How NOT To Teach American History
There are ways, and there are ways...
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This is a riff on a Hoover Institution essay by that name by David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd
The bombs are dropping, and the guns are firing in the war over America’s past. Given the myriad crises our country now confronts, who would believe that among them would be how we teach American history? The content, presentation and teaching of US history are in the news almost daily.
Should we keep statues of Civil War figures from the losing side—or former slaveholders?
Do we need to change the names of streets, buildings and institutions that bear the names of historical figures that do not satisfy present moral or political sensibilities?
Should we rewrite history texts to reduce their emphasis on “flawed” heroes while increasing the teaching of racial, ethnic and gender minorities?
Should we erase, rewrite, apologize for, protect against, knock down, or cover up our history?
Recently, a 1936 painting at George Washington High School in San Francisco that depicts the life of George Washington with two features found “troublesome” and raised eyebrows:
“White” settlers standing over the body of a “Native American;”
Slaves working at Washington’s estate.
Some students, faculty and parents declared the mural racist and offensive. Others said it tells the truth about that era. Still others said, regardless of the historical questions, it is a work of art and should remain.
Art has to make us feel uncomfortable. That’s what art does.
Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover, Washington High Class of 1966.
Initially, the school board wanted to do away with the mural, but after a hue and cry from many—including minority groups and artists—it reversed course and concluded it would cover it up at a cost of over $600,000. The sense was that showing the art would traumatize students and others in the community, but that destroying it permanently went too far.
Must we depict the past “inoffensively?”
What happens in the schools makes up the ground war in the battle over American history, but some are busily engaged in an air war. The New York Times joined the battle by introducing The 1619 Project, “a major initiative...to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” The supposed beginning of slavery in the Americas in 1619 (it really started at least fifty years earlier) explains everything, including the brutality of American capitalism.
[N]early everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.
New York Times
The California state school board has proposed a draft ethnic studies curriculum that seeks not just to celebrate the historic contributions of minorities, but to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression at the intersection of our society.” Is this the way to open a conversation about the historic contribution of ethnic groups?
Why should the teaching of America’s past have become so controversial now?
One factor has been the shifts in how parents think about their children.
Helicopter parents increase their involvement in their kid’s lives, fearing their children might somehow be left behind if left to their own devices and judgement.
Lawnmower parents mow down any and every obstacle that might stand in a child’s path, including any distress about “problematic pasts.”
For these (mostly) Gen Z and Millennial parents, children are “snowflakes” who might melt if exposed to too much heat, including the fires of controversy, questioning, or even criticism. Taking down murals and rewriting stories of an “uncomfortable” past becomes part of the strategy of coddling and protecting these oh-so sensitive youngsters chanting “from the river to the sea” rather than letting them confront the difficulties of the past and make sense of them for themselves, developing judgment, critical thinking skills, and resilience for life…so they can scream at Jews in safety and comfort.
Another important factor is the movement to demythologize American history.
Howard Zinn led this charge with his People’s History of the United States (1980), a textbook that “reveals” the selfish motives and cruel actions of America’s traditional heroes, while retelling America’s narrative from the perspective of the “victims.” By Zinn’s account, Columbus came to murder natives and steal gold, while the Founders developed a constitutional republic that would protect their slaves and property.
At first, teachers assigned People’s History as a counterpoint to traditional history texts.
Zinn’s work gradually became the new orthodoxy. By 2024, it sold over two million copies and has become the dominant narrative in primary schools. His disciples now feel the need to eliminate the heroic view and favorable understanding of American history altogether. Some now claim that World War II was about “advancing the imperial interests of the United States,” and the last eighty years have been “a capitalistic encouragement of enormous fortunes alongside desperate poverty, a nationalistic acceptance of war and preparations for war.”
Presentism has infected American history teaching.
The History Wars have become politics by other means. If colonials owned slaves, for example, our present standards must cause us to reject them, even erase their names from our history. If a leader was on the “wrong” side of the Civil War, we may no longer honor them, despite any other accomplishments before or after the conflict. Finding contemporary politics in history class is not surprising because it has been thus since Reconstruction, but we now find this politics in every part of the curriculum—even in biology and art. While publishers sell very different history textbooks in conservative Texas than they do in liberal California, so they did in the 20th Century sell one view of the Civil War in the North and another in the South. The difference is that for most of the 19th and 20th Century, the simple facts of the conflict were not in dispute and were apolitical. In the 21st Century, those facts are reasons for reparations.
We face historical ignorance.
All sides should be able to agree that we have been teaching history and civics poorly. In the most recent report of the National Educational Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “America’s report card”), only 18% of 8th graders tested as “proficient” or better in American history while a mere 23% were “proficient” or better in government and civics. Only 1-2% tested as “advanced” in these subjects. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation reported last year that only 36% of Americans could pass the US Citizenship Test, including questions about the ratification and provisions of the US Constitution, the participants in World War II and other history basics. An Annenberg Public Policy Center Study in 2017 reported that 75% of students did not know the three branches of government and 37% could not name one right in the First Amendment.
A promising approach to teaching uses primary documents, not just textbooks.
The Ashbrook Center in Ohio has trained and retrained thousands of teachers to use primary documents—not just the Constitution and Declaration, but speeches, letters, and other documents of the time—to recreate events and debates in our past. This engages students more actively than the passive reading of a textbook and invites them to understand the past from the perspective of the participants, not just through the political lens of the 21st Century. Teachers report both greater excitement and understanding from the use of primary documents and the prospect that students can draw their own conclusions. Wilfred M. McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story delivers an inspiring narrative of American history, without rewriting, whitewashing, avoiding or politicizing. In McClay’s hands, the story of the past is an interesting and hopeful narrative, not a collection of disputed facts and intrusive opinions.
We aren’t just learning about the past to satisfy our curiosity—we are learning about the past to do our jobs as Americans.
James Loewe, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me
The Founders understood that a free republic would only work if an informed citizenry supported it and education was high on their agenda. Ronald Reagan warned of the need to return the teaching of civics and history to develop “an informed patriotism.”
It is not popular to talk about in an era of identity politics, but history teaching in school has a civic purpose, not only a disciplinary purpose.
Sam Wineburg
We seem to engage in every approach to history except to learn from it.
We seek to erase it, cover it over, topple it, rewrite it, apologize for it, skip it—but not put it out there to learn from it. The evidence suggests students learn very little of the past, unsurprising given our current methods of presentation. It is time we return to an understanding that history and civics are essential underpinnings for active citizenship, and that teaching them includes, most assuredly, the basics but also an appreciation of one’s country and a willingness to be prepared to serve it.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
Steele’s Battalion is a story on a story: a novelistic tale of a young man who starts America’s World War One as a Corporal and ends up a Brigadier General, as told by a scholar who “finds” the young man’s diaries in an old steamer trunk.
Yes, it’s another literary experiment, like nearly everything else I write, but some people like how I write, including the Roads to the Great War website.
And Finally...
On 21 June:
1915: The Supreme Court hands down Guinn v. United States. Centered on Oklahoma’s voter registration laws requiring literacy tests, the Court struck down the state’s "grandfather clause," finding it unconstitutional as it violated the Fifteenth Amendment.
1942: Japanese submarine I-25 shells Ft Stevens on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Columbia River. Although the submarine's deck guns fired seventeen shells, the fort remained undamaged, and no one on either side suffered casualties. Coming as it did on the heels of the Japanese offensive in the Aleutians, it amplified the invasion scare along the West Coast that had raged since February.
And today is SUMMERSGIVING, held on the Saturday after the summer solstice (yesterday). Dedicated to celebrating life and being grateful for our loved ones while bringing America’s finest thanksgiving food together, the holiday began in 2009.
Everyone is entitled to their point of view. I would fault no Indian for having a different perspective on American history than I have.
What is scary is the ignorance of history that is so prevalent. As with so many things, it is more important to many people to restate accepted mantras than to know what the hell they're talking about.