My name is Burton Weltman. I am a history maven. I have been interested in history since I was in high school, and have been studying it for over sixty years. I am particularly interested in intellectual history, and why and how people think the way they do and make the choices they make. I like to think and write about literature, education, philosophy and politics, although I generally end up looking at all of those things from a historical perspective.
In my view, everything is history, including the sentence I just typed and you just read. The present becomes the past as soon as we think of it, and we inevitably go forward while looking back at the past. So, it is particularly important, I think, that we look at the past in ways that can help us make our best ways forward.
I am retired now from gainful employment, but I taught history for over twenty-five years, including some fifteen years teaching history education. I taught history and education at a wide range of colleges, including Essex Community College in Newark, New Jersey, Rutgers University in both Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey, Teachers College/Columbia University in New York City, and William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, from which I retired about twelve years ago. I worked in and with a wide range of schools. These included inner city and suburban schools; elementary, middle, and high schools; and, undergraduate and graduate college programs.
I also worked as a lawyer for some twenty years, 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.
I approach history as people making choices. I am interested in studying how and why people think the way they do, and make the choices that they do. Whether we are studying the colonists making the American Revolution, Herman Melville writing the novel Moby Dick, or a Little League baseball manager calling for a squeeze play, we need to look at the alternatives that these people had, the reasons they chose a particular alternative over the others, the consequences of that decision, and what might have been the result if they had made a different choice. This is essentially what we do when we evaluate the decisions we make in our own lives.
My approach to law has been essentially the same as my approach to history. A legal case is basically a debate about the history of something, whether it be a crime that was ostensibly committed, a contract that was arguably breached, or an injury that was sustained. A case will generally turn on the choices made by the people involved in the case, why they made those choices, and whether their choices were reasonable.
So, everything, in my view, is history and, especially, the history of people making choices.
As a child, I hated school, was terminally bored by my classes and frequently played hooky. I was drawn toward teaching by a desire to help save future children from the misery that I experienced in school. I was attracted to history by an unconventional high school teacher who made history interesting and relevant to students by relating the choices and actions of people in the past to present-day problems. This is a key aspect of approaching history as people making choices. My goal as a teacher has been to emulate my high school history teacher.
I published a book about twelve years ago entitled “Was the American Revolution a Mistake? Reaching Students and Reinforcing Patriotism through Teaching History as Choice.” The book discusses the methods that I used during my career in teaching history and in helping history teachers. It also presents an outline of American history discussed as the result of people making choices.
The first third of the book describes the pedagogical method of approaching history as choice. It would probably be of interest mainly to teachers and other people involved in teaching history. The next two-thirds of the book discusses a series of key events in American history as the consequence of people making choices. This part of the book might be of interest to anyone who wants to read about major issues and turning points in American history. The book is available in paper and as an e-book through the publisher AuthorHouse and through on-line retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and others.
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