VCU news

By Kyra Newman

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, news footage of bare store shelves prompted people to recall similar scenes from the Great Depression nearly a century earlier – a faulty comparison, Virginia Commonwealth University professor Gabriel Reich says.

After all, the Great Depression resulted from a complex mix of economic factors. But those empty shelves in spring 2020 reflected an overtaxed supply chain, not a shortage of actual goods or personal finances.

This is an example of historical consciousness, which Reich, Ph.D., a professor in VCU’s Department of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education, described as “how people use what they know about the past to make sense of what’s going on in the present – or even to imagine what might be possible in the future.”

During his recent study-research leave, Reich spent a month in Sweden gathering insights on his latest writing and research, offering professional development training for teachers and visiting classrooms. At the annual conference of HEIRNET – the History Educators International Research Network – he gave several papers in which he sought to describe the ways that knowledge of history impacts how people make sense of the world around them.

How history shifts like the tides

Reich uses the term “tidalectics,” coined by Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, to describe the changes he has observed in the way Americans think about their past. Reich said ideas in society come and go, much like the tides.

“Sometimes a historical narrative meets the need of people in that culture, and when it does, it can rise like a really high tide and sweep through the way people think about certain events,” he said.

In the first of two papers he presented at HEIRNET, Reich addressed the relationship between history as created by historians and history as it exists in popular culture.

“Many scholars have a stark divide between those two,” he said. “And I think they are different, but I think they are deeply related and conversing with each other.”

He pointed to the 1619 Project, a New York Times-led initiative focused on the history of race in America. The project emerged in the years after a mass killing in a Black church in Charleston, S.C.; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd. It filled a void, which spans generations, that stemmed from ignoring the history of race and the centrality of African Americans in U.S. history.

“That 1619 work fit into this cultural search for a story that would help explain this history of race, and it swept like a tide and changed how a lot of people saw it,” Reich said. “But like a tide, there’s going to be a backlash, and that has come now in the form of new culture war battles, with bans on critical race theory in school and banning books.”

The impact of nationalism

In his second paper, Reich looked at the importance of nationalism in history curricula taught today, particularly its impact on people’s view of the world over the past 150 years. The evolution of modern nation-states in Europe and the Americas paralleled the development of history as an academic discipline and the establishment of mass public schools.

Returning to the 1619 Project as an example, Reich cited the 1776 Commission, a conservative report that presented a different version of the nationalist story, with its anchor to the nation’s Founding Fathers and their beliefs.

“But those narratives aren’t necessarily as different as we often think,” he said. “They are both telling stories of progress, the form of the story is very similar, and they both adhere to something pretty close to American exceptionalism.”

Although they both tell a nationalist story about the United States, 1619 and 1776 differ in that they place different groups at the center as the star. “That’s very interesting to me,” Reich said, noting its role in his research, “because in our culture wars, these are seen as polar opposites.”

Focusing on historical consciousness

Those papers will serve as chapters in Reich’s upcoming book on historical consciousness. A major example in the book – which leans into social science, quantitative analysis and qualitative studies, along with history – looks at views of the Civil War.

During his fall visit to the University of Karlstad, he spoke to classes about his field research in 2016. Art and English teachers taught parallel units about Richmond’s Monument Avenue, so-named for its statues of many Confederate leaders as well as Arthur Ashe, a tennis legend from the city. The final art project called for the Central Virginia high school students – most of whom were Black – to create a statue out of papier-mâché, while their English assignment was to write a letter to the mayor about what they believed should be the avenue’s future.

“I used those letters to talk about the students’ historical consciousness,”‘ Reich said. “In the letters, they’re talking about the past, they’re connecting the past to the present. They’re talking about, primarily, why the Confederate statues went up, why the Arthur Ashe statue went up and what the future of the avenue should look like.”

At the time, not one student argued for the removal of the Confederate statues, but “events can happen, and that can shift what we believe is possible in dramatic ways, as it did in Richmond,” he said. The city and state began removing the statues after the George Floyd protests.

That same research provided the foundation for professional development workshops Reich led for Swedish teachers. Those sessions included guidance on teaching during culture wars, which the Scandinavian country currently is experiencing with tensions around nationalism and immigration.

Reich’s study-research leave research was funded in part by the VCU Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Fund.