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

by James W. Loewen

  Many school yearbooks show photos of their graduating seniors accompanied by a list of activities and honors after each name. If they do not supply such lists, they do include photographs of student organizations, from science club to cheerleader. Students can enter the number of organizational memberships for each student, the student’s race, ethnic group, and other information into a spreadsheet. Then they can look for trends by decade. It may be helpful to categorize minor activities like Latin Club or Prom Decoration Committee from more important posts like Student Council Vice President or lead in the class play. Members of an ethnic group may list no activities at all in early yearbooks. Then they can be found in the academic clubs and the band, and still later in athletic organizations. Finally they get chosen as cheerleader, class president, or prom king or queen.

  END OF THE NADIR

  After about 1940, race relations started to improve. Racism as an ideology started to decrease. Again, three underlying factors were involved. First came the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to the North. Blacks didn’t move everywhere in the North, however. Sundown practices closed many potential communities, channeling migrants toward the larger cities. Within these cities, increasing levels of residential segregation—shown by the higher D’s mentioned previously—meant that African Americans were restricted to just a few neighborhoods. Northern states never chased African Americans from voter rolls, however. Therefore, black residential concentration during the Nadir, unfortunate as it was from a race relations standpoint, carried with it one reward: African Americans were able to elect members of their race to city councils and state legislatures. In 1928, Chicago’s South Side elected Oscar De Priest to the U.S. Congress, the first African American since George White.

  Second, imperialism as an ideology became a spent force after World War I. That hapless war taught the “undeveloped” nations that Western nations weren’t so smart. Nationalist movements arose in India, Ghana, and other nations. During World War II, the question of India’s independence, and that of such nations as Indonesia, Ghana, and the Philippines plainly became not “whether” but “when.” Whites were no longer seen as necessary or appropriate to rule nations of color. Also, when World War II ended, the United States found itself locked in a contest for world supremacy with the U.S.S.R., which boasted an explicitly egalitarian racial ideology. Segregation and exclusion on racial grounds now became an embarrassment, especially when African and Asian diplomats to the United Nations in New York and ambassadors in Washington embassies could not find places to sleep or even to eat in trips outside those cities.

  Adolf Hitler provided the third and most important factor. The U.S. has always demonized its opponents in war; all nations do. But Germany made it easy. As Americans learned more about Nazi policies of extermination regarding Jews and “Gypsies” (Rom people), they recoiled. In addition, the connection of those policies to our own practices of exclusion (sundown towns), reserves (Native Americans), concentration camps (Japanese Americans), racial segregation, and forced sterilization (of “mental defectives,” mixed-race people, and paupers) during the Nadir became all too clear. Germans took those practices to their logical extreme. Moreover, shockingly, they did it to people who were becoming defined in the U.S. as “white.” In sum, Hitler gave a bad name to eugenics, Social Darwinism, and racial discrimination in general. As a result, just as the Civil War had led to whites becoming antiracist, so, to a lesser extent, did World War II.

  After the war, the old order began to crack. Jackie Robinson, President Truman’s order desegregating the armed forces, and the Brown decision both presaged and helped to cause the Civil Rights Movement. In turn, the Civil Rights Movement helped white Americans to question the underlying premise of the Nadir—that African Americans are on the bottom because they are inferior. As soon as that premise got questioned, then historians could see that the Nadir was unfair—indeed, now they could see that it existed.

  Students can see the effects of the Nadir in old newspapers, simply by counting their use of terms like “uncle” and “Mrs.” During the Nadir, whites rarely called African Americans “sir” or “ma’am” or used courtesy titles like “Mr.” or “Mrs.” (See the figure caption on p. 199.) Instead, whites called older and more senior African Americans “uncle” or “aunt.” Relics of this system include Uncle Ben’s rice and Aunt Jemima’s pancake syrup today. Students can also count the number of stories about black weddings, church happenings, and other social events over time.

  History textbooks usually lag social change by a few years. To see the gradual end of the Nadir, students can compare textbooks over time. They can count the number of photographs that include African Americans (or Native Americans or women). More subtle investigations—such as assessing the sanity level of John Brown—will also prove interesting.

  Students can use the same data sources discussed above—tombstones, the manuscript census, city directories, school yearbooks—to show improvement in race relations in their community after 1940. Newspaper articles and school district files can help students write the history of the two or more high schools that merged to form one, if the school district desegregated. Students can also interview members of the generation that first broke these barriers. In many communities, the first black children to attend interracial schools and the white children who welcomed or did not welcome them have never told their stories. Now they are aging, and these important historical resources may be lost forever.

  IMPLICATIONS FOR TODAY

  We have mentioned that the Nadir of race relations has left us with two important legacies today. Chapter 3 tells that the Nadir distorted the way textbooks present John Brown, Reconstruction, and other topics, including their omission of the Nadir itself. This chapter has introduced sundown towns and residential segregation as a second legacy of the Nadir, along with the curious claim by some residents that an all-white community or neighborhood is cause for status rather than shame. Students can do research to learn if all-white neighborhoods and communities near them are all-white on purpose. Students can also investigate other inequalities that linger from the Nadir period. For example, more computers may be available in elementary schools that have whiter student bodies. The number of library books per student in each high school may be higher in whiter high schools. This is especially likely across district lines in metropolitan areas. Students can find out such facts and then take steps to change them.

  After researching the Nadir, students may feel that their textbook should give the topic more attention. If so, they can construct an account of the Nadir, summarizing their local research and what they have learned nationally about the period. They might even put this into textbook style, complete with illustrations and study questions, as a resource for next year’s students. Also, they can write a class letter to the author(s) and publisher of their textbook, pointing out the problem. They might attach their research as an appendix. Earlier chapters told of a class that wrote such a letter about slave-owning presidents. Unfortunately, they got back a mindless reply from the publisher and none at all from the author. Even such a result has its benefits: at the least, it cautions students not to take textbooks too seriously.

  The lower overall status today of African Americans and Native Americans (and to a degree Hispanics) is not simply “their fault” but has historical roots. Even in this age of Obama, textbooks must recognize racism as a continuing force in our national life. Otherwise they discourage students from using history to address our most persistent and historically embedded national problem. Textbooks must tell how racism has increased and decreased over time. Otherwise, they prevent students from asking (and then discovering) what causes and what eases racism. The Nadir must be part of such exegesis.

  Inserting the Nadir into discussions of affirmative action changes those discussions. Now students no longer talk about atavisms lingering from slavery. It isn’t slavery that holds back African Americans today. Moreover, while it’s
true that many white families suffered in the conflict that ended slavery, white families only enjoyed unfair advantage during the swelling discrimination of the Nadir. When students understand that overt discrimination continued into the recent past and even to the present, then they see that the Nadir and its legacies still haunt us today. Getting students to make this connection between the past and present is exciting. So is helping them make the connection between something they learned and actions they take in the public arena.

  FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Teachers (or students) who need to know more about Reconstruction should read Lerone Bennett, Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969 [1967]) or Eric Foner, Reconstruction (NYC: Harper & Row, 1988). Unfortunately, both stop at 1877; no good survey treats the Fusion period, circa 1875–1895 (varying by state).

  Loewen, “The Nadir,” Chapter 2 of Sundown Towns (NYC: New P, 2005), is the best short introduction to this neglected era nationally.

  C. Vann Woodward’s classic short book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (NYC: Oxford UP, 1965 [1957]), tells of the Nadir in the South.

  Students have done good work on the waning of the Nadir and the end of segregation. See In Relentless Pursuit of an Education, Keeping the Struggle Alive, Minds Stayed on Freedom, and “The First Black Students at Virginia Tech,” cited at the end of Chapter 4.

  AFTERWORD

  Still More Ways to Teach History

  WE HAVE REACHED THE END OF THIS BOOK, but not the end of a course in U.S. history. Chapters 1 through 10 have suggested various ways to get students interested in learning about the past, beginning with coming to their own conclusions about how people first got to the Americas. Teachers need not cover every one of their 30–50 topics via world-class, once-in-a-lifetime student projects, however. Chapter 1 pointed out that simply reading and discussing the textbook might cover some topics effectively.

  A teacher may have learned a given subject from an impressive lecturer in college and may have saved her lecture notes or developed new ones. Now she believes that by the old-fashioned lecture method she can teach that subject well. Fine! She can tell her charges that they have advanced to college level in their abilities and are now ready to learn the way most college students do—listening to lecture and taking notes. The teacher can follow up by asking students to be sure they understand their notes by pairing with another student to discuss the lecture and agree on its main points. Followed by a quiz—to give feedback to students and the teacher about what was learned well and what was not—such a unit can impart knowledge effectively. It can also help students anticipate that college courses are unlikely to be as varied in form as they are in K–12.

  Although they may be the best methods for certain topics, these traditional techniques still present knowledge for students to “learn.” Therefore, they run the risk that students will learn, only to forget, because they have not really invested psychic energy in the topic. “I read, I forget,” goes the first third of a saying about teaching. My first-year college students prove that adage correct. “I see, I remember,” continues the saying, and finally, “I teach, I understand.” So why not invite students to teach a topic? The first topic of the year—how and when people arrived in the Americas—offers a good site, as each group tries to convince the class that its choice of date and route is correct. Or, when learning about the diverse Native American societies in North America, each student might choose a tribe or nation to explore, taking care to bring their story into the present. Each student gets ten minutes and is expected to make up a one-page handout or develop a PowerPoint or website display that other students can access. Then the presentations can be tested upon and get taken seriously.1

  Various other subjects during the year lend themselves to student teaching. These include explorers before and after Columbus, immigrant groups and Americanization, as suggested in Chapter 4; or different facets of the rise of urban and suburban America. Almost any recent topic will also work, from the Korean War through the women’s movement to the present, because sources are readily available, including newspaper stories and people to interview. Since classes typically reach recent topics near the end of the school year, this means that student teaching can fill that lame duck session after the APUSH exam, statewide exams, or, for seniors, after graduation lists have been turned in. Whenever they do it, teaching their peers will cement facts and ideas in students’ heads. With guidance from their teacher, students will also understand that they have to have a storyline—indeed, that history is, in large part, the creation of a storyline.

  Another year-end project derives from the teacher’s list of 30–50 topics: Ask each student to suggest an item that should have been on that list. They should defend their choice to the class, explaining its importance and its relevance to the present. If the class agrees, then the student prepares a handout (or PowerPoint or website) and takes the class over for ten minutes to teach about their topic.

  Another way to get students teaching their peers is to assign parts of a book to different members of the class. While a graduate student, leading a seminar of college sophomores, I happened upon this method by accident. I had just finished my doctoral dissertation, now published as The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White.2 Near the end of the semester, aware that I had been writing it all year, my students asked if they might read it. I realized it would be good for them to read a sociological monograph, but it was not reasonable for each to read 300 pages in the last week of class. So I gave each student a chapter, winding up with two or three students assigned to each. In the last class meeting, diffident about teaching my own work, I said, gruffly, “You people don’t want to discuss this, do you?” “Well, yes,” they replied. Those who had read early chapters wanted to know how the saga turned out. Those who had read the last chapter, telling that Chinese Americans were now reasonably well off in the social structure of the Mississippi Delta, wanted to know how they had risen in status and wealth. Readers of middle chapters wondered why Chinese Mississippians lived only in the Delta, that flat plantation land between Memphis and Vicksburg. All I had to do was keep the discussion on track chronologically; students kept it going by asking questions for more than an hour.

  Many books might spark discussion, so long as they are narrative (telling a story) or faceted (each chapter presenting part of an interlocking analysis). The novel Okla Hannali offers a rich and factual account of the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of an (imaginary) Choctaw leader.3 Another novel, Jubilee, the “antidote” to Gone with the Wind, tells how a black family experienced slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in Georgia.4 Many nonfiction books can also be used.

  Teachers or the class might also end the year by choosing a current national or world problem and have students trace its roots back in time. Doing so is another good way to engage student interest, since they can see history not only as a past event but also as a part of our present.

  Chapter 3 argued that understanding historiography is one of the great gifts a history course can impart to students. Teachers can engage them with this idea once more at the end of the year. With historiography securely in their minds, students can engage in an interesting thought experiment: What will historians write 50 years hence about a given topic? That question takes them out of the present and can help reveal limitations in our vision today.5

  The course should end as it began: with the recognition that history is important and students in the class are important. In the introduction I argued—hoped?—for a reciprocal relationship between truth about the past and justice in the present. Students can make this connection come to pass. They can make a difference, even before they leave school, as examples cited in Chapter 4 show. Conversely, students will make a difference—and not for the better—if they choose to do nothing in their job as Americans for the rest of their lives. That job, as the introduction suggested, is to bring into being the America of the future. At the end of the cours
e, teachers can turn students loose to start doing that job. On what topic do they want to work? What defect in our society do they want to remedy? What policy—public or private—needs reversal? What issue do Americans need to rethink, aided by new information? How is history relevant to this topic? Again, each student might present his or her topic to the class. Then all students can suggest steps the individual can take to make a difference. And then they can all get started.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. I don’t fully grasp the distinction between history and social studies. According to the National Council for the Social Studies, “Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence.” (National Council for the Social Studies 1972 statement, reprinted in “Curriculum Standards for Social Studies: I. Introduction,” socialstudies.org/standards/introduction/, 7/2005.) Seems vague, but otherwise, who can argue with it? To be competent, historians, too, must use the insights and methods of the social sciences. They must know how to construct a table, read the census, and employ theoretical ideas like social structure or cognitive dissonance. Moreover, when competently taught, history provides marvelous preparation for “civic competence.”