I am especially pleased to welcome this book to the Multicultural Education Series because of my personal and professional admiration and respect for Jim Loewen, which is a consequence of his actions to promote racial equality and social justice during his lifetime and career. I first became acquainted with Jim’s work when he coauthored an innovative and bold Mississippi history textbook, Mississippi: Conflict and Change (Loewen & Sallis, 1974), which evoked an enormous controversy because it shattered the silences of the oppressive racial history in Mississippi. The controversy ended in a legal victory for Jim and his co-author because of the truth and accuracy of their book. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Loewen, 1995), as well as Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005), continue to break silences and change our perspectives on history. Jim walks the talk in his books, in his workshops for teachers, and in his inspiring and popular public lectures. This timely, needed, and erudite book exemplifies his transformative and creative work at its best.
—James A. Banks
REFERENCES
Banks, J. A. (2004). Multicultural education: Historical development, dimensions, and practice. In J. A. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 3–29). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Banks, J. A. (Ed.). (2009). The Routledge international companion to multicultural education. New York and London: Routledge.
Banks, J. A., & Banks, C. A. M. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Cesari, J. (2004). When Islam and democracy meet: Muslims in Europe and the United States. New York: Pelgrave Macmillan.
Dillon, S. (2006, August 27). In schools across U.S., the melting pot overflows. The New York Times, vol. CLV [155] (no. 53,684), pp. A7 & 16.
Eck, D. L. (2001). A new religious America: How a “Christian country” has become the world’s most religiously diverse nation. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.
Loewen, J. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: The New Press.
Loewen, J. W. (2005). Sundown towns: A hidden dimension of American racism. New York: The New Press.
Loewen, J. W., & Sallis, C. (Eds.). (1974). Mississippi: Conflict and change. New York: Random House.
Martin, P., & Midgley, E. (1999). Immigration to the United States. Population Bulletin, 54(2), 1–44. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau.
Progressive Policy Institute. (2008). 50 million Americans speak languages other than English at home. Retrieved September 2, 2008 from http://www.progressivepolicy.org/
Roberts, S. (2008, August 14). A generation away, minorities may become the majority in U.S. The New York Times, vol. CLVII [175] (no. 54,402), pp. A1 & A18.
Suárez-Orozco, C., Suárez-Orozco, M. M., & Todorova, I. (2008). Learning a new land: Immigrant students in American society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2003, October). Language use and English-speaking ability: 2000. Retrieved September 2, 2008 from http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf
U.S. Census Bureau. (2008, August 14). Statistical abstract of the United States. Retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/07statab/pop.pdf
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2004). Yearbook of immigration statistics, 2004. Washington, DC: Office of Immigration Statistics: Author. Retrieved September 6, 2006 from www.uscis.gov/graphics/shared/statistics/yearbook/Yearbook2004.pdf
ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN
Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
Sundown Towns
Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus
Social Science in the Courtroom
Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with Charles Sallis et al.)
Social Science in the Courtroom
The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White
Rethinking Our Past (audio lectures)
Acknowledgments
FOR HELPFUL COMMENTS, I thank Mary Cavalier, Irene Laroche, Nick Loewen, Susan Luchs, Jackie Migliori, Jeff Schneider, Laura Updyke, series editor Jim Banks, and editor Brian Ellerbeck.
For illustrations, I thank Scott Nearing, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Idaho State Historical Society, the New York Times, Glencoe McGraw-Hill, U.S. News and World Report, the Library of Congress, and the National Museum of American History.
INTRODUCTION
History as Weapon
HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES,1 as usually taught before college, can hinder rather than help build students’ understanding of how the world works. Indeed, my bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me, opens with the claim that American history as taught in grades 4 through 12 is in crisis and typically makes us stupider.
Of course, it’s easy to make such a bold statement. At some point since 1980 just about every field in education has been declared “in crisis.”2 The reception of Lies My Teacher Told Me, however, implies that many readers, including many teachers of American history in grades 4 through 12, agree with my assessment. In 2007, Lies passed a million copies sold and was selling at a higher rate than ever, even though it had been on the market, unchanged, for twelve years.3 Teachers have been special fans, leading to overflow workshops at venues like the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Association for Multicultural Education. So maybe I’m right. Maybe history/social studies is in crisis.
Certainly we can do better.
Since Lies My Teacher Told Me came out in 1995, I have traveled the country, giving workshops for school districts and teacher groups on how to teach history and social studies better. Some of the ideas I present in these workshops came from other K–12 teachers I have met over the years. Others derive from my own teaching experience and from my years of thinking about what Americans get wrong about the past. This book collects the best shticks from those workshops for the benefit of teachers and future teachers I will never meet.
Teachers who already teach beyond and occasionally against their U.S. history textbooks will find that this book will help them explain their approach to other teachers who still teach traditionally. For those who have not yet dared to break away from the security of just teaching the textbook, this book will provide specific ways to do so—ways that have worked for other teachers. It may also help them explain their new approach to principals and more traditional parents.
Before plunging into how to teach history better, however, we need to spend a few pages considering why. This introduction begins with a cautionary tale from Mississippi, showing how history was used there as a weapon to mislead students and keep them ignorant about the American past. Moving north to Vermont, I show that ignorance about the past is hardly limited to Mississippi. Mississippi merely exemplified the problem in exaggerated form, as Mississippi embodied many national problems in exaggerated form in the late 1960s and ’70s. The introduction goes on to dissect the usual reasons that teachers and textbooks give to persuade students that history is worth knowing. I suggest other more important reasons why history is important, both to the individual and society. The introduction then closes with a brief overview of the book.
A LESSON FROM MISSISSIPPI
I first realized how history distorts our understanding of society in the middle of my first year of full-time teaching, at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. I had started teaching at Tougaloo, a predominantly black institution, in the fall of 1968, after finishing my doctorate in sociology at Harvard University. That first year, in addition to my sociology courses, I was assigned to teach a section of the Freshman Social Science Seminar. The history department had designed this seminar to replace the old “Western Civ” course—History of Western Civilization—then required by most colleges in America, including most black colleges. The FSSS introduced stu
dents to sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and so on, in the context of African American history—appropriate enough, 99% of our students being African Americans.
African American history uses the same chronology as American history, of course, so the second semester began right after the Civil War, with Reconstruction. I had a new group of students that first day of the spring semester in January 1969, and I didn’t want to do all the talking on the first day of class. So I asked my seminar, “What was Reconstruction? What images come to your mind about that era?”
The result was one of those life-changing “Aha!” experiences—or, more accurately, an “Oh, no!” experience. Sixteen of my seventeen students told me, “Reconstruction was that time, right after the Civil War, when African Americans took over the governing of the Southern states, including Mississippi, but they were too soon out of slavery, so they messed up, and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back control of the state governments.”
I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions of facts glared from that statement that it was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never took over the Southern states. All Southern states had white governors and all but one had white legislative majorities throughout Reconstruction. Moreover, the Reconstruction governments did not “mess up.” Mississippi in particular enjoyed less corrupt government during Reconstruction than at any point later in the century. Across the South, governments during Reconstruction passed the best state constitutions the Southern states have ever had, including their current ones. They started public school systems for both races. Mississippi had never had a statewide system for whites before the Civil War, only scattered schools in the larger towns, and of course it had been a felony to teach blacks, even free blacks, to read and write during slavery times. The Reconstruction governments tried out various other ideas, some of which proved quite popular. Therefore, “whites” did not take back control of the state governments. Rather, some whites—Democrats, the party of overt white supremacy throughout the nineteenth century—ended this springtime of freedom before full democracy could blossom. Spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan, they used terrorism and fraud to wrest control from the biracial Republican coalitions that had governed during Reconstruction.
How could my students believe such false history? I determined to find out. I visited high schools, sat in on history classes, and read the textbooks students were assigned. Tougaloo was a good college—perhaps the best in the state. My students had learned what they had been taught. Bear in mind that they had been attending all-black high schools with all-black teaching staffs—massive school desegregation would not take place in Mississippi until January 1970, a year later. In school after school, I saw black teachers teaching black students white-biased pseudo-history because they were just following the book—and the textbooks were written from a white supremacist viewpoint.
The yearlong Mississippi History course was the worst offender. It was required of all 5th- and 9th-graders, in public and private schools, owing to a state law passed after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, intended to desegregate the public schools. This Mississippi statute was part of a package of obstructionist measures designed to thwart the Court and maintain “our Southern way of life,” which every Mississippian knew meant segregation and white supremacy. The one textbook approved for the 9th-grade course, Mississippi: Yesterday and Today by John K. Bettersworth, said exactly what my students had learned. Other than “messing up” during Reconstruction, this book omitted African Americans whenever they did anything notable. Among its 60 images of people, for instance, just 2 included African Americans.4
I knew John Bettersworth. In my junior year in college, I attended Mississippi State University, where he taught history. He knew better. Indeed, when he reviewed several books on Reconstruction in the New York Times Book Review, he made clear that he knew that the interracial Republican coalition that governed Mississippi during Reconstruction had done a good job under difficult circumstances. But in his 9th-grade textbook, Bettersworth wrote what he imagined the Mississippi State Textbook Board wanted to read. He knew full well that historians did not (and still do not) review high school textbooks, so his professional reputation would not be sullied by his unprofessional conduct.5
Dr. Bettersworth could not have believed that his textbook was an innocent way to make a few thousand dollars without hurting anyone. At Mississippi State, he encountered the graduates of Mississippi high schools by the hundreds, and he knew how racist some of them could be—partly because they believed the BS (Bad Sociology) about African Americans in his textbook.
Perhaps as a passive form of resistance against their racist textbooks, many Mississippi teachers—white as well as black—spent hours of class time making students memorize the names of the state’s 82 counties, their county seats, and the date each was organized as a county. Or, perhaps more likely, they did this because it had been done to them. Regardless, these 250 twigs of information were useless and soon forgotten.6 Meanwhile, students learned nothing about the past from this book that would help them deal with the wrenching changes Mississippi was going through in the 1960s and ’70s.
Black students were particularly disadvantaged. What must it do to them, I wondered that January afternoon, to believe that the one time their group stood center-stage in the American past, they “messed up”? It couldn’t be good for them. If it had happened, of course, that would be another matter. In that case, it would have to be faced: why did “we” screw up? What must we learn from it? But nothing of the sort had taken place. It was, again, Bad Sociology.
For more than a year, I tried to interest historians in Mississippi in writing a more accurate textbook of state history. Finally, despairing of getting anyone else to do so, I put together a group of students and faculty from Tougaloo and also from Millsaps College, the nearby white school, got a grant, and we wrote it. The result, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, won the Lillian Smith Award for best Southern nonfiction the year it came out. Nevertheless, the Mississippi State Textbook Board rejected it as unsuitable. In most subjects, the board selected three to five textbooks. In Mississippi history, they chose just one. Only two were available, which might be characterized “ours” and “theirs.” By a two-to-five vote, the board rejected ours, accepting only theirs. Two blacks and five whites sat on the board.
Our book was not biased toward African Americans. Six of its eight authors were white, as were 80% of the historical characters who made it into our index. An index 20% nonwhite looks pretty black, however, to people who are used to textbooks wherein just 2% of the people referred to are nonwhite. Moreover, in contrast to the white supremacist fabrications offered in “their book,” our book showed how Mississippi’s social structure shaped the lives of its citizens. So, after exhausting our administrative remedies, we—coeditor Charles Sallis and I, accompanied by three school systems that wanted to use our book—eventually sued the textbook board in federal court. The case, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al., came to trial in 1980, Judge Orma Smith presiding. Smith was an 83-year-old white Mississippian who believed in the 1st amendment—students’ right to controversial information—and was bringing himself to believe in the 14th amendment—blacks’ right to equal treatment.7
For a week we presented experts from around the state and around the nation who testified that by any reasonable criteria, including those put forth by the state itself, our book was better than their book. Among other topics, they found Conflict and Change more accurate in its treatment of prehistory and archaeology, Native Americans, slavery, Reconstruction, Mississippi literature, the Civil Rights era, and the recent past.
Then came the state’s turn. The trial’s dramatic moment came when the Deputy Attorney General of Mississippi asked John Turnipseed, one of the board members who had rejected our book, why he had done so. Turnipseed asked the court to turn to page 178, on which was a photograph of a lynching. “Now y
ou know, some 9th-graders are pretty big,” he noted, “especially black male 9th-graders. And we worried, or at least I worried, that teachers—especially white lady teachers—would be unable to control their classes with material like this in the book.”
As lynching photos go, ours was actually mild, if such an adjective can be applied to these horrific scenes. About two dozen white people posed for the camera behind the body of an African American man, silhouetted in a fire that was burning him. The victim’s features could not be discerned, and no grisly details—such as whites hacking off body parts as souvenirs—were shown or described. Nevertheless, our book was going to cause a race riot in the classroom.
We had pretested our book—along with Bettersworth’s—in an overwhelmingly white classroom and an overwhelmingly black classroom. Both had preferred ours by huge margins. So we had material to counter this argument when our turn came for rebuttal. We never had to use it, however, because at that point Judge Smith took over the questioning.
This is the lynching photo to which Turnipseed objected. A lynching is a public murder, done with considerable support from the community. Often, as here, the mob posed for the camera. They showed no fear of being identified because they knew no white jury would convict them.
“But that happened, didn’t it?” he asked. “Didn’t Mississippi have more lynchings than any other state?”
“Well, yes,” Turnipseed admitted. “But that all happened so long ago. Why dwell on it now?”
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 2