Historiography of Holocaust Testimonies

Historiography-Based Inquiry (HBI) is a new curricular model that invites students to examine how historians make claims and interpret sources. This teaching set offers an instructional sequence and HBI resources developed by Aya Marczyk, Abby Reisman, and Brenda Santos, and published in the #AHRSyllabus in the American Historical Review. Educators are invited to read the framing essay that introduces the pedagogical underpinnings of HBI, and then use the provided teaching set to engage students in historiographical investigation.

These materials introduce students to the works of three influential Holocaust historians: Martin Broszat, Saul Friedländer, and Christopher R. Browning. Students examine excerpts from their work and the testimony of Mania Kaufman to explore how the inclusion of testimony changed writing about the Holocaust in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Historiography-Based Inquiry

This essay introduces the pedagogical design of Historiography-Based Inquiry. It analyzes how the study of historians’ perspectives and interpretations can support and complement work with primary sources in secondary classrooms. It is part of the #AHRSyllabus project, which offers teaching materials based on historians’ disciplinary practices.

Resources for Educators

A Teaching Guide shares the rationale for the document packet and offers a suggested instructional sequence. It comes with a Historiographical Signposts document that provides a brief overview of how survivors’ testimonies and other first-person accounts have figured in historical writing about the Holocaust.

Document Packet

A set of brief excerpts from the books of three prominent Holocaust historians: Martin Broszat, Saul Friedländer, and Christopher Brownings. The excerpts are framed with contextual information, and they invite students to analyze each historian’s perspective, claims, and interpretation of sources.

Guiding Questions

A set of questions that support close reading of the texts in the Document Packet. These questions also invite students to think comparatively and articulate their own understandings of the significance of first-hand witness accounts in the study of the Holocaust.

Mania Kaufman’s Testimony

This was one of the testimonies that Christopher R. Browning examined in “Remembering Survival.” After reading Browning’s analysis, students are invited to learn about the Fortunoff interview methodology and listen to Mrs. Kaufman’s narrative about her experiences in the Nazi camps in Starachowice, Poland.

Podcast

In this episode of the American Historical Association’s “History in Focus” podcast Aya Marczyk, Abby Reisman, and Brenda Santos discuss strategies for teaching Historiography-Based Inquiry. Listen from 1:39 to 14:34.