Waters T. Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History

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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American HistoryAuthor(s): Tony WatersSource: The History Teacher, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Nov., 2005), pp. 11-21Published by: Society for History EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036740 .Accessed: 07/05/2014 14:27

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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History

Tony Waters California State University, Chico

STUDENTS IN MY UNDERGRADUATE Sociology and Social Sci- ence classes often tell me that the "history" they learned in high schools was different than the "history" they learned in our university classes. They often claim that what they learned in K-12 was "wrong" and that they did not learn the "real" history until they got to college. They usually focus on the fact that K-12 history is typically taught from a triumphal "grand sweep" perspective emphasizing places and dates, and the glories of the past in general. They contrast this with a college curriculum that they say emphasizes that there were great injustices in the past. Students often feel as if they have to choose between one version, or the other.

Often my students' history preferences are based on their pre-existing political views about the role of the state in ordering society. Those on the right choose to believe in the "glorious past" version of K-12, and those from the left focus on the "persistence of oppression" version often emphasized by college courses in history and education departments. The "glorious past" version of history has in its corner the millions of K-12 textbooks distributed to schools around the country. The persistence of oppression school uses a different "clandestine" history of which the most popular right now seems to be James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. This The History Teacher Volume 39 Number 1 November 2005 C Society for History Education, Inc.

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12 Tony Waters

book is a systematic debunking of K-12 American history texts and is often read enthusiastically by students claiming that they now understand "real" American history.

I think though that the dichotomy between right and wrong history, right or left political views, or real and fake history is all false. In fact, there are two histories being taught, each of which is reasonable and important in the reproduction of society. The K-12 version is about affirming the logical basis for our being a people with a past and, by implication, a present. This version is inherently patriotic and positive. In the case of the United States, this optimistic story explains why today's values of democracy, capitalism, equal opportunity, and individual liberty are an important basis for a just society. This story is important because Americans need to agree that there is a plausible and logical explanation for why today's institutions are the best possible. But in these patriotic and optimistic views there is a limitation. The problem is that the optimism of the story told in K-12 is never consistent with what is observed in the present. This is where the role of college history comes in. College history emphasizes not only optimism and patriotism but also ambiguity and conflict. Learning this history is important because it is part of a broader contingent story, part of which will eventually be used to explain to children of the future a logical basis for their present. What a good college level history course does is draw the student into the wider conversation about the problems of the past. It does this in order that future citizens will have the intellectual tools to explain a present that has yet to emerge.

The Problem of a Plausible Past

There is a problem, however, with maintaining a patriotic story for our children. The story needs to be plausible with respect to both what significant adults remember of the past, what is happening in the present, and the dreams a society has for a future. These three things of course never quite match, but they at least need to be consistent enough to avoid too much dissonance. When there is too much dissonance, the old story becomes "wrong," and a new "more accurate" story emerges, creating a new version which is still optimistic and patriotic.

Let me use a recent story from the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement confronted a country which claimed to value democracy, equal opportunity, and individual liberty. But this claim highlighted an obvious dissonance which was the disenfranchise- ment of African-Americans who had fought for these values in World War II. History books of the 1950s reflected an older version of Ameri-


Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History 13

can history which dealt poorly with questions of race, and focused on previous concerns about the need to reconcile whites split by the fratri- cide of the Civil War. These histories told a triumphal story of how English colonists established the Massachusetts Bay and Virginia colo- nies, conducted a successful revolt and gained independence from an English king who denied them basic political rights. They then fought a terrible Civil War focused by a need to preserve the union, and inciden- tally abolish slavery. In order to make plausible the story that the war "saved the union," memories of the intense hatred created by that war needed to be downplayed and the patriotism of whites from the south and north celebrated. The story then continued by noting that the united country successfully fought World Wars I and II in defense of democracy and liberty. This history took little note of millions of African-Ameri- cans, a situation which was difficult to reconcile with the participation of black units in World War II. Nor could it explain the increasingly large presence of segregated African-American communities in northern and southern cities where public facilities were separate and unequal.

In response, the story told of "we the Americans" changed in the history textbooks. Our origins were traced to peoples and places besides England, including African slaves. Beginning in the 1970s, the role that slavery and race played in the origins of the Civil War was re-emphasized, and it was no longer primarily a war to preserve the union. Frederick Douglass was added to the glorious story of the Civil War, and Robert E. Lee's role declined in a country no longer focused on reconcili- ation of northerners and southerners, but in reconciling blacks and whites. By the 1980s, the assassinated Martin Luther King was elevated to a glorious role in the country's struggle for freedom. In short, the story remained a glorious and plausible one, but over a period of 30 to 40 years even the heroes changed.

And guess what? In fifty years, how we teach history at the K- 12 level will change again. The story of the Civil War told in the history textbooks of 2055 will not be the same as that told in 2005, or 1955. The story told in the K-12 textbooks of 2055 will reflect a new story, which will be presented to children as being the truth about an honorable past. Almost inevitably, today's textbooks will be criticized for having omitted issues which do not seem important today. But again, this is where college classes should come in. College classes are part of the contingent "running conversation" from which this future vision of the past will emerge. In contrast, K-12 is about the consensus reached in that conversation, at least at the point in time when state boards of education approved textbooks for distribution. The approved textbooks will always present an optimistic and patriotic expression of the political context the boards


14 Tony Waters

of education reflect. That which is still contested will not be legitimated politically, and will be left out of the K-12 canon known as "the content standards."

This brings me back to the issue of what historians in our universities do, and why what they teach is so often different from what is taught in K-12. Universities produce the contingent history of tomorrow. The grab bag that their classes dip into will become the stories and analyses that will explain events in an unknowable future. But only a very few will actually be used in future K- 12 books. For example, the reason why Islam is a new emphasis of the American social studies curriculum, and not Shintoism or Hinduism, has to do with broader political and military issues which emerged after September 11,2001. There will probably be a stronger emphasis on Islam in future K-12 textbooks because the story of Islam is important in 2005 for explaining to our children the present actions of the United States, while the stories of Shintoism and Hinduism are not. The emphasis on Islam has everything to do with the story America is trying to tell itself, and little to do with the relative importance of Islam, Hinduism, or Shintoism as world religions.

Max Weber on Ethnic Groups: How Nations Think about Their History

The sociologist Max Weber discussed how groups use history to define themselves as having a common identity in ethnicity, nationality, or citizenship. Weber wrote that such status groups are made up of "communities" of people who share the common "honor" of a particular identity. In the case of ethnic and national groups, this honor comes through a plausible belief in common ancestry. Note that this common form of "honor" needs to be one of "belief"' not actual verifiable genetic fact. So long as there is a belief in common origin, and it is credible and creditable, it is enough for the group to verify who belongs and who does not. It has to be credible in the sense that habits, looks, dress, food, likes, etc., are consistent with common practice. It has to be creditable in the sense that the group needs to have an explanation of why their unique sense of dignity is important, irrespective of objective conditions. This is K-12 history at its best: credible, creditable, and expressing the dignity of nationalism and patriotism. K-12 history ultimately is the definition of a nation or ethnic group both to itself and to the world about why it is unique.

All groups, whether of low or high status, believe themselves to be creditable, and tell stories about why their own group is better than others. However, there is a problem of how to go about doing this



credibly. Status groups, when compared to others, are either positively or negatively privileged. The story they tell about themselves--their history--must credibly explain why things are the way they are. Positively privileged groups need to explain to others why their privileges are natural and normal. Negatively privileged groups need to explain how privileges are denied them, despite their own basic goodness. In other words, ethnic groups need to explain to themselves and others why their status is creditable, in a credible fashion.

Weber writes that positively privileged status groups focus on their own general "excellence." Their kingdom is "of this world." Positively privileged groups control the government which in the modem world also controls the school curriculum. They live for the present and need to identify a great past that logically leads up to that present. Weber explains that part of the privileged status is a fear of "decay from inside" by a present generation. They believe that they themselves, and especially the young, are incapable of living up to the moral standards established by "the greatest generation," or subversion by groups jealous of their privileges. Quite often dominant groups describe how their education or skills have made them inappropriate for lower status tasks, that is the "dirty work" of society which is reserved for the subordinate groups.

Nevertheless, subordinate groups also have a sense of excellence and dignity. For them, there is a glorious future lying beyond the present, whether it is of this life, or a later life. There is often in such groups a belief that they have a providential mission from God, and that a messiah figure will appear to shine a light on their hidden excellence. It is generally believed that this light will naturally lead to the overthrow of their undeserving oppressors. When this happens, their true honor will become obvious to a world which has previously defined them as pariahs.

Put bluntly, positively privileged groups have nostalgia for the past, and are likely to "celebrate" it through telling and retelling of their history. Subordinated groups dream of future deliverance, and speak little of a discreditable past. During the Civil War, the nostalgia for the past was expressed in songs like "Dixie" which glorified the past that dominant Southern planters sought to preserve. At the same time, subordinated slaves expressed themselves through songs of deliverance, like "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" and even the "Battle Hymn of the Repub- lic," which expressed a belief in a future salvation.

Credibility, Creditability, and Thoroughbred Anthropological Types

Whether a status group is positively or negatively privileged in a particular society, they also generate what Weber calls a "thoroughbred


16 Tony Waters

anthropological type." These are the stereotypes that ethnic and national groups use to define themselves, as well as the others with whom they have contact. These definitions include beliefs about characteristic food preferences, dress, music, and professions. These likes and dislikes are asserted through song, ritual, stories, and history texts. For modem dominant groups, such self-definition may become encoded in law, and the story expressed through K-12 texts.

The anthropological thoroughbreds developed by dominant and subordinate groups are patterned. The dominant group sees itself as being smart, benevolent, and unable to do unskilled labor, while subordinate groups are lazy, and fit only for menial tasks. The dominant group generally believes that the subordinate people are satisfied in their position. This view is often expressed in the United States today in dominant views about immigrants from poor Third World countries. It is believed that immigrants will take low-status jobs in farm-work/gardening/restaurants, and that they are still happy to be here because life in the home country was so miserable. Complementing such folk anthropology is the belief that the native born are incapable of working in farm-work/gardening/restaurants because the pay is too low, and the youth too decadent to work as hard as required.

But the anthropological thoroughbreds developed by subordinate groups also fit a pattern. The stories they tell tend to describe themselves as being clever and indispensable, while the dominant group is rich, cruel, and easily fooled. The Br'er Rabbit stories developed by African-Americans during the days of slavery are a good example of such stories. Subordi- nate groups also often believe that were it not for the skills and insights of themselves, the system of the dominant group would collapse. Slaves in the American South typically all shared this view, irrespective of the fact that their status in the larger society was low. Today, building custodians, and farm workers will assert that the larger market system they serve would collapse without them. Note that this view is both credible and creditable. It is through such stereotypes, if you will, that the conversation about how a group defines its own characteristics and those of others is sustained.

Most important for this essay, dominant groups have the further advantage that a formal history, such as that introduced in K-12, establishes stereotypes as historical fact. But the running conversations of the subordinate groups are also important. For it is out of this unofficial "clandestine" conversation that the rationalizations needed to explain future shifts in power, prestige and honor will emerge.



History, Mass Modern Society, and Textbooks Textbooks are an important means by which mass modem societies

affirm and recreate an explanation of where a nation is today. Millions of glossy paged copies are produced to teach K-12 students the dominant explanation of why society is the way it is. Meanwhile, the stories of subordinate groups tend to be passed along clandestinely through allegorical myths, music, gossip, and art. New ideas emerging out of subordinated media are often unnoticed by the dominant culture. Music is a powerful means for passing along clandestine values in modem society. Powerful clandestine forces emerging during the last 40 years or so were first expressed in rap, soul, and folk music. Much of the now-dominant conservative movement had its origins in allegorical myths about wel- fare, capitalism, affirmative action, race, abortion, taxation policy, and government bureaucracy. These stories were told clandestinely in little- noticed publications, business schools, and radio stations which gained currency in the 1960s and 1970s.

College classrooms, where individual professors have broad power to assign books, are a place where clandestine ideas are expressed and tested for their plausibility. For what it is worth, the clandestine ideas of the right tend to be expressed in business and economics departments. Clan- destine ideas of the left are often found in history and education Depart- ments. The advantage of the college classroom is that these ideas can be shaped and interpreted in ways that make sense in the context of different plausible futures.

The Problem of Historical Change: Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving

No dominant group started out being in charge. What is more, no dominant group will remain dominant forever. And if you look carefully, you can see the fingerprints of subordination in the histories that dominant groups tell about themselves. This is because every dominant group must at some time outwit someone else, permitting the group to achieve its rightful place in the sun. In other words, there must be a foil in the story, a messiah figure, and a theme of triumph against odds. This story is rooted in a past which is plausible, creditable, and credible to a dominant group. A good way to do this, is to legitimate an event which is beyond the lived memories of people within the society. This is why dominant groups tell stories of a distant, rather than recent past. Perhaps it is even why so many K-12 history classes never seem to reach the end of the book where the recent past is discussed. Glorious stories of a hundred years ago are less likely to be challenged by the memories of the living.


18 Tony Waters

A good way to illustrate this is by looking at how the American Thanksgiving went from being a one-off minor celebration by fewer than fifty English religious heretics dependent on Indian largesse, to a descrip- tion of a glorious past for a nation of two hundred ninety-four million people. The Thanksgiving story, as is told in our K-12 history textbooks, is the story of a small band of church dissenters--Pilgrims -upset with the theological practices of the Church of England. They first went to Holland, and later to Massachusetts. They settled at Plymouth in the forests of Massachusetts near Cape Cod in 1620. After democratically deciding to govern themselves with written laws (The Mayflower Com- pact) these rational modem human beings established themselves on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Their first winter in New England was devastating, and many of the Pilgrims perished. A messiah figure eventually appeared in the person of Squanto, an Indian who spoke English and introduced them to the Indians of the area. The Puritans worked with these Indians to establish farms which the following season provided an abundant harvest. After the harvest was in, the Pilgrims invited their new Indian friends to a feast of uniquely American food like turkey, venison, and maize. And the story often concludes that today's uniquely positive American values like the rule of law, freedom of religion, cultural diversity, farming, and hard work are logically celebrated by acknowledging the role Pilgrims and Indians played in developing the new society.

The problem that the grouchy critical historians at the universities are likely to point to is that it didn't quite happen that way. To start with, Spaniards, French, and even English had long preceded the Pilgrims in America. Indeed, if there was a "first food" it was cod liver oil from the fisherman who boiled the massive codfish caught along Cape Cod. And as for friendship and tolerance, the Pilgrims were the antecedents for seventy years of Puritan theological despotism which included the perse- cution of Quakers, the military annihilation of Squanto's heirs in King Philip's War, and culminated in the Salem Witch Trials in 1691. Indeed, it was only an autocratic act by that great social liberal, the King of England, that finally revoked the democratic Puritan Charter, replacing it with a staid Royal Charter which finally protected religious liberty from the excesses of the Pilgrims' successors.

Nevertheless, despite these uncomfortable truths, we continue to use the Pilgrims as exemplars of virtue in our textbooks. Virtually all Ameri- cans celebrate Thanksgiving and honor both the Pilgrims and the Indians. As I will conclude below, this is probably a good idea. Given the nature of American society today, including the importance of religion, cultural diversity and the rule of law, the Pilgrim story continues to resonate well. But, I suspect that it is no coincidence that the second Thanksgiving was



not held until about 1820, long after the excesses of the Puritans had faded from immediate memory. There was also of course a need, as Weber pointed out, for the new country to define itself as unique from others in terms of food likes, dress, and social customs. Thanksgiving has proved to be an excellent ritual to assert this "American exceptionalism."

And so, hundreds of millions are exposed to Thanksgiving through the shared experience of donning Indian or Puritan costumes as second graders, eating American turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, and, of course, reading about the story in millions of American history textbooks. By performing these rituals, and insisting that our second graders dress up as Pilgrims or Indians (even those living in Polynesian Hawaii), we make an important statement about what values are important to us as a nation today, not just in the past.

Choosing a Plausible Past, Present, and Future

So what happened to the nasty side of the Massachusetts' Puritans? Aren't we their heirs, too? In a positivistic sense we are; and in the college history curriculum it is generally taught that events like the Salem witch trials are a natural outgrowth of religious extremism. Indeed the reason we talk about the Salem witch trials today is that intellectuals of the 1950s effectively resuscitated these events to make a clandestine point about witch trials being important as literary metaphor, that is, trials without heroes or honor. No one in the story of the Salem witch trials is creditable given contemporary values. The powerful prosecutors who condemned the witches to death are not people to be emulated. The judges who relaxed rules of evidence to permit ready convictions are not creditable. And none of the victims left clandestine diaries, notes, or stories which would provide a credible example of how good could overcome evil. I There are no heroes, so there is no creditable history. The Salem witch trials may be instructive for would-be prosecutors and judges to study in law schools, but they are of dubious value for K-12 books seeking to create an optimistic patriotism.

And this is why Loewen's book Lies my Teacher Told Me will never become part of a state board of education's content standards for K-12. Loewen's book points out that there is much to be discredited about American history. Heroes were in fact clods, and racism, not only pursuit of freedom and liberty, is a dominant theme in American history. Which is of course the reason that it cannot be used as a textbook in K- 12, where the dominant society needs to convince its children that an American identity is honorable, and that the dominance of the state is a natural consequence of a glorious past.


20 Tony Waters

Lies My Teacher Had Better Teach Me

This brings me full circle to answering the original question that my students first asked about the two types of history, that taught in K-12, and that learned in the university. The history we tell in K-12 is always tied to a need to justify the present. Implicitly, and most importantly, the story is about what "we" as a group believe our future should be. Through what is chosen to include in the history taught to our children, the government is helping children to discuss more than the problems of the past. Children are taught about how the problems of the present are discussed, and what future should be hoped for. In a modern society where the dominant group is inherently in charge of the state, this means that textbooks will always tell a creditable story which glorifies the past, and justifies the present. There will always be an assumption that today's youth do not quite measure up to their honored predecessors. This is what my students called the "wrong" history when they got to my class. But rather than being right or wrong, it is what modern states need to do to persist. History taught to the masses is always glorious, and always justifies the present.

But, while a glorious past may be important for the present, it is inadequate for a future where the unforeseen will need to be explained. Interpretations of future events will be contested, as power shifts occur, and new problems are dealt with. In the 1960s the United States was fortunate that a generation of historians prepared a "clandestine history" about Fredrick Douglass and others who have become recognized since as contributing creditably and credibly to a present focused on a need to reconcile racial differences. Other clandestine histories are being written today, most of which will never be heard of beyond a limited group of specialized scholars, or perhaps by undergraduates in a sociology, anthropology, or history class. But, necessarily a few will address the unforeseen circumstances of the future, and be used by someone to assert a claim of legitimacy for the people we will become. This will become the future's K-12 history at its best: credible, creditable, and expressing the dignity of nationalism and patriotism.



Sources and Further Reading

Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Spread on Nationalism, 2"d edition. New York: Verso Press.

Barth, Fredrik,edior (1969). "Introduction" to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Ori- gins of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little Brown.

Blumer, Herbert (1958). "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position." Pacific Socio- logical Review. v. 1: 3-8.

Loewen, James (1996). Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

Waters, Tony and Kim LeBlanc (2005). "Refugees and Education: Mass Public School- ing without a Nation-State. Comparative Education Review 49(2): 129-147.

Weber, Max (1948) "Class, Status, Party," pp. 180-194 in From Max Weber. New York: Free Press.

Notes

1. Which is not of course to say that there could not have been any; after all without the voice provided by Anne Frank's diaries, her capture, deportation and death would have had as little to say to us as the victims of the Salem Witch Trials, as without the diary she would have been as anonymous as the victims of Salem.

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle Contentsp. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21Issue Table of ContentsThe History Teacher, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Nov., 2005), pp. 1-139Front MatterWelcome to Our New Editor: Jane Dabel [pp. 9-10]Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History [pp. 11-21]The Craft of TeachingWhat Happened and Why? Helping Students Read and Write Like Historians [pp. 23-32]The State of the ProfessionJames Conant's Uncompleted Revolution: Methods Faculty and the Historical Profession, 1978-2004 [pp. 33-41]HistoriographyThe Spanish Borderlands, Historiography Redux [pp. 43-56]Special Feature: National History Day 2005 Prize EssaysIntroduction [pp. 57-58]Divided by a Common Language: The Babel Proclamation and its Influence in Iowa History [pp. 59-88]The Great Communicator: How FDR's Radio Speeches Shaped American History [pp. 89-106]Notes and Comments'To Feel Fiercely': Tradition, Heritage, and Nostalgia in English History [pp. 107-115]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 117-118]Review: untitled [pp. 118-119]Review: untitled [pp. 119-120]Review: untitled [p. 121-121]Review: untitled [pp. 121-123]Review: untitled [pp. 123-124]Review: untitled [pp. 124-125]Review: untitled [pp. 125-126]Review: untitled [pp. 126-128]Review: untitled [pp. 128-129]Review: untitled [pp. 129-130]Review: untitled [pp. 131-132]Review: untitled [pp. 132-133]Review: untitled [pp. 133-134]Review: untitled [pp. 134-135]Review: untitled [pp. 136-137]Review: untitled [pp. 137-138]Review: untitled [pp. 138-139]Back Matter

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Waters T. Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History