Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me

The people listed below, in alphabetical order, talked with me, commented on chapters,
suggested sources, corrected my mistakes, or provided other moral or material aid. I thank
them very much. They are: Ken Ames, Charles Arnaude, Stephen Aron, Jose Barreiro, Carol
Berkin, Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill Bigelow, Michael Blakey, James Baker, Linda
Brew, Tim Brookes, Josh Brown, Lonnie Bunch, Vernon Burton, Claire Cuddy, Richard N.
Current, Pete Daniel, Kevin Dann, Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio, Susan Dixon, Ariel
Dorfman, Mary Dyer, Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John Fadden, Patrick Ferguson, Paul
Finkelman, Frances FitzGerald, William Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch, Mel
Gabler, James Gardiner, John Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick Hagopian,
William Haviland, Gordon Henderson, Richard Hill, Mark Hilgendorf, Mark Hirsch, Dean
Hoge, Jo Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson, Clifton
H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge, Stuart Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger Kennedy, Paul Kleppner,
J. Morgan Kousser, Gary Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken Lawrence, Mary Lehman, Steve Lewin, Caret
Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Marciano, J.
Dan Marshall, Juan Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows,
Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer, Deborah Menkart, Donna Morgenstern,
Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Jeff Nygaard, Jim O'Brien, Roger Norland, Wardell Payne, Mark
Pendergrast, Larry Pizer, Bernice Reagan, Ellen Reeves, Joe Reidy Roy Rozensweig, Harry
Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins, John Salter, John Anthony Scott, Saul Schniderman,
Barry Schwartz, Louis Segal, Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian Sherman, David Shiman,
Beatrice Siegel, Barabara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold Starr, Mark Stoler, Bill
Sturtevant, Lonn Taylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan von Sertima, Herman Viola,
Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara Woods, Nancy Wright, and John Yewell.

Three institutions helped materially. The Smithsonian Institution awarded me two senior
postdoctoral fellowships. Members of its staff provided lively intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow fellows at the National Museum of American
History. Interns at the Smithsonian from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and
especially Portland State University chased down errant facts. Second, the flexible
University of Vermont allowed me to go on leave to work on this book, including a
sabbatical leave in 1993. Finally, The New Press, Andre Schiffrin, and especially my
editor, Diane Wachtell, provided consistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.

It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.

Felix Okoye 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.

Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko, samizdat letter to a historyjournal, c. 1975, USSR Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade. James W. Loewen

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history
invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty-one
subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-rtng is the adjective they apply to it. When students 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 classes in history, they repress what they learn, so
every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don't know.

African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special
dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly
worse than white students in mathematics. If you'll pardon my grammar, non-white students
do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for
minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don't even know they are 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 a lot of
time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient 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,
these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up
going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only
material that will appear on the next test.

College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant
exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers 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 wasmistaught.Professors of English literature don't presume that Romeo andJuliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, 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
arrived at 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 da.

Outside of school, Americans show great interest in history. Historical novels, whether by
Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr, et al.) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho!, Utah!, Nebraska!, Oregon!, Missouri.', and on! and on!) often become bestsellers. The National Museum of American History is one
of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The series “The Civil War”
attracted new audiences to public television. Movies based on historical incidents or
themes are a continuing source of fascination, from Birth ofa Nation through Gone with the Wind to Dances with Wolves andJFK.

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 are directly
relevant 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 this question by noting that the teaching of history, more
than any other discipline, is dominated by textbooks. And students are right: the books are boring.“ The stories that history textbooks tell
are predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. 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 fine in the end. ”Despite setbacks, the United
States overcame these challenges,“ in the words of one textbook. Most authors of history
textbooks 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
consider gender roles in contemporary society as a means of prompting students to think
about what women did and did not achieve in the suffrage movement or in the more recent
women's movement. They might ask students to prepare household budgets for the families of
a janitor and a stockbroker as a means of prompting thinking about labor unions and
social classes in the past and present. They might, but they don't. The present is not a
source of information for writers of history textbooks.

Conversely, textbooks seldom use the past to illuminate the present. They portray the past
as a simple-minded morality play. “Be a good citizen” is the message that textbooks
extract from the past. “You have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look
at what the United States has accomplished.” While there is nothing wrong with optimism,
it can become something of a burden for students of color, children of working-class
parents, girls who notice the dearth of female historical figures, or members of any group
that has not achieved socio-economic success. The optimistic approach prevents any under
standing of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color are
alienated. Even for male children from affluent white families, bland optimism gets
pretty boring after eight hundred pages.

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are
history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled
by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to 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 look inside. The titles themselves tell the story: The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise the American Nation. Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or
college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles ofChemistry, not Rise ofthe Molecule. And you can tell history textbooks just from their covers, graced as they are with
American flags, bald eagles, the Statue of Liberty.

Between the glossy covers, American history textbooks are full of information-overly
full. These books are huge. The specimens in my collection of a dozen of the most popular
textbooks average four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. No publisher
wants to lose an adoption because a book has left out a detail of concern to a particular
geographical area or a particular group. Textbook authors seem compelled to include a
paragraph about every U.S. president, even Chester A. Arthur and Millard Fillmore. Then
there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. Land ofPromise, to take one example, enumerates 444 chapter-closing “Main Ideas.” In addition, the book
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 the various sections within each chapter. 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 so many high school graduates cannot remember in which century the
Civil War was fought!

None of the facts is remembered, because they are presented simply as one damn thing after
another. While textbook authors tend to include most of the trees and all too many twigs,
they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the
forests. Textbooks stifle meaning by suppressing causation. Students exit history
textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social Life.

Even though the books bulge with detail, even though the courses are so busy they rarely
reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out most of what we need to know
about the American past. Some of the factoids they present are flatly wrong or
unverifiable. In sum, startling errors of omission and distortion mar American histories.

Errors in history textbooks often go uncorrected, partly because the history profession
does not bother to review textbooks. Occasionally outsiders do: Frances FitzGerald's 1979
study, America Revised, was a bestseller, but it made no impact on the industry. In pointing out how textbooks
ignored or distorted the Spanish impact on Latin America and the colonial United States,
FitzGerald predicted, “Text publishers may now be on the verge of rewriting history.”
But she was wrongthe books have not changed.

History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sourcesthe
plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles,
diaries, and letters that document times past. Based on these primary materials,
historians write secondary worksbooks and articles on subjects ranging from daftness 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 workstextbooks
covering all phases of U.S. history.

In practice, however, it doesn't happen that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones
of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them a
half-dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is written not by the authors
whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher's offices.
When historians do write textbooks, they risk snickers from their colleagues-tinged with
envy, but snickers nonetheless: “Why are you devoting time to pedagogy rather than
original research?”

The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks list
up-to-the-minute secondary sources in their bibliographies, yet the narratives remain
totally traditionalunaffected by recent research.'

What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read a poem? The
editors' voice in an English literature textbook might be as dull as the voice in a
history textbook, but at lease in the English textbook the voice stills when the book
presents original works of literature. The omniscient narrator's voice of history
textbooks insulates students from the raw materials of history. Rarely do authors quote
speeches, songs, diaries, or letters. Students need not be protected from this material.
They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold”
speech as read American Adventures's two paragraphs about it.

Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furious
debate informed by evidence and reason. Textbooks encourage students to believe that
history is facts to be learned. “We have not avoided controversial issues,” announces
one set of textbook authors; “instead, we have tried to offer reasoned judgments” on
themthus removing the controversy! Because textbooks employ such a godlike tone, 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 in 1991.
“However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture,” she
continued, “so ] never thought to doubt that it was.”

As a result of all this, most high school seniors are hamstrung in their efforts to
analyze controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter these students
the next year as college freshmen.) We've got to do better. Fivesixths of all Americans
never take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens “learn” in
high school forms much of what they know about our past.

This book includes ten chapters of amazing storiessome wonderful, some ghastlyin American
history. Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere
details but events and processes with important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave
out or distort these events and processes. 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 as
representing the range of textbooks available for American history courses. Two of the
books, Discovering American History and The American Adventure, are “inquiry textbooks” composed of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary
sources such as diaries and laws, all woven together by an overarching narrative .These books are supposed to invite students to “do” history themselves. The American Way,Land of Promise, The Untied St Republic, American History, and The American Tradition are traditional high school narrative history textbooks. American Adventures, Life and Liberty, and The 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 used on college campuses as well as in high schools.' These twelve textbooks, which
are listed (with full citations) in the appendix, 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 classes in Mississippi, Vermont, and the
Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and more hours interviewing high school history
teachers.