Dr. James Franklin Williamson is a newly appointed History teacher here at McIntosh. His research is extensively on German and U.S History. He focused on public mourning practices and collective memory for the Second World War in East and West of Germany. His teaching practices include showing students how something about their lives is actually a product of historical events.
“I was interested in how people talk about military service, and how they talk about death as a result of military service,” Williamson said. “That got me thinking about how Americans remember history, and eventually led me to study how Germans do the same.”
Williamson also believes in studying history from multiple perspectives to form a better understanding of the past. This tends to be especially important when studying divided societies during a country affair like the Cold War era.
“No one source will tell you everything,” Williamson noted. “Only by looking at East German and West German sources and everything in between can we fill in the full picture.”
He encourages students to not just think of history as a subject, but really as a way of understanding the world that they live in. Whether it be from the structure of schools to the workings of an economy, he believes historical context would help explain how society functions today.
“It can help us understand, like, why we’re doing the things that we’re doing. Maybe it’s fixing laws to solve problems, or fixing environmental regulations or building codes, or just helping people to sort of understand each other a little bit better,” Williamson said.
