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

by James W. Loewen

Here are seven examples of local history mostly done by middle and high school students:

  In Relentless Pursuit of an Education (Lexington Park, MD: Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions, 2006). The catalog of a museum exhibit done by adults and students about the black schools that predated desegregation in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. A similar volume should be completed in every locale that had segregated schools, from California to Delaware.

  Bernadette Anand et al., Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town (NYC: Teachers College P, 2002), tells how teachers got students to research race relations in their New Jersey home town.

  Anderson Valley High School, Boonville, C0A, Voices of the Valley (website, ncrcn.org/vov/, video, books). These students interviewed nonagenarians and used their results to make a video, books, and website.

  Khmer Legacies, at KhmerLegacies.org. Cambodian American students interview their parents about life in Cambodia, escaping, and life in the U.S.

  R.O.C.C., Minds Stayed on Freedom (Boulder: Westview, 1991). Written by students in a Mississippi high school, this book tells of the Civil Rights Movement 25 years earlier in their county, researched through interviews. I wish the students had integrated the accounts into an overall narrative, but for a collection of separate interviews, it is still uncommonly interesting.

  Robert A. Scappini, “Teaching High School History in the Context of Performance-Based Standards,” The History Teacher, 37 #2 (2/2004), 183–91, tells how his inner-city students have researched poverty, local inventors, and deaths in the 1918 flu epidemic.

  Peter Wallenstein, “The First Black Students at Virginia Tech,” VPI&SU Diversity News 4 #1 (Fall 1997), 3–4, at spec.lib.vt.edu/archives/blackhistory/timeline/blackstu.htm. Not by a student, but a good example of research students could do among the alumni of their high school.

  The following three items help teachers to help students do local history:

  David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty, Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You, (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2000). A bit dull and plodding, putting off students, but contains many possible topics that can be researched locally, along with pointers toward sources of information.

  Robert K. Lamb, “Suggestions for the Study of Your Home Town,” Human Organization, 11 (1952), 29–32, though old, offers a compact introduction to the use of plat books, city directories, and other local records.

  Glenn Whitman, Dialogue with the Past (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2004). Whitman has his high school students do oral history with everyone from their grandmothers to high officials in the federal government. He reports improved work by students at all ranges of past performance and tells how to avoid pitfalls.

  CHAPTER 5

  How and When Did People Get Here?

  WE NOW TURN TO THE FIRST OF SIX SPECIFIC content areas that prove problematic in U.S. history courses. The earliest of the 30–50 topics in such courses turns out to be a hot issue: how and when people first reached the Americas. Teachers must not present any one date—such as 13,000 BP1—as “the answer,” because the field of archaeology is riddled with debate. Nor should teachers present the Bering land passage as fact. The second edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me and its footnotes provide a brief introduction to these controversies,2 but any published summary rapidly goes out of date.

  Luckily, U.S. history courses reach this issue at the beginning of the school year. I say luckily, because the controversy provides a teachable moment to caution students about the voice in which textbooks are written. It is a monotone of certainty, providing answers for them to “learn,” as in rote memorization, and it simply won’t do. Since no sure answer yet exists, teachers must instead teach the conflict. Better yet, let students choose a position themselves and support their choice with evidence. It’s wonderful to get this lesson across so early in the school year.

  How can teachers get students thinking about these matters? One way is to ask on the first day of class, “When did people first reach the land that we now call the United States?” Each student jots down a number. Then ask, “How?” and ask them to jot down a phrase. After everyone has written something, I launch the discussion by calling on someone and asking for their date. In the style of an auctioneer, “Do I hear older?” I ask, if the date proffered is within the last 12,000 years. “Do I hear more recent?” I ask, if the date proffered is farther back than 50,000 years. Eventually a range of dates comes forth. Don’t flinch at offbeat answers like “1620,” “millions of years ago,” or “We have always been here.” If students have access to computers—in class, in the library, or at home—turn them loose to find information to refine, change, or back up their answers.

  Another good way to get students thinking about how and when people got here is by listing the disciplines that help answer the question. These include:

  cultural anthropology, the study of human cultures. Cultural anthropology can help determine whether similar cultural elements—pots, words, architecture—show a common origin or independent invention.

  glottochronology, the study of language similarity and decay. Glottochronology can help tell if various languages have a common origin and, if so, when they split from each other.

  physical anthropology, the study of anatomical differences among groups. Physical anthropology can help show how similar and different various peoples are, helping to infer when they split from each other.

  human genetics, our increasing knowledge of the human genome. This fast-moving field now contributes much of the new information about the ancestors of American Indians, with implications for when they arrived and from where.

  epidemiology, the study of diseases. Since different diseases arose at different times and in different places, the susceptibility of today’s populations to them gives clues to their history.

  botany, the study of plants. Did such plants as cotton require human help to cross the Atlantic? Did sweet potatoes require help to cross the Pacific?

  zoology, the study of animals. Animal remains in garbage dumps and human feces can tell what Native Americans were eating, when.

  archaeology, the study of artifacts and remains and their dates

  history, including oral history of descendants, sometimes called ethnohistory

  A class can distribute itself (or be distributed) across these areas of study. Each team of two or three students has the job of finding out what their field says about how and when people got here, in the process assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Then the class combines the information from the assorted disciplines, seeing what alternative dates and routes emerge and which seem more likely.

  Because no consensus exists, and because new information keeps coming forth, the web is a good resource for investigating this issue. Of course, all websites are not equal. This is a good point to introduce the values of vetting, credentials, and peer review. Journalists don’t have credentials in archaeology, but they do have professional standards about accuracy. Editors vet articles in major newspapers and newsmagazines. Journals like Science and American Antiquity have the additional advantage of peer review, meaning that professionals who know the research literature have to approve an article before it can appear in print or on the organization’s website.3 On their own websites, individuals can put up anything they want with no review by anyone. Of course, any website might be right. Students can apply the same four tests used to assess the credibility of sources in the previous chapter: locate the speaker, audience, and era; look for internal contradictions; seek confirmation in outside sources; and check for problems with verstehende. Teachers can kindle this process by suggesting two or three sites—including one that is not very reputable—for students to critique.

  A CRASH COURSE ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL ISSUES

  Until recent decades, archaeologists of the Western Hemisphere agreed on the answers to the main questions in the field. How had people come to the Americas? They had walked. From where? Siberia, of course. When? During the last Ice
Age, around 13,000 BP, when much of the Earth’s water was stored in massive ice formations on Antarctica and the Earth’s northernmost land masses. At that time, ocean levels were so low that the Bering Strait was dry land that we now call Beringia. Yet an ice-free corridor beckoned southeastward through Canada.

  Today, this consensus is in disarray. Students will quickly discover at least five controversies that now enliven archaeology:

  people may have come by boat rather than on foot

  people from many places may have washed up in the Americas

  clovis points (explained below) haven’t been found in Siberia

  a comet may have hit North America around 13,000 BP, causing a firestorm and transforming human life

  humans may have spread throughout the hemisphere before 13,000 BP, including throughout Amazonia

  Teachers need not be experts on these possibilities. They can let students do the work of convincing each other which positions are based on sound evidence. The more teachers know, however, the better they can guide their charges.

  There turns out to be almost no evidence that the ancestors of today’s Native Americans walked across Beringia. They might have. But the archaeological record does not disclose older and older sites of human habitation as we move from British Columbia to Yukon, Alaska, and finally Siberia. To be sure, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Archaeologists have not done enough excavation in northwestern North America. In addition, most sites may now be underwater, since the ocean level has risen dramatically since the alleged crossing. Nevertheless, the Bering crossing remains only hypothesis, not fact.

  Five of six current U.S. history textbooks in my collection include maps like this, showing the “correct” route the first settlers of the Americas took to get here. (The only exception has no map but says the same thing in words.) I would suggest these answers to the questions this map asks: 1. None. No evidence suggests that migration routes “flowed” along any mountain ranges. More likely, migration flowed along the seacoast, by canoe and small boat, but since the seacoast then may have been miles to the west compared to the seacoast now, no archaeological evidence supports boat travel, either. 2. They had boats, and even today, it’s only 55 miles across.

  Besides, it’s a hypothesis that disrespects Indians. Implicitly it assumes that, so long ago, people could not have come by boat because they were too “primitive.”4 Yet people reached Australia more than 40,000 years ago, and humans could never have walked from Asia to Australia, no matter what the ice was doing.5 Before about a thousand years ago, few artifacts survive except those made from stone, and no people ever made stone boats. Hence, archeologists have no evidence of boats from this ancient period. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

  Evidence for a land crossing consists mainly of one fact: there are cultural and genetic similarities between Native Americans and Siberians, and perhaps also Ainus, the early settlers of Japan. Evidence for a boat crossing consists mainly of two facts: first, boat passage is easier than walking.6 Second, most Native Americans show unusual genetic uniformity, such as we would expect from a handful of settlers—a few boats full, perhaps.7 There’s not much hard evidence on either side! So we must leave open the question of how people got here.

  Until recently, the consensus that ruled archaeology resolutely denied diffusion—the possibility that elements of Native cultures might have come from beyond the Americas. Archaeologists still call pre-1492 cultures “pre-contact.” Good reasons underlay this bias against diffusion. The amateurs who had dominated archaeology before it became a science were a gullible lot who seemed to see diffusion everywhere. When they found pyramids in Central America, that proved to them that Egyptians had been there. When they found scratchings on rocks in central Canada, they “translated” them as words the prehistoric Irish had written in Celtic Ogham script. When they found long straight lines and landscape figures in Peru that could only be fully appreciated from above, they concluded that visitors from other planets had drawn them.8 Minimizing diffusion also meant that archaeologists did not have to become experts on ancient non-American societies and cultures like Egypt, China, or the Celts.9

  Diffusionists now get more attention within the field of archaeology. Most scholars now realize that allowing for the possibility of diffusion need not imply that Native Americans were stupid or primitive. To be sure, little evidence suggests that any crossing of the Atlantic or Pacific resulted in transoceanic trade. The Atlantic Current is fine for crossing from Africa but a barrier for returning. To get back to Europe or Africa from America by sea, one must make use of the Gulf Stream or its southern branches. One would land in the Atlantic islands or Iberia, not in West Africa. In Black Africans and Native Americans, Jack Forbes cites interesting examples of what seem to be Native American navigators washing up in Iberia, but none of Africans doing so.10 It is unlikely that any roundtrip voyages were ever made from Africa before the Europeans did it. Round trips from China or Japan are equally unlikely.11 Still, ruling out the possibility that people—shipwrecked stragglers at the least—might have found their way to the Americas from Africa, China, and Europe before 1492 seems baseless. After all, people in tiny boats have crossed the oceans repeatedly in both directions—on purpose and by accident—in the last few centuries.

  Moreover, stragglers may have influenced Native culture while not influencing Native genetics. For decades, archaeologists used Clovis points—the well-made spearheads and arrowheads first found in Clovis, New Mexico—to label what they thought was the earliest important culture in North America. However, “not a single Clovis point has turned up in Siberia,” according to Newsweek reporter Andrew Murr, summarizing research by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford. Stanford suggested that “Clovis people”—who made the points—came by boat from Spain, 15,000 years before Columbus. “They were from Iberia, not Siberia,” he quipped.12 Of course, the idea of Clovis points may hail from Spain, rather than the people. Put another way, just one person could have crossed the Atlantic around 15,500 BP, joined Native Americans, and made beautiful spear points in a style that Natives then adopted. In any event, it used to be rare for a major archaeologist to suggest a problem with the Clovis hypothesis, but now it is happening.

  Further complicating the record is increasing recent evidence that a comet probably exploded in the atmosphere above North America about 13,000 BP. It split up as it crashed, perhaps setting much of North America on fire. This firestorm, not Native Americans, may have killed most of the large mammals—mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths—that formerly inhabited the Americas. It may also have decimated Native Americans, perhaps killing everyone who did not happen to be in a cave or within seconds of a body of water. Surviving mammals and people then faced a difficult time, because the climate change resulting from soot in the atmosphere killed many plants on which they relied, further reducing the population. Such a reduction in numbers may complicate our present efforts to learn about the first settlers. For instance, this event, rather than a boat crossing, may explain why surviving American Indians are so closely genetically related to one another.13

  Finally, parts of the Americas now viewed as wilderness may have been thickly settled long ago. This includes even the Amazon basin, now a sparsely settled forest. As summarized by journalist Charles Mann,

  [A] growing number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enormous environmental impact on the jungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact—that is, an artificial object.

  Anthropologist Clark Erickson suggests that the regular mounds and straight berms crisscrossing northern Bolivia were built by South American Natives as part of an elaborate agricultural and fish-catching system. Then the residents were decimated by the new diseases brought after 1492, as well as by the warfare and deculturation caused by European conquerors.14

  Again, the issue is not whether this claim is correct. Rather, teachers mus
t help students grasp the fact that our knowledge of the history of the Americas before 1492 is tentative. These are exciting times for archaeology. Major new theories arise every few months. But most textbook authors have no particular insight into archaeology. They have no credentials to warrant the certainty that they adopt in their first chapters about pre-1492 America. They are consumers of archaeology, just like K–12 teachers and students. There is no reason to limit what students learn about the millennia of human activity in the Americas to the conclusions that textbook authors have selected for them. Teachers must let students in on the excitement.

  PRESENTISM

  Historians sometimes accuse each other of “presentism”—applying concerns of today to the past so as to distort our understanding of what happened. Presentism is a useful word, worth teaching to students, because it names a bias. Therefore, it helps students understand that biases exist and helps them become more critical readers.

  Presentism can wreak havoc upon our understanding of the ancient past, probably more so than with any other era. This is ironic, considering that the ancient past is so distant from the present. The reason is simple: knowing about the distant past is so hard. Some archaeologists think that the petroglyphs dotted across Western rock formations are omens to ensure a successful hunt. Others think they were done by shamans while they were high on hallucinogenic drugs. Yet another serious hypothesis holds that they are mostly female genitalia. An onlooker might conclude, “Archaeologists don’t really have a clue.” Their confusion is perfectly reasonable, because they don’t have much data. They try to infer an entire culture and social structure based on a few rock tools and what’s left of a garbage midden after ten thousand years of erosion. With so little to go on, notions from the present about the past can sneak in without scholars realizing it.