What History Can Be

What do the Grinch, an academic symposium, and archival documents at Penn’s Kislak Center have in common? They’re all part of the first-year seminar, A History of America’s Children, taught by Hardeep Dhillon, an assistant professor in the Department of History and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program. The course leans heavily on experiential and analytical learning not only to examine how the roles and perceptions of children and childhood have changed in American history, but also to explore new ways of studying history altogether.

“This seminar is really about introducing students to what history can be. It’s about history in its multitudes,” says Dhillon, who is offering the seminar for the first time this semester. “History is often misunderstood as a field of facts and dates. As a discipline, however, it offers core analytical skills that allow students to interpret the past.”

Dhillon’s main area of research is the history of immigration, particularly the effects of United States law on immigrant communities and families. Among a larger focus on U.S. citizenship, alienage, and racial violence, Dhillon also studies how American law affects children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents. This includes access to public schooling and equal rights.

“As I researched immigrant families, I increasingly thought about children,” she says. “Their appearance in historical records made me think about their absence in immigration history and the importance of historical methods. I found myself asking how we write histories of people who are marked as passive actors or whose voices are written out altogether.”

By presenting American history from the vantage point of childhood, Dhillon felt she could offer a nuanced understanding of industrialization, education, and social reform. Though perceptions of children and childhood can mirror broader historical shifts, Dhillon argues that children from diverse cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds have vastly different experiences. “So, rather than making broad generalizations about U.S. history, I’m locating children and communities affected in various ways by shared and distinct sets of laws and bureaucratic practices,” she says. “This more granular approach encourages students to slow down and think about the past in a different way.”

Top left: A photograph in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania shows students at a Native American boarding school. Top right:Professor Hardeep Dhillon (right) leads a discussion in the first-year seminar, A History of America’s Children. Bottom right: (L to R) First-year College students Fia Guyer Galperin, Olivia LaPlante, and Victoria Largaespada-Tercero examine documents at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

One example Dhillon offers is off-reservation Native American Boarding Schools established in the late 19th century. Children who attended these schools were separated from their families and prevented from practicing their Native languages and cultures. “We’re learning about the consequences of those schools through oral histories, the memoirs of people who attended them as children, and Native advocacy in the past and present,” she says. “These histories present a perspective that should prompt us to attend to the historical silences, erasures, and conflicts in the archive and whose authority has shaped Native history and the history of education in the United States.”

This more granular approach encourages students to slow down and think differently about the past.

There are many other examples, and students engage with them through short written responses to readings or discussions, small group activities, and debates. The final project is a presentation exploring a single archival document of each student’s choosing—a “micro-history” tracing where the document came from, how it landed in a particular archive, and the way it has been employed by historians.

Dhillon says she wants students to gain crucial analytical skills applicable beyond the classroom, fostered by understanding how history is produced and influences ideas about the world. “Many arguments that we have as a society are based on historical interpretations of the past—many of them inaccurate—so critical history is a fundamental skill. It helps you better understand arguments about the past and their relationship to the world we live in.”

And how does the Grinch fit in all of this? “How the Grinch Stole Christmas is fundamentally a story about how childhood innocence transforms even the cruelest character,” Dhillon says. “We need to understand childhood innocence as a historical production through an intersectional lens. For instance, which children were seen as innocent? Which were not? Why? The seminar offers analytical moments like this, introducing students not only to the history of children in America but to the discipline of history as a field with multiple facets and methods.”