Page 120 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 5
If I had a textile factory and I made a lot of coats, then I needed, first of all, a lot of cotton. So where did I get my cotton? Secondly, if I produce 5,000 coats a day and almost everybody in my own country already wore my coats, where could I sell my coats?
Bob also provided an interesting option for using historical empathy to explain historical phenomena. Instead of explaining the differences between communism and capitalism himself when talking about the beginning of the Cold War, Bob asked his students to imagine that they were blindfolded and dropped into an unknown country. Next, he asked his students to remove the imaginary blindfold and asked them to describe how they would know if they were in a communist or capitalist country:
Bob: What do you have to notice? Where do you look?
Student A: The buildings. In a communist country, the buildings look very similar.
Student B: Maybe the differences between people?
Student C: Communism does not focus on making profit; capitalism does. Bob: And how could you see this?
Student C: The cars, the communist countries might drive the same car, often Ladas.
Bob: And why is that?
Student C: The government owned the factories and why does the government need to produce different cars?
Kim encouraged her students to practice historical empathy the most. She was the only teacher in the sample who explicitly used a historical empathy task. When explaining 18th-century child labor, she divided her class into dyads, and each dyad was instructed to empathize with a different historical agent living in the 18th century, for example, an 8-year-old child, a factory owner, and a politician. The central task was to reason whether the historical agent was against or in favor of child labor. Mark did not engage his students in historical empathy at all. When he taught his students about the Second World War and the rise of Hitler, he could have, for example, described a young German man who was unsure as to which political party he would vote for in 1930 and asked his students to empathize and reason if the man had voted for the Nazi Party. In his other lesson, he centralized a historical agent (Alexander the Great),
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