When it comes to discussing the events at the Capitol building on January 6, teachers have risen to the challenge. Meredith Baker, who teaches social studies in Virginia, suggests the first step should be defining five very charged terms. And that’s what we do today.
To view the archives of #sschat and see how teachers are reacting to current events in their classrooms, click here.
Also, click here to see the report on terrorism in the United States from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
[00:00:06] We were just told that there has been tear gas in the rotunda and we're being instructed to each of us get gas masks...
Nick Capodice: [00:00:18] All right, I don't usually come to Civics 101 episodes from a personal standpoint. We have a topic we want to explore. We call guests to explain it to us. We edit it together as a team, and we try to maintain a professional distance from the subject. But I frankly don't know any other way to start this episode. I'm just going to say I was sick and angry when I saw the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. And that night I thought, how on earth are we going to talk about this on the show? And thankfully, there was another group of people wrestling with the exact same question. There's this community of social studies and civics educators that we regularly interact with on the show. They're called #sschat. They hold weekly live discussions on Twitter where teachers all over the country share resources and lesson plans. They give advice to each other.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:14] They talk about what their kids are talking about, they air grievances. And they hosted an emergency chat session on the night of the sixth with one question. How are you going to talk about this with your students tomorrow?
Nick Capodice: [00:01:27] Meredith Baker, who teaches social studies in Virginia, said she would focus purely on definitions. So that's what we're going to do today.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:39] You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:42] I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:43] And today we're going to talk about some basic dictionary definitions with Meredith and hear how her students responded to the events on January 6th.
Meredith Baker: [00:01:51] I wanted to make sure that we did that in class because in my class, meaning matters. Context matters, language matters, accuracy matters. Truth matters. And so [00:02:00] I wanted to make sure we were all using the same terms in the same way.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:04] What terms did she define?
Nick Capodice: [00:02:05] Insurrection, protest, coup, terrorism and sedition.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:12] OK, so let's go through these one at a time. What is insurrection?
Meredith Baker: [00:02:17] So insurrection is defined as the act or instance of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:25] I asked Meredith, was the attack on the Capitol on the 6th an insurrection?
Meredith Baker: [00:02:29] Absolutely. I think that having looked at the headlines and reading the accounts of what happened, this was a revolt against a constituted government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:41] Are there other instances of insurrections in U.S. history?
Nick Capodice: [00:02:44] Yeah, one of the most famous ones has come up a lot in our show, Shay's Rebellion. In 1786, Daniel Shays and his followers led an armed insurrection in Massachusetts to protest foreclosures of farms due to debt. And it was one of the events that showed the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation and ultimately led to the need for a new constitution.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:04] Let's move on to protest.
Meredith Baker: [00:03:06] A protest is participation in a public demonstration in opposition to something.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:11] I feel like these terms aren't mutually exclusive, right? Like a protest can also be an insurrection.
Meredith Baker: [00:03:17] Right. Or it can start as one thing and turn into another.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:20] This next term is one that I am most eager to define because it's been hinted at in media coverage and historians have debated its usage to describe the events of the 6th. What exactly is a coup?
Meredith Baker: [00:03:32] A coup is defined as the removal of an existing government from power, usually through violent means. And typically it's an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power by a political faction in the military or a dictator.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:44] Has there ever been a coup in U.S. history?
Meredith Baker: [00:03:47] So in Wilmington in 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina, there was a fusionist government that was made up of African-Americans and and whites and that [00:04:00] was violently overthrown. And they were duly elected. They were removed from power forcibly. So, yes, that happened on a state level.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:08] An unknown number of Black Americans were murdered by white supremacists in Wilmington in November of 1898 with the express purpose of overthrowing its multiracial government. Isaac Stanley-Baker in The Washington Post referred to this as the only successful coup in American history.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:25] Where did Meredith and her students stand on the usage of that term for January 6th, 2021?
Meredith Baker: [00:04:31] I've seen this called a coup or an attempted coup, but when my class discussed this definition, we had the same reservations as many historians that I've read, and that is that this was not, to our knowledge, backed by a military power or a single government entity or something like that to give it that designation. So my students were hesitant to call it a coup. And I think many other reporters also weren't willing to go that far because they didn't feel like it met the criteria for that attempted or failed. Sometimes I've seen that used but my students in my class did not feel that that was a completely accurate term.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:19] I do want to add that it is not yet clear that the explicit intentions of the group as a whole on January 6th were to overthrow the U.S. government. And yes, some in the crowd called it a revolution, but we just don't have the information yet to know. So the next term Meredith defined was terrorism.
Meredith Baker: [00:05:36] We just used a standard dictionary definition of terrorism, and that would be the use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians in the pursuit of political goals.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:46] In a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, they found between 1994 and 2020, there have been 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, right wing terrorists perpetrated 57 percent [00:06:00] of all attacks and plots during this period, and left wing terrorists did 25 percent. We're going to put a link to the whole report on the website because it merits a thorough read.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:09] And finally, let's define sedition.
Meredith Baker: [00:06:11] Sedition is conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state. Interestingly enough, my students did not have a lot of disagreement over this one.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:22] There have been many incidents of sedition in U.S. history. The recent second impeachment of Donald Trump was on the charge of incitement of insurrection, which is by itself the definition of sedition.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:34] So how did it go from Meredith on that day with her class? Did her students come to a consensus on these terms?
Meredith Baker: [00:06:40] My students come from a range of opinions and backgrounds. They're very bright and they're also very respectful of each other. There definitely was some pushback. Some students took exception to the way that the insurrection was covered in the news. Some of them brought up issues of previous riots and protests. But we did have disagreement in the class, but it remained respectful.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:09] Well, those are some definitions today on Civics 101, a huge thank you to all of those teachers out there, not just for helping our youth navigate and understand the world, but for helping us do the same. If any of you out there are interested in how teachers are teaching civics in the past and present of America, you should view all the archives of those chats at sschat.org
