American Horror Stories: (Un)dead Pasts and Uncanny Curriculum in the Gothic Sensibilities of History Education

• In Event: Curriculum History

Abstract

While ghosts, hauntings, and supernatural occurrences rarely appear in the official curriculum of history education in the United States, affective elements of that which we call “Gothic” are present in many forms of history curriculum in the U.S. This paper suggests how themes of haunting, dread, the uncanny, and other Gothic sensibilities operate in history education curricula. A crucial element in Gothic style, substance, and sensibility takes the form of trauma (Hogle, 2014; Wheatley, 2012; Spooner & McEvoy, 2007). Building upon the importance of trauma as a curricular concept in educational theory (Burdick & Freeman, 2012; Espiritu, 2006; Simon, 2014; Zembylas, 2008, 2009), I foreground examples of that which is traumatic in history education in the United States. I investigate how Gothic elements work in the historical-curricular imagination through four case studies representative of U.S. history education curricula: (1) Indigenous/Settler Contacts; (2) The Temperance Movement; (3) Reconstruction in the South; and (4) the Great Depression. I examine how national guilt and horror become curricular constructs in history education that draw upon elements of the Gothic Sedgwick (1986) equated with “an aesthetic of pleasurable fear” (p. vi). I argue Gothic sensibilities activated in history education allow for a curriculum that makes historical awareness for learners something dark, foreboding, and disavowed; traumatic affects of guilt, fear, and shame create a historical world educators call forth in their curriculum that, as Howells associates with the Gothic, is “a peculiarly fraught fantasy world of neurosis and morbidity” (1995, p. 5).

Author

• Mark Helmsing, University of Wyoming