In November 1979, militant Islamists broke into the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage, fueled by the emotional surge of the Iranian Revolution, which deposed the Shah of Iran. The standoff lasted 444 days and helped decide a Presidential election, as incumbent Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Carter's inability to bring the hostages home safe and sound cost him the office.
What few remembered about the event, at least before "Argo" came out, was that six embassy workers escaped before the embassy takeover and were taken in by Canadian diplomats. "Argo" tells the story of how the Central Intelligence Agency and the Canadian government conducted a joint operation to help those six escapees flee Iran before they were captured.
Being only 12 years old when it happened, I had a very vague recollection of what exactly caused violent uprising that resulted in the hostage situation. I remembered it having something to do with the Shah's ouster and Islamist fundamentalism sweeping through Iran like a tsunami. I remembered seeing images of American flags being burned and seeing American political figures burned in effigy on the streets of Tehran. They hated us, and part of the reason was that Shah was viewed as a friend of the United States. What I had completely forgotten was how the U.S. took in the Shah, who was dying of cancer at the time. The Iranian people wanted retribution for the Shah's reported cruelty while in power, and the U.S. refused to turned him over to the Iranian government for judgement and in all likelihood, an execution.
There is a movement afoot in social studies education to develop "historical thinking" skills among students today. The National Center for History in the Schools has defined historical thinking activities as those with involve chronological thinking, historical comprehension, historical analysis and interpretation, historical research capabilities, and analysis and decision-making related to historical issues.
In short, teachers are not just supposed to get students to memorize all of the possible causes of a certain historical event. Instead, having a historical understanding of that event involves being able to prioritize what causes are more important than others. Given the story of "Argo," my understanding of the Iranian hostage crisis has evolved.
Would the hostage crisis have happened if the U.S. had denied the Shah entry into the country? We'll never know for sure. Anti-U.S. sentiment in the region is complicated, and that one act alone may not have actually driven Iranian militants to such extreme measures. Then again, knowing the history of the Shah's bloody rule, it's safe to assume that the U.S. giving safe passage to the Shah certainly played a big role in bringing to a head the events of 1979. As history teachers, we need to encourage our students to dig deep to find out what really caused something to happen. More importantly, though, they need to be able to analysis historical events to argue what effect those causes had on the event being investigated.
Excellent back story. I think it is important too for student to thing critically of what could have happened if events were different. All in all students need to be actively engaged in the concepts and it have a more lasting effect.
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