Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History

by James W. Loewen

  Unfortunately, ethnocentrism is, among other things, a form of ignorance. An ethnocentric person finds it hard to learn from another culture, already knowing it to be inferior. Ethnocentrism also has a Siamese twin, arrogance; the combination has repeatedly hampered U.S. foreign policy.

  History can make us less ethnocentric, but as usually taught in middle and high school, it has the opposite effect. That’s because our textbooks are shot through with the ideology called “American exceptionalism.” In 2007, Wikipedia offered a fine definition:

  the perception that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its unique origins, national credo, historical evolution, or distinctive political and religious institutions.20

  Wikipedia went on to note that superiority, not just difference, is almost always implied, although not necessarily.

  Of course, every national story is unique. Consider Portugal: no other nation “discovered” half the globe, as Portugal’s tourism board puts it. Or Namibia: no other nation in the twentieth century had three-fourths of its largest ethnic group (the Hereros) wiped out by a foreign power (Germany). But by American exceptionalism, authors of U.S. history textbooks mean not just unique, but uniquely wonderful. Consider the first paragraph of A History of the United States by Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley:

  American history is the story of a magic transformation. How did people from everywhere join the American family? How did men and women from a tired Old World, where people thought they knew what to expect, become wide-eyed explorers of a New World?21

  Surely that passage is meant to impart that the United States is truly special—and in a positive way. Presumably Boorstin and Kelley want students to be wide-eyed themselves as they learn more about the “magic transformation” that is American history.

  I suggest that teachers want students to be clear-eyed, not wide-eyed, as they learn American history. American exceptionalism promotes ethnocentrism. Still worse, it fosters bad history. To get across the claim that Americans have always been exceptionally good, authors leave out the bad parts. Woodrow Wilson involved us in a secret war against the U.S.S.R., for example. Let’s leave that out. Americans committed war crimes as a matter of policy in our war against the Philippines. Let’s suppress that. Ultimately, writing a past sanitized of wrongdoing means developing a book or a course that is both unbelievable and boring.

  Our national past is not so bad that teachers must protect students from it. “We do not need a bodyguard of lies,” points out historian Paul Gagnon. “We can afford to present ourselves in the totality of our acts.”22 Textbook authors seem not to share Gagnon’s confidence. But sugarcoating the past does not work anyway. It does not convince students that the U.S. has done no wrong; it only persuades them that American history is not a course worth taking seriously.

  Thus far we have noted four reasons why history is an important course.

  History helps students be better citizens by enabling them to understand what causes what in society.

  History helps students become critical thinkers. Doing historiography (and learning that word) is part of that process.

  History helps students muster countervailing power against those who would persuade them of false ideologies. This is the “history as weapon” point.

  History helps students become less ethnocentric.

  All four relate to history’s effects upon students, which make sense, since this is a book for teachers. But history—what we say about the past—also has effects upon our society as a whole.

  WHY HISTORY IS IMPORTANT TO SOCIETY

  There is a reciprocal relationship between justice in the present and honesty about the past. When the United States has achieved justice in the present regarding some past act, then Americans can face it and talk about it more openly, because we have made it right. It has become a success story. Conversely, when we find a topic that our textbooks hide or distort, probably that signifies a continuing injustice in the present. Telling the truth about the past can help us make it right from here on.

  This insight hit me between the eyes as I compared American history textbooks of the 1960s and 1990s in their handling of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1961, Thomas Bailey’s The American Pageant, for example, made no mention of the internment. Five years later, it got a paragraph, telling that “this brutal precaution turned out to be unnecessary,” for their loyalty “proved to be admirable.” The paragraph ends, “Partial financial adjustment after the war did something to recompense these uprooted citizens….”

  In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, apologizing for the “grave injustice” and paying $20,000 to each survivor of the camps. This amount hardly sufficed to recompense more than three years of life and labor lost behind barbed wire, as well as the loss of homes and businesses, but it was more than a token. Around that time, textbooks expanded their coverage of the incident. By 2006, Pageant had more than doubled its paragraph, added an ironic photograph of two Japanese Americans in Boy Scout uniforms posting a notice that read “To Aliens of Enemy Nationalities,” and included a boxed quote from a young Japanese American woman that told her angry reaction to the order. It also devoted the next two pages to the Japanese as “Makers of America,” providing a summary of the group’s entire history in the United States, including a photograph of deportees getting into a truck and another of Manzanar Camp, with lengthy captions. The last sentence in the main text treats our 1988 apology and payment of $20,000.23

  Because textbooks began to increase their treatment of the incarceration before 1988, historian Mark Selden suggests they may have helped to cause the 1988 apology and reparations payment. I suspect the textbooks merely reflected the change in the spirit of the times. But either way, there seems to have been an interrelationship between truth about the incarceration and justice toward its victims.

  Evidence shows that our society is ready to look at many past atrocities without flinching. In 2000, for example, the exhibit of lynching photos, Without Sanctuary, broke all attendance records at the New York Historical Society.24 To be sure, lynchings are over. Americans don’t do that anymore.25 So the lack of lynchings has become a success story and the topic is thus easier to face. Nevertheless, many visitors to the museum were surprised to learn that lynchings were not the work of a few hooded men late at night. The open daytime photos showing a white community proud to be photographed in the act startled them. Most Americans have not seen such images. Not one high school textbook on American history includes a lynching photo. Presented here is an example of the lynching photographs that are available but never included in U.S. history textbooks. Surely publishers’ caution is mistaken. After all, in 2003 Duluth faced this event, dedicating a memorial to the victims after decades of silence.

  On June 15, 1920, a mob took Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, three black circus workers, from the Duluth, Minnesota, jail and lynched them.

  Images like the Duluth mob can help students understand that racism in the United States has not typically been the province of the few, but of the many; not just the South, but also the North. Today, too, the discrimination facing African Americans (and to a degree, other groups, such as Native Americans and Mexican Americans) does not come from a handful of extremist outcasts late at night. Leaving out lynchings, sundown towns,26 and other acts of collective discrimination impoverishes students and hurts their ability to understand the present, not just the past.

  History is important—even crucial. Helping students understand what happened in the past empowers them to use history as a weapon to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens, including students. The rest of this book will suggest ways to teach this important topic importantly.

  It begins with four general chapters about teaching history/social studies. First, teachers must free themselves from the straitjacket of the textbook—the message of Chapter 1. Then they need
to address why the achievement gap between white students and black, Anglos and Native Americans, rich compared to poor, is larger in history than in any other discipline. Chapter 2 shows that teacher expectations play a role, which means, on the positive side, that changed expectations can narrow the gap. Historiography is the most important single gift that a history course can give to a student. Chapter 3 explains it and suggests ways to help students grasp and use the idea. Chapter 4 shows how to help students do history, not merely learn it.

  The final six chapters treat six specific topics, arranged chronologically from prehistory through secession to the Nadir of race relations. Each has proven to be problematic. Teachers in my workshops have told me that they worry about these areas and have shown me that they do not teach them well. Yet these six topics have important implications for our time, so each should be taught. With added information and new ways to introduce them, these topics can become high points rather than pitfalls of the course.

  I’ve found that learning new things about our American past is exciting, for me as well as for students and other teachers. So will you.

  FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I know how busy most teachers are, so each chapter will list only sources that are crucial for teachers to read. The following five books (choose either book by Percoco) are key preparation for any social studies or U.S. history teacher.

  Either James A. Percoco’s A Passion for the Past (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998) or Divided We Stand (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001) supplies a daunting list of innovations for history classes, from visiting cemeteries to getting students talking about controversial historic photographs. It’s daunting because Percoco lays out so many ideas; but if a teacher chooses just two or three and makes them work, his book will have done its job.

  In Beyond the Textbook, David Kobrin (NYC: Heinemann, 1996) suggests only a handful of innovations, but he explores each in depth, showing pitfalls to avoid.

  Note Bill Bigelow’s how-to accounts of several innovative classroom exercises in Wayne Au, Bigelow, and Stan Karp, eds., Rethinking Our Classrooms (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2007).

  After the Fact, by two college professors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 1992), intended for college history majors, covers about twenty topics, providing examples of how treat a topic at some length.

  Do read Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

  CHAPTER 1

  The Tyranny of Coverage

  EVERY PROBLEM THE INTRODUCTION DESCRIBED stems from relying upon the huge U.S. history textbook. It boasts 1,150 pages, several hundred “main ideas,” and thousands of “terms and names” to memorize.1 Teachers can’t run an interesting American history course if they try to cover that textbook. Nor can they do any of the things this book will suggest. Teachers must be selective. This chapter tells how to choose what to teach.

  FORESTS, TREES, AND TWIGS

  In a world history class, this does not seem revolutionary. World history teachers already grasp the fact that they could not hope to cover the history of the world without picking and choosing. Otherwise, they would have to devote perhaps 13 minutes to the history of Malaysia, 7 to Singapore, and a whopping 28 for Thailand—impossible! But in U.S. history, teachers still feel a compulsion to teach 4,444 twigs (8,888 if it’s an “Advanced Placement” course), rather than a much smaller number of trees and only a handful of forests. Sometimes they feel compelled to do so by statewide “standardized” twig tests. Unfortunately, the more teachers cover, the less kids remember. Fragmenting history into unconnected “facts” practically guarantees that students will not be able to relate many of these terms to their own lives. As a professor who specializes in teaching first-year courses, I can guarantee that by the time they enter college, most students who were taught U.S. history the usual way have forgotten everything—except that World War I preceded World War II.

  Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than cover it. Instead of “teaching the book,” teachers must develop a list of 30–50 topics they want to teach in their U.S. history course. Every topic should excite or at least interest them. What meaning might it have to students’ lives?

  These topics will be the trees. They organize the twigs that students are to recall. More important, they organize the entire school year. After creating your list, sleep on it, then add any forgotten topics the next day. Then (and only then), check a good college textbook in U.S. history to see if you have made an egregious omission.2 If so, add it, but only if you judge it important and are excited to teach it.

  No list can be completely idiosyncratic. If it omits the making and use of the Constitution, it’s an incompetent list. If it does not include the Civil War and its impact, it is an incompetent list. But must it include, for instance, the removal of the five so-called civilized tribes from the Southeast—the Trail of Tears of the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles? My list would. But a Minnesota teacher revealed to me that hers wouldn’t—she’d rather teach the Dakota War or Sioux Uprising of 1862–63, which happened right in her part of Minnesota. She had a point. But at some point every list must include the taking of the land from its first possessors, or it cannot be competent. Teachers of APUSH—the Advanced Placement in U.S. History—will want to include the era that ETS’s test will cover in its DBQ (Document-Based Question).

  I made up my own list of 30–50 trees and wound up with just 36, so I know it can be done. I’ll not publish my list, because doing so might deter some teachers from coming up with their own. But I will list a few topics that did not make it: the European explorers after Columbus (Ponce de Leon, Cabot, etc.), the formation and controversy over the national bank, the Plains Indian wars, the Progressive movement, and the Clinton presidency. I’m not excited about teaching any of them. I’m not sure what I think high school graduates must know about them, years later, that they couldn’t look up for themselves.

  Recall the old cartoon showing a lad defending his D in history to his parents: “When you took it, there wasn’t as much history to learn!” He has a point. In the 1940s, the Civil War came in the second semester of U.S. history courses. Today Reconstruction often gets shoehorned into the first semester, because teachers now must cover the Cold War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, Clinton’s impeachment, two wars in Iraq, and more. Fifty years from now, contemplate the addition of four or five additional chapters totaling 200 more pages. Impossible. Backs will break, to say nothing of minds. Teachers must leave things out.

  The greater danger lies in stuffing everything back in. For example, the Plains Indian wars could be shoehorned into “imperialism,” which is on my 30–50 list, or “manifest destiny,” which is not. But the teacher who does so merely reinvents the chapter titles of a typical overstuffed U.S. history textbook. The American Pageant, for example, organizes its thousands of twigs of information into 42 chapters, a number that does fall between 30 and 50. Such chapters—compendiums of topics—are not what we’re talking about here.

  A teacher can tell her students, “There was a Progressive movement. It happened around 1910. Chapter 28 treats it. A well-educated high school graduate needs to know about it. I suggest you read chapter 28.” Then, she need not teach it … unless the Progressive movement excites her and makes her list of 30–50.

  Every problem the introduction described stems from relying upon the huge U.S. history textbook. Educational researchers point out that U.S. schooling covers too many topics in all subject areas. Curricular consultant Lynn Erickson suggests that covering too many topics helps explain why U.S. students perform worse than students in most other modern nations in science and math. In history, she notes, the problem is especially acute. R. J. Marzano and J. S. Kendall surveyed the national and state standards that have proliferated in every discipline over the past two decades. Their conclusion is obvious from their title: “Awash in a sea of standards.” Again, history and civics ar
e by far the worst offenders, each with more than 400 “benchmarks” that students are supposed to be able to know or do.3

  Everything suggested in this book—or any other book about how to teach history effectively—hinges upon solving the problem of how to use the huge U.S. history textbook. Teaching 30 to 50 trees is the solution.4

  WINNOWING TREES

  How do teachers decide whether to include a given topic? One way is to ask what students need to know about it 20 years from now, when they are in the workforce. If they need to know a lot of twigs, can’t they look them up then? Admittedly, twigs are important. Knowing that the U.S. removed Native Americans from the Southeastern states in about 1830, not 1930, provides a historical context that helps a student understand both centuries. Students need to include twigs in the projects they do, the debates they hold, the papers they write. In states with statewide multiple-choice exams in history/social studies, teachers will want to include the topics, skills, and yes, twigs that the exam stresses. But twig memorization must not be the focus. Students will learn twigs for the best of reasons—because they need them to understand and complete the fascinating tasks on which they are working.

  Key questions to raise when winnowing nonessential topics are: Why do I want my students to know all this? What should they be able to do with the information, assuming they recall it once they leave school? Teachers can ask friends, family members, or colleagues—maybe the math teacher!—what they remember and what they think everyone should know about the tree under consideration.