The AP Exam in U. S. History Explained

Just when you thought you were rotten sick of hearing about the AP exam in U. S. history, here comes the fullest explanation of the Advanced Placement program that can be found anywhere. Here it is in Rants & Raves. If this be (fair & balanced) erudition, so be it.

[x OAH Newsletter]
Teaching the College Introductory Survey in the High School: Reaching out to AP U.S. History Teachers
by
Mike Johanek, Uma Venkateswaran, and Lawrence Charap

The College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) program now serves as a strong vehicle for promoting high academic standards, with college-level work for high school students. The product of a unique collaboration between high school teachers and college faculty dating back to the 1950s, AP is the de facto standard for academic programs that help students make the transition from high school to college. The recognition of AP as a program of academic excellence has, in turn, fueled a rapid expansion in the number of students taking the examinations. Last year, approximately 250,000 students took the Advanced Placement United States History examination. With this growth comes the continued twin challenges of maintaining high standards that correspond with advances in each discipline, and expanding access to these rigorous courses in much more equitable ways.

In this article we provide a brief overview of college faculty's involvement in the school-college collaboration that is AP, including the College Board's expanded efforts to strengthen its support to AP teachers.

Faculty Involvement in AP United States History

The AP U.S. history exam is three hours and ten minutes long and tests the knowledge and skills gained in a college level survey course through both multiple choice and essay questions. College faculty play a critical role in the following ways:

• Establishing the content domain for the examination

Colleges nationwide are surveyed to determine the course material covered in a typical survey course as well as any pedagogical changes. This feedback is used to establish the contents of the exam.

• Developing the examination

Led by one of its college faculty members, a development committee of seven college and high school faculty write, review and approve all the questions for the examination.

• Pretesting questions

The program gathers data on every multiple-choice question through a process called pretesting. College faculty administer shorter versions of the exam to their students at the end of a survey course. Student performances on these questions are then analyzed in order to ensure that the AP exam meets psychometric standards.

• Grading the exams

The essays on the exam are graded by college and high school faculty, who meet on a college campus in June. Every year, college and high school faculty participate in a week-long AP Reading, which combines rigorous grading by day with informal research, collegial discussion and academic collaboration in the evening. This last June, over 780 college and high school faculty participated at Trinity University in San Antonio.

• College Comparability Studies

Every four or five years, the program invites select colleges nationwide to participate in a college comparability study that is used to set the standards for the exam. Faculty from colleges with students who have high AP scores administer a mini version of the exam to their students. Performances of these students are then compared to the performances of AP candidates to ensure that AP standards match college level standards.

Supporting AP Teachers

Critical to maintaining high standards and to broadening access to AP is a whole set of resources and professional development opportunities offered by College Board and by collaborating universities. All across the U.S., hundreds of one- and two-day workshops are held during the academic year, and many week-long institutes are held during the summer. In order to carry out such a broad array of professional development--over sixty thousand teachers are involved each year across the program--the College Board depends on hundreds of consultants, active teachers and faculty who receive training, endorsement and support from College Board. In addition, College Board endorses only those summer institutes that use consultants, appropriate materials, and standardized evaluations that comply with the quality standards set by a panel of college and school representatives. Finally, a number of publications are available as well, including teacher's guides, released exams, CD-ROMs and other supporting materials.

In addition to these efforts, College Board seeks to continue to learn more about AP teachers, and carries out regular research on AP teaching, including a broad forty- question survey of over thirty thousand teachers regarding their academic background and professional support needs. At present, we are in the midst of a study of AP U.S. History teachers and students, examining instructional practices in light of student performance patterns.

AP Central

One important component of the College Board's professional development efforts is its web site for AP teachers, AP Central, launched in December 2001. The site currently has over two hundred thousand registered users, representing principals, AP coordinators, and college professors, as well as high school teachers. In addition to providing current information on the Advanced Placement Program and the AP Examinations, AP Central features &opendouble;best practices" teaching articles, lesson plans, curriculum units, online discussion groups, and announcements for AP workshops and Summer Institutes. The site puts teachers in touch with one another and keeps them informed of larger trends in teaching and research affecting their fields.

One important way that AP Central has created connections between AP teachers and higher education is through its Teachers' Resource Catalog. This searchable database contains thousands of reviews of resources commonly used in the AP classroom and the college-level survey course. The review list in each course is drawn up by a content advisor and peer-reviewed by teachers and college faculty; the reviews themselves are similarly written by veteran AP teachers and by college survey instructors. The reviews do not merely provide a synopsis of the content of a given textbook, video, web site, primary source, or other teaching tool: they discuss how it can actually be used in the AP classroom, whether as a student assignment or as background information for a teacher.

AP Central has also been a prime way to join the research community with the needs and interests of high school teachers. Collaboration agreements with professional organizations such as the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association have resulted in a series of "state of the field" pieces by leading scholars, discussing how recent developments in historical research will affect the teaching of the U.S. history survey course. College Board is also working with the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Institution to produce web, print and online resources for the use of artifacts in teaching the survey. Other innovative content development on the site--such as a series of U.S. history online lesson plans created by the Ohio State University's Teaching Institute--presents teachers with an integrated package of sources and teaching materials about important topics in the AP classroom.

The site is also an ideal portal that allows teachers to connect with other valuable academic resources for the survey course, such as the "Teaching and Textbook" column of the JAH, or a series of online teaching modules created by the Columbia American History Online project.

Collaboration with OAH

AP U.S. History has established a strong partnership with the OAH over the last couple of years through a number of initiatives. At the readings, OAH sponsors distinguished faculty who address the readers and share information about the OAH. The College Board distributes the OAH Magazine of History to over 8,000 AP U.S. History teachers at its workshops nationwide. More recently, we are proud to announce the formation of a Joint OAH/AP Advisory Board on Teaching the U.S. History Survey Course. The Advisory Board consists of distinguished college and high school faculty who will guide efforts to strengthen the survey and provide resources to AP U.S. History teachers. Faculty involvement is critical to AP and it is our hope that these initiatives will strengthen the ties between AP and the academic community.

Michael Johanek received his doctorate in U.S. history from Columbia University and is Executive Director of K-12 Professional Development at the College Board; Uma Venkateswaran received her doctorate in U.S. history from Case Western Reserve University and is Assessment Specialist, History and Social Sciences at Educational Testing Service; and Lawrence Charap received his doctorate in U.S. history from Johns Hopkins University and is Head of the Humanities and Social Science Group at the College Board.

Copyright © Organization of American Historians

A Retired AP Teacher & AP Reader Weighs In On The Tascosa HS AP Incentive Program

Tom Terrific taught for 25+ years at Sun Prairie HS (an affluent Madison suburb with a lot of UW faculty children in attendance). I met Tom Terrific seven years ago at the AP Reading in U. S. history at Trinity University. We sat at the same table for the week and became fast friends. Not only is he a great guy, but he knows a helluva lot of history. His AP students knew a helluva lot of history, too. I concur with his take on the Tascosa nonsense. If this be (fair & balanced) disdain, so be it.

Tom Terrific (Madison, WI) wrote to Rants & Raves:

After reading your article on financial incentives for AP grades at Tascosa H.S. in Amarillo, I realize I taught in the wrong place! I could have augmented my salary considerably considering I had about an 80% pass rate (as defined by a 3 or more) when I taught APUSH. Another thing I find interesting in looking at the graph of their AP scores, only about 39% of the students taking the exam "passed." I always considered anything under 60% a terrible result and expected 80% or higher as did those I taught with at SPHS. Maybe if Tascosa restricted their classes to students who were better suited to the advanced nature of the course they'd realize that a 3 isn't a big deal and a 5 is what marks an outstanding student who won't need the $100 because he/she will be getting plenty of scholarship money as a reward.

I agree with your assessment of the AP scores. In the 13 years you and I together have graded AP exams, there wouldn't be enough 9s to fill one section of a college survey course.

I was in California last week and I arrived back in Wisconsin on Monday evening to cold and colder weather as the week progressed. It is in the 20s as I write this with a low of 12 predicted for tonight. I hope Heather (daughter) buys a two bedroom condo in LA soon so I can escape this cold for the winter.
Peace,
TR

I Am An Unreasonable Man & Now I Know Why

I have been unreasonable and irrational of late. If this be (fair & balanced) self-disclosure, so be it.

[x CHE]
Unreason's Seductive Charms
By DAVID P. BARASH

I teach a course titled "Ideas of Human Nature." When we talk about reason and rationality, my students are respectful but restrained; when it's time to deal with unreason and irrationality, they are downright enthusiastic. Was Hamlet wrong? And Aristotle?

"What a piece of work is a man!" exulted the otherwise melancholy Danish prince. "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!" Nearly two thousand years earlier, Aristotle maintained that happiness comes from the use of reason, since that is the unique glory and power of humanity. Indeed, for the Greeks generally, reason distinguishes us from all other living things, and the life of reason is thus the greatest good to which human beings can aspire. So why doesn't it attract more adherents these days?

For one thing, it may simply be that reason -- by definition -- is dry and cerebral, only rarely making inroads below the waist. Omar Khayyam made this trade-off uniquely explicit: "For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:/Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed/And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse."

To be sure, excessive reason is easy to caricature. Thus, at one point in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, our hero journeys to Laputa, whose male inhabitants are utterly devoted to their intellects: One eye focuses inward and the other upon the stars. Neither looks straight ahead. The Laputans are so cerebral that they cannot hold a normal conversation; their minds wander off into sheer contemplation. They require servants who swat them with special instruments about the mouth and ears, reminding them to speak or listen as needed. Laputans concern themselves only with pure mathematics and equally pure music. Appropriately, they inhabit an island that floats, in ethereal indifference, above the ground. Laputan women, however, are unhappy and regularly cuckold their husbands, who do not notice. The prime minister's wife, for example, repeatedly runs away, preferring to live down on Earth with a drunk who beats her.

Thus presented, to reject reason seems, well, downright reasonable. Consider how rare it is for someone caught in the grip of strong emotion to be overcome by a fit of rationality, but how frequently events go the other way. After all, Blaise Pascal, who abandoned his brilliant study of mathematics to pursue religious contemplation, famously noted "the heart has its reasons that reason does not understand." Or as the 17th-century English churchman and poet Henry Aldrich pointed out in his "Reasons for Drinking," often we make up our minds first, and find "reasons" only later: "If all be true that I do think/There are five reasons we should drink:/Good wine -- a friend -- or being dry -- / or lest we should be by and by -- /Or any other reason why."

We may speak admiringly of Greek rationality, of the Age of Reason, and of the Enlightenment, yet it is far easier to find great writing -- and even, paradoxically, serious thinking -- that extols unreason, irrationality, and the beauty of "following one's heart" rather than one's head. Some of the most "rational" people have done just that.

Legend has it, for example, that when Pythagoras came up with his famous theorem, justly renowned as the cornerstone of geometry (that most logical of mental pursuits), he immediately sacrificed a bull to Apollo. Or think of Isaac Newton: pioneering physicist, both theoretical and empirical, he of the laws of motion and gravity, inventor of calculus, and widely acknowledged as the greatest of all scientists. ("Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.") This same Newton wrote literally thousands of pages, far more than all his physics and mathematics combined, seeking to explicate the prophecies in the Book of Daniel.

Montaigne devoted many of his essays to a skeptical denunciation of the human ability to know anything with certainty. But probably the most influential of reason's opponents was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed that "the man who thinks is a depraved animal," thereby speaking for what came to be the Romantic movement. But even earlier, many thinkers, including those who employed reason with exquisite precision, had been inclined to put it "in its place." The hardheaded empiricist philosopher David Hume, for example, proclaimed that "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Furthermore, when reason turns against the deeper needs of people, Hume argued, people will turn against reason.

Probably the most articulate, not to mention downright angry, denunciation of human reason is found in the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, especially his novella Notes From the Underground, which depicts a nameless man: unattractive, unappealing, and irrational. In angry contradiction to the utilitarians who argued that society should aim for the "greatest good for the greatest number" and that people can be expected to act in their own best interest, the Underground Man -- literature's first "antihero" -- jeered that humanity can never be encompassed within a "Crystal Palace" of rationality. He may have a point: Certainly, unreason can be every bit as "human" as the Greeks believed rationality to be. You don't have to be a Freudian, for example, to recognize the importance of the unconscious, which, like an iceberg, not only floats largely below the surface -- and is thus inaccessible to rational control -- but also constitutes much of our total mental mass.

It is one thing, however, to acknowledge the importance of unreason and irrationality, and quite another to applaud it, as the Underground Man does: "I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man." The key concept for Dostoyevsky's irrational actor is spite, a malicious desire to hurt another without any compensating gain for the perpetrator. Consider the classic formulation of spite: "cutting off your nose to spite your face," disfiguring yourself for "no reason."

Significantly, spiteful behavior does not occur among animals. Even when an animal injures itself or appears to behave irrationally -- gnawing off its own paw, killing and eating its young -- there is typically a biological payoff: freeing oneself from a trap, turning an offspring that may be unlikely to survive into calories for the parent. Spite is uniquely human.

The Underground Man goes on to rail against a world in which -- to his great annoyance -- two times two equals four. He claims, instead, that there is pleasure to be found in a toothache, and refers, with something approaching admiration, to Cleopatra's alleged fondness for sticking golden pins in her slave girls' breasts in order to "take pleasure in their screams and writhing." As the Underground Man sees it, the essence of humanness is living "according to our own stupid will ... because it preserves for us what's most important and precious, that is, our personality and our individuality." He believes that people act irrationally because they stubbornly want to, snarling that "if you say that one can also calculate all this according to a table, this chaos and darkness, these curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all in advance would stop everything and that reason alone would prevail -- in that case man would be insane deliberately in order not to have reason, but to have his own way!"

Such sentiments are in no way limited to this most famous apostle of the dark Russian soul, or to European Romantics. Here is a poem from that quintessentially American writer, Stephen Crane: "In the desert/I saw a creature, naked, bestial,/Who, squatting upon the ground,/Held his heart in his hands,/And ate of it./I said, 'Is it good, friend?'/ 'It is bitter -- bitter,' he answered;/'But I like it/Because it is bitter,/And because it is my heart.'"

But no matter how fashionable it may be to "dis" reason, let's not be carried away. Strong emotion can be wonderful, especially when it involves love. But it can also be horrible, as when it calls forth hatred, fear, or violence. In any event, one doesn't have to idolize Greek-style rationality to recognize that excesses of unreason typically have little to recommend themselves, and much misery to answer for.

We may admire -- albeit surreptitiously -- the Underground Man's insistence on being unpredictable, even unpleasant, spiteful, or willfully irrational. But most of us wouldn't choose him to be our financial, vocational, or romantic adviser, or, indeed, any sort of purveyor of wisdom. Maybe unalloyed reason doesn't make the heart sing, but as a guide to action, it is probably a lot better than its darker, danker, likely more destructive, albeit sexier alternative.

In Newton's case, as in Pythagoras', the most exquisite rationality did not preclude unreason or, as some would prefer to call it, faith. But at least, no great harm seems to have been done by the cohabitation. Sadly, this isn't always the case. "Only part of us is sane," wrote Rebecca West.

"Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our 90s and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves. ... "

It may be significant that West wrote the above while reminiscing on her time in the Balkans, among inhabitants of what we now identify as the former Yugoslavia, people with a long, terrible history of doing things to each other that many outsiders readily label "insane," or at least "unreasonable." Her point is deeper, however, not merely a meditation on Balkan irrationality, but on everyone's.

Take, for a more pedestrian example, the following: Imagine that you have decided to see a play and paid the admission price of $10 per ticket. As you enter the theater, you discover that you have lost the ticket. The seat was not marked, and the ticket cannot be recovered. Would you pay $10 for another ticket? Forty-six percent of the subjects of an experiment answered yes; 54 percent answered no.

Then, a different question was asked: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theater, you discover that you have lost a $10 bill. Would you still pay $10 for a ticket for the play? This time, a whopping 88 percent answered yes and only 12 percent answered no.

In other words, most people say that if they had lost their ticket, they would be unwilling to buy another, but if they had simply lost the value of the ticket ($10), an overwhelming majority have no qualms about making the purchase! Why such a huge difference? According to the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (the former a recent economics Nobelist), it is explicable -- not by reason but by the way people organize their mental accounts.

Here is another one: Would you accept a gamble that offers a 10-percent chance to win $95 and a 90-percent chance to lose $5? The great majority of people in the study rejected this proposition as a loser. Yet, a bit later, the same individuals were asked this question: Would you pay $5 to participate in a lottery that offers a 10-percent chance to win $100 and a 90-percent chance to win nothing? A large proportion of those who refused the first option accepted the second. But the options offer identical outcomes. As Kahneman and Tversky see it: "Thinking of the $5 as a payment makes the venture more acceptable than thinking of the same amount as a loss." It's all a matter of how the situation is framedin this case, the extent to which people are "risk averse."

Which brings us to yet another perspective on why Homo sapiens isn't always strictly sapient. Let's start by agreeing with Herbert Simon (who also won a Nobel Prize in economics) that the mind is simply incapable of solving many of the problems posed by the real world, just because the world is big and the mind is small. But add this: The human mind did not develop as a calculator designed to solve logical problems. Rather, it evolved for a very limited purpose, one not fundamentally different from that of the heart, lungs, or kidneys; that is, the job of the brain is simply to enhance the reproductive success of the body within which it resides.

This is the biological purpose of every mind, human as well as animal, and moreover, it is its only purpose. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood, of the lungs to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, while the kidneys' work is the elimination of toxic chemicals. The brain's purpose is to direct our internal organs and our external behavior in a way that maximizes our evolutionary success. That's it. Given this, it is remarkable that the human mind is good at solving any problems whatsoever, beyond "Who should I mate with?," "What is that guy up to?," "How can I help my kid?," "Where are the antelopes hanging out at this time of year?" There is nothing in the biological specifications for brain-building that calls for a device capable of high-powered reasoning, or of solving abstract problems, or even providing an accurate picture of the "outside" world, beyond what is needed to enable its possessors to thrive and reproduce. Put these requirements together, on the other hand, and it appears that the result turns out to be a pretty good (that is, rational) calculating device.

In short, the evolutionary design features of the human brain may well hold the key to our penchant for logic as well as illogic. Following is a particularly revealing example, known as the Wason Test.

Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let's say that the four cards are as follows:

T 6 E 9

Which ones should you turn over?

Most people realize that they don't have to inspect the other side of card T. However, a large proportion respond that the 6 should be inspected. They are wrong: The rule says that if one side is a vowel, the other must be an even number, but nothing about whether an even number must be accompanied by a vowel. (The side opposite a 6 could be a vowel or a consonant; either way, the rule is not violated.) Most people also agree that the E must be turned over, since if the other side is not an even number, the rule would be violated. But many people do not realize that the 9 must also be inspected: If its flip side is a vowel, then the rule is violated. So, the correct answer to the above Wason Test is that T and 6 should not be turned over, but E and 9 should be. Fewer than 20 percent of respondents get it right.

Next, consider this puzzle. You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?

Nearly everyone finds this problem easy. You needn't check the age of person 1, the water drinker. Similarly, there is no reason to examine the beverage of person 2, who is over 21. But obviously, you had better check the age of person 3, who is drinking beer, just as you need to check the beverage of person 4, who is underage. The point is that this problem set, which is nearly always answered correctly, is logically identical to the earlier set, the one that causes considerable head scratching, not to mention incorrect answers.

Why is the second problem set so easy, and the first so difficult? This question has been intensively studied by the evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides. Her answer is that the key isn't logic itself -- after all, the two problems are logically equivalent -- but how they are positioned in a world of social and biological reality. Thus, whereas the first is a matter of pure reason, disconnected from reality, the second plays into issues of truth telling and the detection of social cheaters. The human mind, Cosmides points out, is not adapted to solve rarified problems of logic, but is quite refined and powerful when it comes to dealing with matters of cheating and deception. In short, our rationality is bounded by what our brains were constructed -- that is, evolved -- to do.

One of Goya's most famous paintings is titled "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters." Monsters, however, arise from many sources, and not just when reason is slumbering and our irrational, unconscious selves have free play. Sometimes, in fact, it is reason itself that generates monstrous outcomes. After all, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were technical triumphs, involving no small amount of "rationality." And perhaps I need to acknowledge that no matter the extent to which my students' embrace of the Underground Man seems to me downright unreasonable, it is also profoundly human.

David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington at Seattle.

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

I've Lost That Lovin' Feelin: Bobby Hatfield, RIP

I know who just entered Rock'n Roll Heaven (where they've got a helluva band). Actually, Hatfield and Medley performed in a club in Orange County, CA that was frequented by black Marines stationed at El Toro Marine Air Station. The Righteous Brothers got their name from the appreciative Marines for their soulful sound. I have nearly worn out a CD of the best of the Righteous Brothers. If this be (fair & balanced) hagiography, so be it!

[x NYTimes]
Bobby Hatfield, a Righteous Brothers Singer, Dies at 63
By BEN SISARIO

Bobby Hatfield, whose wholesomely passionate tenor carried the upper harmonies of the pop-soul duo the Righteous Brothers in hits like "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," died on Wednesday in a hotel room in Kalamazoo, Mich. He was 63 and lived in Newport Beach, Calif.

The cause was unknown, said David Cohen, his manager. Mr. Hatfield's body was found in bed shortly before the Righteous Brothers were to perform at Western Michigan University, Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Hatfield and his partner in the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley, were deeply influenced by the intimate and expressive style of black soul singers, but unlike most previous white groups they sought to emulate the raw intensity of those singers. In hits like "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," "Unchained Melody" and "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration," Mr. Medley and Mr. Hatfield channeled an emotional power that had rarely been heard in white pop.

Robert Lee Hatfield was born in Beaver Dam, Wis., and grew up in Anaheim, Calif. He is survived by his wife Linda; his sons Robert Jr., Kalin and Dustin; and a daughter, Vallyn, all of Newport Beach.

Mr. Hatfield attended Fullerton Junior College and Long Beach State University, both in California, and sang in groups that played at proms and fraternity dances. In 1962 Mr. Hatfield's group, the Variations, merged with Mr. Medley's, the Paramours. The men formed a duo later that year and reportedly took their name after a black fan exclaimed at one of their concerts, "That was righteous, brothers."

Unlike Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis before them, the Righteous Brothers maintained a well-scrubbed image. "Lovin' Feelin' " was a No. 1 hit in 1965 and has become one of the most popular songs in radio history. A spokeswoman for BMI, the music-licensing organization, said that the song had been broadcast more than 10 million times in the United States. But "Lovin' Feelin' " was an unlikely hit. Before it was recorded, the Righteous Brothers had only minimal success; the group's biggest hit was "Little Latin Lupe Lu," which reached No. 49 in 1963.

Phil Spector signed the group to his Philles label in 1964 and wrote "Lovin' Feelin' " for them with his songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. That hit was recorded with Mr. Spector's trademark "wall of sound" technique, with an abundance of instruments, including four acoustic guitars, three basses and three pianos. Mr. Medley sang the verses in a sonorous baritone and Mr. Hatfield joined in on the choruses with soaring harmonies.

Worried that the song was too long to be played by D.J.'s, Mr. Spector listed a false running time on the record's label. Instead of its actual length of 3 minutes and 50 seconds, the last two digits were reversed, so the label read 3:05.

The Righteous Brothers recorded several more hits with Mr. Spector, including "Unchained Melody," "Ebb Tide" and "Just Once in My Life," before signing a million-dollar contract with Verve Records. At Verve the group recorded another Mann-Weil song, "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration," with Mr. Medley as producer fastidiously recreating Mr. Spector's wall of sound. It became a No. 1 hit in 1966. In the mid-60's the group was also a regular act on the weekly television show "Shindig!"

The group broke up in 1968 and for a short time Mr. Hatfield retained the name the Righteous Brothers on tour, with Jimmy Walker filling in for Mr. Medley.

Mr. Hatfield and Mr. Medley reunited in 1974 and had a No. 3 hit with "Rock and Roll Heaven," a tribute to dead rock stars. Mr. Medley retired in 1976, but the two reunited again in 1983. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland this year.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company