The newest SATs have abandoned analogies, but that revision does not alter the main point. The exam maintains its built-in bias against African, Native, and Latino Americans, the working class, and rural Americans, for reasons this paragraph in the main text explains.
22. See Loewen, “Statement,” in Eileen Rudert, ed., The Validity of Testing in Education and Employment (DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1993), 42–43; cf. Loewen, “A Sociological View of Aptitude Tests,” Ibid., 73–89.
23. Alicia P. Schmitt, Paul W. Holland, and Neil J. Dorans, “Evaluating Hypotheses About Differential Item Functioning” (Princeton, NJ: ETS Research Report 92–98, 1992), 16.
24. James W. Loewen, Phyllis Rosser, and John Katzman, “Gender Bias on SAT Items,” American Educational Research Association, 4/1988, New Orleans; ERIC ED294915.
25. Again, the new SAT no longer uses analogy items, but differential knowledge of vocabulary remains a major component of test bias. Analogy items illustrate this problem compactly.
26. For that matter, even among students from elite backgrounds, those few who have learned the words and get the item right might be more retentive, as well as good reasoners, and hence do better in college.
27. One answer to this problem is to rely less on multiple-choice items when making prescriptive decisions about individuals, such as to put them in “advanced” or “slow” classes or admit them to college. Some colleges are making less use of SAT and ACT scores in their admissions process.
28. “Discussion,” in Rudert, ed., The Validity of Testing in Education and Employment, 58–59; cf. Loewen, “A Sociological View of Aptitude Tests,” Ibid., 73.
29. collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/about.html, 12/2007.
30. As a general rule, if a course demands more than 125% as much as other comparable courses, students will resist those demands.
31. Susan Eaton, The Children in Room E4 (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2006), 257.
32. This was the mantra of Ernst Borinski, longtime sociologist at Tougaloo College and a subject of the movie From Swastika to Jim Crow.
33. Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: Brookes, 1995), 30, 62–70, 123–48, 159–68.
34. In The Blind Side, Michael Lewis showed the difference that intense intervention coupled with expectations can make. The subject of the book, Michael Oher, basically raised himself, homeless on the streets of Memphis. A rich white family took him in, partly because his athletic prowess might make him an asset to the football program at Ole Miss, their alma mater. Tutoring and private school helped Oher realize his academic potential. As of this writing (2/2008), Oher has just decided to return to Ole Miss for his senior year, foregoing an early draft to the NFL. More importantly, he has succeeded academically, with an A-GPA, majoring in journalism. (Michael Lewis, The Blind Side [NYC: W.W. Norton, 2006]; Scott Cacciola, “Oher says he’s not entering NFL draft,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1/17/2008, commercialappeal.com/news/2008/jan/17/oher-says-hes-not-entering-nfl-draft/, 2/2008.) My point isn’t to suggest that every rich family in America adopt a street kid—although that would be interesting—but to suggest that poverty and ignorance can make capability hard to spot.
35. James Rosenbaum, Making Inequality (NYC: Wiley, 1976), 33–34.
36. See Jay Mathews, Class Struggle (NYC: Times Books, 1998), 234–35; Linda Darling-Hammond, “Inequality and Access to Knowledge,” in James A. Banks, ed., Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education (NYC: Macmillan, 1995), 474; and Anne Wheelock, Crossing the Tracks (NYC: New P, 1992), 57–58, 92–117.
37. Louanne Johnson, “They’re All My Children,” Reader’s Digest (May 1995), 155–63 ff, based on experiences described in The Girls in the Back of the Class (NYC: St. Martin’s, 1995).
38. Postings to APUSH discussion list, 3/2004.
39. The AVID program—Advancement Via Individual Determination—helps “average” students develop skills to succeed in “advanced” courses. See avid.org.
40. James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939–41), 289.
41. For the record, the right answer is A.
42. Yes, they’re small states. Don’t be fooled. Larger states have larger tax bases, too. States rely upon multiple-choice twig tests because they’re cheap. Too often states then let out-of-state testing agencies recycle old questions, graded by machine, thus reaping windfall profits. If a topic is worth testing—history/social studies is—then it is worth testing well.
Chapter 3
1. John Unruh Jr., The Plains Across (Urbana: U of IL P, 1979), 156, 176, 185.
2. Brigham Madsen, “The ‘Almo Massacre’ Revisited,” ID Yesterdays, 37 #3 (Fall 1993), 59.
3. Larry McMurtry, “Broken Promises,” NY Review of Books, 10/23/97, 16.
4. See Loewen, Lies Across America (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 92–93.
5. Leon Festinger, “Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (1959), 203–10.
6. For decades the federal government acquiesced in Southern states’ denial of citizenship and equal treatment to their black residents.
7. Adam Goodheart, “Change of Heart,” AARP Magazine, 5/2004, 45–47.
8. Ibid.
9. Bernard Weisberger, “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography,” Journal of Southern History, 25 #4 (11/1959), 427–47; Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History, 10 #4 (12/1982), 82–88.
10. My hope is that this relationship is indeed reciprocal: that telling the truth about the past helps bring about justice in the present.
11. Some students may have learned a somewhat similar checklist from speech or English courses, based on the acronym SOAPS, which stands for Subject, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, and Speaker. SOAP provides a checklist for speakers planning a talk; modified with a final S, “Speaker,” it offers another way to teach historiography and critical reading.
12. That one was John A. Garraty with Aaron Singer and Michael Gallagher, American History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
13. Actually, he did not. “Landslide” is defined as 60% to 40%. Pierce won 1,601,274 votes, or 51%; Whig Winfield Scott got 1,386,580, or 44.1%. Of votes cast for the two major candidates, Pierce won 53.6%. He did win the electoral college by 254 to 42.
14. Paul Boyer, Holt American Nation (Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003), 350.
15. The civil rights era is a watershed event in our historiography, even more than in our history. Students should be cautioned to look at when books were written—before or after the struggle for civil rights. Of course, historians wrote good books before 1956. Certainly, historians wrote bad books after 1972. But regarding not just black-white race relations, the Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction, but also women’s history, American Indian history, social class, and various other topics, as the struggle for civil rights reverberated through American culture, it changed the assumptions underlying historians’ thinking.
Chapter 4
1. For most presidents, they didn’t have to dig very deeply, to be sure. The web sufficed.
2. I’m not suggesting chiselling off the letters on one side and putting on new ones. Most markers aren’t made that way. Students might attach temporary marker text, maybe on foam board, with permission and with media coverage, thus making public the problems with the original. Various states are rewording bad markers (Kansas, Virginia), tearing them down (Mississippi), or putting up corrective plaques nearby (Wisconsin, Wyoming).
3. To be sure, the census is now on the web. Even the “manuscript census” is on the Web. Increasingly, newspapers show up on the web and can even be searched electronically. Sources like the census or old newspapers are usually as accurate on the web as they are on microfilm or hard copy. Even traditionalists have no quarrel with such information. By inveighing against “the web,” they mean to challenge
websites with unvetted pages by unqualified authors, like the Pierce page just discussed, and also such collaborative efforts as Wikipedia. Articles in Wikipedia vary wildly in quality, so traditionalists are right not to accept them thoughtlessly, but many articles show care, erudition, and a level of detail not readily available elsewhere. Books, newspaper articles, and the like can certainly be biased or wrong. Indeed, my book Lies My Teacher Told Me demonstrates errors in history textbooks. Nevertheless, several people have usually reviewed a book or article by the time it appears in a library.
4. Adrian Turner, A Celebration of ‘Gone with the Wind’ (NYC: W. H. Smith, 1992), 166. It is also the most widely viewed movie in Great Britain, according to the British Film Institute (“Gone with the Wind tops film list,” BBC News, 11/28/2004, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4049645.stm, 2/2008).
5. Books in Print online, bowker.com/brands/bip.htm, 2/2008; “A Favorite Still,” Burlington Free Press, 1/24/1988.
6. Darden A. Pyron, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (NYC: Oxford UP, 1991), 19–29, 84–85.
7. Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (NYC: Avon, 1973 [1936], 645.
8. Olivia de Havilland quoted in Thomas K. Arnold, “‘Wind’ still blows even co-star away,” USA Today, 11/2/2004. De Havilland, of course, had no idea what black cast members thought.
9. Because Reconstruction was so poorly taught throughout the Nadir of race relations, and because inertia so afflicts the textbook industry and the teaching profession, teachers need to read a “modern” interpretation of that important period. (Bear in mind that modern interpretations are similar to those made at the time.) Here are three, the first fictional: Margaret Walker, Jubilee (NYC: Bantam, 1967); Eric Foner, Reconstruction (NYC: Harper & Row, 1988); Lerone Bennett, Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).
10. To be sure, some professors have grown so pessimistic about the quality of the results that they no longer ask students to write anything substantive in college, either. Thus, we progress.
11. Teachers may choose to make the reasoning behind a group explicit to its members or may imply that the groupings are more or less random. This is a delicate decision best made in the light of knowledge about the students involved.
12. Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Kelley, A History of the United States (Needham, MA: Prentice-Hall, 2005), 6–10, 15–16, 23–24.
13. Jules Benjamin, A Student’s Guide to History (NYC: St. Martin’s, 2000), bedfordstmartins.com/history/benjamin/con_index.htm?wri, 2/2008.
14. I prefer “storyline” because “thesis” can imply that the work can be summarized in one hypothesis. For an experiment in rat psychology this may be true, although some sociologists of science deny that science works this way. It is definitely too limiting for most history papers, which are often more open and more exploratory. In everyday usage, “argument” implies disagreement. While historians use the term to refer to a position taken vis-à-vis other scholars, this does not resonate well with high school students.
15. They do have underlying story lines, such as the archetype of unrelenting progress, but these are rarely made explicit. So far as students can infer, they just present one thing after another.
16. Once in a while, a student will footnote too often. See the discussion of “common knowledge” in the next paragraph.
17. Previously the teacher will have read the proposal to ensure it is neither embarrassingly bad nor above criticism.
18. Some parents will miss both sessions. Don’t judge them, and don’t let their child feel that their absence will hinder him/her.
19. Included should be email and phone contact information for the teacher, the name of the school librarian (who has been alerted to the project), the name of a staff member at the community library (who has also been alerted) along with its address and hours, a website or two that will likely prove helpful, and how students can access that website without a computer or internet connection at home.
20. Elaine W. Reed, Helping Your Child Learn History (DC: U.S. Dept. of Education, 1993), at ed.gov/pubs/parents/History/index.html, 2/2008.
21. One Hundred Years of Progress: The Centennial History of Anna, Illinois (Cape Girardeau: Missourian Printing, 1954).
22. I write “perhaps” because the size and destructiveness of the Chicago fire may not merit the attention it gets in our national narrative. After all, on the same day, fire destroyed Peshtigo, in northeast Wisconsin, and went on to consume 1,875 square miles of forest, an area almost as large as Delaware. The Peshtigo fire destroyed 17 towns, killed between 1,200 and 2,500 people (at least five times as many as died in Chicago), and remains the deadliest fire in U.S. history. The Peshtigo fire was the first conflagration in history to be understood as a firestorm; hence it was studied by U.S. armed forces planners before bombing cities in Germany and Japan in World War II. See Denise Gess and William Lutz, Firestorm at Peshtigo (NYC: Holt, 2002), 205–12. Students might enjoy researching the Peshtigo fire, making the case that it dwarfed the Chicago fire, and analyzing why Chicago got more news coverage, both then and later.
23. See Loewen et al., Mississippi: Conflict and Change (NYC: Pantheon, 1980), 214–17, for a summary.
24. “The First Black Student at Virginia Tech” and In Relentless Pursuit of an Education in the bibliography provide examples.
25. For an example of this kind of history, see Charles Bright, “It was as if we were never there,” Journal of American History, 3/2002, 1440.
26. Admittedly, one Illinois town’s local history collection consists of a single book!
27. The educational research literature is too vast to cite here. James Rosenbaum’s Making Inequality (NYC: Wiley, 1976) deserves mention, however, not only as an exemplary piece of research but also as a good read (for teachers). He studied “the hidden curriculum of high school tracking” in a Massachusetts city where students varied very little in social class, yet got tracked as if they did.
28. The 1990 and 2000 censuses are fairly easily used. For earlier years, selecting the year of interest yields a morass of pdf files. The census of population is in there, usually including the specific tables a student needs, but digging around is required to find them. The printed census in a community library or nearby university can be less frustrating.
29. The manuscript census is available for a fee at ancestry.com. For individual states, it is usually available for free somewhere, sometimes at the state historical society’s website. Many libraries and genealogical collections also have it on microfilm.
30. I do not advocate documentary and performance competitions. Shooting a documentary seems alluring and, when done in the service of a local history topic, can be important and compelling. Unfortunately, most historical research, including local research, is not telegenic, since the event itself is past. Poring over the manuscript census or looking through old newspapers does not make for good video. At best, research may include an interesting interview on an important topic, but that interview may flow better if it is not filmed. Besides, students know that “head and shoulder” interviews are considered boring video. So they pick a telegenic topic—usually something copied from the History Channel or its clones. This often means military history. While there is nothing wrong with military history, the resulting student documentary rarely adds much to the original. Most students focus on the basics of what happened rather than developing storylines of their own. Since students already watch enough television, they gain little by being encouraged to watch more. Furthermore, we have not agreed upon a method for footnoting videos. That last problem also besets the performance competition. Students also wind up sinking too much time into costumes and props, rather than the history they are telling. Moreover, that history again emphasizes the basics—what happened—rather than why, or any storyline developed by the students.
31. In his transcribed interviews he had actually created important historical materials for the future, so I suggested that
he ask Mrs. Robinson where her husband’s papers are and to deposit his transcriptions there for future researchers.
32. Lindsay Harney and Amanda Staab, letter to Mayor Ossie Langfelder and petition to city council, 3/21/1991; Bernard Schoenburg, “A Day to Remember,” IL State Journal-Register, 5/27/1991; Harney, “It Started Small, It Grew,” talk at Eastern Illinois University, 10/27/2000; Springfield Had No Shame (Springfield: Inst. for Public Affairs, U of IL, video, n.d.).
Chapter 5
1. Before the Present. Archaeologists often use “BP” rather than “BC” or “BCE.” Because dates for long-ago remains and artifacts are ranges, not intended to be accurate within several hundred years, the passage of a few years as a published source ages does not invalidate such estimates.
Scholars increasingly use “BCE” (“Before the Common Era”) rather than “BC” (“Before Christ”). Maybe teachers should, too, but they must decide for themselves whether this windmill merits a tilt. After all, 50 years before the common era was also about 50 years before Christ, and neither phrase necessarily has a religious content. AD (Anno Domini, or In the Year of the Lord) is harder to defend (versus CE), since it refers to the Christian God. “AD” grew more secular, however, as usage shifted from “AD 1492” to “1492 AD.” The former was grammatically correct: Columbus indeed sailed “in the year of the Lord 1492.” The latter has no similarly succinct translation, but none is required, because to most people “1492 AD” merely signifies 1,492 years after the division point from BC to AD.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 31