Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the next chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, In all history, there is...
Critical thinking requires assembling data to back up one’s opinion. Otherwise students may falsely conclude that all opinions are somehow equal.
Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We...
Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the...
Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response.
Celebration. Textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from race relations to transportation. The traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as a period of Yankee usurpatio...
When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: According to tradition...
When students are not asked to assess, but only to remember, they do not learn how to assess or how to think for themselves.
The duty of the historian, Gordon Craig has reminded us, is to restore to the past the options it once had. Craig also pointed out that this is an appropriate way to teach history and to make it memor...
The answer is not to expand Lies My Teacher Told Me to cover every distortion and error in history as traditionally taught, to say nothing of the future lies yet to be developed. That approach would m...
Surely the desired end product of high school U.S. history courses is graduates who can think clearly, distinguish evidence from opinion, and separate truth from what comedian Stephen Colbert famously...
Sundown town police forces, in addition to being all-white, may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city’s first line of defense against black interlopers. As a result, they engage...
Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life. Even
Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks. —THOMAS BAILEY
A generic National Park Service (NPS) brochure promises children, Hidden within each national park is an exciting story waiting to be discovered. Learning the secrets of each national park is easy. Si...
What You Can Do About Sundown Towns: The Three-Step Program in Action To help sundown towns transcend their pasts and end second-generation sundown town issues, I suggest a Three-Step Program: •Admit...
The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks, which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a line of constant progress. Including ideas would make his...
Sometimes authors do know better. As previously mentioned, in After the Fact, a book aimed at college history majors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle do a splendid job telling of the Indian plagues, dem...
Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term boy itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.