Graphic Histories No. 2: Historical Storytelling
The atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 killed upwards of 39,000 people. Seventy-five years later in Richland, Washington—next door to the nuclear plant that produced the bomb’s plutonium—the Richland High School “Bombers” still cheer for a mushroom cloud mascot at football games. Richard Bauman, professor of history at WSU Tri-Cities, writes about the challenge of teaching descendants of those who built the bomb, many of whom study at the local university, a history of the Hanford Nuclear Site that challenges a local culture that takes pride in having built the bomb that helped clinch a U.S. victory in World War II, as well as Hanford’s central role in the Cold War.
Similarly, historian Megan Kate Nelson faced the challenge of writing a history of the Civil War in the Southwest, a story that still feels personal to many people—and carries with it a good amount of patriotic lore. How, then, can we teach history in a way that builds a more complete (and thus, more accurate) understanding of events that remain close to home for the student or reader? The answer isn’t simple, but both Bauman and Nelson rely on shifts in perspective to lead the way.
This week’s graphic journaling exercise: Questionable attempts at drawing some of the protagonists from The Three-Cornered War by Megan Kate Nelson. The giant-ness of James Carleton’s head may not be quite historically accurate.
Telling a story through the eyes of someone who lived it engages the reader or student to explore the bigger picture. Nelson’s Civil War history features nine key players, representing the “three corners”—the confederacy, the union, and native peoples—to weave a much more complex understanding of the war than one might otherwise hold. When characters meet against the backdrop of some of the war’s major events, one chapter tells the story only from a confederate general’s perspective. Only several chapters later do you read the same story from the perspective of a Navajo resister. Bauman uses a similar approach, inverted. By introducing students to oral histories, documents, and other first-person accounts of Hanford, he employs the study of local history to explore national and global issues like civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental history.
Both authors also employ geographic perspective to increase understanding. Whether he’s teaching regional, Cold War, or public history, Bauman’s students visit Hanford Site, museums, and other physical locations to ground readings in reality. Nelson uses geography most powerfully by recounting several protagonists’ divergent experiences of being in the same place at the same time. Much of the story takes place in Diné Bikéyah, the Navajo homeland stretching across portions of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. From the perspective of Louisa Hawkins Canby, wife of a Union colonel tasked with driving the Navajo residents from New Mexico. Later, we hear from Juanita, the wife of a powerful Navajo headman, about her role in resisting that effort. It’s striking to develop a sense of empathy for Canby’s life and perseverance through hardships, then read how devastating the outcome of her husband’s invasion of Diné Bikéyah lands—for which she provided support—was for the Navajo Nation.
Bauman’s insight into the broader ideas that can be explored through Hanford history, in particular, will be useful to shaping my Hanford-focused research project. Nelson’s willingness to explore a range of players in historical events adds interest to and deepens her readers’ understanding of the broader history of the Civil War in the West. Graphic storytelling lends itself to presenting personal and varied perspectives, but these written resources offer ideas for how to build those approaches into the narrative as well.
