Teaching, Learning, and Living History: Anne Firor Scott

Anne Scott was a legendary teacher among Duke University undergraduates from 1961 to 1991. Though small in stature, she had a commanding presence in the classroom that belied the years she had spent on the margins of our profession. In the 1960s, she was one of the few opportunities Duke students had to experience a woman professor who exuded such authority. Decades before "active learning" became a goal for undergraduate classrooms, she began her courses announcing that "lectures have been obsolete since the invention of the printing press." I vividly recall that declaration on the first day of class in my sophomore year in 1963. Thirty-five of us were seated on rows of wooden benches bolted to the floor, much like pews, our seats separated by small desktops that left just enough room to squeeze in and sit down. The structure of the room declared that this was a lecture hall, but Dr. Scott made it clear we had to come to class prepared to discuss whatever we were assigned for that day. The learning was in the discussion. She did not use the term, but her teaching was Socratic.

She made a seating chart the first day, and by the end of that week she knew every name and where we were sitting. "Miss Evans, what was this author's point about the Revolution?" "Mr. Jones, what was the evidence for that?" In later years, when she held court at class reunions, I realized that she carried in her memory thirty-plus years of classrooms and could have filled out those charts with almost every student in the right seat. My place was two rows back, stage left. If I had failed to prepare that day, I studiously looked at the floor as she was deciding who to call on. Sometimes that worked. Otherwise, "Miss Evans?" would elicit a guilty admission, or an effort to sound informed based on what had already been said in class.

Dr. Scott (I could not call her anything but Dr. Scott until I was well into my forties and a tenured professor myself) became my model for teaching. I poached and reconfigured her assignments to give my own students the same opportunity to discover the joys of historical research and analysis. She required us to write the history of the day we were born, which took me back to the middle of World War II and down to the newspaper archive. And we were sent to the archives to find a "primary source"—preferably some personal papers like letters and diaries—from which to write a brief research paper.

The Duke archive at that time was in the basement of the library. A low ceiling with fluorescent lights hovered over large tables in the middle and cast light on surrounding shelves of guides to the collections and reference books. Several women (I do remember the archivists as female) came in and out, offering advice based on their apparently encyclopedic knowledge of what was in the hundreds of collections whose boxes could be requested for study. That archive was a revelation. I had already found the musty newspaper room, whose huge books of bound papers had special stands to hold them while you turned their yellowed pages. This time I wanted to see personal writings, perhaps from the Civil War. An archivist—who in hindsight I would guess was well aware of Dr. Scott's research interest in women—pointed me to the letters and diaries of a young white Georgia woman through which I suddenly found myself in the middle of a giddy round of balls and visits to neighboring plantations. This young woman punctuated narratives of her social life with news of a war that she clearly did not understand and with complaints about shortages of all manner of everyday items. I zeroed in on a picnic outing to Andersonville, where her potato salad, deviled eggs, and ham won the attentions of young Confederate soldiers stationed there to guard a stockade filled with prisoners. Her obvious delight (some of the men were...