Was the American Revolution a Mistake?

About the Book

Why was George Washington dismayed by the outcome of the American Revolution?

Would slavery still exist if the South had not seceded from the Union in 1861?

Might socialists rule America today if Teddy Roosevelt had not run for President and lost in 1912?

                History is full of contingencies.  People confront problems and debate options for solving them.  Then they make a choice and face the consequences of their choice.  Often they wonder if a different choice might have been better.  Was the American Revolution a mistake?  Was racial segregation inevitable?  Was the Cold War necessary?  Americans have repeatedly asked these sorts of questions as they examined the consequences of their choices.

                This is a book about revisiting crucial choices people made in history and examining the consequences of those choices for them and for us.  It demonstrates a method of teaching history that recreates events as people experienced them, and asks important questions that troubled them but that rarely appear in conventional textbooks.  Unlike conventional methods that often reduce history to names, dates and factoids for students to memorize, it is a method that brings past debates to life, the losers' as well as the winners' points of view, and makes the subject exciting.

                In studying history as choice, students examine the problems people faced, their options for solving them, their decision-making processes, and the choices they made.  Then students evaluate the consequences of those choices both for people in the past and us today.  They explore what might have happened if different choices had been made.  Finally, students relate the consequences of those past choices to problems we face today and the choices we need to make.

                History as choice is a practical and practicable method.  It has been designed to satisfy the curriculum goals of the National Council for the Social Studies, and the book explains how it can be used to satisfy any state or local curriculum standards.  The book also identifies and illustrates resources that can be used with this method -- from data bases to popular music -- and explains how teachers can gradually integrate it into their courses. 

                In the first part of the book, the method of history as choice is explained using the question of whether the American Revolution was a mistake as a case in point.  The second part of the book explores thirteen other questions about significant issues and events in American history as additional examples of how one might teach history as choice.

About the Author

Burton Weltman has taught history for over forty-five years and has taught history education for more than twenty years. He has worked in and with a wide range of schools. These have included inner city and suburban schools; elementary, middle, and high schools; and, undergraduate and graduate college programs. He has taught prospective and practicing teachers at a wide range of colleges, including Essex Community College, Rutgers University, Teachers College/Columbia University, and William Paterson University, from which he recently retired as a social studies education professor. Professor Weltman has also worked as a lawyer, serving as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of New Jersey and in a variety of policy-making and administrative positions for the City of New York and the State of New Jersey. He grew up in Chicago and has been a life-long Cubs fan. This experience helps explain his interest in lost causes and in reconsidering the viewpoints of the losers in history, a key element in the method of teaching history as choice that he explains in this book. As a child, Professor Weltman hated school, was terminally bored by his classes and frequently played hooky. He was drawn toward teaching by a desire to help save future children from the misery he had experienced in school. He was attracted to history by an unconventional high school teacher who made history interesting and relevant to his students by relating the choices and actions of people in the past to present-day problems, another key aspect of the method Professor Weltman demonstrates in this book. Professor Weltman has an M.A. degree in American history, a J.D. degree, and an Ed.D. degree in social studies education. He is married with two children and a grandchild. He lives in New Jersey.