A new history project helps educators make sense of democratic backsliding

“Authoritarianism 101,” an effort helmed by UChicago’s Mark Bradley, features 30 scholars and brings historical context to the classroom. 

By Sarah Steimer

Last spring, Mark Philip Bradley, in his role as editor of the American Historical Review, asked 30 historians from across the globe to participate in a teaching project about authoritarianism. All 30 individuals responded with a swift affirmative answer — a clear nod to the importance of educating others on the profound effects of this threat to democracies.

“People felt — myself included — a need to do something that seemed like a productive intervention in the moment,” says Bradley, the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College.

“Authoritarianism 101: A Global History” is an effort to bring historian voices to the conversation of democratic backsliding. And because the phenomenon is newer to the United States, the project includes voices that speak on authoritarianism across time and the globe.

“We think historically, and we think over big sweeps of time, and we think across a variety of geographies,” Bradley says. “We landed on this notion of trying to think about particular cases in the past where we could ask a big question of that case — a question that would transcend the particularities of the case, the moment, the place, but that would let people get a sense, in a granular way, of what it meant to experience a form of authoritarianism in that period.”

Each A101 module is centered around a big question about authoritarianism, a single primary source — some textual and some visual — and a discussion of context and teaching strategies. They’re designed so that college, university, and high school teachers can drop the modules into their existing courses, or otherwise use them as a way to develop their own history of authoritarianism courses. The three major themes of the modules include practices of authoritarianism, challenging authoritarianism, and visual cultures of authoritarianism.

Contributors brought their unique research expertise to the topic. The modules include, for example, a discussion of how authoritarian regimes promote control and legitimacy by way of physical culture and sports, as explored through the rise of the Vichy state in 1940 France. Another, centered in China in 1989, considers how authoritarian governments try to suppress political protests that challenge their rule. 

In addition to a central material for the lesson — a historical letter, a comic strip, or a film clip, perhaps — each historian also provides a framework for presenting the module in the classroom.

“What the scholars are doing is providing some kind of context that lets teachers feel like, Okay, I can put this in the moment,” Bradley explains. “They offer some very specific guidance around how to teach it and what kinds of questions to raise, and sequence ways of thinking about those questions.”

The second UChicago voice in the project is that of Samuel Fury Childs Daly, an associate professor of History and the College. Daly’s expertise focuses on law, militarism, and crime in twentieth century Africa — making him a clear candidate for the project. But he also notes that, “as a person who is living through big political changes in my own country, I think a lot about how the history that I write might inform my own times.”

The module Daly created questions whose side the law is on in a dictatorship. His primary source features the 1977 testimony of a follower of Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat musician who criticized the Nigerian dictatorship and the military that sustained, making him a political target. This one glimpse of a legal procedure, Daly explains, shows how even the strictest legal systems can be turned back against those who make them. 

Each module also includes two or three deeper readings for the teacher to explore further. Contributors were also asked to nominate what they believe to be the single most important work on the history of authoritarianism from their research perspectives. The resulting reading list includes a short pitch for the work they selected. The website also features video and podcast interviews with some of the scholars, in which they discuss their participation in the project and how to teach their modules. 

While primarily intended for the classroom, AHR is also encouraging the modules’ use in discussions organized and led by students themselves, or in reading groups at public libraries as a civic project. Bradley refers to this as a phase two goal, but he’s enthusiastic about the project reaching those outside the academy.

Historians, Bradley says, are often approached for help in understanding the state of the world, and they’ve felt the pressure of students' desires to make sense of our current moment. A project like A101, he says, gives people tools to approach these questions.

“History doesn't offer us a clear rule book or a map or a path for how to navigate things that are going on in the present,” Daly says. “But it does give us things that we can compare ourselves to and riff on, and animate our own thinking about our own times.” 

A101 is designed to do just that. History may not tell us how to navigate our own political reality, Daly explains, but it does offer perspectives from the past to help us digest the present.