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"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so." -- Felix Okoye
"Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade." -- James Loewen
"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." -- James Baldwin
"Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people." -- General Petro G.Grigorenko, samizdat letter to history journal, c. 1975, U.S.S.R.
High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it "the most irrelevant" of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. "Borr-r-ring" is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even when they are forced to take history, they repress it, so every year or two another study decries what our 17-year-olds don't know.
African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. Pardoning my grammar, they do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult than trigonometry or Faulkner. I will argue later that high school history so alienates people of color that doing badly may be a sign of mental health! Students don't know they're alienated, only that they "don't like social studies" or "aren't any good at history." In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.
Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have lots of time, light family responsibilities, some resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, they withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they settle for just staying ahead of their students in the books, teaching what will be on the test, and going through the motions.
College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had more rather than less exposure to the subject before they reach college. Not in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is
rarely taught in high school, but they don't assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. English literature courses don't presume that "Romeo and Juliet" was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, a later chapter will show that history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.
Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to C. Wright Mills, we know we do. Outside of school, Americans do show great interest in history. Historical novels often become bestsellers, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho! Utah! Nebraska! Oregon! Missouri! and on! and on!). The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The Civil War series attracted new audiences to public television. Movies tied to history have fascinated us from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to Dances With Wolves and JFK.
Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. These same stories show what America has been about and have direct relevance to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.
What has gone wrong?
We begin to get a handle on that question by noting that textbooks dominate history teaching more than any other field. Students are right: the books are boring. The stories they tell are predictable because every problem is getting solved, if it has not been already. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out wonderful in the end. "Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges," in the words of one of them. Most authors don't even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as "mumbling lecturer." No wonder students lose interest.
Textbooks almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might ask students to learn about gender roles in the present, to prompt thinking about what women did and did not achieve in the suffrage movement or the more recent women's movement. They might ask students to do family budgets for a janitor and a stock broker, to prompt thinking about labor unions and social class in the past or present. They might, but they don't. The present is not a source of information for them. No wonder students find history "irrelevant" to their present lives.
Conversely, textbooks make no real use of the past to illuminate the present. The present seems not to be problematic to them. They portray history as a simple-minded morality play. "Be a good citizen" is the message they extract from the past for the present. "You
have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has done." While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it does become something of a burden for students of color, children of working class parents, girls who notice an absence of women who made history, or any group that has not already been outstandingly successful. The optimistic textbook approach denies any understanding of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color are alienated. Even for male children of affluent white families, bland optimism gets pretty boring after eight hundred pages.
These textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to the rest of our schooling. Why are they so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Their contents are muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud," goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs, but we need not even take a look inside. The difference begins with their titles: The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule. Even literature collections are likely to be titled Readings in American Literature. Not most history books. And you can tell these books from their covers, graced with American flags, eagles, and the Statue of Liberty.
Inside their glossy covers, American history books are full of information - overly full. These books are huge. My collection of a dozen of the most popular averages four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. No publisher wants to be shut out from an adoption because their book left out a detail of concern to an area or a group. Authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every president, even Chester A. Arthur and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. Land of Promise, to take one example, enumerates 444 "Main Ideas" at the ends of its chapters. In addition, it lists literally thousands of "Skill Activities," "Key Terms," "Matching" items, "Fill in the Blanks," "Thinking Critically" questions, and "Review Identifications" as well as still more "Main Ideas" at the ends of each section within its chapters. At year's end, no student can remember 444 main ideas, not to mention 624 key terms and countless other "factoids," so students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test following each chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder high school graduates are notorious for forgetting in which century the Civil War was fought!
None of the facts is memorable, because they are presented as one damn thing after another. While they include most of the trees and all too many twigs, authors forget to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks stifle meaning as they suppress causation. Therefore students exit them without developing the ability to think coherently about social life.
Even though the books are fat with detail, even though the courses are so busy they rarely reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out what we need to know about the American past. Often the factoids are flatly wrong or unknowable. In sum, startling
errors of omission and distortion mar American histories. This book is about how we are mistaught.
Errors in history textbooks do not often get corrected, partly because the history profession does not bother to review them. Occasionally outsiders do: Frances FitzGerald's 1979 study, America Revised, was a bestseller, but she made no impact on the industry. In a sarcastic passage her book pointed out how textbooks ignored or distorted the Spanish impact on Latin America and the colonial United States. "Text publishers may now be on the verge of rewriting history," she predicted, but she was wrong - the books have not changed.
History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources - the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters from the time. Based on these primary materials, historians write secondary works - books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness on Martha's Vineyard to Grant's tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians working individually or in teams then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works - textbooks covering all phases of United States history.
In practice, however, it doesn't work that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them half a dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is not written by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher's offices. When historians do write them, they face snickers from their colleagues and deans - tinged with envy, but snickers nonetheless: "Why are you writing pedagogy instead of doing scholarship?"
The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks do list up-to-the-minute secondary sources in bibliographies at the ends of chapters, but the contents of the chapters remain totally traditional - unaffected by the new research.
What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read a poem? The editors' voice in literature textbooks may be no more interesting than in history, but at least that voice stills when the textbook presents original materials of literature. The universal processed voice of history textbook authors insulates students from the raw materials of history. Rarely do authors quote the speeches, songs, diaries, and letters that make the past come alive. Students do not need to be protected from this material. They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech as read two paragraphs about it, which is what American Adventures substitutes. No wonder students find the textbooks dull.
Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason, not just answers to be learned. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is learning facts. "We have not avoided controversial issues" announces one set of textbook authors; "instead, we have tried to
offer reasoned judgments" on them - thus removing the controversy! No wonder their text turns students off! Because textbooks employ this god-like voice, it never occurs to most students to question them. "In retrospect I ask myself, why didn't I think to ask for example who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, and how did it change when Columbus arrived," wrote a student of mine. "However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture," she continued, "so I never thought to doubt that it was." Tests supplied by the textbook publishers then tickle students' throats with multiple choice items to get them to regurgitate the factoids they "learned." No wonder students don't learn to think critically.
As a result of all this, high school graduates are hamstrung in their efforts to apply logic and information to controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter them the next year as college freshmen.) We've got to do better. Five sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens "learn" there forms most of what they know of our past.
America's history merits remembering and understanding. This book includes ten chapters of amazing stories - some wonderful, some ghastly - in American history. Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere details but events and processes that had and have important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave out or distort them. I know because for several years I have been lugging around twelve textbooks, taking them seriously as works of history and ideology, studying what they say and don't say, and trying to figure out why. I chose the twelve to represent the range of books available for American history courses. Two, Discovering American History and The American Adventure, are "inquiry" textbooks, composed of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary sources like diaries and laws, linked by narrative passages. These books are supposed to invite students to "do" history themselves. The American Way, Land of Promise, The United States -- A History of the Republic, American History, The American Tradition, are traditional high school narrative history textbooks. Three textbooks, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, and Challenge of Freedom, are intended for junior high students but are often used by "slow" senior high classes. Triumph of the American Nation and The American Pageant are also used on college campuses. These twelve have been my window into the world of what high school students carry home, read, memorize, and forget. In addition, I have spent many hours observing high school history classrooms in Mississippi, Vermont, and the Washington metropolitan area.
The eleventh chapter analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption to explain what causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must confess an interest here: I once wrote a history textbook. Written with co-authors, Mississippi: Conflict and Change was the first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although Conflict and Change won the Lillian Smith Award for "best nonfiction about the South" in 1975, Mississippi rejected it for public school use, so the authors and three school systems sued the textbook board. In April, 1980, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. resulted in a sweeping victory based on the first and fourteenth amendments. The experience taught me first-hand more than most authors or publishers ever want to know about the textbook
adoption process. I have also learned that not all the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the adoption agencies. Chapter twelve looks at the effects of using these textbooks. It shows that they actually make students stupid. An epilogue, "The Future Lies Ahead," suggests distortions and omissions that went undiscussed in earlier chapters and recommends ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American history more honestly - sort of an inoculation program against the next lies we are otherwise sure to encounter.
In What Ways Were We Warped?
When I was a boy on our annual summer vacation trips, the family car seemed to stop at every historic marker and monument. Maybe yours did too. Dad thought it was "good for us," and I suppose in a way it was. Little did he suspect that it was also bad for us — that the lies we encountered on our trips across the United States subtly distorted our knowledge of the past and warped our view of the world. My sister and I needed to unlearn the myths we were learning in school, but the historic sites we visited only amplified them and taught us new ones.
My most recent book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, told how American history as taught in most high schools distorts the past and turns many students off. One result is that only one American in six ever takes a course in American history after graduating from high school. Where then do Americans learn about the past? From many sources, of course — historical novels, Oliver Stone movies — but surely most of all from the landscape. History is told on the landscape all across America — on monuments at the courthouse, by guides inside antebellum homes and aboard historic ships, by the names we give to places, and on roadside historical markers. This book examines the history that some of these places tell and the processes by which they come forward to tell it.
Markers, monuments, and preserved historic sites usually result from local initiative. Typically a voluntary organization — the Chamber of Commerce, a church congregation, the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy — takes the initiative, but public monies are usually involved before it's over. It follows that the site will tell a story favorable to the local community, and particularly to that part of the community that erected or restored it. An account from another point of view might be quite different and also more accurate.
Americans like to remember only the positive things, and communities like to publicize the great things that happened in them. One result is silliness. The first airplane was invented not by the Wright Brothers, but by the Rev. Burrell Cannon, and the first flight was not at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but in Pittsburg, Texas. Must be true — an impressive-looking Texas state historical marker says so! Texas has so many state historical markers that it may be that everything from airplanes to maple syrup was invented in Texas. Not anesthesia, though — Georgia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island already claim the originator of that. Meanwhile, Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, battle on the landscape over where Brunswick stew was born.
A more important result is racism. People who put up markers and monuments and preserve historic houses are usually pillars of the white community. The recent spate of Martin Luther King avenues and monuments notwithstanding, Americans still live and work in a landscape of white supremacy. Especially in the South, but all across America, even on black college campuses, the names on the landscape and the markers and monuments glorify those who fought to keep African Americans in chains and those who, after Reconstruction, worked to put them back into second-class citizenship. What person gets the most historical markers in any state? Not Lincoln in Illinois, it turns out, nor Washington in Virginia, but Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalry leader and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, in Tennessee. And if white Southerners were misguided enough not to be racist, they are left off the landscape entirely or converted into "good white Southerners" when remembered on it. Thus Helen Keller's birthplace flies a Confederate flag, while she was an early supporter of the NAACP.
Other monuments express white domination over Native Americans. A later introductory essay, "Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments," shows how sculptors typically place Native Americans lower than European Americans on historic monuments. Lame Deer, a Dakota leader, sees the same message in the four European American faces carved on Mount Rushmore:
What does this Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, "First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun would shine, in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Then we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were stronger, and there were more of us than there were of you, and because we had cannons and Gatling guns. . . . And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.
The language at historic sites is also warped. All across the country, Americans call Native Americans by tribal names that are wrong and even derogatory. On the landscape Indians are "savage," whites "discover" everything, and some causes are portrayed as stainless today that were drenched in blood in their own time. Distorted as well is the art on historic monuments. Whites inevitably wind up on top, in positions of power and action, while people of color are passive on the bottom.
Then there is the matter of who gets memorialized and who gets left out. All too often memorials heroify people who should not be forgotten, but who should never have been commemorated — Jeffrey Amherst for example, who initiated germ warfare in the Americas and for whom Amherst College and Amherst, Massachusetts, are named. Across America the landscape commemorates those men and women who opposed each agonizing next step our nation took on the path toward freedom and justice, while the courageous souls who challenged the United States to live out the meaning of its principles lie forgotten or even reviled. Markers and monuments in many states leave out women, sometimes so totally as to be unwittingly hilarious. The only white woman to get a historical marker in Indiana, to take one offending state, gets remembered for coming into the state minus a body part that she lost in Kentucky! Kentucky, meanwhile,
erected (the right word) a female Civil War horse with an extra body part that turns her into a he! Historic sites also cover up or lie about the sexual orientations of the people who made their history if those orientations were gay or lesbian.
Another form of omission takes place at historic homes. Instead of telling visitors what happened to the people who lived and worked there, guides prattle on about what the guests ate and the silverware they used. Most historic house sites simply do not take their own history seriously enough to bother to tell it like it was. Even at crucial historic sites like Independence Hall, guides tell charming but inconsequential and ultimately boring anecdotes rather than talking about the historic events that happened there. Merely taking notes at many historic sites makes guides nervous. Diane Skvarla, Curator of the United States Senate, complains that tour leaders — some private, some under her employ — dwell on the quaint anecdote that may even be made up, while leaving out crucial historic events that really happened. "Some senator brought his dogs into the hall, which then gets embellished into 'in heat,' but what of the important topics that were debated or decided here?" Puzzled at this behavior, she concludes, "I think people are afraid of historic facts."
Guides almost always avoid negative or controversial facts, and most monuments, markers, and historic sites omit any blemishes that might taint the heroes they commemorate, making them larger and less interesting than life. (High school history textbooks do the same thing.) Presidents, especially, must be perfect. When historian Richard Shenkman asked a tour guide at FDR's family mansion in Hyde Park, New York, about Roosevelt's mistresses, she told him "the guides are specifically forbidden from talking about this." Woodrow Wilson's house in Washington, D.C., says nothing negative about the man who segregated the federal government; a temporary exhibit even credits him for supporting women's suffrage, which he opposed. Even Franklin Pierce, arguably our least popular president, is lauded by the historical marker in his hometown.
But inventing blemish-free heroes doesn't really work. High school students don't really buy that the founding fathers were flawless, and they don't think of them as heroes to emulate. Instead they conclude that history textbooks are dishonest. Similarly, adult Americans don't really believe that their heroic forebears were as perfect as the landscape claims. I have watched as tourists grow passive while guides tell them quaint stories about dead presidents. They don't know enough to ask about what's being left out, and the social situation doesn't encourage substantive questions, so they just disengage much of their brains and traipse from room to room on automatic pilot. A critical question to ask at any historic site is: What does it leave out about the people it treats as heroes?
A special form of these omissions occurs at war museums, which present war without anguish, instead focussing genially on its technology. The USS Intrepid in New York City leaves out the Vietnam War — too "political" for its board of directors — but most visitors never notice it. Omissions can be hard to detect, especially for visitors who come to a site to learn some history and do not bring a knowledge of the site with them. People don't usually think about images that aren't there.
And some images don't exist anywhere. Scottsboro, Alabama, became world-famous for exactly one incident — the Scottsboro Case — but although downtown Scottsboro boasts four historic markers, none mentions the Scottsboro Case. "Pay attention to what they tell you to forget," poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, and this book does — it covers the Scottsboro Case and three events in Richmond, a city that truncates its public memory on the day that the Confederacy ceased to rule it, because of their importance — and because they are not recognized on the landscape. Nowhere have I seen portrayed the multicultural nature of pioneer settlements, where Native Americans, European Americans, and often African Americans lived and worked together, sometimes happily. Only an obscure marker in Utah offers any hint of the trade in Indian slaves that started in 1513 and continued at least until the Emancipation Proclamation. All across America, the landscape suffers from amnesia, not about everything, but about some crucial events and issues of our past.
When the landscape does not omit unpleasant stories entirely, it often tells them badly, compared even to the mediocre standards set by U. S. history textbooks. Except for the Chief Vann house, a state historic site in Georgia, historic sites and museums in the United States offer few depictions of Native American farms, frame houses, or schools, compared to the enormous number of tipis they display. Thus they portray American Indians as mobile and romantic — even when they weren't! What tourists learn about slavery from visiting most historic sites is far inferior to the somewhat improved information that textbooks now provide to high school students. On Reconstruction, that period after the Civil War when the federal government tried to guarantee equal rights for African Americans, the landscape is almost silent; most sites that do mention it present a distorted "Gone With the Wind" version that never happened. There is little trace on the land today of the lynchings and race riots that swept the United States between 1890 and 1925, the "nadir of race relations." All across America, monuments to the Spanish-American War, which was over in three months, say "1898-1902"; few visitors realize that those dates refer to the larger and longer Philippine-American War, which otherwise has mostly vanished from the landscape and from our historical memory.
The antithesis of omission is overemphasis, and the history written on the American landscape is largely the history of the federal governments — United States of America and Confederate States of America — and particularly of their wars. We infer much of what we know about the ancient Mayans and Egyptians from their public sculpture and monuments. What will archaeologists ages hence infer about us? That we venerated war above all other human activities?
America has ended up with a landscape of denial. James Buchanan's house denies that our 15th president was gay. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial denies that Nebraska's most enduring writer was lesbian. Fort Pillow denies that Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederates massacred surrendered U. S. troops there. The National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum denies that mining today causes any environmental damage. And so it goes, from sea to shining sea. These misrepresentations on the American landscape help keep us ignorant as a people, less able to understand what really happened
in the past, and less able to apply our understanding to issues facing the United States today.
The thoughtful visitor can learn to read between the lines of historical markers, however, and can deconstruct the imagery on historic monuments. Then these sites divulge important insights, not only about the eras they describe, but also about the eras in which they went up. In short, the lies and omissions across the American countryside suggest times and ways that the United States went astray as a nation. They also point to unresolved issues in a third era — our own. That's why it may be more important to understand what the historical landscape gets wrong than what it gets right.
So come along as we visit more than a hundred markers, monuments, houses, and other historic sites in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Our journey will start in the West, mirroring the journey the first people made as they discovered the Americas and settled it from west to east. People got to the Americas by boat from northeast Asia or by walking across the Bering Strait during an ice age. Most Indians in the Americas can be traced by blood type, language similarity, and other evidence to a very small group of first arrivals. Thus they may have come by boat. Either way, afoot or by boat, evidence suggests that people entered Alaska first: Native Americans share some cultural and physical similarities with northern Asians to the west of Alaska.
Beginning in the west has the additional benefit of being unconventional. "How refreshing it would be," ethnohistorian James Axtell wrote, "to find a textbook that began on the West Coast before treating the traditional eastern colonies." The usual approach to the American past is from the vantage point of Boston, looking southwestward. Travel books too start in New England, even though Japan sends more tourists to the United States than any other nation. Europeans — Spaniards — were also living in New Mexico years before Anglos had moved to New England or Virginia, so it is doubly appropriate for us to make our trip from west to east. Therefore we will begin in the state that extends farthest west, Alaska, and end in Maine, farthest east. You don't have to go that direction, however. The Index of States invites you to proceed alphabetically by state or to begin with whatever state interests you. The Index of Topics allows you to investigate themes, topics, and eras; and cross-references within and at the end of each entry encourage you to explore related entries.
On our journey, not only will we uncover new facts about the American past, we will also catch indications of hidden fault lines in the social structure of the United States today. Some of these places are familiar to millions of Americans: Boston Common, Valley Forge, the Jefferson Memorial, Abraham Lincoln's log cabin, Sutter's Fort. Other entries will tell stories and visit places that have not been memorialized grandly on the landscape. You will meet people whose existence you never imagined — Elizabeth Van Lew, for instance, Robert and Mary Ann Lumpkin, Print Matthews — and perhaps learn some facts you never imagined about famous Americans you thought you knew well.
Some of these sites lie far off well-traveled tourist paths and never get into travel guidebooks. Other markers or statues stand in oft-visited places but unobtrusively, such
as plaques in the entry halls of state capitols. Although few writers have commented on most of these monuments and markers, they too make a difference because they represent the thousands of other historic sites, all across America, that help frame the way we talk about the past, yet have never drawn the attention of the historical profession.
These barely known but important sites bring up the important distinction between what happened in the past versus what we say about it. The former is "the past," the latter "history." Ideally, I believe the two should match. Some do not agree. In 1925 the American Legion declared that American history, at least when taught to children, "must inspire the children with patriotism," "must be careful to tell the truth optimistically," and "must speak chiefly of success." Since the American past is littered with failures as well as successes, and since the past cannot be changed, the Legion would have history lie or say little about the failures. So would a lot of other people. It follows that sites that are important but barely known may have been left out of history because their stories would be unsettling to some Americans. Conversely, nothing much happened at some allegedly important sites — Valley Forge for one — but history has made a great to-do about them. Again, this usually happens at sites whose stories are particularly comforting to some Americans.
Some monuments and markers tell their stories complexly and accurately, so not every entry will be critical of its site. Sites are also depicted favorably, I'm sure, when their bias matches my own — and my biases can be inferred from the list of heroes to whose memory this book is dedicated. I have chosen these sites to correct historical interpretations that seem profoundly wrong to me and to tell neglected but important stories about the American past. To be honest, I also include a few because they are funny.
Americans share a common history that unites us. But we also share some more difficult events — a common history that divides us. These things too we must remember, for only then can we understand our divisions and work to reduce them. Markers and monuments could help, except they suffer too often from the same forces that created the divisions in the first place. Moreover, most markers, monuments, and other historic sites don't just tell stories about the past; they also tell visitors what to think about the stories they tell. Many sites seek to transform our secular history — events that actually happened on the earth, done by real people with the usual mix of admirable and despicable characteristics — into hallowed milestones along the path of our sacred journey as a nation. But if a monument or marker misrepresents the past, or tells it from only one viewpoint, then whatever moral imperative it suggests must be suspect. If we cannot face our history honestly, we cannot learn from the past.
Americans agree with this proposition when applied to other countries. We commend Germany for preserving concentration camps as monuments of remembrance. We commend the Russians for changing Leningrad back to St. Petersburg rather than continuing to honor a man whose political philosophy wreaked havoc on so many lives. We understand when South Africans, after dethroning white supremacy, set about re-evaluating their statues and museum exhibits honoring white supremacists. Surely the
United States — like Germany, Russia, or South Africa — needs to rethink its past and reassess how it commemorates that past in stone. Surely we don't want to be people of the lie, complicit with the worst in American history because we cannot stand to acknowledge it. The way we heal is to come face to face with the truth, and then we can better deal with it and each other.
Indeed this process is already underway. Throughout the book, entries will show how history as remembered in town squares and on highway waysides has changed over time. Even though monuments are written in stone, they are not permanent. Americans have forever been talking back to their landscape, whether by persuading a state to revise the wording on a historical marker or by vandalizing a statue. On the whole, it is a healthy process. The history written on the American landscape was written by people, after all, and we the people have the power to take back the landscape and make it ours.
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Photo of Jackson statue.
After United States forces took New Orleans during the Civil War, Union commander Ben Butler altered the monument to Andrew Jackson in the center of the French Quarter: he had the words "The Union Must And Shall Be Preserved" carved onto its base. Confederates fumed, but they had to admit that the phrase was Jackson's, spoken as a toast in the face of separatist John C. Calhoun.
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When a site tells an inaccurate or incomplete tory, challenging what our public history commemorates can make a difference in our public discourse. Indeed, questioning the myths told on the American landscape is intrinsically subversive, since the interrogation itself diminishes their power to motivate human behavior, a power that depends on shared belief. Questioning the myths requires serious historical research. Often the viewpoint of the dominant faction not only rules the landscape but also dominates the history books. In the last thirty years, however, historical researchers have unearthed new voices from the past and allowed them to speak in their books and articles. Altering the landscape then involves expanding our public history by telling about the past from these "new" perspectives. In the process, new markers and monuments will establish new stories and extol new heroes — factually based, with feet of clay when appropriate, but role models nonetheless. "American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." James Baldwin said that. The truth is also more wonderful and more terrible than the lies Americans have been telling themselves.
The next four essays provide some tools and provisions for our journey. "Some Functions of Public History" examine the roles that monuments, markers, and other historic sites play for individuals and in our society. "How Markers and Monuments Get Put Up" tells how historical markers get on the landscape in the first place and suggests
that their local nature has both positive and negative implications for the history that they tell. "Historic Sites Are Always a Tale of Two Eras" notes that every site can teach visitors something about the event or person it commemorates and the time of its own erection. Therefore visitors must consider both eras when thinking about what the site says. "Hieratic Scale in Monuments" discusses how the nonverbal symbolism on monuments and memorials influences how visitors think and feel about the topic they commemorate. Aided by these discussions, readers will be more able to critique the next place they visit, even if it is not among the more than a hundred sites described here.
After our tour of lies across America, two final essays will provide some ideas on what to do about the biased texts, inappropriate names, and unfit statues we will have encountered. "Snowplow Revisionism" points out that even though history on the landscape is written in metal and stone, revision constantly takes place. "Getting into a Dialogue with the Landscape" tells how Americans have been changing many sites already. Finally, Appendix A suggests twenty candidates that deserve immediate removal or revision and suggests ways that Americans can make our markers, monuments, and historical sites tell a fuller history.
Introductory Essays
In What Ways Were We Warped?
Some Functions of Public History
The Sociology Of Historic Sites
Historic Sites Are Always a Tale of Two Eras
Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments
The Far West
1. Alaska Denali (Mt. McKinley): The Tallest Mountain — The Silliest Naming
2. Hawaii Honolulu: King Kamehameha I, The Roman!
3. California Sacramento: The Flat Earth Myth on the West Coast
4. California Sacramento: Exploiting vs. Exterminating the Natives
5. California San Francisco: China Beach Leaves Out The Bad Parts
6. California Downieville: Killing a Man is Not News
7. Oregon La Grande: Don't "Discover" 'Til You See The Eyes of the Whites!
8. Washington Cowlitz County: No Communists Here!
9. Washington Centralia: Using Nationalism To Redefine A Troublesome Statue
10. Nevada Hickison Summit: What We Know and What We Don't Know about Rock Art
11. Nevada Nye County: Don't Criticize Big Brother
The Mountains
12. Idaho Almo: Circle the Wagons, Boys — It's Tourist Season
13. Utah North of St. George: Bad Things Happen in the Passive Voice
14. Arizona Navajo Reservation: Calling Native Americans Bad Names
15. Montana Helena: No Confederate Dead? No Problem! Invent Them!
16. Wyoming South Pass City: A Woman Shoulda Done It!
17. Colorado Pagosa Springs: Tall Tales in the West
18. Colorado Leadville: Licking The Corporate Hand That Feeds You
19. New Mexico Alcalde: The Footloose Statue
The Great Plains
20. Oklahoma Oklahoma City: The Oklahoma State History Museum Confederate Room Tells No History
21. Kansas Gardner: Which Came First, Wilderness Or Civilization?
22. Nebraska Red Cloud: No Lesbians on the Landscape
23. South Dakota Brookings: American Indians Only Roved for about a Hundred Years
24. North Dakota Devils Lake: The Devil is Winning, Six to One
The Midwest
25. Minnesota St. Paul: "Serving the Cause of Humanity"
26. Iowa Muscatine: Red Men Only — No Indians Allowed
27. Missouri Hannibal: Domesticating Mark Twain
28. Wisconsin Racine: Not the First Auto
29. Illinois Chicago: America's Most Toppled Monument
30. Indiana Graysville: Coming Into Indiana Minus a Body Part
31. Indiana Indianapolis: The Invisible Empire Remains Invisible
32. Kentucky: Lexington: Putting the He in Hero
33. Kentucky Hodgenville: Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace Cabin — Built Thirty Years after His Death!
34. Michigan Dearborn: Honoring a Segregationist
35. Ohio Delaware: Who Menaced Whom?
The South
36. Texas Gainesville: "No Nation Rose So White and Fair; None Fell So Free of Crime"
37. Texas Alba: The Only Honest Sundown Town in the United States
38. Texas Pittsburg: It Never Got Off the Ground
39. Texas Fredericksburg: The Real War Will Never Get into the War Museums
40. Texas Galveston: This Building Used to Be a Hardware Store
41. Arkansas Grant County: Which Came First, the Statue or the Oppression?
42. Arkansas Little Rock: Men Make History; Women Make Wives
43. Louisiana Laplace: Suppressing a Slave Revolt for the Second Time
44. Louisiana Colfax: Mystifying the Colfax Riot and Lying about Reconstruction
45. Louisiana New Orleans: The White League Begins to Take a Beating
46. Louisiana Baton Rouge: The Toppled "Darky"
47. Louisiana Fort Jackson: Let Us Now Praise Famous Thieves
48. Mississippi Hazlehurst: The End of Reconstruction
49. Mississippi Itta Bena: A Black College Celebrates White Racists
50. Alabama Calhoun County: If Russia Can Do It, Why Can't We?
51. Alabama Tuscumbia: Confining Helen Keller under House Arrest
52. Alabama Scottsboro: Famous Everywhere but at Home
53. Tennessee Remember Fort Pillow!
54. Tennessee Woodbury: Forrest Rested Here
55. Georgia Stone Mountain: A Confederate-KKK Shrine Encounters Turbulence
56. Florida Near Cedar Key: The Missing Town of Rosewood
57. South Carolina Beech Island: The Beech Island Agricultural Club Was Hardly What the Marker Implies
58. South Carolina Fort Mill: To the Loyal Slaves
59. South Carolina Columbia: Who Burned Columbia?
60. North Carolina Bentonville Battlefield: The Last Major Confederate Offensive of the Civil War
61. Virginia Alexandria: The Invisible Slave Trade
62. Virginia Alexandria: The Clash of the Martyrs
63. Virginia Richmond: "One of the Great Female Spies of All Times"
64. Virginia Richmond: Slavery and Redemption
65. Virginia Richmond: The Liberation of Richmond
66. Virginia Richmond: Abraham Lincoln Walks through Richmond
67. Virginia Appomattox: Getting Even the Numbers Wrong
68. Virginia Stickleyville: A Sign of Good Breeding
The Atlantic States
69. West Virginia Union: Is California West of the Alleghenies?
70. District of Columbia Jefferson Memorial: Juxtaposing Quotations - Misrepresent a Founding Father
71. District of Columbia Lincoln Memorial: A Product of Its Time and All Time
72. Maryland Hampton: "No History to Tell"
73. Delaware Reliance: The Reverse Underground Railroad
74. Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Telling Amusing Incidents for the Tourists
75. Pennsylvania Valley Forge: George Washington's Desperate Prayer
76. Pennsylvania Lancaster: "You're Here to See the House"
77. Pennsylvania Gettysburg: South Carolina Defines the Civil War in 1965
78. Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Remember the "Splendid Little War" — Forget the Tawdry Larger Wars
79. Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Celebrating Illegal Submarine Warfare
80. New Jersey Trenton: The Pilgrims and Religious Freedom
81. New York Manhattan: Making Native Americans Look Stupid
82. New York Alabama: Which George Washington?
83. New York North Elba: John Brown's Plaque Puts Blacks at the Bottom!
84. New York Manhattan: The Union League Club: Traitors to Their Own Cause
85. New York Manhattan: Selective Memory at USS Intrepid
New England
86. Connecticut Darien: Omitting the Town's Continuing Claim to Fame
87. Massachusetts Boston: The Problem of the Common
88. Massachusetts Amherst: Celebrating Genocide
89. Massachusetts Boston: What a Monument Ought to Be
90. Vermont Burlington: Shards of Minstrelsy on a Far-North Campus
91. New Hampshire Peterborough and Dublin: Local History Wars
92. New Hampshire Concord: "Effective Political Leader"
93. Rhode Island Block Island: "Settlement" Means Fewer People!
94. Rhode Island Warren and Barrington: Fighting over the "Good Indian"
95. Maine Bar Harbor: At Last — An Accurate Marker
Concluding Essays
Snowplow Revisionism
Getting into a Dialogue with the Landscape
Appendixes
Appendix A: Selecting the Sites
Appendix B: Ten Questions To Ask at a Historic Site
Appendix C: Twenty Candidates for "Toppling"
Restoring the Past. A History Teacher’s Response to
James Loewen’sLies My Teacher Told Me
by Dick ParsonsInstitute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College, Columbia University, 1999
"Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.” James Loewen
(Author’s Note: This paper is also written in hypertext and published on the World Wide Web to allow the highlighted links to support the lesson suggestions made in the article itself. By clicking on any of the highlighted links or images in the left-side frame, the reader will be able to view full versions of the proposed lesson ideas with active links to the websites indicated in the right-hand frame. The size of the frames may also be adjusted for easier viewing.)
The Trouble With Textbooks
On the opening page of his popular book, James Loewen proposes a new twist to the
old adage about understanding the past. Indeed, even the most cursory reading of his
indictment of high school textbooks, Lies My Teacher Told Me, will reveal that the social
price we pay for having a false sense of our history is far more consequential than
repeating the eleventh grade. Today, young people leave most social studies classrooms
with the illusion that history consists of committing to memory a finite number of settled
and disconnected facts, that it is a boring and predictable story without conflict or real
suspense, and that there is little connection between what happened in the past and what
we experience today. But perhaps worst of all, “high school students hate history
(Loewen, 1995)."
Loewen’s critique, which centers on the lack of student engagement with historical
controversy, the absence of analysis and interpretation, the “heroification” of our nation’s
historical figures, and the subordination of cause and effect to the memorization of
disconnected factoids, is a charge that reaches far down into the wellspring of current
educational practice in the United States. And, for those of us who practice our craft in
social studies classrooms in public schools across the nation, it stings.
In fact, the education establishment has had a long and profound romance with the
ubiquitous textbook. Textbooks have provided an inexpensive, standardized and
structured foundation for schooling since the Reformation. And, as Robbie McClintock,
Director of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University argues, since
the 16th century and the emergence of print technologies, textbooks have created a divide
separating public schooling from the intellectual resources of the academy. Textbooks
provide an alternative to the expensive scholarly community that emerged 500 years ago,
when serious investigation became increasingly dependent upon costly libraries and
laboratories. It is the textbook then, which has been responsible for a unique school
culture that is defined by structures which
Confine students to well defined spaces in frames of limited time
Sort and motivate students by reward systems based on competition and
examination
Structure curriculum standards around concepts of literacy based on traditional
notions of narrowly-defined intellectual disciplines
McClintock further suggests that, “ …In the process of making books usable, people not
only shaped effective presentations of knowledge, but also the effective presentations
began to shape the knowledge presented (McClintock, 1999).” The result has been the
familiar contemporary institutions of schooling that feature classrooms consisting of
twenty-five desks laid out in neat rows in order to focus attention on a single teacher at
the front of the room. The student’s day is divided into seven (or eight) forty-five (or
fifty) minute periods each devoted to a single, departmentalized discipline .
When students are questioned about their school experiences, they invariably cite
history and social studies as among their least favorite classes. Social studies is generally
perceived to be undemanding, uninteresting, and irrelevant. When they are asked to
describe what it is that might make the discipline more interesting students tend to
suggest that a greater variety in instructional methods (including simulations, role
playing, group projects, etc.) less repetition, and greater relevance to student experience
would improve their learning environment. Investigations by Loewen and others reveal
that textbooks which burden students on the average, with huge (four and a half pounds),
long-winded (888 pages on average) narrations, typically promoting 444 main ideas and
624 key terms and “countless other factoids”, provide the keystone that supports a very
shaky structure. In their report on the first national assessment of history and literature in
1987 Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., found that 59.6% of high school juniors used a
textbook daily and that 71.4% of these students took a history test at least once a week.
Yet these high school juniors could respond correctly to only 54.5% of the questions on
the national assessment. In summarizing their findings, Ravitch and Finn, Jr. write that,
“In the eyes of the students, the typical history classroom is one in which they listen to
the teacher explain the day’s lesson, use the textbook, and take tests…They seldom work
with other students, use original documents, write term papers, or discuss the significance
of what they are studying (Ravitch and Finn, Jr., 1987)." When the NAEP's
comprehensive American history test results were made public in 1990, it was clear that
America's history students were still achieving at a level of C- in history (Nash, et al,
1997). Small wonder high school students find little relevance in their study of history
and continually rank social studies at or near the bottom of their list when it comes to
school subjects (Schug, et al, 1984).
Despite the very apparent lack of success that textbooks provide and the force of the
criticism that has accompanied the techniques employed in their production, adoption,
and use, the textbook continues to provide the basis for the making of curriculum and
pedagogical decisions. For the last two decades, careful investigators have continually
charged that American History Textbooks are:
Daunting in size
Bland and voiceless
Fact-filled
Deadly catalogues of factual material
Boring
Excessively dominated by coverage
Decontextualized and incoherent
And yet the system remains intact largely because pressure groups and adoption boards
force publishers to avoid controversy in their appeal to the marketplace; because teachers
and administrators, too often inadequately trained in the historian's craft, find comfort
and confirmation in their textbooks; because textbooks over time have assumed a
credibility and importance and, in effect, provide the canon of historical literacy; and
because textbooks can save time when coaching, after-school activities, or grading
homework assignments become higher priorities than abreast of the discipline. In short,
textbooks survive because they are created for the adults in the system much more than
for students. (Fitzgerald, 1979; Gagnon, 1989; Loewen, 1995; Nash, et al, 1997; Sewall,
1987).
Restoring the Past
We can do better by our students and for our discipline. Since moving from the
social studies classroom to become the curriculum and professional development
manager at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University, it has become
increasingly clear to me that the new media offer substantial opportunities to teachers and
students for restoring the past. The purpose of this article is to propose that the
thoughtful integration of classroom technologies can allow the emphasis currently placed
on history textbooks to be redirected in an effort to resolve at least some of the issues
raised by Loewen’s accusations. The New Deal Network (http://newdeal.feri.org), an on-
line archive of documents, teaching resources, and curriculum strategies, provides one
model for restoring credibility to the way we approach the teaching and learning of
history. By providing access to these intellectual resources the New Deal Network
transcends the demarcation that separates the school and the university and paves the way
for the construction of meaningful understandings through generative and authentic
academic activity.
Among James Loewen’s most disturbing charges is the proposition that the men and
women whom we venerate as historical heroes are depicted as one-dimensional
caricatures. This issue which Loewen raises under the standard of “heroification” not
only limits students’ understanding of the human role in shaping historical events, but
seriously damages the connection that young people can establish with realistic role
models. In Loewen’s words, ”…when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems,
the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they
reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to
melodramatic stick figures. Their inner struggles disappear
and they become goody-goody not merely good (Loewen,
1995)."
This unfortunate condition is effectively illustrated by
The American Pageant’s coverage of Eleanor Roosevelt.
The American Pageant, is one of the most widely used high
school texts in the United States. In its 1,037 pages it offers but a single paragraph and
one accompanying photograph of “tall, ungainly, and toothy” Eleanor Roosevelt who is
intriguingly depicted as “…the most active First Lady in history.” The paragraph asserts
that she was “condemned by conservatives and loved by liberals” and portrays her as
having been “…one of the most controversial—and consequential—public figures of the
twentieth century (p. 795)." Here then is precisely the superficial caricature that has
produced the “Disney version of history” that so effectively stands between public school
students and their meaningful engagement with the characters of America’s past.
Teachers might turn the intriguing few sentences offered by the textbook to their
advantage by inviting students to embark upon a WebQuest
(http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/webquest.html). This web-based research strategy,
developed by Bernie Dodge and his colleagues at San Diego State University, provides a
structured process that allows students to construct meaning from complex sources and/or
contradictory information. Teachers and students for example, might work together to
shape portions of the general content of the paragraph cited above into a significant
research question. For example, why was ER condemned by conservatives and loved by
liberals? What actions during her life and career made her a controversial and
consequential public figure? What policies enacted by the national government bear her
unmistakable influence? By providing students with a suitable number of Web-based
resources to accompany the more traditional resources found in their school library, a
more complete and satisfying picture of Eleanor Roosevelt will hopefully replace the
toothy cartoon that is so frequently left in the minds of students.
The award-winning New Deal Network is but one of many archival sites that has
responded to the potential offered by the new media to
provide digital resources for students, scholars and other
interested investigators. These evolving collections make
important contributions and offer teachers great
opportunities for overcoming the criticism by Loewen and
others that textbooks provide students with little occasion to
connect past and present and to understand the interaction of
cause and effect.
The New Deal Network, The American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress,
History Matters, and other similar archival collections of historical materials offer an
alternative to our textbook-developed tendency to think of history as chronology— a
timeline of facts and dates pressing to be memorized for the inevitable test and then as
quickly forgotten to make room for the next set of dates and facts and the next exam.
How were the conditions of the Depression period both different from and similar to the
conditions we experience today? How did the actions of the New Deal inspire the system
of government we know in the 1990’s? How did the administrations of earlier
Progressive presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Woodrow Wilson,
pave the way for the New Deal? One model for this more meaningful approach is
suggested by Douglas Perry and Wendy Sauer, fellows in the American Memory’s
Summer Institute, who have prepared a lesson that compares and contrasts the New Deal
with contemporary America. Their lesson entitled, “The Great Depression and the
1990s”, draws on the Federal Writer’s Project and the “Life Histories” that the program’s
unemployed writers and journalists gathered during the ’30s. Students that work in this
way with primary sources to make connections between the past and the present
inevitably find more authenticity and relevance in their study of history.
Because the new technologies offer a context that makes the presentation of
multimedia possible, the power of interdisciplinary learning is increased accordingly.
Audio clips of speeches and video clips of film previously only accessible to privileged
visiting scholars are increasingly made available to students
and teachers. Some of the most compelling images of the
Great Depression, captured by photographers such as Rondall
Partridge or Dorothea Lange, or the literary contributions of
authors such as Zora Neale Hurston or John Steinbeck, offer
creative and compelling ways to integrate the disciplines and
offer project-oriented activities that call on students to
exercise a broader range of their intellectual skills.
“Every Picture Tells a Story" offers an enticing and creative approach for assisting
students to understand the world of documentary photography while instructing them in
the cautions required when using photographs as historical evidence. Intriguing
photographs by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans are used to demonstrate the emotional
and political content that powerful images may contain. The activity challenges students
to view the use of photographs as a strategy for justifying federal legislative proposals
and, in the role of editor, decide which of several photographic compositions best serves
the editorial viewpoint desired.
Many textbooks suggest an interdisciplinary approach for combining art and literature
with history, but offer few of the resources necessary for a successful teaching
experience. The John Steinbeck Links page provides a remedy for a textbook’s
superficiality. Here students and teachers will find a wealth of resources useful for
teaching of the Depression period in an interdisciplinary way. The site offers a portal to
bibliographical information, literary criticism, and excerpts from Steinbeck’s works as
well as the full text of his 1962 Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize. Beyond that,
however, students of Steinbeck and the New Deal era will find audio files of folk music,
links to first-hand accounts in “Voices from the Dust Bowl”, and photographs from the
Federal Farm Security Administration of the Library of Congress. Particularly intriguing
is the “Ballad of Tom Joad,” written by Woodie Guthrie shortly after seeing the movie
version of Grapes of Wrath in 1940.
By offering a broader range and depth of resources, gateway educational websites such
as the New Deal Network can contribute immensely to the toolkit of strategies available
to teachers and the resources helpful to students in their investigations of the past. For
example, FDR’s “court reorganization” plan offers one of the
most colorful and intriguing episodes of the New Deal era
and some fascinating insights into the mind and character of
the President.
Loewen rebukes textbook authors for avoiding controversy
and for their unwillingness to portray our forefathers in other
than a positive and patriotic light. In fairness, most textbooks,
including The American Pageant, mention FDR’s arrogance
in attacking the composition of the Supreme Court in 1937, suggesting that his decision
was “…to be one of the most costly political misjudgments of his career” and that “…at
best, Roosevelt was headstrong and not fully aware of the fact the court, in popular
thinking had become something of a sacred cow.” (p. 817) The superficiality of this
cautious approach leaves students out of the loop. It is both unsatisfying and
condescending in that it disconnects students from the full telling of this important story.
Typically, the textbook approach disallows the antagonists from speaking for themselves,
and even FDR is permitted only three sentences from his 1937 radio address, reproduced
in a box at the top of the page.
The court controversy offers an excellent opportunity for students to inquire into issues
related to the separation of powers, investigate the appropriate roles of each of the three
branches of our Federal government, and explore the world of political action in all its
complexity. Participants in the New Deal Network’s week-long institutes at Vassar
College during the summers of 1998 and 1999, have contributed impressively to the
resources available on the NDN website. One suggested strategy proposes that students
examine the archive of political cartoons that has been collected in the resources section
of the New Deal Network, thanks to the efforts of Paul Bachorz and his AP students at
Niskayuna High School. Another is presented by Jim Molloy and framed as a Document-
Based Question activity. Interested teachers have access to the full texts of FDR’s
“fireside chat” of March 1937, as well as many of the speeches made by the President’s
friends and adversaries during the reorganization debate. These resources offer students
the chance to play roles in a structured simulation of the legislative maneuvering that
characterized the contest of wills around the “court packing” issue. Or, they might be
presented with a number of preselected documents and asked to write a position paper
from a particular point of view.
As the Depression worsened many thoughtful Americans turned in their frustration
away from traditional notions of capitalism and toward alternative economic systems.
Textbooks then, and the curriculum they reflect, seriously neglect to serve students by
leaving out any internal discussion of the very ideas that were generating such interest at
home while inspiring such controversy in the capitols of Europe. By ignoring the appeal
that alternative economic systems presented to American intellectuals, these same
textbooks create little context for student understanding of the post-war witch-hunting
that defined the McCarthy era and which resulted in the destruction of the careers of so
many disillusioned intellectuals.
It is unfortunate that textbooks so offhandedly assign these controversial voices of
protest to stereotypical categories or write them off as foolish demagogues, whose
contribution was merely to offer up a few crackbrained proposals. Loewen argues that
textbook authors and the adoption boards which they must satisfy proceed under the
notion that their mission is to instill a sense of nationalistic pride and patriotic duty in
their impressionable young audience.
Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks, which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a line of constant progress. Including ideas would make history contingent: things could go either way, and have on occasion. The “right” people, armed with the “right” ideas,
have not always won… Including ideas would introduce uncertainty… (Loewen, 1995)
Consequently, the tactic as characterized by a
representative of Holt, Reinhart and Winston is: “When
you’re publishing a book, if there’s something that is
controversial, it’s better to take it out. Loewen, 1995)” It may be better for the publishers,
but the impact on teachers and students is reflected in the fact that 44% of students think
that their social studies class is boring (Schug, et al, 1984).
Yet, Father Coughlin’s Sunday radio addresses may have reached as many as 40 million
listeners while Dr. Francis Townshend may have attracted 5 million to his Old Age
Revolving Pension Fund (Brinkey, 1982). Despite his popular appeal, each man receives
but one short paragraph in The American Pageant. Huey Long, perhaps the most well
known of all these voices of nonconformity, also finds himself relegated to a single
paragraph and even that he must share with his chief organizer and lieutenant, Gerald
L.K. Smith. In any event, there is virtually no serious discussion or analysis of their
contentious ideas. Again, in an effort to avoid controversy textbook authors allow
blandness to substitute for the textured excitement that distinguishes the lives and ideas
of these colorful characters.
Sources available on the World Wide Web invite teachers to challenge students to
analyze and confront the intriguing world of alternative ideas. While textbooks avoid
thoughtful engagement with controversial people and the opinions they promoted, it is
often these very men and women who provide the connection and interest that is so
remarkably absent from the traditional textbook-driven, history curriculum. The appeal of
both Long and Coughlin to a middle-class constituency that increasingly found itself
subject to the overwhelming effects of an encroaching industrialization and an
accompanying loss of community, provides a coherent connection to the Populists of the
late 19th century and indeed, is reminiscent of a good many contemporary concerns. An
investigation into the lives and careers of men such as Upton Sinclair, Francis Townsend,
Huey Long, and Father Charles Coughlin will permit students a chance to actually hear
audio files from the Louisiana Kingfish’s broadcasts and discover for themselves whether
Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice was actually an appeal to
undercurrents of Anti-Semitism or latent Fascist tendencies.
_______________________________________
“There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.”
(Marc Ferro in Loewen, 1995)
As the 21st century looms before us, the promise of technology to bring the traces of
the past into the classrooms of our nation’s history students carries with it the power to
reform not just the study of America’s past, but the archaic structures that dictate the
culture of schooling. Teachers need to find the courage and policy-makers need to offer
the kinds of respectful support that allow for risk-taking and venturing out into new
territory- a bold pedagogical inquiry into places where students and teachers alike can
work authentically to add to and create for themselves the resources that permit a more
compelling and meaningful investigation of our country’s story. The current tendency to
define standards in terms of facts and events, packaged as “content literacy,” have not
and will not in themselves restore the truth to “the lies our teachers told us” nor will they
provide the mechanisms that will support and encourage important changes in history
education. Technology and the resources made available on the World Wide Web can
move us a long way toward a more thoughtful pedagogy and a more respectfully mature
understanding of our complex, occasionally troubling, but always fascinating national
story.
Bibliography
Bailey, Thomas A. and Kennedy, David. The American Pageant. A History of
the Republic, Tenth Edition. Lexington, Massachusetts: DC Heath and
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Depression. New York: Vintage/ Random House, 1982.
Fitzgerald, Francis. America Revised. History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth
Century. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979.
Gagnon, Paul. Democracy’s Half-Told Story. What American History Textbooks
Should Add. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers, 1989.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster,
1995.
McClintock, Robbie. The Educator's Manifesto. Renewing the Progressive
Bond with Posterity Through the Social Construction of Digital Learning
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Nash, Gary B, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn. History on Trial. Culture
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Schug, Mark C., Todd, Robert J., and Beery, R. "Why Kids Don't Like Social
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