Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History
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2. Dalton Conley, “Forty Acres and a Mule Isn’t Enough,” http://mondediplo.com/2001/09/08richconley, Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris), 9/2001.
3. Loewen, Sundown Towns (NYC: New P, 2005), 81, 119, 144–45.
4. Kain research summarized in W. A. Low and V. A. Clift, eds., Encyclopedia of Black America (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 447–48; Michelle Singletary, “Helping Blacks Overcome Barriers to Homeownership,” Washington Post, 10/14/01.
5. Douglas opinion, Jones et us v. Alfred H. Mayer Co, 392 US 409, 445–47 (1968).
6. Included were the photo of a lynching (p. 6), John Brown (p. 72), Gordon (p. 191), and other illustrations in Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2007), or on my website.
7. Quoted in The Shaw Memorial (Conshohocken, PA: Eastern National, 1997), 56.
8. I don’t intend this sentence as a comment on the issue of reparations for slavery. My stand on reparations for slavery might depend upon what kind of reparations, paid to whom, by what governments or corporations.
9. A little later, racism also arose to justify the taking of Indians’ land. Chapter 7 described one example.
10. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cincinnati: R. Clarke, 1873), 274–75, quoted in Felix Okoye, The American Image of Africa: Myth and Reality (Buffalo, NY: Black Academy P, 1971), 37.
11. William Harris and Judith Levey, eds., The New Columbia Encyclopedia (NYC: Columbia UP, 1975), 1088.
12. See Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 144–46; see also Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1957).
13. In truth I don’t know the sex of the squirrel, nor how to tell at a distance.
14. Major exceptions would be captive animals: livestock, pets, animals in zoos, and so on. Some of these do have considerable autonomy from moment to moment, however.
15. Six Women’s Slave Narratives (NYC: Oxford UP, 1988 [1863]), “Memoir of Old Elizabeth,” 3–4.
16. Ira Berlin, Many Thousand Gone, listed at the end of this chapter, 130. In My Bondage and My Freedom, however, also listed at chapter’s end, Frederick Douglass explains how slavery could rend family ties so thoroughly that they could not be reconnected.
17. George Rawick, ed., The American Slave, 18 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972 [1941]), 43–44.
18. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988), 51–52.; cf. David Bertelson, The Lazy South (NYC: Oxford UP, 1967).
19. Ruth B. Gross, If You Grew Up with George Washington (NYC: Scholastic, 1993).
20. Las Casas, History of the Indies (NYC: Harper & Row, 1971), 257; Las Casas quoted in Marcel Bataillon, “The Clerigo Casas,” in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Bartolomé de Las Casas in History (DeKalb: Northern IL UP, 1971), 415–16. Las Casas went on to say that he has prayed to God to have mercy on his soul for giving the pro-slavery advice in the first place, but “he does not know if God will do so.” See also Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, originally The Truth About Columbus (NYC: New P, 1992), 34; “Antonio de Montesinos,” Virtual American Biographies website, famousamericans.net/antoniodemontesinos/, 5/2008.
21. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, 34–35; Thomas Benjamin, “A Time of Reconquest: History, the Maya Revival, and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas,” American Historical Review 4/2000, 424–27.
22. That we do not recall the name of their leader is an important part of the story, because they seem not to have had one leader. This revolt, therefore, shows a general readiness to resist slavery, at least in Louisiana, not a movement dependent upon a single charismatic leader.
23. Over time, every last root cellar in Vermont has become a stop on the Underground Railroad. While it’s wonderful that so many Americans wish their property or their ancestors had played a role in opposing slavery, good history requires that only those properties and ancestors that did play a role get honored for it today. The National Park Service is completing a list of valid sites. Send results to them via nps.gov/history/ugrr/.
24. Ball quoted in Lynne Duke, “This Harrowed Ground,” Washington Post Magazine (8/24/1994), 22.
Chapter 9
1. Steven Deyle, “Competing Ideologies in the Old South,” presented at the American Historical Association, 1/99. As I write in 2008, gasoline prices are at an all-time high. Oil companies rejoice while auto manufacturers and airlines sink into debt. Slaveowners shared several fundamental interests, however, whether their slaves grew cotton or rice or made nails.
2. The “Declaration of Immediate Causes” is available in many places on the web, such as http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.
3. Moreover, if a citizen of a New England state who was denied citizenship in a slave state actually brought a case against that state, they might yet have prevailed on Constitutional grounds. Here Taney contradicts Article IV, Section 2: “The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” In such a case, Taney’s language in this part of Dred Scott might be considered obiter dictum. Also, Dred Scott was wrong in its facts. When the U.S. formed, African Americans voted more widely than they did decades later, when Taney wrote his decision. To claim they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” overstated the matter, as Justice Curtis pointed out at the time in his dissent.
4. Secessionists also denounced the idea of local sovereignty in the territories, although South Carolina did not do so in this document. In the Missouri Compromise, Congress had closed territories north of the Arkansas-Missouri line to slavery, except Missouri itself. That was fine with most slaveowners in 1820. By the 1850s, however, they wanted more. Stephen A. Douglas wanted territorial governments in Kansas and Nebraska, until then Indian land, mainly to further his railroad interests. Slaveowners agreed to support the new territories only if Douglas included language opening them to slavery. Douglas capitulated and incorporated what he called “popular sovereignty” in the bill. This meant Kansas could become a slave state if it chose to, even though it lay north of the Missouri Compromise line. So, for that matter, could Nebraska. The notion was in accord with states’ rights.
Within a year or two, this breakthrough was no longer enough for Southern extremists. One reason was, settlers in Kansas did not want slavery. At first, pro-slavery forces responded by trying to hijack the Kansas territorial government. “Border ruffians” from Missouri crossed over and voted, while intimidating some “Free Soil” settlers from voting. The Pierce and Buchanan administrations, controlled by the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party, went along. Eventually, pro-slavery leaders realized they could not prevail in Kansas, so they looked to federal protection of slavery, regardless of local sentiment. The pro-slavery Supreme Court majority granted this wish in Dred Scott. Indeed, Chief Justice Taney even denied that a legally constituted territorial government could pass laws restricting slavery.
5. Three other factors possibly underlay secession. Southern political discourse grew ever more extreme. By the late 1850s, Southerners were demanding that the federal government pass a slave code guaranteeing slavery in all federal territories. This was not politically feasible, but the internal dynamics of political rhetoric in the South made it hard to be reasonable. Just to admit that insisting upon guarantees for slavery in parts of the United States where slavery would never succeed made no sense caused politicians to get labeled “unsound on slavery.” Then, having demanded slavery throughout the territories, having put their “honor” on the line and that of their state or section, politicians could not back down when, for example, Democrats nominated an opponent of a territorial slave code (Stephen A. Douglas), so they had to secede from the Democratic Party. Similarly, having stated that the election of “the black Republican” would threaten slavery in the South, they had to secede from the nation when Lincoln won.
Second, some participants claimed that white Southerners seceded simply to have power, to rule their
own country. John A. Logan of Illinois advanced this argument in The Great Conspiracy (NYC: A. R. Hart, 1886, especially Chapter 11). To a degree, the argument is circular: Southerners formed their own government to form their own government.
Third, some slaveowners feared that Republican ideology might eventually make headway in slave states. They may have been right. Certainly most whites in east Tennessee, west Virginia, western North Carolina, northwest Arkansas, north Texas, and scattered other subregions in the South opposed secession, some because they opposed slavery. Pro-slavery leaders worried that if they did not secede on the occasion of Lincoln’s election, they might not have another chance later. Then slavery might find itself threatened from within the South.
As causes of secession, these factors are more nebulous than slavery and the election of Lincoln. Necessarily they could never have been announced publicly—hence Logan’s book title. Nor do they conflict with slavery and the election of Lincoln. I think they are nuances, too advanced for high school classes to consider.
Finally, near its end, the South Carolina document does predict that after Lincoln takes over, “a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.” Then “the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self protection….” A diehard proponent of the claim that the South seceded for states’ rights might exclaim, “Aha!”, for here at last is a mention of “the equal rights of the States.” The context is all slavery, however—worry about a federal war against slavery, a war that Lincoln had denied any intention to wage.
6. I do not suggest the literal continuation of the slave power. The next chapter shows that the same social and ideological elements in Southern society that welcomed Dred Scott and then forced secession won their point around 1890. During the Nadir of race relations (1890–1940), they minimized the role of slavery in causing secession. We still do.
7. David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History (Columbia: U of SC P, 1951), 527.
8. Richmond Daily Enquirer, 11/2/1864, quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: LA State UP, 1988), 60.
9. John Mosby, “Letter to Sam Chapman, 6/4/1907” (NYC: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC3921.21).
10. William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: UP of KS, 1996), 177.
11. The books included Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, and James McPherson, The American Journey (NYC: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2000); Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, A History of the United States (Needham, MA: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005); Paul Boyer, Holt American Nation (NYC: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 2003); Andrew Cayton et al., America: Pathways to the Present (Needham, MA: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005); Gerald A. Danzer et al., The Americans (Boston: McDougal Littell [Houghton Mifflin], 2007); and David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The last does quote from the South Carolina document but manages to avoid any actual cause by the adroit use of ellipses. I suspect that Houghton Mifflin simply did not want to mention slavery, imagining that some Southern state textbook adoption board might take offense.
12. Holt does go on without delay to mention slavery: “The issue went beyond states’ rights, however. Also at stake was the determination of the southerners to protect slavery….” Nevertheless, most readers would perceive states’ rights as the primary reason, slavery second.
13. Alert readers will notice that I do not attack “the basic economic and social differences of the North and the South” as a cause of secession, because that phrase can be a euphemism for slavery.
14. Textbook editor, personal communication, 7/2006.
15. Well, Davis was born in Missouri, but he now teaches at Virginia Tech and has thrice won the Jefferson Davis Award, given by the Museum of the Confederacy.
Chapter 10
1. Historian Rayford Logan established the term in his The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir. I use somewhat different dates but have been influenced by Logan’s fine work, reprinted as The Betrayal of the Negro (NYC: Macmillan Collier, 1965 [1954]).
2. Robert A. Frister, “Forgotten heroes: Black winners of the Kentucky Derby,” Ebony, 5/1989, at http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-7568349/forgotten-heroes-black-winners-of-the-kentucky-derby, 7/2008.
3. Robert Azug and Stephen Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America (Lexington: UP of KY, 1986), 118–21, 125.
4. D is particularly useful because it is not affected by the overall proportion of African Americans in the metropolitan area. Thus we can compare the level of residential segregation in Atlanta (56% black in 2000) to Seattle (8% black), or Detroit in 2000 (83% black) to Detroit in 1890 (<2% black). D works for two groups at a time, here blacks and nonblacks.
5. This photo was taken in early 1857 or perhaps late 1856. (Thanks to Jean Libby for close scholarship on the date.) Within two years, Brown did grow a beard, perhaps in a modest attempt at a disguise. There was a price on his head after he helped eleven African Americans escape bondage in Missouri late in 1858 and get to Canada.
6. John Logan, Brian Stults, and Reynolds Farley, “Segregation of Minorities in the Metropolis: Two Decades of Change,” Demography, 41 #1 (2/2004), Table 2.
7. James Loewen and Charles Sallis, Mississippi: Conflict and Change (NYC: Pantheon, 1974), 188.
8. I quote President Grant, writing much earlier, who was in the process of washing his hands of federal responsibility for dealing with the problem.
9. William Graham Sumner, Folkways (NYC: Mentor, 1960 [1906]), 91.
10. John K. Bettersworth, Mississippi: Yesterday and Today (Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1964), 222.
11. Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 44.
12. Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Tragic Legend of Reconstruction,” in Stampp and Leon Litwack, eds., Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: LA State UP, 1969), 17–20.
13. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (NYC: Scribner’s, 1922 [1916]), 16.
14. Leola Bergmann, “The Negro in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 1969 [1948], 44–45.
15. Places to look for old textbooks include used bookstores and the main library and education library of the nearest state university. A few school districts keep copies of old textbooks or donate them to community libraries. The state textbook boards of those states that adopt textbooks statewide—about half of all states—may have kept copies of all books they adopted. These boards mostly date only to the Depression, however, so they will not have textbooks older than that. Local history rooms in community and college libraries will have state histories; while not textbooks, they, too, provide fascinating comparisons over time.
16. The entire manuscript census is available online at Ancestry.com. State historical societies and other libraries make it available for their state. The 1890 census was destroyed in a fire.
17. Chapter 11 of Loewen, Social Science in the Courtroom (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1982), tells how to compute D and what D means.
18. My website, http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/, provides a short article telling how to do this research.
19. Jerry Poling, A Summer Up North (Madison: U of WI P, 2002), 10.
20. Herbert Small, Handbook of the New Library of Congress (Boston: Curtis & Cameron, 1897), 15. I changed some spelling to match modern usage.
21. Ibid., 13–15.
22. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (NYC: Routledge, 1996); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998).
23. Granite City Public Library, 75th Year Celebration of the City of Granite City, IL (Granite City, no publisher listed, 1971), 24. In Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Jacobson showed how whites unified racially nationwide during this period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998). Cf. Sundown Towns (NYC: Ne
w P, 2005), 95, 119, 157, 411.
24. David M. P. Freund, Making It Home (Ann Arbor: U of MI Ph.D., 1999), 515.
Afterword
1. Indeed, the class can be asked, “Are you ready to be quizzed about the Mohawks? If not, tell [the student presenter] what more you need to know.” Self-interest then leads students to give good critiques.
2. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988 [1971]).
3. R. A. Lafferty, Okla Hannali (Norman: U of OK P, 1991 [1972]).
4. Margaret Walker, Jubilee (NYC: Bantam, 1967 [1966]).
5. This question can also be asked throughout the year, perhaps as part of a recurring “fun with history” day.
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the print edition of this book. Please use the search function of your e-reader to locate the topics and terms listed herein.
Ability grouping, 60–63, 224 n. 27
Achievement gap, 17, 42–47, 59
Achievement tests, 51–52
ACT, 58, 217 n. 1
Adams, Cecil, 229 n. 28
Adams, John, 83
Adams, Stephen, 230 n. 10
Advanced Placement in U.S. History (APUSH), 20, 32–34, 37, 62–63, 210
Affirmative action, 207
Africa, 198, 202–203, 205
African Americans. See also Nadir of race relations; Slavery
Black English, 44–45, 218 n. 10, 219 n. 21
Black History Month, 161–162
Civil Rights Movement and, 71–76, 80–81, 101, 110, 150, 199, 204–206, 221
contemporary relevance of slavery, 155–159
cultural bias and, 53
lynchings and, 5, 6, 16–17
in Mississippi, 2–6, 73
names and, 44–45, 156–157, 199
sundown towns and, xii, 93, 99–100, 192, 203–205