and available on Youtube. The second, on the Civil War, recently concluded, and the third, on Reconstruction, starts at the end of February. All three will be available on iTunes afterward for posterity.


I sat down to talk with Foner about what it's like to teach the Civil War and what his experiences with working online have been like. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity, with hyperlinks added in the text.)


—Mike Konczal

Mike Konczal: What are some of the challenges in translating your course to an online audience?

Eric Foner: I'm a pretty low-tech kind of person. I don't exist on social media. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter. That's how I actually get work done, ya know? I don't worry about it. One of the challenging things according to the people involved is that people's attention spans online are shorter. My lectures are an hour and fifteen minutes, but here they have to be broken up into ten-minute segments. But I wasn't lecturing with a clock, timing the transitions. So I had to go back over all the lectures and find a place to have a break. And then you add in quizzes and primary sources in-between those segments.

So what I see as a seamless lecture gets broken up into segments. Fundamentally, this is my course, just with a lot of bells and whistles. It differs from most of these MOOCs, which are produced in a studio. That's not what I'm doing; I'm showing what a class at Columbia is.

The classroom setting works well in the video. There's a lot of little moments of you reacting to the audience that comes through.

It would have been easier to do it in a studio. Setting it up in a classroom there's all kinds of intangible things that you can't predict. I said, "No, forget that." They even said that they'd get students to volunteer and sit there. Nobody is going to volunteer for a whole semester to do that!

But the most important thing is the energy. A lecture is a performance, and you feed off the audience, and if they respond, you respond.

How's it gone so far?

It had a much lower dropout rate than most of these MOOCs. It started off with about 7,000 people and maybe five or six thousand finished the course. A lot of these things have large dropout rates. But the people who took this seem to be committed. Quite a few participated in the online forums.

But this is not the future of education. At least I hope not. But it is a tremendous adjunct to education. What appealed to me about this is that the students are all over the world, all of different ages, many retirees, students, teachers. So I'm using this to reach people I'd never encounter in my classroom. And that's our job, to spread knowledge.

An early lecture described at length how historians argue and think about the Civil War over time. Why is that important for the class?

This is what we call historiography. The word itself is an invitation to fall asleep, right? But it's critical to any history course, getting students and viewers to understand that history is not just a body of facts. It is not just a fixed set of information that people have to memorize. It is always changing and being debated. Revising history is the name of the game. That's how our knowledge increases, with new perspectives and new questions.

This era has been written about for well over a century. Looking at how historical interpretation has changed over time is essential to thinking about this period. In the first MOOC, I talk about the coming of the Civil War and how many different scholars have described that. Reconstruction is maybe the most striking example of how historical interpretation has radically changed over the past thirty or forty years, compared to the accepted interpretation that dominated for the first half or more of the twentieth century.

What are the consequences of that? Historical interpretation has real world impact. They're not just ivory tower questions. Later on in the second MOOC I'll talk about how historians have interpreted why the Confederacy lost. There are internal and external explanations, military, political and social explanations. How historians have tried to balance all that is another example.

It's hard for people not versed in history to get the point on why historical interpretation changes. In the general culture "revisionist historian" is a term of abuse. But that is what we do. Revising history is our job. So every historian is a revisionist historian in some sense.

How hard is it to communicate to the students that a bad history of Reconstruction really harmed the country for a long time?

I make a big point of it in my third course. The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow System. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relation because of the worry of having another Reconstruction.

All of the alleged horrors of Reconstruction helped to freeze the minds of the white South in resistance to any change whatsoever. And it was only after the Civil Rights revolution swept away the racist underpinnings of that old view—i.e., that black people are incapable of taking part in American democracy—that you could get a new view of Reconstruction widely accepted. For a long time it was an intellectual straitjacket for much of the white South, and historians have a lot to answer for in helping to propagate a racist system in this country.
 
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