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

by James W. Loewen

  Americans share a common history that unites us. But we also share some more difficult events—a common history that divides us. These things, too, we must remember, for only then can we understand our divisions and work to heal them. Questioning the myths told in our textbooks is a first step toward good citizenship. Whether maintaining the status quo is a good thing depends on what the society is doing today. Usually it’s a mix of good and bad. Perhaps the United States has been both “the last great hope of mankind,” in Lincoln’s words, and an ethnocentric empire robbing some members of mankind, at home and abroad, of their chance for a decent life. So we have to be thoughtful citizens—neither cynics nor nationalists, but thoughtful citizens. Being critical readers and critical thinkers about the past is great preparation, and historiography helps.

  Asking students to question their textbooks may not be a lightweight assignment. The task may require serious historical research. Chapter 1 told of a 6th-grade teacher in Illinois whose students critiqued their textbook for leaving out the fact that most early American presidents owned slaves. To show that they did own slaves was easy. To show how textbooks distort the Vietnam War would require much more work. Indeed, it almost demands that students create a superior account of the war. This they can do—but only as a group project, supplied with enough time, guest speakers, and other resources. “Critique your textbook” assignments must therefore be made thoughtfully, taking into account the size of the task and amount of research required to do a credible job.

  OTHER WAYS TO TEACH HISTORIOGRAPHY

  Content analysis provides another way students can see history changing right before their eyes. The key is to use a standard unit of analysis that makes sense, such as a column inch or paragraph. Or students might count the illustrations of a group over time. After the Civil Rights Movement, coverage of Native American societies increased dramatically, for instance. In 1961, among 268 total pictures, Rise of the American Nation included 10 that contained Native people, alone or with whites. Twenty-five years later, the retitled Triumph of the American Nation had 15. By 2003, Holt American Nation had at least 53, although admittedly, the total number of illustrations had also soared.

  Students can assess not only quantity but also quality. They might classify Native American images to see if they depict or caption Indians as one-dimensional primitives or as people who participated in struggles to keep their identities and their land. Native treatment in the main narrative also changed, becoming more critical of governmental actions after the Civil Rights Movement.15 The 1966 edition of The American Pageant labeled the Dawes Act of 1887 a “legislative landmark” and said it was “designed to help the Indians.” Forty years later, Pageant called the act “the misbegotten offspring of the movement to reform Indian policy.” Its much longer discussion of Dawes went on to tell how it “struck directly at tribal organization” and “ignored the inherent reliance of traditional Indian culture on tribally held land.” The tone with which authors described American Indians became more respectful, as well.

  Throughout the school year, classes can keep handy an alternative text, to see if it treats each topic differently than does the main textbook. Several titles listed at the end of this chapter provide different viewpoints.

  Considering issues in the recent past provides another way to get students to think about historiography. Drawing upon a distinction made in Kiswahili, I have found useful the terms “sasha history” and “zamani history.” Events in the sasha remain in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to recall an event dies, that event leaves the sasha for the zamani, the distant past. For myself, born in 1942, the period from about 1952 to now is the sasha. Before that, history is zamani for me.

  This distinction has implications for the question of historical perspective. The passage of time, some people assume, somehow provides perspective. However, historical perspective does not automatically accrue from the passage from sasha to zamani. On the contrary, more accurate history—certainly more detailed history—can often be written while an event lies in the sasha. Then people on various sides have firsthand knowledge of the event. Primary sources, on which historians rely, come from the sasha. To assume that historians or sociologists make better sense of them later in the zamani is merely chronological ethnocentrism, a subject we shall revisit in Chapter 5. Moreover, writers working in the sasha know that they may be critiqued by others who lived through the events they are describing, so they may be more careful.

  Whether on the women’s movement of the 1970s, the Gulf War of the 1990s, or the ongoing issue of gay rights, with a teacher’s guidance students can invite to class guest speakers and can find newspaper articles and other primary sources from various sides of the issue. Indeed, with the advent of websites like the American Memory project at the Library of Congress and the archived and indexed New York Times, students can be challenged to write the history of events in the zamani entirely from primary sources, making sure to include material from all acting groups. Then they can compare their result with their textbook’s treatment. The next chapter tells more about how to get students actually doing history.

  FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Every middle school or high school U.S. history classroom needs at least one college-level textbook. Used bookstores sell older editions cheaply; they will do fine. I suggest Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (NYC: Norton), or Mary Beth Norton, A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).

  Each room should also have two alternative textbooks: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (NYC: Harper & Row), and Joy Hakim, A History of US (NYC: Oxford UP), because it reads so well. Any edition will do.

  In addition, consider Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (NYC: Harper-Collins, 1999), a book avowedly both conservative and celebratory. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 2008), offers a distinctive emphasis on African American history. Through Women’s Eyes, by Ellen DuBois and Lynn Dumenil (NYC: St. Martin’s, 2005), does the same from a feminist viewpoint.

  CHAPTER 4

  Doing History

  HISTORY COMES ALIVE WHEN STUDENTS DO, rather than merely read, history. Doing history, broadly defined, means identifying a problem or topic, finding information, deciding what sources are credible for what pieces of information, coming to conclusions about the topic, developing a storyline, and marshaling the information on behalf of that storyline, while giving attention to information that may seem to contradict the argument. That’s a long sentence, and it’s a big job, but most students—maybe all students—can do it. They can research something that happened, learn about it, write it up (perhaps using other media, such as photography, video, or a website), and thus create history.

  DOING HISTORY TO CRITIQUE HISTORY

  Recall the history teacher in Chapter 1 whose class challenged her claim that most American presidents before Lincoln owned slaves. Her students had to do history to investigate her claim. They had to find out about the family living conditions of George Washington, John Adams, and the others.1 Critiquing offers an easy way in to doing history, because the storyline situation has already been structured by the work being examined. Several chapters suggest turning students loose to critique their textbook’s treatment of an important topic, perhaps one the textbook handles particularly poorly.

  Alternatively, after locating the historical markers and monuments in the area, students might critique a particularly bad one. Who put it up? Who wrote it? What point of view was left out? Students might write an alternative marker text, telling the history as seen from that (omitted) viewpoint. If the marker has the same text on both sides, students might collaborate to fit their alternative text onto one side, eliminating the duplication and improving the marker.2 Perhaps other positions are still left out and a four-sided marker is in order.

  As they do history, most students will surely use the web. Teachers use i
t; why shouldn’t students? Of course, the web has problems. Several years ago, working on my book Lies Across America, I needed to know something about Franklin W. Pierce. Pierce is not a popular subject for biographers. Indeed, he is my candidate for the second worst president in U.S. history. He is so bad that the Library of Congress listed not a single biography of him. So I turned to the web, typed in “Franklin W. Pierce” and “biography,” and up came a site called “Franklin W. Pierce: A Biography.” It looked promising until I saw misspelled words; it turned out to be by a 7th-grade boy in Pierce’s home town of Hillsborough, New Hampshire. So it was not the best source.

  Some students have no working computer at home with internet access. Some schools don’t have computers available for students’ easy use. Given the low cost of used computers today, this is an outrage. It might make for a good student project itself—comparing computer availability across schools and school districts. Hopefully all students can get to a library, but since some have never been, starting a history project with a field trip to a nearby major library is useful. Teachers can arrange for a librarian to show students sources relevant to their topic and how to find them, in hard copy and online. Every student who does not have a library card gets one, of course.

  Teachers can impose two requirements that help students do good history while using the internet. First, although students can (and should) use the web, they must not stop there. Books still exist in the library, after all. Local historical societies have archives and objects that reveal the past. People who lived through historic events remain to be interviewed. We still have the census, newspaper archives, and many other sources, many of which, unlike the web, have been vetted, making them arguably more credible.3 Second, every source—from the web, the library, or their textbook—needs to be annotated. The annotation—as short as a sentence or even a phrase—tells why this source is credible. Credibility is not just a matter of credentials. The website of an Arkansas Ku Klux Klan leader is probably credible when addressing the question “What does today’s Klan believe?” even if its author dropped out of high school. I learned something from the Hillsborough student’s web page on Franklin Pierce, despite his lack of credentials, partly because he did include references.

  Students can apply four tests to sources to assess their credibility. First, locate the speaker, audience, and era. (This is, of course, a large part of historiography.) Then look for internal contradictions, external contradictions, and problems with verstehende. Let me illustrate these tests—and explain the word “verstehende,” new to many readers—using a source known to all of us and read (or seen) by all too many of us: the book and movie Gone with the Wind. The dominance of this book and movie is massive. It has sold more than twice as many copies in hardcover as any other novel. In constant dollars, Gone with the Wind is by far the most profitable and most widely seen movie ever made.4 In 1988, the American Library Association asked patrons across the U.S. to name the “best book in the library.” Gone with the Wind won. But that’s not the full story. Consider that more than one billion different books have been published in the history of the world. More people chose Gone with the Wind than all the others combined.5 Of course, Gone with the Wind is first and foremost a romance. However, set in Georgia between 1861 and 1871, it also purports to be a historical novel. Is it a trustworthy guide to the eras—slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction—that it treats?

  Let us locate the speaker, audience, and era. Margaret Mitchell was a white Southerner. Her parents were upper middle class; they named her older brother for the vice president of the late Confederacy. She wrote during the Nadir of race relations era when, as Chapter 10 tells, racism rose to its highest level in U.S. history. Few white Northerners at that time believed in racial equality, and Mitchell lived in Atlanta. During her most important sojourn outside of the South, at Smith College in Massachusetts, she protested bitterly when she found a black student in a history class with her and demanded to be transferred to another class. After a year, she left Smith and returned to the South. To characterize her as limited by and to her race, social class, region, and era seems fair.6

  Speaking in the role of author, telling readers what happened during Reconstruction, Mitchell uses these words:

  Aided by the unscrupulous adventurers who operated the Freedmen’s Bureau … the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild—either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.7

  The flat racism in passages like that makes for chilling reading nowadays. Mitchell repeatedly uses animal imagery to describe African Americans—both en masse and as individual characters. In the 1930s, however, neither her overt racism nor her false analysis of Southern race relations were offputting to white Northerners, including Olivia de Havilland, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Melanie Wilkes in the movie. Instead, it won them over. “The whole cast, all of us, became Southerners,” de Havilland said in 2004. “Our sympathies lay with the South, and to this day, I think they still do.”8 As the previous chapter on historiography explains, a historical source—novel, movie, newspaper story, even textbook—may reveal more about its own era than about the period it treats.

  With a little guidance, students can do similar analyses of speaker, audience, and date for a newspaper article, historical marker, or history textbook. Doing so stimulates critical reading. Learning about the writer, audience, and era is only a step, however. Stopping there amounts to an ad hominem attack. After all, some writers, moviemakers, and other creators of culture have transcended all limitations of place, race, and age. Students of history must still consider the product.

  Students can look first for internal contradictions, because that search requires no examination of anything beyond the source at hand. In the case of Gone with the Wind, internal contradictions suggest it is not trustworthy history. For example, Margaret Mitchell portrays the enslaved African Americans at Tara, the huge plantation where Scarlett grew up, as content with their lot, even happy. When war comes, however, all but three decamp as soon as they can. Mitchell seems not to notice the contradiction. Later in the novel, during Reconstruction, African Americans are voting, determining public policy, going to school, and in other ways acting as if they consider themselves equal to white people. Again, this behavior contradicts the alleged happiness they had with their assigned inferior position during slavery. Mitchell does notice this contradiction and blames their newfound audacity on outside agitators from the North, who are in it only for financial gain. This deus ex machina papers over the contradiction but does not really resolve it.

  Other internal contradictions mar Gone with the Wind, but my task here is not to critique the novel to death. Contradictions and tensions often exist within a source. U.S. history textbooks are replete with contradictions, partly because different authors often wrote them, and in different decades. For example, a textbook tells that before 1492, most Native Americans farmed. Forty pages later, explaining U.S. Indian policy, the same book says, “They [government officials] tried to get Indians to settle down on farms and become ‘good Americans.’”

  By external contradictions, I mean what other sources say about this period or issue that may be different. An interesting source to compare to Gone with the Wind is Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. Set in the same part of Georgia at the same time as Gone with the Wind, Jubilee is said to tell a similar story from a black point of view. Certainly, Margaret Walker was an African American poet and novelist. Students who compare excerpts from Gone with the Wind about Reconstruction, say, to the treatment in Jubilee face a dilemma: both books cannot be accurate. They are forced to locate additional sources to learn more. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction and Lerone Bennett’s Black Power U.S.A.: The Huma
n Side of Reconstruction can help.9

  Once students understand the term, they can find many problems with verstehende in Gone with the Wind. Sociologists have brought this German word into English. It means “empathetic understanding”—placing oneself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how they see the world and what they would do. It’s fun to teach students, en masse, how to pronounce this word (vehr-SHTAY-end-deh), and then invite them to dazzle their parents with it. A problem with verstehende underlies the internal contradiction described earlier. Mitchell does not take time to understand why slaves would vote, talk politics, and otherwise be “uppity” during Reconstruction. If she did, she would be able to explain why most slaves left Tara as soon as they could.

  Gone with the Wind is riddled with these verstehende problems. Consider the most important black character in Gone with the Wind, Mammy. From the first pages of the book and the first minutes of the movie, Mammy is obsessed with raising Scarlett, with helping her make a good impression on others, even with making sure she eats before going to the barbecue because men are said to favor women with small appetites. No doubt such a character is possible, and Margaret Mitchell can make her characters have whatever motivations she wishes. But if students put themselves in Mammy’s place, would they be concerned only with their white charge? What about her own children? Or, if childless, what about her parents, siblings, and fellow slaves? Throughout the book, almost never does an African American display a plausible emotion about or a connection to another African American.

  WRITING A PAPER

  When students use these four methods to critique a claim in their textbook, a historical marker in their town, or a passage from Gone with the Wind, they are doing history. They are seeking more information, assessing sources, developing an argument, and collecting evidence to persuade their reader. The next step is to invite students to write a paper entirely their own, not structured as a critique. An old-fashioned term paper can be the key method for teaching and learning one of the 30–50 topics in a U.S. history course.