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

by James W. Loewen

  In a recent workshop, a teacher confessed that she did not understand the importance of the controversy about the national bank during Andrew Jackson’s administration. “Do I have to teach it?” she asked. The answer is no. Indeed, she should not teach it, precisely because she does not understand its importance. The textbook she used, Boorstin and Kelley, devotes three full pages and two illustrations to the matter. Asking students to skip those pages can seem awkward (although students rarely complain about not having to read something). But she does not know what she wants students to do with the information—and for the record, neither do I.

  I am not advising anyone to omit the bank issue. Another teacher may understand its importance better than I do, and better than my teacher. The bank issue can be linked to the principles of Keynesian economics that underlie the occasional decisions by the Federal Reserve Board to lower interest rates to avoid a recession. The nation has wound up with a mixed system of private banks, perhaps like those favored by Jackson, and public coordination, as favored by Nicholas Biddle and the Whigs. Perhaps this system combines the best of both worlds, or perhaps the rights of the common citizen are subordinated to those of the plutocracy, as Jackson implied. I write this paragraph in the midst of the mortgage lending crisis of 2008, when the federal government is taking steps to shore up huge private corporations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Teachers who understand this issue, are excited to teach it, see its relevance to the present, and think all students should understand it, should include the national bank. Teachers who don’t should not.

  One way to assess the significance of a topic is to consider the continuing major themes of U.S. history to which it may relate. I came up with ten:

  how cultures change through diffusion and syncretism

  taking the land

  the individual versus the state

  the quest for equity (slavery and its end, women’s suffrage, etc.)

  sectionalism

  immigration and Americanization

  social class; democracy vs. plutocracy

  technological developments and the environment

  relations with other nations

  historiography, how we know things

  Perhaps these are the forests. Each is central to the discipline of history, at least of the United States. Each refers to crucial issues in the development of our country. There are concepts and facts connected with each of these themes that I hope high school graduates can tell me, when I encounter them three years later in a college class. Another person’s list might be somewhat different. It might usefully be shorter. I suggest it should not be longer. (Moses had a point: we do have ten fingers.)

  Teachers might share their list of themes with students at the beginning of the year. They can all fit on a single sheet of poster paper, taped to the wall inconspicuously. From time to time, a given tree can be shown to tie in explicitly with one of these continuing themes. Chapter 6 will use diffusion and syncretism to explain the rise of Europe, for example. In turn, the key result of Columbus’s voyages—“the Columbian exchange”—also exemplifies both terms. Forcing students to memorize the list or recall which themes apply to which topics throughout the year would be dreary. Instead, teachers can create “aha moments” by asking students, after they are well into a topic, “Does this topic relate to any of the themes on the poster?”5

  DEEP THINKING

  Years hence, as citizens, students need to be able to investigate deep issues. At the least, they need to be able to accept or debunk the cause-and-effect propositions that others suggest in answer to such issues. Tomorrow’s issues, of course, we can predict only imperfectly today. Teachers prepare students to think about them by helping them learn to think about issues and causal statements in our past. High school textbooks in U.S. history do this poorly.

  Consider this question: Why did slavery take greater hold in the South than the North? Slavery certainly existed in the North, after all. Indeed, the first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts. In 1720, of New York City’s population of 7,000, 1,600 were African Americans, mostly slaves. Wall Street was the marketplace where slaveowners could hire them out by the day or week.6 But slavery grew more important in the South and ended in most of the North after the Revolutionary War. Why? Let us research this question using a currently popular textbook by Boorstin and Kelley. Under “slavery,” its index does not list “causes” or any other likely subtitle. Turning to the first mention, we find the familiar account of the arrival of a Dutch ship in Jamestown in 1619, off-loading twenty blacks, “probably not slaves but indentured servants.” Fifteen pages later, Boorstin and Kelley tell that 400,000 blacks lived in the colonies in 1765, “scattered from Massachusetts Bay to Georgia.” Only 40,000 lived north of Maryland.

  The first question the book ignores is, What happened in Virginia (and other colonies) to cause Africans to lose the status of indentured servants and become enslaved? Instead of answering that question using evidence from Virginia, the authors turn to the assertion:

  To grow tobacco economically a planter needed a large estate and a sizable work force. It was easy to find the land, but hard to find the workers. Many indentured servants, once free, would go off and start their own farms. Why should they work for someone else?

  In short, Boorstin and Kelley imply that planters had to import slaves.

  This “analysis” begs the question. Of course it is “economical” to grow tobacco with slave labor. Doing anything with unpaid labor is likely to prove profitable. It is also true that tobacco culture requires work. Until recently, people transplanted tobacco seedlings, cut off the leaves from the bottom as they ripened, tied them in bunches, and hung them to dry—all by hand. On a small farm, one person can do all these things, however, and just as efficiently as 100 can do them on a plantation. Slavery itself made white workers, including formerly indentured servants, hard to recruit. Few immigrants to the United States chose to come to the South, where they would have had to compete with unpaid laborers.

  Next, authors do not address the question of why so few slaves wound up north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Even if tobacco production somehow calls for slaves—which it does not—many farmers in Connecticut and western Massachusetts grew tobacco. Indeed, they still do—and never have with slaves. This our textbook authors simply don’t know. “There was little tobacco,” they assure us; “New England found its wealth in the sea.” They also never address the issue of why the cod industry could not have relied on slave labor.

  “Ask students to contrast the northern and southern economies,” suggests the teacher’s edition of Holt American Nation. That looks like a large and deep question, but all they want students to do is to “mention the southern economy’s reliance on slave labor, the southern lag in industrialization, and the predominance of crops such as tobacco and cotton.” Asking students that question verges on being anti-intellectual, because it encourages students to participate in premature closure. Instead of actually addressing the topic, it merely requests the parroting of memorized information, and we have already seen that some of the information is questionable. As to why, authors rely mainly on topography and climate to “explain” the absence of slavery in northern climes. “Because of its different climate and agricultural practices, the Upper South did not rely as heavily on slave labor as the Lower South,” according to Holt. Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland were the main states in the Upper South. Tobacco was their main crop (not including slaves for sale). Holt believes that tobacco automatically seems to require “reliance on slave labor.” So this answer makes no sense. Also, if the authors of Holt gave but a glance at Connecticut, they would see tobacco being raised by free labor. Nevertheless, let’s “learn” it.

  I don’t want to leave the question hanging. We begin to get a handle as to why slavery did not blossom in the North when we note that the only place where it did flourish was on the huge patroon estates established by the Dutch in the Hudson River valley.
Rather than certain configurations of geography (or weather) calling forth plantations, it seems that plantations called forth slavery. Where the value system did not favor the vast hierarchy that is plantation social structure, and where working-class and lower-middle-class whites held proportionate political power, plantations did not thrive. There slavery did not penetrate. Conversely, where slavery thrived, working-class whites did not immigrate in great numbers, having no incentive to compete against unpaid labor.

  The question of “Why did slavery take greater hold in the South than the North?” turns out to have appropriate depth. It’s not shallow. It’s not a matter for mindless regurgitation and is not a “yes-no” question. It’s not too deep, so it won’t require weeks to plumb to the bottom of it. I would have students think about it, because after students leave high school, I want them to understand that geographic or economic determinism is usually too simple. The role of various determinants including ideas is a central question in history, sociology, and political science. Causation is also worth thinking about in the normal course of citizenship. Often ideas make a difference. I think they did here. From first English settlement, the New England newcomers were more egalitarian than the Virginians.

  There are other arenas in which these points can be discussed. Not every teacher needs to get students to ponder the geographic determination of slavery. But consider this generic deep question, to be asked near the end of any unit: What are the implications of this topic for us today? What does it matter?

  Every tree needs to be amenable to consideration of that question. If not, maybe it should be chopped off the list of topics.

  RELEVANCE TO THE PRESENT

  Every tree must have consequences. What is its ongoing importance, its relevance to the present? It’s easy to see how the recent past relates to the present. As I was writing this chapter in 2007–2008, for example, President George W. Bush pointed to the relevance of the Vietnam War to the present by comparing that war to his war in Iraq, then in its fifth year.7 The present importance of more distant events—say, the War of 1812—can be harder to spot. Here is another point where the continuing themes play a role. Each still resonates as an issue today—that’s why they are continuing.

  Two continuing themes on my list—taking the land and sectionalism—may seem to have ended long ago. Not really. Europeans (with help from Africans) took most of what is now the United States by 1890. Ramifications of the taking process, however, still plague our society. Non-Natives have found it hard to admit that “we” took the land. Of course, “we” didn’t—not one of us was alive in 1890. But white Americans unfortunately seem to identify with their forebears, in a process Chapter 8 calls “racial nationalism.” Therefore, they would rather see them as innocents. As a result, Americans distort our past. Chapter 7 explains how this ideological need prompts many textbook authors to project low population estimates onto the pre-Columbian past. Thus, students learn bad history today about something that happened long ago.

  Many specific issues remain between Native and non-Native governments and peoples. From northern Maine to Washington state, many whites do not accept that the treaties by which the U.S. forced Native Americans to yield most of their lands did (and still do) grant them hunting and fishing rights. In the West, reservations were granted water rights in perpetuity, but their water has been the backbone of nearby ranching and mining operations, leading to continuing conflict. The largest and longest-running lawsuit in U.S. history is the continuing Native American case against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has “lost” or mismanaged several billion dollars it was overseeing on behalf of tribes across the country. From Florida to Alaska, tribes have opened or proposed to open casinos, despite state opposition, making use of their quasi-sovereignty to deal directly with the federal government. Also from Florida to Alaska, high schools and colleges (and the NFL’s Washington Redskins) have been asked to stop making mascots of Native tribes.

  These specific controversies pale in significance next to the general ideological issue that the taking still embodies in our culture: How can non-Indians have treated these people so unfairly for so long? Since—like anyone—we Americans want to consider ourselves good people, we need to cover up the bad treatment. Chapter 7 explores one of the myths Americans tell each other. Such falsehoods constitute ongoing slander against Native Americans, being told today, in the present, in too many elementary school classrooms across the U.S.

  Sectionalism hardly ended with the Civil War. During Reconstruction, of course, the North occupied the South. The two sections came to their greatest accord between 1890 and 1940 (the Nadir of race relations, the topic of Chapter 10), but serious sectional differences remain today. Compare the maps presented here. The South voted differently from the North in 1860 and 2004. To a lesser degree, the West still remains a distinctive section whose interests differ from the East.

  Shown in white are states carried by Breckinridge, Douglas, and Bell, candidates for president in 1860 (against Lincoln), and territories.

  Shown in white are contiguous U.S. states carried by George W. Bush, Republican candidate for president in 2004.

  My other continuing themes are clearly ongoing. They can help teachers see the present relevance of a past topic. So can talking with colleagues—in history and beyond. If all else fails, a teacher who wants to teach a topic but can see no contemporary relevance for it might admit that to her students from the start. At the end of the unit, maybe they will come up with ways they deem it relevant.

  SKILLS

  Each tree in the master list must tie to at least one of the skills that the teacher, district, and state want students to develop. In my experience, the “behavioral objectives,” “competencies,” or “benchmarks” for student achievement set by state boards of education and subscribed to by local school boards are splendid. Rarely do they conflict with what a good teacher wants students to be able to do. (The multiple-choice tests that some states mandate for measuring student performance are another matter.)

  Let me suggest that students should be able to:

  read effectively, finding the main ideas in a text (or movie, etc.)

  read critically, assessing whether those ideas are supported by evidence and placing a source in context with other sources and other knowledge

  understand the difference between primary and secondary sources, realizing the importance and role of each

  apply the principles of historiography to a source, locating the speaker and audience in social structure and time, and assessing the impact of that time and location upon the questions raised and the answers supplied

  write a coherent essay, creating an effective introduction, organizing a “storyline,” justifying assertions with evidence, coming to a conclusion, and referencing sources correctly

  write effectively in other formats, such as drafting a letter to a public official or textbook editor, composing a list, writing a newspaper article, or creating a website

  speak effectively, perhaps including debate or mock-court formats

  read a map, grasping compass directions and knowing enough geographic twigs to use the map effectively

  understand, critique, and create tables of data

  cause change in society

  These ten skills are essential to functioning as an effective adult in today’s society.

  State guidelines may not be as blunt as “cause change in society,” but they still validate such a skill. Mississippi, for example, lists as a benchmark, “The student will understand the ideals, principles, and practices of citizenship in preparation for participation in a democratic society.” That’ll do. Even better is the key paragraph Mississippi supplies in describing what history or social studies should be in high school:

  Upper grade level social studies education should focus on depth of content in order to foster critical thinking skills. Appropriate breadth of social studies topics, varied resource materials (e.g., literature selections, primary docu
ments, technology, audio visuals, guest speakers, etc.), along with critical analysis of the materials and production of social studies related projects must be used to promote active learners. Powerful social studies education at the upper grade levels will have a significant and meaningful impact on the development of positive democratic citizens.

  That paragraph cannot be used to justify an American history course based primarily on “learning” the textbook. Such verbiage can only help teachers as they move beyond a textbook-centered approach. Each topic on the list of 30–50 trees can be tied to at least one skill, behavioral objective, or benchmark derived from paragraphs like this and from the course guidelines put out by the state or local school district.

  The textbook will not disappear from class. But no longer will it move the class from topic to topic. Instead, the teacher will move the class to the next topic. Transitions prove to be no problem. As I look down my list, I realize that chronology and logic cause my first item (“How did people get here?”, incorporating issues in archaeology and other disciplines) to lead inexorably to the second (“Native American societies”), and so on.8 As students investigate how people got here, the textbook should be their first tool. Quickly they will realize that it is worse than Wikipedia—which has footnotes, after all—and far inferior to a good journalistic summary of recent research.9 On other topics, such as “Women’s rights, culminating in suffrage,” the textbook can supply useful context about Woodrow Wilson’s administration, for instance. For some topics, the textbook chapter might even suffice. Lecturing, too, still has its place, especially in a context where students need the information for some project or purpose of their own. Usually, however, a debate, mock trial, interview, term paper, small group project, and so on, will engage students much more intensely than just reading a textbook chapter and listening to lectures on it.