Final Written Exercise The most important lesson I have .docx

Final Written Exercise
The most important lesson I have learned from this class is that
history, at least the history taught in
classrooms, is not an accurate, unbiased account of the past. In
reality, history presented by highly
regulated textbooks has been twisted in such a way that students
are not given a clear picture of past
events, individuals, and conflicts. Various interest groups and
demographics have essentially dictated
which information can rightfully be published, and which
information is too threatening to reach the
pages. According to author Alexander Stille, “American history
taught in schools has been rewritten and
transformed in recent decades by a handful of large publishers
who are more concerned to meet the
demands of both the multicultural left and the conservative
religious right” (The Betrayal of History). In
essence, textbooks have reworked history in such a way that it
has become falsified and flavorless. Facts
are presented without controversy, and important historical
figures are portrayed without blemish. As

historian James Loewen writes, “authors selectively omit
blemishes to make certain historical figures
sympathetic to as many people as possible” (Loewen, 26). This
quotation declares that authors withhold
relevant historical information from textbooks, which further
supports the idea that history has been
continually distorted in today’s classrooms.
In regards to Christopher Columbus, I learned that he was not
the “American hero” that textbooks
portray him as being. As we all know, he was credited for
“discovering America,” yet he was not the first
non-Native to reach the Americas. 2“People from other
continents had reached the Americas many
times before 1492. Europeans may already have been fishing off
Newfoundland in the 1480s” (Loewen,
33). Also, I was previously unaware that Columbus was
involved in the murder and persecution of many
Native Americans. In fact, he initiated a punishing policy that
“resulted in complete genocide” of the
Natives (Zinn, 7). Finally, I learned the shocking statistic that
there were as many as 120 million Native
Americans by 1492 (Discussion 2). Upon learning this number,
I was completely stunned, as I had

severely underestimated the size of their population.
As little kids, we are all told the story of the pious, freedom-
seeking Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth.
Additionally, we all learned about the “First Thanksgiving”
where the Native Americans and Pilgrims
peacefully united for a wonderful, bountiful feast. This story,
however, is historically inaccurate. In
reality, the Pilgrims were not seeking religious freedom at all,
because they had already found that in
the Netherlands (Discussion 3). Furthermore, the Pilgrims were
very economically driven. In fact, “profit
was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the
trip” (Loewen, 87). Nevertheless, American
society perpetuates the story of the brave Pilgrims because it
advances the “American psyche,” which
characterizes Americans as the immaculate, indelible race
(Loewen, 70).
Before this course, I did not have an accurate picture of the
realities of the American slave trade. In all
honesty, I had no idea that the slave trade was so large and
widespread. Yet, as I soon learned, slavery
absolutely dominated the economy of the South. 3For instance,
“in 1790, a thousand tons of cotton
were being produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a

million tons. 4In the same period,
500,000 slaves grew to 4 million” (Zinn, 171). This excerpt
from A People’s History of the United States
demonstrates that slavery was a major force in American
society. Fast-forwarding to the present, I was
completely oblivious to the fact that slavery still exists today,
even here in the United States (Discussion
7). Also, I was upset to discover that “everything we touch
today-from the bricks that make up the
exterior of our homes, to the rug on the floors- has been touched
by the hand of a slave” (Discussion 7).
As a testament to my ignorance, I was under the impression that
slavery, for the most part, had become
nonexistent in today’s modern world.
One week ago, I did not even know what the Gilded Age was.
Now, I understand it as a time where a
handful of extremely wealthy individuals, such as Andrew
Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, owned most
of the country’s wealth (Discussion 9). 1Laborers, however,
received “wages that barely kept their
families alive” (Zinn, 257). Worker compensation,
unfortunately, was only the tip of the iceberg.

Additionally, factory conditions during this time were
extremely hazardous. “In the year 1904, 27,000
workers were killed on the job, in manufacturing, transport, and
agriculture. 3In one year, 50,000
accidents took place in New York factories alone” (Zinn, 327).
The conditions described above ultimately
sparked the emergence of the Progressive movement, which
fought to ameliorate these circumstances.
1In general, the Progressives strove to “stabilize the capitalist
system by repairing its worst defects. and
restore some measure of class peace in a time of increasingly
bitter clashes between capital and labor”
(Zinn 354).
I found imperialism to be one of the most fascinating topics this
semester. In essence, imperialism was a
mechanism that allowed Americans “to find foreign purchasers
for [their] goods. and provide the means
of making access to foreign markets easy, economical, and safe”
(Zinn, 306). In my opinion, imperialism
is an example of American greed, which led to the abuse of its
power.
Regarding World War II, I want to spend a little bit of time
discussing the Holocaust. Previously, I
thought that the Jews were the only people targeted by the

Nazis. However, I learned that Africans,
Asians, the physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, and
gypsies were all persecuted by the Third
Reich (Discussion 13). Also, I had never really seen what the
concentration camps truly looked like.
Needless to say, I was absolutely shocked to see thousands of
dead bodies just piled up, as if they were
not even there at all. Even more disgusting was the way the
Nazis just threw the bodies into pits, with
absolutely no respect whatsoever (Memory of the Camps). After
the Holocaust, the United States vowed
to never let anything of this nature happen again. However,
recently hundreds of thousands have died
in Darfur (Discussion 13). It is upsetting to me that the United
States has not done more to help stop this
genocide.
Throughout this class, I have learned that we, as U.S. citizens,
are not completely aware of the actions of
our government. For instance, I discovered that the government
has “orchestrated the oustings of
political leaders,” and that “we had a hand in assassinating
many foreign leaders” (Discussion 14). This
demonstrates that the United States believes that it should
intervene in foreign affairs, as long as this

intervention promotes our own interests. As in the Vietnam
War, the United States got unnecessarily
involved and ended up being embarrassed by a much less
powerful army. While the anti-war sentiment
in America was high, possibly the highest of all time, the
government still felt the need to deploy troops
to Vietnam. 5In my opinion, the U.S. government should make
more of an effort to heed public opinion.
To conclude, I want to discuss my general opinions of textbooks
and publishing companies. The general
trend throughout history is that the most wealthy, powerful, and
privileged have had the greatest
influence on events and outcomes of the past. In textbook
publishing, “members of the upper class have
had a hand in it” (Loewen, 306). This has to change, so that
future students are given an unbiased,
impartial layout of past events. If textbooks continue to cater to
the needs of particular groups, then
history will never be a worthwhile class to take. Considering the
“day-to-day resistance” that students
display towards classes, teachers and textbooks should do a
better job telling the exciting, historically

accurate story of the past in order to spark students’ interest
(Loewen, 341). Overall, I am glad to have
taken a class that focuses on the real story, rather than the
sugar-coated, bland version of history that
so many students must endure each year.
GIVEN EVERYTHING YOU HAVE
SEEN, HEARD, FELT, EXPERIENCED, DISCUSSED
AND READ THIS SEMESTER, ANSWER THE FOLLOWING
QUESTION:
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED THIS SEMESTER?
MORE SPECIFICALLY, WHAT LESSONS HAVE YOU
DRAWN FROM YOUR STUDIES AND DISCUS-
SIONS (BOTH IN AND OUTSIDE OF THIS COURSE) ABOUT

THE HISTORY YOU HAVE LEARNED
THIS SEMESTER, AND WHAT ETHICAL DILEMMAS HAVE
ARISEN FOR YOU AS A RESULT OF
THIS NEW INFORMATION?
COMPREHENSION DOES NOT MEAN DENYING THE
OUTRAGEOUS, DEDUCING THE UNPRECEDENTED FROM
PRECE-
DENCE, OR EXPLAINING PHENOMENA BY SUCH
ANALOGIES AND GENERALITIES THAT THE IMPACT OF
REALITY AND
THE SHOCK OF EXPERIENCE ARE NO LONGER FELT. IT
MEANS, RATHER, EXAMINING AND BEARING
CONSCIOUSLY
THE BURDEN WHICH OUR CENTURY HAS PLACED ON US
– NEITHER DENYING ITS EXISTENCE NOR SUBMITTING
MEEKLY TO ITS WEIGHT.”
~ HANNAH ARENDT
FINAL
—twelve point
font, double-spaced,

one-inch margins. In writing your answer, please do not exceed
five pages.
handouts, class notes
taken from discussions, and any other SCHOLARLY sources
you may want.
ust be supported by direct citations
from the text, class
notes, or instructor’s handouts.
notes or presenta-
tions, you might use: (Zinn, 26) or (Loewen, 3) or (class notes)
or (Powerpoint,
Cold War).
narrative. Please follow this
format. There should be many citations throughout your
response taken from the
sources noted above because assumptions and interpretations
must be bolstered by
citations. The strength of your response is dependent largely
upon the number of
citations from the assigned sources.

answer to this question.
However, you must write your own, unique, independent answer
to this question.
“HISTORY IS FICTION, EXCEPT FOR THE PARTS THAT I
LIKE, WHICH ARE, OF COURSE,
TRUE.”
~ JIM CORDER
DIRECTIONS
Table of Contents
ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1. - HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY
Chapter 2. - 1493
Chapter 3. - THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST
THANKSGIVING
Chapter 4. - RED EYES
Chapter 5. - “GONE WITH THE WIND”
Chapter 6. - JOHN BROWN ANDABRAHAM
LINCOLN
Chapter 7. - THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
Chapter 8. - WATCHING BIG BROTHER
Chapter 9. - SEE NO EVIL
Chapter 10. - DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE:
Chapter 11. - PROGRESS IS OUR MOST
IMPORTANT PRODUCT
Chapter 12. - WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT
LIKE THIS?
Chapter 13. - WHAT IS THE RESULT OF
TEACHING HISTORY LIKE
THIS?
AFTERWORD
NOTES
APPENDIX
INDEX
Copyright Page
ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN
Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get
Wrong

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher
Columbus
The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White
Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with Charles
Sallis et al.)
Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction,
and Lies in American History
Social Science in the Courtroom
Sundown Towns:
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
Dedicated to all American history teachers
who teach against their textbooks
(and their ranks are growing)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO THE FIRST EDITION
THE PEOPLE LISTED BELOW in alphabetical order
talked with me,
commented on chapters, suggested sources, corrected
my mistakes, or provided
other moral or material aid. I thank them
very much. They are: Ken Ames,
Charles Arnaude, Stephen Aron, James Baker,
Jose Barreiro, Carol Berkin,
Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill Bigelow,
Michael Blakey, Linda Brew,
Tim Brookes, Josh Brown, Lonnie Bunch, Vernon
Burton, Claire Cuddy,
Richard N. Current, Pete Daniel, Kevin Dann,
Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio,
Susan Dixon, Ariel Dorfman, Mary Dyer,
Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John
Fadden, Patrick Ferguson, Paul Finkelman,
Frances FitzGerald, William
Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch, Mel
Gabler, James Gardiner, John
Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick
Hagopian, William Haviland,
Gordon Henderson, Mark Hilgendorf, Richard
Hill, Mark Hirsch, DeanHoge, Jo
Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David
Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson,
Clifton H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge, Stuart
Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger
Kennedy, Paul Kleppner, J. Morgan Kousser, Gary
Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken
Lawrence,Mary Lehman, Steve Lewin, Garet
Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick
Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John
Marciano, J. Dan Marshall, Juan

Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis
Meadows, Donella Meadows,
Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer,
Deborah Menkart, Donna
Morgenstern, Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Roger
Norland, Jeff Nygaard, Jim
O’Brien, Wardell Payne, Mark Pendergrast, Larry
Pizer, Bernice Reagon, Ellen
Reeves, Joe Reidy, Roy Rozensweig, Harry
Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins,
John Salter, Saul Schniderman, Barry Schwartz,
John Anthony Scott, Louis
Segal, Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian
Sherman, David Shiman, Beatrice Siegel,
Barbara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold
Starr, Mark Stoler, Bill Sturtevant,
LonnTaylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan
Van Sertima, Herman Viola,
Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara
Woods, Nancy Wright, and John
Yewell.
Three institutions helped materially. The
Smithsonian Institution awarded me
two senior postdoctoral fellowships. Members of
its staff provided lively
intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow
fellows at the National Museum of
American History. Interns at the Smithsonian from
the University of Michigan,
Johns Hopkins, and especially Portland State
University chased down errant
facts. The flexible University of Vermont allowed
me to go on leave to workon

this book, including a sabbatical leave in 1993.
Finally, The New Press, André
Schiffrin, and especially my editor, Diane
Wachtell, provided consistent
encouragement and intelligentcriticism.
TO THE SECOND EDITION
AS I ENDURED THE MORAL and intellectual
torture of subjectingmyself to
six new high school American history textbooks in
2006-07, the following
assisted in important ways: Cindy King,
David Luchs, Susan Luchs, Natalie
Martin, Jyothi Natarajan, the Life Cycle
Institute and Department of Sociology
at Catholic University of America, and Joey the
guide dog in training. Many of
the folks thanked for their assistance with
the first edition—including those at
The New Press—also helped this time. So
did Amanda Patten at Simon &
Schuster.
INTRODUCTION
TO THE SECOND EDITION
I really like your book, Lies My Teacher
Told Me. I’ve been
using it to heckle my history teacher from
the back of the room.

—HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT1
I just wanted to let you know that I don’t
consider Lies My
Teacher Told Me outdated; I really don’t see
much improvement
in textbooks at all!
—HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, SHERWOOD, AR2
I was expecting some liberal bullshit, but I
thought it was right
on.
—WORKER, BAYER PHARMACEUTICALS, BERKELEY,
CA3
READERS NEW TO Lies My Teacher Told Me
should go straight to page one.
This introduction tells old friends (and enemies?) how
this edition differs from
the first and why it came to be. Since it
came to be largely because reader
response to the first edition was so positive, the
introduction seems self-
congratulatory to me—another reason to skip it.
Lies My Teacher Told Me does
take readers on a voyage of discovery
through our past, however, and some
readers may want to learnof the reactions of fellow
passengers.
From the first day, readers made Lies a

success. As its name implies, The New
Press was a small fledgling publisher without
an advertising budget; word of
mouth caused Lies to sell. The book first created
a stir on the West Coast.
“Although the book is considered
controversial by some, libraries in Alameda
County [California] can’t keep it on their
shelves,” reported an article at
California State University at Hayward. A high
school student wrote to the
editor of the San Francisco Examiner:“I was a
poor (D-plus) student in history
until I read People’s History of the United States
and Lies My Teacher Told Me.
After reading those two books, my GPA in
history rose to 3.8 and stayed there.
If you truly want students to take an interest in
American history, then stop lying
to them.” 4 An early review in the San
Francisco Chronicle called Lies “an
extremely convincing plea for truth in education,”
and my book spent several
weeks on the Bay Area bestseller list in 1995.5
Independent bookstores—the kind whose owners
and clerks read books and
whose customers ask them for recommendations—spread
the buzz across North
America. “Turns American history upside down,”
wrote “Joan” of Toronto in
1995 in a column called “Best New Books
Recommended by Leading

Independent Bookstores.” “A landmark book,” she
went on, “a must read, not
only for teachers of history and those who write
it, but for any thinking
individual.” 6 The Nation, a national magazine,
said that Lies “contains so much
history that it ends up functioning not just as
a critique but also as a kind of
counter-textbook that retells the storyof the
American past.” SoonLies reached
the bestseller lists in Boston; Burlington, Vermont;
and othercities. It was also a
bestseller for the History and Quality PaperbackBook
Clubs. In paperback, Lies
has gone through more than thirty printings at
Simon & Schuster. From the
launch of Amazon.com, Lies has been the sales
leader in its category
(historiography). So, as far as I can tell, Lies is
the bestselling book by a living
sociologist.7 Counting all editions, including Recorded
Books, sales of the first
edition totaled about a million copies.
I wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me partly
because I believed that Americans
took greatinterest in their past but had been bored to
tears by their high school
American history courses. Readers’ reactions confirmed
this belief. Their
responses were not onlywide, but deep. “Myhistory
classes in high school, I
found, were not important to me or my life,” e-
mailed one reader from the San
Francisco area, because they “did not make it
relevant to what was happening

today.” Some adult readers had always blamed
themselves for their lack of
interest in high school history. “For all theseyears
(I am forty-nine), I have had
the opinion that I don’t like history,” wrote a
woman from Utah, “when in truth,
http://Amazon.com
what I don’t like is illogic, or inconsistency.
Thank you for your work. You have
changed my life.”
Many readers found the book to be a
life-changing experience. A forklift
operator in Ohio, a forty-seven-year-oldhousewife in
Denver, a “do-gooder” in
upstate New York were inspired to finish college or
graduate school and change
careers by reading this book. “Words cannot
describe how much your book has
changed me,” wrote a woman from New York City.
“It’s like seeing everything
through new eyes. The eyes of truth as I
like to call it.” While readers repeat
adjectives like “shocked,” “stunned,” and
“disillusioned,” many have also found
Lies to be uplifting.
To be sure, not every reaction was positive.
Although one reader “never could
decide whether you were a Socialist or a
Republican,” others thought they could
and that Lies suffers from a leftward bias.
“Marxist/hippie/socialist/ anti-

American/anti-Christian” commented one reader at
Amazon.com, who would be
shocked to learn my real feelings about
capitalism. “What a piece of racist
trash,” said an anonymous postcard from El
Paso. “Take your sour mind to
Africa where you can adjust that history.”
That was, of course, a white response—a very
white response. Very different
has been the reaction from “Indian country.” A reader
who I infer is part-Indian
wrote:
Yourbook Lies My Teacher Told Me, and especially
the chapter “Red
Eyes,” has had an unprecedented effect on how I
view the world. I have
never felt inclined to write a letter of
approval for anything I’ve read
before. Your description of the Indian
experience in the United States
and, more importantly, the concept of a syncretic
American society has
subtly, but powerfully, changed my understanding of
my country, and, in
fact, my own ancestry.
If, as Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, history
is the least-liked subject in
American high schools, it is positively abhorred in
Indian country. There it is the
record of five centuries of defeat. Yet, properly
understood, American history is
not a record of Native incompetence but of
survival and perseverance. From

speaking before Native audiences in six states,
I have come to understand to
what extent false history holds Native Americans
down. I now believe that only
when they accurately understand their past—
including their recent past—will
young American Indians find the social and
intellectual power to make history in
http://Amazon.com
the twenty-first century. That understanding must
include the concept of
syncretism—blending elements from two different
cultures to come up with
somethingnew. Syncretism is how cultures typically
change and survive, and all
Americans need to understand that Native
American cultures, too, must change
to survive. Natives as well as non-Natives often
laborunder the misapprehension
that “real” Indian culture was those practices
that existed before white contact.
Actually, real Indian culture is still being
produced—by sculptors like Nalenik
Temela (page 133), musicians like Keith Secola,
and American Indian parents
everywhere.
Lies has also enjoyed huge success among African
Americans. In the fall of
2004, for example, it reached number three
on the bestseller list of Essence
magazine and was the only book on that list by a
nonblack author. “My students,

who are all African Americans, were immensely
enthused and energized by your
book,” wrote a sociology professor at
Hampton University. A Missouri native
wrote that he found Lies My Teacher Told
Me and Lies Across America
“incredibly empowering” and planned “to buy an
extracopy of both books and
leave them in the barbershop I patronize in
downtownSt. Louis. I figure if one
or two kids read it, it will make a huge
difference for generations to come.”
Working-class groups and labor historians have
also enjoyed Lies. “Thanks
again for your scholarship and solidarity in helping
show the side of the story
that best reflects the rootsof the other90 percent
who aren’t wealthy,” wrote a
nonwealthy reader in 2004. Programs in gay
and lesbian studies and women’s
studies have also invited me to speak, even though
Lies My Teacher Told Me—
unlike its successor Lies Across America—contains
no explicit treatment of
sexual identity or preference or gender issues.8
Prisoners respond positively, too:
a Wisconsin inmate, for example, wrote, “My
congratulations to you for the
courage you had to have to write such a
book that goes against the grain.”
Hardly least, “regular” white folks—even
males—like my book, too, perhaps
because I take obvious satisfaction in and give
credit to those white men from
Bartolomé de Las Casas through Robert

Flournoy to Mississippi judge Orma
Smith who have fought for justice for all of
us.
If Lies My Teacher Told Me has made such an
impact, why this new edition?
Especially when the book, as of 2007,
was selling better than ever, averaging
nearly two thousand copies per week?
Back in 2003, writing from Walnut Creek,
California, a devoted reader
convinced me of the need for a new edition. “I
thinkmany people believe that
your book describes problems that USED TO exist in
school textbooks, not as
current problems,” she e-mailed me. “My own
anecdotal experience withmy
own kids’school textbooks is that many of your
original findings remain valid.
An updated edition would make it harder
for people to minimize your book’s
truth by characterizing it as dated.” Questions
from audiences over the years
taught me that despite my debunking of
automatic progress in Chapter 11, many
readers still believe in the myth, even as
applied to the textbook publishing
industry. The problems I noted with high school
history books were so galling
that these readers want to believe—and therefore
do believe—that the books
must have improved. Unfortunately, we cannot

assume progress. Whether
history textbooks have improved is an
empirical question. It can only be
answered with data. And it is an interesting
question, especially to me, because it
subsumes another query: Did my book make any
difference?
So I spent much of 2006-07 pondering six
new U.S. history textbooks. I did
find them improved in a few regards—especially in
their treatment of
Christopher Columbus and the ensuing Columbian
Exchange.I also found them
worse or unchanged in many otherregards—but
that is the subject of the rest of
the book. It’s safe to conclude that Lies didn’t
influence textbook publishersvery
much. This did not surprise me, because fifteen
years earlier, Frances
FitzGerald’s critique of textbooks, America
Revised, was also a bestseller,but it,
too, made little impact on the industry.
However, Lies did reach and move teachers. Doing
so is important, because
one teacher can reach a hundred students, and
another hundred next year.
Teachers were a central audience I had in mind as
I wrote Lies. What have they
made of it?
Sadly, a few teachers rejected Lies unread,
concluding from its title that I am
one more teacher-basher. The book itself
never bashes teachers. As a former

college professor who in a typical semester
appeared before students for nine
hours a week, I have greatrespect for K-12
teachers. Many work in classrooms
for as many as thirty-five hours a week;
on top of that they must assign, read,
and comment on homework, prepare and grade
exams, and develop next week’s
lesson plans. When are they supposed to find
time to research what they teach in
American history? During their unpaid summers
and weekends? Moreover, I
realize that a sizable proportion—I used to
estimate 25 to 30 percent, but the
number is growing—of high school American history
teachers are serious about
their subject. They study it themselves and get
their students involved in doing
history and critiquing their textbooks. In
speeches to teacher groups, I used to
begin by acknowledging all the foregoing,
trying to persuade them to venture
beyond the book’s title.9 Moreover, there is a
certain tension between the title
and the subtitle, “Everything YourAmerican History
Textbook Got Wrong.” If
teachers merely rely on their textbooks,
however, and try to get students to
“learn” them, and if the textbooks are as bad as
the next eleven chapters suggest,
then teachers are complicit in miseducating their charges
about our past.

In central Illinois, a teacher provided an
example of what to do about bad
textbooks. In autumn 2003, treating the early
years of the republic, she told her
sixth graders in passing that most presidents before
Lincoln were slaveowners.
Her students were outraged—not with the presidents,
but with her, for lying to
them. “That’s not true,” they protested, “or it
would be in the book!” They
pointed out that the book devoted many pages
to Washington, Jefferson,
Madison, Jackson, and otherearlypresidents, pages
that said not one word about
their owning slaves. “Maybe I’m wrong, then,”
she replied, suggesting that they
check her facts. Each chose a president
and found out about him.When they
regrouped, they were outraged at their
textbook for denying them this
information. They wrote letters to the
putative author and the publisher. The
author never replied, which did not surprise
me—as we shall see, many authors
never wrote “their” textbooks, especially in
their later editions. Some are even
deceased. The students did get a replyfrom a
spokesperson at the publisher. “We
are always glad to get feedback on our product,” it
went, or boilerplate to that
effect. Then it suggested, “If you will look at
pages 501-506, you will find
substantial treatment of the Civil Rights
Movement.” The students looked at
each otherblankly: how did this relate to their
complaint?

Such a critique is a win-win action for
students. Either they improve the
textbook for the next generation of students, or
they learnthat a vacuum resides
at the intellectual center of the textbook
establishment. Either way, they become
critical readers for the rest of the academic year.
The storyof thesesixth graders shows that we
underestimate children at our
peril. Teachers who have gotten students as young
as fourth grade to challenge
textbooks and do original research have found that
they exceeded expectations.
A fifth-grade teacher in far southwestern
Virginia wrote me that at the start of
the year his students say they hate history. “Within
two weeks, all or most love
history.” He gets them involved with:
primary source documents such as newspaper
accounts and actual photos
of freedmen being lynched. This is tough on
the kids sometimes but they
handle it well. They get an attitude about evil
and vow to keep it from
happening. They no longer think that video
games with people getting
blown up are funny. They even start to check
out books on history and
read them and get awayfrom the sanitized vanilla yogurt
in the textbooks
and shoot for a five-alarm chili type of history.

They love history that has
“the good stuff ” in it. And then they are promoted
and go back to the
textbook! Which creates a problem. They raise hell
with the next teacher!
They become politicallyactive within the middle
school. They look like
they will become good citizens.
Surely good citizens are what we want—butwhat
do we mean by a “good
citizen”? Educators first required American history as a
high school subject as
part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign around
1900. Its nationalistic genesis
has always interfered with its basicmission: to prepare
students to do their job as
Americans.
Again, what exactly is our job as Americans?
Surely it is to bring into being
the America of the future. What should
characterize that nation? How should it
balance civil liberties and surveillance against
potential terrorists? Should it
allow gay marriage? What should its energy
policies be, as the world’s finite
supply of oil begins to impact upon us? To
participate in thesediscussions and
influence thesedebates, good citizens need to be able to
evaluate the claims that
our leaders and would-be leaders make. They must
read critically, winnow fact
from fraud, and seek to understand causes and
results in the past. These skills
must stand at the center of any competenthistory

course.
These are not skills that American history
textbooks foster—even the recent
ones. Nor do courses based on them. Why
then do teachers put up with such
books? The answer: they make their busy lives
easier. The teachers’ edition of
Holt American Nation, to take one example, begins
with twenty-two pages of
ads making this point. One page touts its
“Management System.” It contrasts two
photographs. One shows a teacher struggling to
carrya textbook, several other
books, someoverhead projections, a binder of
lecture notes, and miscellaneous
papers, the other a teacher smiling as she
slips a single CD into her purse.
“Everything you need is on one disk!”
trumpets the ad, including “editable
lesson plans,” “classroom presentations” containing
lecture notes suitable for
projection, and an “easy-to-use test generator.”
No longer do teachers need to
make their own lesson plans or construct their
own tests, and if they run out of
things to say in the classroom, the disk also
contains previews of the teaching
resources and movies that Holt offers as ancillary
materials. Many of these
supplements, including a series of CNN videos,
are more valuable education
tools than the textbook itself. The problem is that

the purpose of all the
ancillaries is to get teachers to adopt Holt’s
textbook. Then, sincethe textbook
runs to 1,240 pages—and all too many
teachers assign them all—students are
unlikely to have time to do anything with any of
theseadditional materials.
Sometimes help comes from the top down. Many
school systems have grown
displeased with the low student morale in these
textbook-driven history courses.
As a matter of school-board policy, at least
two systems require any teacher in
social studies or history to read my book.
Homeschoolers have also found their
way to Lies My Teacher Told Me. Wrote David
Stanton, editor of a resource
catalog for homeschoolers, “I read it cover to
cover (including the footnotes),
found it hard to put down, and was sad when
it ended.”
Students have also taken matters into their own hands.
A fourteen-year-old in
Mount Vernon, South Dakota, going into the
ninthgrade, had already read Lies
My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America.
“These are EXCELLENT
books!” she wrote. “After reading them, I
spread them around the school to
different teachers. All were shocked and, due to this,
are changing their teaching
methods.” John Jennings, a high school student
somewhere in cyberspace, wrote
that he and a group of his friends “have

read your book Lies My Teacher Told
Me and it has opened our eyes to the true history
behind our country, positive
and negative.”He went on to add that he is “signed
up to take American History
next semester . . . and we are using one of
the twelve textbooks you reviewed, so
I can’twait to attempt to start discussions in
class concerning issues discussed in
your book and use your book as a reference.” A
North Carolina dad wrote, “My
daughter uses Lies My Teacher Told Me as a
guerrilla text in her grade eleven
Advanced Placement U.S. History, and loves it—
although the teacher isn’t
always as pleased.” My favorite e-mail of all
camein from a lad somewhere at
AOL.com: “Dear Mr. Loewen, I really like
your book, Lies My Teacher Told
Me. I’ve been using it to heckle my history
teacher from the back of the room.”
My friends all like it, too, he went on. “If I
could get a group priceon it from the
publisher, I could sell it in the corridors of
my high school.” I got him the group
price, and since then, several teachers—
perhaps including his—have told me
that my book, in the hands of precocious
pupils, made their lives miserable until
http://AOL.com
they got their own copy, which jarred them out of
their textbook rut. So thereis
also hope from the bottom up.

Best of all has been the response in the
“aftermarket”—adults who have
turned to Lies because they sensed something
remiss about their boring high
school history courses. Many find it a book to
share. “I read it twice and then it
made the round of friends who were stubborn
about returning it, but I finally got
it back and now I’m reading it again,” wrote
a security guard in California.
“After completing each successive chapter, I
always felt that I had to comment
to a friend about what I just learned,”
wrote a graduate-student-to-be in
education. “I have been sharing your information
with every teacher I can get to
stand still for five minutes,” wrote a teacher’s
aide in Montana. “This is a book
that you buy two of,” wrote a professor in New
Hampshire, “one to read and
keep, and one to lend or give away.” A reader
in Sherman Oaks, California, said,
“It is more than just interesting: it is life-
enriching. I will give copies as gifts . . .
for years to come.” Some readers get them
cheap: they join the Quality
PaperbackBook Club to obtain four copies of
Lies for a dollar each, give them
to four friends, quit the club, then join again to
get four more.10
I hope you find this new edition of Lies as useful
as the first in getting people to
question what they thinkthey know about American

history. If you do, share it
with others. No doubt the publisher would like to
sell everyone you know a
copy, but I’m happiest when Lies gets multiple
readers. I’m also happy to get
readers’ reactions—positive or negative11—to my
work. You can reach me
through my website, uvm.edu/~jloewen/, or
[email protected]
http://uvm.edu/~jloewen/
INTRODUCTION
SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY WRONG
It would be better not to know so many
things than to know so
many things that are not so.
—JOSH BILLINGS1
American history is longer, larger, more various,
more beautiful,
and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said
about it.
—JAMES BALDWIN2
Concealment of the historical truth is a crime
against the people.
—GEN. PETRO G. GRIGORENKO, SAMIZDAT

LETTER TO A HISTORY
JOURNAL, c. 1975, USSR3
Those who don’t remember the past are condemned
to repeat the
eleventh grade.
—JAMES W . LOEWEN
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS hate history. When
they list their favorite
subjects, history invariably comes in last.
Students consider history “the most
irrelevant” of twenty-one subjects commonly
taught in high school. Bor-r-ringis
the adjective they apply to it. When students
can, they avoid it, even though
most students get higher grades in history than in
math, science, or English.4
Even when they are forced to take classes in
history, they repress what they
learn, so every year or two another study
decries what our seventeen-year-olds
don’t know.5
Even male children of affluent white families think
that history as taught in
high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African
American,Native American,and
Latino students view history with a special

dislike. They also learn history
especially poorly. Students of colordo only slightly
worse than white students in
mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar,
nonwhite students do more worse in
English and most worse in history.7 Something
intriguing is going on here:
surely history is not more difficult for minorities
than trigonometry or Faulkner.
Students don’t even know they are alienated,
only that they “don’t like social
studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college,
most students of colorgive
history departments a wide berth.
Many history teachers perceive the low morale in
their classrooms. If they
have a lot of time, light domestic
responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a
flexible principal, some teachers respond by
abandoning the overstuffed
textbooks and reinventing their American history
courses. All too many teachers
growdisheartened and settle for less. At least dimly
aware that their students are
not requiting their own love of history, these
teachers withdraw some of their
energy from their courses. Gradually they
end up going through the motions,
staying ahead of their students in the textbooks,
covering only material that will
appear on the next test.
College teachers in most disciplines are happy
when their students have had
significant exposure to the subject before

college. Not teachers in history.
History professorsin college routinely put down
high school history courses. A
colleague of mine calls his survey of American history
“Iconoclasm I and II,”
because he sees his job as disabusing his charges
of what they learned in high
school to make roomfor more accurate information.
In no otherfield does this
happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know
that non-Euclidean
geometry is rarely taught in high school, but
they don’t assume that Euclidean
geometry was mistaught. Professors of English
literature don’t presume that
Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school.
Indeed, history is the only
field in which the more courses students take, the
stupider they become.
Perhaps I do not need to convince you that
American history is important.
More than any othertopic, it is about us.
Whether one deems our present society
wondrous or awful or both, history reveals
how we arrived at this point.
Understanding our past is central to our ability to
understand ourselves and the
world around us. We need to know our history,
and according to sociologist C.
Wright Mills, we know we do.8
Outside of school, Americans showgreatinterest in

history. Historical novels,
whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr, et
al.) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho!,
Utah!, Nebraska!, Oregon!, Missouri!, and on!
and on!) often become
bestsellers. The National Museum of American History
is one of the three big
draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The series
The Civil War attracted new
audiences to public television. Movies based
on historical incidents or themes
are a continuing source of fascination, from
Birthof a Nation through Gone With
the Wind to Dances with Wolves, JFK, and
Saving Private Ryan. Not history
itselfbut traditional American history courses turn
students off.
Our situation is this: American history is full of
fantastic and important
stories. These stories have the power to
spellbind audiences, even audiences of
difficult seventh graders. These same stories show
what America has been about
and are directly relevant to our present society.
American audiences, even young
ones, need and want to know about their
national past. Yet they sleep through
the classes that present it.
What has gone wrong?
We begin to get a handle on this question by
noting that textbooks dominate
American history courses more than they do any other
subject. When I first came

across that finding in the educational research
literature, I was dumbfounded. I
would have guessed almost anything else—plane
geometry, for instance. After
all, it would be hard for students to interview
elderly residents of their
community about plane geometry, or to learn
about it from library books or old
newspaper files or the thousands of photographs
and documents at the Library of
Congress website. All these resources—and
more—are relevant to American
history. Yet it is in history classrooms, not
geometry, where students spend more
time reading from their textbooks, answering
the fifty-five boring questions at
the end of each chapter, going over those
answers aloud, and so on.9
Between the glossy covers, American history
textbooks are full of information
—overly full. These books are huge. The
specimensin my original collection of
a dozen of the most popular textbooks averaged
four and a half pounds in weight
and 888 pages in length. To my astonishment,
during the last twelve years they
grew even larger. In 2006 I surveyed six
new books. (Owing to publisher
consolidation, there no longer are twelve.) Three
are new editions of “legacy
textbooks,” descendedfrom books originally published
half a century ago; three

are “newnew”books.10 These six new books average
1,150 pages and almost
six pounds! I never imagined they would get
bigger. I had thought—hoped?—
that the profusion of resources on the Web would
make it obvious that these
behemoths are obsolete. The Web did not exist
when the earlier batch of
textbooks cameinto being. In those days, for
history textbooks to be huge made
some sense: students in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi,
say, or Beaver Dam,
Wisconsin, had few resources in American history
otherthan their textbooks. No
longer: today every school that has a phone
line is connected to the Web. There
students can browse hundreds of thousands of
primary sources including
newspaper articles, the census, historic photographs,
and original documents, as
well as secondary interpretations from scholars,
citizens, other students, and
rascals and liars. No longer is there any
need to supply students with nine
months’ reading between the covers of one book,
written or collected by a single
set of authors.
The new books are so huge that they may endanger
their readers. Each of the
1,104 pages in The American Journey is wider
and taller than any page in the
twelve already enormous high school textbooks in
my original sample. Surely at
5.6 pounds, Journey is the heaviest book ever
assigned to middle-school children

in the history of American education. (At more
than $84, it may also be the most
expensive.) A new nonprofit organization, Backpack
Safety America, has
formed, spurred by chiropractors and otherhealth
care professionals. Its mission
is “to reduce the weight of textbooks and
backpacks.” In the meantime,pending
that accomplishment, chiropractors are visiting schools
teaching proper posture
and lifting techniques.11
Publishers, too, realize that the books look
formidably large, so they try to
disguise their total page count by creative pagination.
Journey, for example, has
1,104 pages but manages to come in under
a thousand by using separate
numbering for thirty-two pages at the front of
the book and seventy-two pages at
the end. Students aren’t fooled. They know these
are by far the heaviest volumes
to lug home, the largest to hold in the lap,
and the hardest to get excited about.
Editors also realize how daunting thesebooks appear
to the poor children who
must read them, so they provide elaborate
introductions and enticements,
beginning with the table of contents. For The Americans,
for example, a 1,358-
page textbook from McDougal Littell weighing in at
almost seven pounds, the

table of contents runs twenty-two pages. It is
profusely illustrated and has little
colored banners with titles like “Geography
Spotlight,” “Daily Life,” and
“Historical Spotlight.” Right after it comes
a three-page layout, “Themes in
History” and “Themes in Geography.” Then come
hints on how to read the
complex, disjointed thirty- to forty-page chapters.
“Each chapter begins with a
two-page chapter opener,” it says. “Study the
chapter opener to help you get
ready to read.”
“Oh, no,” groan students. “Nothing good will come of
this.” They know that
no one has to tell them how to get ready to
read a Harry Potter book or any other
book that is readable. Something different is going
on here.
Unfortunately, having a still bigger book only spurs
conscientious teachers to
spend even more time making sure students read it
and deal with its hundreds of
minute questions and tasks. This makes history
courses even more boring.
Publishers then try to make their books
more interesting by inserting various
special aids to give them eye appeal. But these
gimmicks have just the opposite
effect. Many are completely useless, except to
the marketing department.
Consider the little colored banners in the table of
contents of The Americans . No
student would ever need to have a list of

the “Geography Spotlights” in this
book. One spotlight happens to be “The Panama
Canal,” but the student seeking
information on the canal would find it by
looking in the index in the back, not by
surmising that it might be a Geography
Spotlight, then finding that list within the
twenty-two pages of contents in the front,
and then scanning it to see if Panama
Canal appears. The only possible use for these
bannered lists is for the sales rep
to pointto when trying to get a school
district to adopt the book.
The books are huge so that no publisher will lose an
adoption because a book
has left out a detail of concern to a
particular geographical area or group.
Textbook authors seem compelled to include a
paragraph about every U.S.
president, even William Henry Harrison and Millard
Fillmore. Then thereare the
review pages at the end of each chapter. The
Americans, to take one example,
highlights 840 “Main Ideas Within Its MainText.”
In addition, the text contains
310 “Skill Builders,” 890 “Terms and Names,”
466 “Critical Thinking”
questions, and still otherprojects within its chapters.
And that’s not counting the
hundreds of terms and questions in the two-page
reviews that follow each
chapter. At year’s end, no student can remember
840 main ideas, not to mention

890 terms and countless otherfactoids. So students
and teachers fall back on one
main idea: to memorize the terms for the test on
that chapter, then forget them to
clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder
so many high school
graduates cannot remember in which century the
CivilWar was fought!12
Students are right: the books are boring.13 The
stories that history textbooks
tell are predictable; every problem has already
been solved or is about to be
solved. Textbooks exclude conflict or real
suspense. They leave out anything
that might reflect badly upon our national
character. When they try for drama,
they achieve onlymelodrama, because readers know
that everything will turn
out fine in the end. “Despite setbacks, the United
States overcame these
challenges,” in the words of one textbook. Most
authors of history textbooks
don’t even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in
a tone that if heard aloud
might be described as “mumbling lecturer.” No
wonder students lose interest.
Authors almost never use the present to
illuminate the past. They might ask
students to consider gender roles in
contemporary society as a means of
prompting students to think about what women
did and did not achieve in the
suffrage movement or the more recent

women’s movement. They might ask
students to prepare household budgets for the
families of a janitor and a
stockbroker as a means of prompting
thinking about labor unions and social
classes in the past and present. They might, but
they don’t. The present is not a
source of information for writers of history
textbooks.
Conversely, textbooks seldom use the past to
illuminate the present. They
portray the past as a simpleminded morality play.
“Be a good citizen” is the
message that textbooks extract from the past. “You
have a proud heritage. Be all
that you can be. After all, look at what the
United States has accomplished.”
While there is nothing wrong with optimism,
it can become something of a
burden for students of color, children of
working-class parents, girls who notice
the dearth of female historical figures, or
members of any group that has not
achieved socioeconomic success. The optimistic
approach prevents any
understanding of failure other than blaming the victim.
No wonder children of
color are alienated. After a thousand pages,
bland optimism gets pretty off-
putting for everyone.
Textbooks in American history stand in sharp
contrast to other teaching
materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism
is one of the culprits.

Textbooks are oftenmuddled by the conflicting
desires to promote inquiry and
to indoctrinate blindpatriotism. “Take a look in
your history book, and you’ll
see why we should be proud” goes an anthem
often sung by high school glee
clubs. But we need not even look inside.14 The titles
themselves tell the story:
The Great Republic, The American Pageant, Land of
Promise, Triumph of the
American Nation.15 Such titles differ from
the titles of all other textbooks
students read in high school or college. Chemistry
books, for example, are called
Chemistryor Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of
the Molecule. And you can
tell history textbooks just from their covers,
graced as they are with American
flags, bald eagles, the Washington Monument.
None of the facts is remembered, because
they are presented simply as one
damn thing after another. While textbook
authors tend to include most of the
trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to
give readers even a glimpse of what
they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks
stiflemeaning by suppressing
causation. Students exit history textbooks without
having developed the ability
to thinkcoherently about social life.
Even though the books bulge with detail, even

though the courses are so busy
they rarely reach 1960, our teachers and our
textbooks still leave out most of
what we need to know about the American past.
And despite their emphasis on
facts, someof the factoids they present are flatly
wrong or unverifiable. Errors
often go uncorrected, partly because the history
profession does not bother to
review high school textbooks. In sum, startling
errors of omission and distortion
mar American histories. History can be imagined as a
pyramid. At its base are
the millions of primary sources—the plantation
records, city directories, census
data, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper
articles, diaries, and letters that
document times past. Based on these
primary materials, historians write
secondary works—books and articles on subjects
ranging from deafness on
Martha’s Vineyard to Grant’s tactics at Vicksburg.
Historiansproduce hundreds
of these works every year, many of them
splendid. In theory, a few historians,
working individually or in teams, then synthesize
the secondary literature into
tertiary works—textbooks covering all phases of
U.S. history.
In practice, however, it doesn’t happen that way.
Instead, history textbooks
are clones of each other. The first thingeditors do
when recruiting new authors
is to send them a half-dozen examples of
the competition. Often a textbook is

written not by the authors whose names grace
its cover, but by minions deep in
the bowels of the publisher’s offices. When
historians do write textbooks, they
risk snickers from their colleagues—tinged with envy,
but snickers nonetheless:
“Why are you devoting time to pedagogy rather
than original research?”
The result is not happy for textbook scholarship.
Many history textbooks list
up-to-the-minute secondary sources in their
bibliographies, yet the narratives
remain totally traditional—unaffected by recent
research.16
What would we think of a course in
poetry in which students never read a
poem? The editor’s voice in an English
literature textbook might be as dull as
the voice in a history textbook, but at least
in the English textbook the voice
stills when the book presents original works of
literature. The omniscient
narrator’s voice of history textbooks insulates
students from the raw materials of
history. Rarely do authors quote speeches, songs,
diaries, or letters. Students
need not be protected from this material. They
can just as well read one
paragraph from William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of
Gold” speech as read
American Adventures’ two paragraphs about it.

Textbooks also keep students in the dark about
the nature of history. History is
furious debate informed by evidence and reason.
Textbooks encourage students
to believe that history is facts to be learned.
“We have not avoided controversial
issues,” announces one set of textbook authors;
“instead, we have tried to offer
reasoned judgments” on them—thus removing the
controversy! Because
textbooks employ such a godlike tone, it
never occurs to most students to
question them. “In retrospect I ask myself,
why didn’t I think to ask, for
example, who were the original inhabitants of the
Americas, what was their life
like, and how did it change when Columbus
arrived,” wrote a student of mine in
1991. “However, back then everything was
presented as if it were the full
picture,” she continued, “so I never thought to
doubt that it was.”
As a result of all this, most high school seniors
are hamstrung in their efforts
to analyze controversial issues in our society. (I
know because I encounter these
students the next year as college freshmen.) We’ve
got to do better. Five-sixths
of all Americans never take a course in
American history beyond high school.
What our citizens “learn” in high school forms
much of what they know about
our past.

This book includes eleven chapters of amazing
stories—some wonderful,
some ghastly—in American history, including a new
chapter on our two Iraq
wars and the continuing “war on terrorism.”
Arranged in roughly chronological
order, these chapters do not relate mere details
but events and processeswith
important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave out or
distort theseevents and
processes.I know, because for twenty years I
have been lugging around eighteen
textbooks, taking them seriously as works of
history and ideology, studying what
they say and don’t say, and trying to figure
out why. I chose these eighteen as
representing the range of textbooks available
for American history courses.17
These books, which are listed (with full
citations) in the Appendix, have been
my window into the world of what high school
students carry home, read,
memorize, and forget. In addition, I have
spent many hours observing high
school history classes in Mississippi, Vermont,
and the Washington, D.C.,
metropolitan area, and more hours talking with high
school history teachers.
Chapter 12 analyzes the process of textbook
creation and adoption in an
attempt to explain what causes textbooks to be as
bad as they are. I must confess

an interest here: I once co-wrote a history
textbook. Mississippi: Conflict and
Change was the first revisionist state history
textbook in America. Although the
book won the Lillian Smith Award for “best
nonfiction about the South” in
1975, Mississippi rejected it for use in public
schools. In turn, threelocal school
systems, my coauthor, and I sued the state textbook
board. In April 1980 Loewen
et al. v. Turnipseed et al. resulted in a
sweeping victory on the basisof the First
and Fourteenth Amendments. The experience taught
me firsthand more than
most writers or publisherswould ever want to know
about the textbook adoption
process. I also learned that not all the blame
can be laid at the doorstep of the
adoption agencies.
Chapter 13 looks at the effects of using
standard American history textbooks.
It shows that the books actually make
students stupid. Finally, an afterword cites
distortions and omissions undiscussed in earlier
chapters and recommends ways
that teachers can teach and students can learn
American history more honestly. It
is offered as an inoculation program of sorts
against the future lies we are
otherwise sure to encounter.
As a sociologist, I am reminded constantlyof
the power of the past. Although
each of us comes into the world de novo,

we are not really new creatures. We
arrive into a social slot, born not only to a
family but also a religion, community,
and, of course, a nation and a culture.
Sociologists understand the power of
social structure and culture to shape not only
our path through the world but also
our understanding of that path and that world. Yet
we often have to expend
much energy trying to get students to see
the influence on their lives of the social
structure and culture they inherit. Not understanding
their past renders many
Americans incapable of thinking effectively about
our present and future. If our
journey together through this book will make
the realities of our past more
apparent, then this “most irrelevant” subject—
American history—might become
more relevant to you. At least, that’s my hope.
1.
HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY
THE PROCESS OF HERO-MAKING
What passes for identity in America is a
series of myths
about one’s heroic ancestors.

—JAMES BALDWIN 1
One is astonished in the study of history at
the
recurrence of the idea that evil must be
forgotten,
distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember
that
Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember
that he
was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must
forget
that George Washington was a slave owner .
. . and
simply remember the things we regard as
creditable
and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this
philosophy is that history losesits value as an
incentive
and example; it paints perfect men and noble
nations,
but it does not tell the truth.
—W.E.B. DUBOIS2
By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a
disservice
both to them and to ourselves. . . . We fail to
recognize
that we could go and do likewise.
—CHARLES V. WILLIE3

THIS CHAPTER is about heroification, a
degenerative process (much like
calcification) that makes people over into heroes.
Through this process, our
educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals
into pious, perfect creatures
without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human
interest.
Many American history textbooks are studded with
biographical vignettes of
the very famous (Land of Promise devotes a
box to each president) and the
famous (The Challenge of Freedom provides
“Did You Know?” boxes about
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate
from medical school in the
United States, and Lorraine Hansberry, author of
A Raisin in the Sun, among
many others). In themselves, vignettes are not a
bad idea. They instruct by
human example. They show diverse ways
that people can make a difference.
They allow textbooks to give space to
characters such as Blackwell and
Hansberry, who relieve what would otherwise be a
monolithic parade of white
male political leaders. Biographical vignettes also
provoke reflection as to our
purpose in teaching history: Is Chester A. Arthur
more deserving of space than,
say, Frank Lloyd Wright? Who influences
us more today—Wright, who

invented the carport and transformed domestic
architectural spaces, or Arthur,
who, um, signed the first CivilService Act? Whose
rise to prominence provides
more drama—Blackwell’s or George H. W. Bush’s
(the latter born with a silver
Senate seat in his mouth4)? The choices are
debatable, but surely textbooks
should include somepeople based not only on
what they achieved but also on
the distance they traversed to achieve it.
We could go on to third- and fourth-guess
the list of heroes in textbook
pantheons. My concern here, however, is not who
gets chosen, but rather what
happens to the heroes when they are introduced
into our history textbooks and
our classrooms. Two twentieth-century Americans
provide case studies of
heroification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller.
Wilson was unarguably an
important president, and he receives extensive textbook
coverage. Keller, on the
otherhand, was a “little person” who pushed
through no legislation, changed the
course of no scientific discipline, declared no
war. Only one of all the history
textbooks I surveyed includes her photograph. Most
books don’t even mention
her. But teachers love to talk about Keller and
oftenshowaudiovisual materials
or recommend biographies that present her life as
exemplary. All this attention

ensures that students retain somethingabout both of
thesehistorical figures, but
they may be no better off for it. Heroification so
distorts the lives of Keller and
Wilson (and many others) that we cannot think
straight about them.
Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blindand
deaf girl who overcame her
physical handicaps, as an inspiration to
generations of schoolchildren. Every
fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne
Sullivan spells water into young
Helen’s hand at the pump. At least a
dozen movies and filmstrips have been
made on Keller’s life. Each yields its version of
the same cliché. A McGraw-Hill
educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen
Keller and Anne Sullivan to the
world is to constantlyremind us of the wonder
of the world around us and how
much we owe those who taught us what it
means, for thereis no person that is
unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the
greatest service any person can
make us is to help another reach true
potential.” 5
To draw such a bland maxim from
the life of Helen Keller, historians and
filmmakers have disregarded her actual
biography and left out the lessons she
specifically asked us to learnfrom it. Keller,
who struggled so valiantly to learn
to speak, has been made mute by history. The

result is that we really don’t know
much about her.
Over the past twenty years, I have asked
hundreds of college students who
Helen Keller was and what she did. All know
that she was a blindand deaf girl.
Mostremember that she was befriended by a teacher,
Anne Sullivan, and learned
to read and write and even to speak. Some
can recall rather minute details of
Keller’s early life: that she lived in Alabama, that
she was unruly and without
manners before Sullivan came along, and so
forth. A few know that Keller
graduated from college. But about what happened next,
about the whole of her
adultlife, they are ignorant. A few students venture
that Keller became a “public
figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf
of the blindor deaf. “She wrote,
didn’t she?” or “she spoke”—conjectureswithout
content. Keller, who was born
in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in
1968. To ignore the sixty-
four years of her adult life or to encapsulate
them with the single word
humanitarian is to lie by omission.
The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical
socialist. She joined the Socialist
Party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become
a social radical even before she
graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized,
because of any teachings
available there. After the Russian Revolution,

she sang the praises of the new
communist nation: “In the East a new star is
risen! With pain and anguish the old
order has given birth to the new, and
behold in the East a man-child is born!
Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the
campfires of Russia! Onward to
the coming dawn!” 6 Keller hung a red flag
over the desk in her study. Gradually
she moved to the left of the Socialist Party
and became a Wobbly, a member of
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the
syndicalist union persecuted by
Woodrow Wilson.
Always a voice for the voiceless, Helen Keller
championed women’s suffrage.
Her position at the head of this 1912 demonstration
shows her celebrity status as
well as her commitment to the cause. The shields
are all from western states,
where women were already voting.
Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her
experience as a disabled
person and from her sympathy for others with
handicaps. She began by working
to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon
cameto realize that to deal solely
with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause.

Through research she learned
that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout
the population but was
concentrated in the lower class. Men who were
poor might be blinded in
industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care;
poor women who became
prostitutes faced the additional danger of
syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller
learned how the social class system controls
people’s opportunities in life,
sometimes determining even whether they can see.
Keller’s research was not just
book learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories,
crowded slums. If I could
not see it, I could smell it.” 7
At the time Keller became a socialist, she was
one of the most famous women
on the planet. She soon became the most notorious.
Her conversion to socialism
caused a new storm of publicity—this time
outraged. Newspapers that had
extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized
her handicap. Columnists
charged that she had no independent sensory input
and was in thrall to those who
fed her information. Typical was the editor of
the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote
that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the
manifest limitations of her
development.”
Keller recalled having met this editor: “At that
time the compliments he paid
me were so generous that I blush to remember

them. But now that I have come
out for socialism he reminds me and the public
that I am blind and deaf and
especially liable to error. I must have
shrunk in intelligence during the years
sinceI met him.” She went on, “Oh, ridiculous
Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind
and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a
system that is the cause of much of
the physical blindness and deafness which we are
trying to prevent.” 8
Keller, who devoted much of her later life to
raising funds for the American
Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in
her belief that our society needed
radical change. Having herself fought so hard to
speak, she helped found the
American CivilLiberties Union to fight for the
free speech of others. She sent
$100 to the NAACP with a letter of support
that appeared in its magazine The
Crisis—a radical act for a white person from
Alabama in the 1920s. She
supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate,in
each of his campaigns for
the presidency. She composed essays on the
women’s movement, on politics, on
economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader
of the American Communist Party, who was then
languishing in jail, a victim of
the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear
Elizabeth Flynn! May the

sense of serving mankind bring strength and
peace into your brave heart!” 9
One may not agree with Helen Keller’s positions.
Her praise of the USSR now
seems naïve, embarrassing, to someeven treasonous.
But she was a radical—a
fact few Americans know, because our schooling
and our mass media left it
out.10
What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson
is even more remarkable.
When I ask my college students to tell me
what they recall about President
Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say
that Wilson led our country
reluctantly into World War I and after the
war led the struggle nationally and
internationally to establish the League of Nations.
They associate Wilson with
progressive causes like women’s suffrage. A
handful of students recall the
Wilson administration’s Palmer raids against left-
wing unions. But my students
seldom know or speak about two
antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out:
his racial segregation of the federal government
and his military interventions in
foreign countries.
Among the progressive-era reforms with which
students oftencredit Woodrow

Wilson is women’s suffrage. Although women did
receive the right to vote
during Wilson’s administration, the president was at
first unsympathetic. He had
suffragists arrested; his wife detested them. Public
pressure, aroused by hunger
strikes and other actions of the movement,
convinced Wilson that to oppose
women’s suffrage was politicallyunwise. Textbooks
typically fail to show the
interrelationship between the hero and the people.
By giving the credit to the
hero,authors tell less than half of the story.
Under Wilson, the United States intervened in
Latin America more oftenthan
at any other timein our history. We landed troops
in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in
1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico
again in 1916 (andnine more
times before the end of Wilson’s presidency),
Cuba in 1917, and Panama in
1918. Throughout his administration Wilson
maintained forces in Nicaragua,
using them to determine Nicaragua’s president and to
forcepassage of a treaty
preferential to the United States.
In 1917 Woodrow Wilson took on a major
power when he started sending
secret monetary aid to the “White” side of the
Russian civil war. In the summer
of 1918 he authorized a naval blockade of
the Soviet Union and sent
expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel,

and Vladivostok to help
overthrow the Russian Revolution. With the blessing of
Britain and France, and
in a joint command with Japanese soldiers,
American forces penetrated
westward from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal,
supporting Czech and White
Russian forces that had declared an anticommunist
government headquartered at
Omsk. After briefly maintaining front lines as
far west as the Volga, the White
Russian forces disintegrated by the end of 1919,
and our troops finally left
Vladivostok on April 1, 1920.11
Few Americans who were not alive at the
time know anything about our
“unknown war with Russia,” to quote the title of
Robert Maddox’s book on this
fiasco. Not one of the twelve American history
textbooks in my original sample
even mentioned it. Two of the six new books
do; Boorstin and Kelley, for
example, write: “The United States, hoping to
keep stores of munitions from
falling into German hands when Bolshevik
Russia quit fighting, contributed
some5,000 troops to an Allied invasion of
northern Russia at Archangel. Wilson
likewise sent nearly 10,000 troops to Siberia as
part of an Allied expedition.” It
is possible, although surely difficult, for an
American student to infer from that
passage that Wilson was intervening in Russia’s
civil war.

Russian textbooks, on the otherhand, give the
episode considerable coverage.
According to Maddox: “The immediate effect of
the intervention was to prolong
a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of
additional lives and wreaking
enormous destruction on an already battered
society. And there were longer-
range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear
proof . . . that the Western
powers meant to destroy the Soviet government
if given the chance.”12
This aggression fueled the suspicions that
motivated the Soviets during the
Cold War, and until its breakup the Soviet Union
continued to claim damages for
the invasion.
Wilson’s invasions of Latin America are better
known than his Russian
adventure. Textbooks do cover some of
them, and it is fascinating to watch
textbook authors attempt to justify theseepisodes.
Any accurate portrayal of the
invasions could not possibly show Wilson or
the United States in a favorable
light. With hindsight we know that Wilson’s
interventions in Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the
stagefor the dictators Batista,
Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose
legacies still reverberate.13
Even in the 1910s, most of the invasions were

unpopular in this country and
provoked a torrent of criticism abroad. By the
mid-1920s, Wilson’s successors
reversed his policies in Latin America. The authors
of history textbooks know
this, for a chapter or two after Wilson they laud
our “Good Neighbor Policy,” the
renunciation of force in Latin America by
Presidents Coolidge and Hoover,
which was extended by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Textbooks might (but don’t) call Wilson’s Latin
American actions a “Bad
Neighbor Policy” by comparison. Instead, faced
with unpleasantries, textbooks
—old and new—wriggle to get the hero off the
hook, as in this example from the
old Challenge of Freedom: “President Wilson wanted
the United States to build
friendships with the countries of Latin America.
However, he found this
difficult. . . .” Several textbooks blame
the invasions on the countries invaded:
“Wilson recoiled from an aggressive foreign
policy,” states the new American
Pageant. “Political turmoil in Haitisoon forced Wilson
to eat someof his anti-
imperialist words. . . . Wilson reluctantly
dispatched marines to protect
American lives and property.” This passage is
sheer invention. Unlike his
secretary of the navy, who later complained that
what Wilson “forced [me] to do
in Haitiwas a bitter pill for me,” no documentary
evidence suggests that Wilson
suffered any such qualms about dispatching troops

to the Caribbean.14
Every textbook I surveyed mentions Wilson’s 1914
invasion of Mexico, but
they posit that the interventions were not Wilson’s fault.
“Cries for intervention
burst from the lips of American jingoes,” according
to Pageant in 2006. “Yet
President Wilson stood firm against demands to
step in.” SoonWilson did order
troops to Mexico, of course, even before
Congress gave him authority to do so.
Walter Karp has shown that this view of a
reluctant Wilson again contradicts the
facts—the invasion was Wilson’s idea from the start,
and it upset Congress as
well as the American people.15 Wilson’s intervention
was so outrageous that
leaders of both sides of Mexico’s ongoing civil
war demanded that the U.S.
forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in
the United States and around the
world finally influenced Wilson to recall
the troops.
Textbook authors commonly use another device
when describing our Mexican
adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our
forces to withdraw, but nobody
is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting
information in a passive voice
helps to insulate historical figures from their own
unheroic or unethical deeds.

Some books go beyond omitting the actorand
leave out the act itself. Half of
the textbooks do not even mention Wilson’s
takeover of Haiti. After U.S.
marines invaded the country in 1915, they forced
the Haitian legislature to select
our preferred candidate as president. When Haiti
refused to declare war on
Germany after the United States did, we dissolved
the Haitian legislature. Then
the United States supervised a pseudo-
referendum to approve a new Haitian
constitution, less democratic than the constitution it
replaced; the referendum
passed by a hilarious 98,225 to 768. As Piero
Gleijesus has noted, “It is not that
Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring
democracy to these little countries.
He never tried. He intervened to impose
hegemony, not democracy.”16 The
United States also attacked Haiti’s proud
tradition of individual ownership of
small tracts of land, which dated back to
the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the
establishment of largeplantations. American troops
forced peasants in shackles
to work on road construction crews. In 1919 Haitian
citizens rose up and resisted
U.S. occupation troops in a guerrilla war that
cost more than three thousand
lives, most of them Haitian. Students who read
Pathways to the Present learn
this about Wilson’s intervention in Haiti: “In
Haiti, the United States stepped in
to restore stability after a series of
revolutions left the country weak and

unstable. Wilson . . . sent in American troops
in 1915. United States marines
occupied Haitiuntil 1934.” These bland sentences
veil what we did, about which
George Barnett, a U.S. marine general, complained
to his commander in Haiti:
“Practically indiscriminate killing of natives has
gone on for sometime.” Barnett
termed this violent episode “the most startling thing
of its kind that has ever
taken place in the Marine Corps.” 17
During the first two decades of this century, the
United States effectively
made colonies of Nicaragua, Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, and several
othercountries. Nor, as we have seen,did Wilson limit
his interventions to our
hemisphere. His reaction to the Russian Revolution
solidified the alignment of
the United States with Europe’s colonial powers.
His was the first administration
to be obsessed with the specter of communism,
abroad and at home. Wilson was
bluntabout it. In Billings, Montana, stumping the
West to seek support for the
League of Nations, he warned, “There are
apostles of Lenin in our own midst. I
can not imagine what it means to be an
apostle of Lenin. It means to be an
apostle of the night, of chaos, of
disorder.”18 Even after the White Russian
alternative collapsed, Wilson refused to extend

diplomatic recognition to the
Soviet Union. He participated in barring Russia
from the peace negotiations after
World War I and helped oust Béla Kun, the
communist leader who had risen to
power in Hungary. Wilson’s sentiment for self-
determination and democracy
never had a chance against his three
bedrock “ism”s: colonialism, racism, and
anticommunism. A young Ho Chi Minh
appealed to Woodrow Wilson at
Versailles for self-determination for Vietnam, but Ho
had all threestrikes against
him. Wilson refused to listen, and France
retained control of Indochina.19 It
seems that Wilson regarded self-determination as all
right for, say, Belgium, but
not for the likes of Latin America or Southeast
Asia.
At home, Wilson’s racial policies disgraced the
office he held. His Republican
predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to
important offices, including those
of port collector for New Orleans and the District of
Columbia and register of
the treasury. Presidentssometimes appointed African
Americans as postmasters,
particularly in southern towns with largeblack
populations. African Americans
took part in the Republican Party’s national
conventions and enjoyed some
access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson,
for whom many African
Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A
Southerner, Wilson had been

president of Princeton, the only major northern
university that flatly refused to
admit blacks. He was an outspoken white
supremacist—his wife was even worse
—and told “darky” stories in cabinet meetings.
His administration submitted an
extensive legislative program intended to curtail
the civil rights of African
Americans, but Congress would not pass it.
Unfazed, Wilson used his power as
chief executive to segregate the federal government.
He appointed Southern
whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks.
His administration used the
excuse of anticommunism to surveil and
undermine black newspapers,
organizations, and union leaders. He segregated
the navy, which had not
previously been segregated, relegating African
Americans to kitchen and boiler
work. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on
racial equality in the Covenant of
the League of Nations. The one occasion on which
Wilson met with African
American leaders in the White House ended in
a fiasco as the president virtually
threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson’s
legacy was extensive: he effectively
closed the Democratic Party to African
Americans for another two decades, and
parts of the federal government remained segregated
into the

1950s and beyond.20 In 1916 the Colored
Advisory Committee of the
Republican National Committee issued a
statement on Wilson that, though
partisan, was accurate: “No sooner had the Democratic
Administration come
into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors entered
upon a policy to eliminate
all colored citizens from representation in the Federal
Government.”21
Of all the history textbooks I reviewed, eightnever
even mention this “black
mark” on Wilson’s presidency. Only four
accurately describe Wilson’s racial
policies. Land of Promise, back in 1983, did the
best job:
Woodrow Wilson’s administration was openly hostile to
black people.
Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist
who believed that black
people were inferior. During his campaign for
the presidency, Wilson
promised to press for civil rights. But once
in office he forgot his
promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and
black workers in
federal government jobs be segregated from
one another. Thiswas the
first time such segregation had existed since
Reconstruction! When black
federal employees in Southern cities protested
the order, Wilson had the
protesters fired. In November, 1914, a black
delegation asked the

President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude
and hostile and refused
their demands.
Mostof the textbooks that do treat Wilson’s
racism give it only a sentence or
two. Some take pains to separate Wilson from
the practice: “Wilson allowed his
Cabinet officers to extend the Jim Crow
practice of separating the races in
federal offices” is the entire treatment in
Pathways to the Present. Omitting or
absolving Wilson’s racism goes beyond concealing
a character blemish. It is
overtly racist. No black person could ever
consider Woodrow Wilson a hero.
Textbooks that present him as a hero are written
from a white perspective. The
cover-up denies all students the chance to learn
something important about the
interrelationship between the leader and the led.
White Americans engaged in a
new burstof racial violence during and immediately
after Wilson’s presidency.
The tone set by the administration was one cause.
Another was the release of
America’sfirst epic motion picture.22
The filmmaker D. W. Griffith quoted Wilson’s
two-volume history of the
United States, now notorious for its racist view
of Reconstruction, in his
infamous masterpiece The Clansman, a paean to

the Ku Klux Klan for its role in
putting down “black-dominated” Republican state
governments during
Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a
book by Wilson’s former
classmate, Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with
race was “unrivaled until Mein
Kampf,” according to historian Wyn Wade. At a
private White House showing,
Wilson saw the movie, now retitled Birth of a
Nation, and returned Griffith’s
compliment: “It is like writing history with
lightning, and my only regret is that
it is all so true.” Griffith would go on to
use this quotation in successfully
defending his film against NAACP charges that it
was racially inflammatory.23
This landmark of American cinema was not only the
best technical production
of its time but also probably the most racist
major movie of all time. Dixon
intended “to revolutionize northern sentiment by a
presentation of history that
would transform every man in my audience
into a good Democrat! . . . And
make no mistake about it—we are doing
just that.”24 Dixon did not overstate by
much. Spurred by Birthof a Nation, William
Simmons of Georgia reestablished
the Ku Klux Klan. The racism seeping down
from the White House encouraged
this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction
predecessor, which President
Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in
one state (South Carolina) and

discouraging nationally for a time. The new
KKK quickly became a national
phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic
Party in many Southern states,
as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon.
Klan spectacles in the 1920s in
towns from Montpelier, Vermont, to West
Frankfort, Illinois, to Medford,
Oregon, were the largest public gatherings in
their history, before or since.
During Wilson’s second term, a waveof
antiblack race riots swept the country.
Whites lynched blacks as far north as
Duluth.25
Americans need to learn from the Wilson
era, that there is a connection
between racist presidential leadership and like-
minded public response. To
accomplish such education, however, textbooks
would have to make plain the
relationship between cause and effect, between
hero and followers. Instead, they
reflexively ascribe noble intentions to the
hero and invoke “the people” to
excuse questionable actions and policies. According
to Triumph of the American
Nation: “As President, Wilson seemed to agree
with most white Americans that
segregation was in the best interests of black as
well as white Americans.”
Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far

and away our most nativist
president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of
those he called “hyphenated
Americans.” “Any man who carries a hyphen
about with him,” said Wilson,
“carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge
into the vitals of this Republic
whenever he gets ready.”26 The American people
responded to Wilson’s lead
with a waveof repressionof white ethnic groups;
again, most textbooks blame
the people, not Wilson. The American Tradition admits
that “President Wilson
set up” the Creel Committee on Public
Information, which saturated the United
States with propaganda linking Germans to
barbarism. But Tradition hastens to
shield Wilson from the ensuing domestic
fallout: “Although President Wilson
had been careful in his war message to state
that most Americans of German
descent were ‘true and loyalcitizens,’ the anti-German
propaganda oftencaused
them suffering.”
Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of
anyone whose opinions differed
from his own. But textbooks take pains to
insulate him from wrongdoing.
“Congress,” not Wilson, is credited with having
passed the Espionage Act of
June 1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year,
probably the most serious
attacks on the civil liberties of Americans
since the short-lived Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798. In fact, Wilson tried to

strengthen the EspionageAct with
a provision giving broad censorship powers
directly to the president. Moreover,
with Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used
his new censorship powers
to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British,
pro-Irish, or that in any other
way might, in his view, have threatened the
war effort. Robert Goldstein served
ten years in prison for producing The Spirit
of ’76, a film about the
Revolutionary War that depicted the British, who were
now our allies,
unfavorably. 27 Textbook authors suggest that
wartime pressures excuse
Wilson’s suppression of civil liberties, but in 1920,
when World War I was long
over,Wilson vetoed a bill that would have
abolished the Espionageand Sedition
acts.28 Textbook authors blame the anticommunist
and anti-labor union witch
hunts of Wilson’s second term on his illness
and on an attorney general run
amok. No evidence supports this view. Indeed,
Attorney General Palmer asked
Wilson in his last days as president to pardon
Eugene V. Debs, who was serving
time for a speech attributing World War I to
economic interests and denouncing
the EspionageAct as undemocratic.29 The president
replied, “Never!” and Debs
languished in prison until Warren Harding
pardoned him.30 The American Way

adopts perhaps the most innovative approach to
absolving Wilson of
wrongdoing: Way simply moves the “red scare” to
the 1920s, after Wilson had
left office!
To oppose America’s participation in World War I,
or even to be pessimistic
about it, was dangerous. The Creel Committee
asked all Americans to “report
the man who . . . cries for peace, or
belittles our efforts to win the war.” Send
their names to the Justice Department in
Washington, it exhorted. After World
War I, the Wilson administration’s attacks on
civil liberties increased, now with
anticommunism as the excuse. Neither before
nor sincethesecampaigns has the
United States come closer to being a
police state.
Because heroification prevents textbooks from
showing Wilson’s
shortcomings, textbooks are hard-pressed to
explain the results of the 1920
election. James Cox, the Democratic candidate
who was Wilson’s would-be
successor,was crushed by the nonentity Warren G.
Harding, who never even
campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history
of American presidential
politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the
major-party votes. The people
were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just wanted a

“return to normalcy.” The
possibility that the electorate knew what it was
doing in rejecting Wilson never
occurs to our authors.31 It occurred to Helen
Keller, however. She called Wilson
“the greatest individual disappointment the world has
ever known!”
It isn’t only high school history courses that
heroify Wilson. Those few
textbooks that do discuss Wilson’s racism and other
shortcomings, such as Land
of Promise, have to battle uphill, for they
struggle against the archetypal
Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history
museums, public television
documentaries, and historical novels.
For twenty-five years now, Michael Frisch has
been conducting an experiment
in social archetypes at the StateUniversity of
New York at Buffalo. He asks his
first-year college students for “the first ten names
that you thinkof” in American
history before the CivilWar. When Frisch found
that his students listed the same
political and military figures year after year, replicating
the privileged positions
afforded them in high school textbooks, he
added the proviso, “excluding
presidents, generals, statesmen, etc.” Frisch
still gets a stable list, but one less
predictable on the basisof history textbooks.
Mostyears, Betsy Ross has led the
list. (Paul Revere usually comes in second.)

What is interesting about this choice is
that Betsy Ross never did anything.
Frisch notes that she played “no role whatsoever
in the actual creation of any
actual first flag.” Ross came to prominence
around 1876, when some of her
descendants, seeking to create a tourist
attraction in Philadelphia, largely
invented the myth of the first flag. With
justice, high school textbooks
universally ignore Betsy Ross; not one high
school textbook lists her in its
index.32 So how and why does her story get
transmitted? Frisch offers a
hilarious explanation: If George Washington is
the Father of Our Country, then
Betsy Ross is our Blessed Virgin Mary! Frisch
describes the pageants reenacted
(or did we only imagine them?) in our elementary
school years: “Washington
[the god] calls on the humble seamstress Betsy
Ross in her tiny home and asks
her if she will make the nation’s flag, to his
design. And Betsy promptly brings
forth—from her lap!—the nation itself, and the
promise of freedom and natural
rights for all mankind.”33
I think Frisch is onto something, but maybe
he is merely on something.
Whether or not one buys his explanation, Betsy
Ross’s ranking among students
surely proves the power of the social

archetype. In the case of Woodrow Wilson,
textbooks actually participate in creating the social
archetype. Wilson is
portrayed as “good,” “idealist,” “for self-
determination, not colonial
intervention,” “foiled by an isolationist Senate,”
and “ahead of his time.” We
name institutions after him, from the
Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald
Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., to
Woodrow Wilson Junior High School
in Decatur, Illinois, where I misspent my
adolescence. If a fifth face were to be
chiseled into Mount Rushmore, many Americans
would propose that it should be
Wilson’s.34 Against such archetypal goodness,
even the unusually forthright
treatment of Wilson’s racism in Land of
Promise cannot but fail to stick in
students’ minds.
Curators of history museums know that their visitors
bring archetypes in with
them. Some curators consciously design
exhibits to confront these archetypes
when they are inaccurate. Textbook authors,
teachers, and moviemakers would
better fulfill their educational mission if
they also taught against inaccurate
archetypes. Surely Woodrow Wilson does not
need their flattering omissions,
after all. His progressive legislative accomplishments
in just his first two years,
including tariff reform, an income tax, the
Federal Reserve Act, and the
Workingmen’s Compensation Act, are almost

unparalleled. Wilson’s speeches
on behalf of self-determination stirred the world,
even if his actions did not live
up to his words.
This statue of George Washington, now in the
Smithsonian Institution,
exemplifies the manner in which textbooks would
portray every American hero:
ten feet tall, blemish-free, with the body of a Greek
god.
Why do textbooks promote wartless stereotypes? The
authors’ omissions and
errors can hardly be accidental. The producers
of the filmstrips, movies, and
othereducational materials on Helen Keller surely
know she was a socialist; no
one can read Keller’s writings without becoming aware
of her political and
social philosophy. At least one textbook author,
Thomas Bailey, senior author of
The American Pageant, clearly knew of the 1918
U.S. invasion of Russia, for he
wrote in a different venue in 1973,
“American troops shot it out with Russian
armed forces on Russian soil in two theatres
from 1918 to 1920.”35 Probably
several other authors knew of it, too.
Wilson’s racism is also well known to
professional historians. Why don’t they let the
public in on thesematters?
Heroification itself supplies a first answer.

Socialism is repugnant to most
Americans. So are racism and colonialism.
Michael Kammen suggests that
authors selectively omit blemishes to make certain
historical figures sympathetic
to as many people as possible.36 The
textbook critic Norma Gabler testified that
textbooks should “present our nation’s patriots in a
way that would honor and
respect them”; in her eyes, admitting Keller’s
socialism and Wilson’s racism
would hardly do that.37 In the early1920s
the American Legion said that authors
of textbooks “are at fault in placing before
immature pupils the blunders, foibles
and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of
our Nation.”38 The Legion
would hardly be able to fault today’s history
textbooks on this count.
Perhaps we can go further. I began with Helen
Keller because omitting the last
sixty-four years of her life exemplifies the sort of
culture-serving distortion that
will be discussed later in this book. We teach
Keller as an ideal, not a real
person, to inspire our young people to
emulate her. Keller becomes a mythic
figure, the “woman who overcame”—but for what?
There is no content! Just
look what she accomplished, we’re exhorted—yet we
haven’t a clue as to what
that really was.

Keller did not want to be frozen in childhood.
She herself stressed that the
meaning of her life lay in what she did once
she overcame her disability.
Certainly she was not the first deaf-blindchildon record
as learning to speak;
that honor goes perhaps to Ragnhild Käta, a
Norwegian girl whose achievement
inspired Keller. Nor was she the first deaf-blind
American to learn to read and
write; that was Laura Bridgman, who taught
the manual alphabet to Anne
Sullivan so Sullivan could teach it to Keller.
In 1929, when she was nearing
fifty,Keller wrote a second volume of
autobiography, Midstream, that described
her social philosophy in somedetail. She wrote
about visiting mill towns, mining
towns, and packing towns where workers were on
strike. She intended that we
learn of these experiences and of the conclusions
to which they led her.
Consistent with our American ideology of
individualism, the truncated version
of Helen Keller’s storysanitizes a hero,leaving
only the virtues of self-help and
hard work. Keller herself, while scarcely
opposing hard work, explicitly rejected
this ideology.
I had once believed that we were all masters of
our fate—that we could
mould our lives into any form we pleased. . . .
I had overcome deafness
and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I

supposed that anyone could
come out victorious if he threw himself
valiantly into life’s struggle. But
as I went more and more about the country I
learned that I had spoken
with assurance on a subject I knew little about.
I forgot that I owed my
success partly to the advantages of my birth
and environment. . . . Now,
however, I learned that the power to rise in
the world is not within the
reach of everyone.39
Textbooks don’t want to touch this idea.
“There are three great taboos in
textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the
biggest houses told me, “sex,
religion, and social class.” While I had been
able to guess the first two, the third
floored me. Sociologists know the importance of
social class, after all.
Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me
that this editor was right,
however. The notion that opportunity might be
unequal in America, that not
everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is
anathema to textbook authors,
and to many teachers as well. Educators would
much rather present Keller as a
bland source of encouragement and inspiration to
our young—if she can do it,
you can do it! So they leave out her adultlife
and make her entire existence over

into a vague “up by the bootstraps” operation.
In the process, they make this
passionate fighter for the poor into somethingshe
never was in life: boring.
Woodrow Wilson gets similarly whitewashed. Although
some history
textbooks disclose more than others about the
seamy underside of Wilson’s
presidency, all eighteen books reviewed share a
common tone: respectful,
patriotic, even adulatory. Ironically, Wilson was widely
despised in the 1920s.
Only after World War II did he come to be
viewed kindly by policy makers and
historians. Our postwar bipartisan foreign policy,
one of far-reaching
interventions sheathed in humanitarian explanations,
was “shaped decisively by
the ideology and the international program developed
by the Wilson
Administration,” according to Gordon Levin
Jr.40 Textbook authors are thus
motivated to underplay or excuse Wilson’s foreign
interventions, many of which
were counterproductive blunders, as well as other
unsatisfactory aspects of his
administration.
A host of other reasons—pressure from the
“ruling class,” pressure from
textbook adoption committees, the wish to avoid
ambiguities, a desire to shield
children from harmor conflict, the perceived need to
control children and avoid
classroom disharmony, pressure to provide answers—

may help explain why
textbooks omit troublesome facts. A certain
etiquette coerces us all into speaking
in respectful tones about the past,
especially when we’re passing on Our
Heritage to our young. 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
don’t want complicated icons. “People do not
like to think. If one thinks, one
must reach conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed
out. “Conclusions are not always
pleasant.”41 Most of us automatically shy away
from conflict, and
understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid
conflict in the classroom. One
reason is habit: we are so accustomed to
blandness that the textbook or teacher
who brings real intellectual controversy into the
classroom can strike us as a
violation of polite rhetoric, of classroom norms.
We are supposed to speak well
of the deceased, after all. Probably we are
supposed to maintain the same
attitude of awe, reverence, and respect when
we read about our national heroes
as when we visit our National Cathedral and
view the final resting places of
Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson, as close
physically in death as they were

distant ideologically in life.
Whatever the causes, the results of heroification
are potentially crippling to
students. Helen Keller is not the only person
this approach treats like a child.
Denying students the humanness of Keller, Wilson,
and others keeps students in
intellectual immaturity. It perpetuates what might
be called a Disney version of
history: The Hall of Presidents at Disneyland
similarly presents our leaders as
heroic statesmen, not imperfect human beings.42
Our children end up without
realistic role models to inspire them. Students
also develop no understanding of
causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate
forays into Nicaragua, for
instance, are surely worth knowing about as
we attempt to understand why that
country embraced a communist government in
the 1980s. Textbooks should
show history as contingent, affected by the power
of ideas and individuals.
Instead, they present history as a “done deal.”
Do textbooks, educational videos, and American
history courses achieve the
results they seek with regard to our heroes? Surely
textbook authors want us to
think well of the historical figures they treat with
such sympathy. And, on a
superficial level at least, we do. Almost
no recent high school graduates have
anything “bad” to say about either Keller or
Wilson. But are these two

considered heroes? I have asked hundreds of
(mostly white) college students on
the first day of class to tell me who their heroes in
American history are. As a
rule, they do not pick Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson,
Christopher Columbus,
Miles Standish or anyone else in Plymouth,
John Smith or anyone else in
Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, or indeed anyone else in
American history whom
the textbooks implore them to choose.43
Our post-Watergate students view all
such “establishment” heroes cynically. They’re bor-r-
ring.
Some students choose “none”—that is, they say
they have no heroes in
American history. Other students display the
characteristically American
sympathy for the underdog by choosing African
Americans: Martin Luther King
Jr., Malcolm X, perhaps Rosa Parks, Harriet
Tubman, or Frederick Douglass. Or
they choose men and women from other countries:
Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or
Nelson Mandela.
In one sense this is a healthy development.
Surely we want students to be
skeptical. Probably we want them to challenge being
told whom to believe in.
But replying “none” is too glib, too nihilistic,
for my taste. It is, however, an

understandable response to heroification. For when
textbook authors leave out
the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character
traits, and the mistaken ideas,
they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to
melodramatic stick figures.
Their innerstruggles disappear and they become goody-
goody, not merely good.
Students poke fun at the goody-goodiestof them all
by telling Helen Keller
jokes. In so doing, schoolchildren are not poking
cruelfun at a disabled person,
they are deflating a pretentious symbol that is
too good to be real. Nonetheless,
our loss of Helen Keller as anything but a
source of jokes is distressing.
Knowing the reality of her quiteamazing life might
empower not only deaf or
blind students, but any schoolgirl, and perhaps boys
as well. For like other
peoples around the world, we Americans need
heroes. Statements such as “If
Martin Luther King were alive, he’d . .
.” suggest one function of historical
figures in our contemporary society. Mostof us
tend to thinkwell of ourselves
when we have acted as we imagine our heroes
might have done. Who our heroes
are and whether they are presented in a way that
makes them lifelike, hence
usable as role models, could have a
significant bearing on our conduct in the
world.

We now turn to our first hero,Christopher Columbus.
“Care should be taken to
vindicate great names from pernicious
erudition,” wrote Washington Irving,
defending heroification.44 Irving’s three-volume
biography of Columbus,
published in 1828, still influences what high school
teachers and textbooks say
about the Great Navigator. Therefore, it
will come as no surprise that
heroification has stolen from us the important
facets of his life, leaving only
melodramatic minutiae.
2.
1493
THE TRUE IMPORTANCEOF CHRISTOPHER
COLUMBUS
Columbus is above all the figure with whom
the
Modern Age—the age by which we may delineate
these
past 500 years—properly begins, and in his
character
as in his exploits we are given an
extraordinary insight
into the patterns that shaped the age at its start
and still
for the most part shape it today.
—KIRKPATRICK SALE1

As a subject for research, the possibility of
African
discovery of America has never been a tempting
one for
American historians. In a sense, we choose
our own
history, or more accurately, we select those
vistas of
history for our examinations which promise us
the
greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to
explore the possibility that our founding father
was a
black man.
—SAMUEL D . MARBLE2
History is the polemics of the victor.
—WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
What we committed in the Indies stands
out among the
most unpardonable offenses ever committed against
God and mankind and this trade [in American Indian
slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel
among
them.
—BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS3

In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus
stole
all he could see.
—TRADITIONAL VERSE, UPDATED
IN FOURTEEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO,
Christopher Columbus
sailed in from the blue. American history books
present Columbus pretty much
without precedent, and they portray him as
America’s first great hero. In so
canonizing him, they reflect our national culture.
Indeed, now that Presidents’
Day has combinedWashington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays,
Columbus is one of
only two people the United States honors by
name in a national holiday. The one
date that every schoolchild remembers is 1492,
and sure enough, every textbook
I surveyed includes it. But most of them leave
out virtually everything that is
important to know about Columbus and the
European exploration of the
Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of
details to tell a better storyand
to humanize Columbus so readers will identify with
him.
Columbus, like Christ, was so pivotal that
historians use him to divide the past
into epochs, making the Americas before 1492

“pre-Columbian.” American
history textbooks recognize Columbus’s importance by
granting him an average
of a thousand words—three pages including a
picture and a map—a lot of space,
considering all the material these books must
cover. Their heroic collective
account goes somethinglike this:
Born in Genoa, Italy, of humble parents,
Christopher Columbus grew up
to become an experienced seafarer. He sailed
the Atlantic as far as
Iceland and West Africa. His adventures convinced
him that the world
must be round. Therefore the fabled riches of
the East—spices, silk, and
gold—could be had by sailing west, superseding
the overland route
through the Middle East, which the Turks had
closed off to commerce.
To get funding for his enterprise, Columbus
beseeched monarch after
monarch in western Europe. After at first being
dismissed by Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got
his chance when Queen
Isabella decided to underwrite a modest
expedition.
Columbus outfitted threepitifully small ships, the
Niña, the Pinta, and

the Santa Maria, and set forth from Spain. The
journey was difficult. The
shipssailed west into the unknown Atlantic for more
than two months.
The crew almost mutinied and threatened to throw
Columbus overboard.
Finally they reached the West Indies on October
12, 1492.
Although Columbus made three more voyages to
America, he never
really knew he had discovered a New
World. He died in obscurity,
unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring
American history
would have been very different, for in a
sense Columbus made it all
possible.
Unfortunately, almost everything in this traditional
account is either wrong or
unverifiable. The authors of history textbooks
have taken us on a trip of their
own, awayfrom the facts of history, into the realm of
myth. They and we have
been duped by an outrageous concoction of
lies, half-truths, truths, and
omissions that is in largepart traceable to the first
half of the nineteenth century.
The textbooks’ first mistake is to underplay
previous explorers. People from
other continents had reached the Americas many
times before 1492. Even if
Columbus had never sailed, other Europeans
would have soon reached the

Americas. Indeed, Europeans may already have been
fishing off Newfoundland
in the 1480s.4 In a sense Columbus’s voyage
was not the first but the last
“discovery” of the Americas. It was epoch-making
because of the way in which
Europe responded. Columbus’s importance is
therefore primarily attributable to
changing conditions in Europe, not to his having
reached a “new” continent.
American history textbooks seem to understand
the need to cover social
changes in Europe in the years leading up to
1492. They pointout that history
passed the Vikings by and devote several pages
to the reasons Europe was ready
this time “to take advantage of the discovery” of
America, as one textbook puts
it. Unfortunately, none of the textbooks
provides substantive analysis of the
major changes that prompted the new response.
Mostof the books I examined begin the
Columbus storywith Marco Polo and
the Crusades. Here is their composite account of what
was happeningin Europe:
“Life in Europe was slow paced.” “Curiosity
about the rest of the world
was at a low point.” Then, “many changes
took place in Europe during
the 500 years before Columbus’s discovery of

the Americas in 1492.”
“People’s horizons gradually widened, and they became
more curious
about the world beyond their own localities.”
“Europe was stirring with
new ideas. Many Europeans were filled
with burning curiosity. They
were living in a period called the
Renaissance.” “The Renaissance
encouraged people to regard themselves as
individuals.” “What started
Europeans thinking new thoughts and dreaming new
dreams? A series of
wars called the Crusades were partly
responsible.” “The Crusaders
acquired a taste for the exotic delights of
Asia.” “The desire for more
trade quickly spread.” “The old trade routes to
Asia had always been
very difficult.”
The accounts resemble each other closely.
Sometimes different textbooks
even use the same phrases. Overall, the level of
scholarship is discouragingly
low, perhaps because their authors are more at
home in American history than
European history. They don’t seemto know that
the Renaissance was syncretic.
That is, Italians combined ideasfrom India(via the Turks),
Greece (preserved by
Muslim scholars), Arabs, and other cultures to
form something new. Authors
also provide no real causal explanations for the
age of European conquest.
Instead, they argue for Europe’s greatness in

transparently psychological terms
—“people grew more curious.” Such arguments
make sociologists smile: we
know that nobody measured the curiosity level in
Spain in 1492 or can with
authority compare it to the curiosity level in, say,
Norway or Iceland in 1005.
Several textbooks claim that Europe was
becoming richer and that the new
wealth led to more trade. Actually, as the
historian Angus Calder has pointed
out, “Europe was smaller and poorer in the
fifteenth century than it had been in
the thirteenth,” owing in part to the bubonic
plague.5
Some teachers still teach what their
predecessors taught me fifty years ago:
that Europe needed spices to disguise the taste of
bad meat, but the bad Turks cut
off the spice trade. Three books in my
original sample—The American
Tradition, Land of Promise, and The American Way—
repeated this falsehood. In
the words of Land of Promise, “Then, after
1453, when Constantinople fell to
the Turks, tradewith the East all but stopped.” But A.
H. Lybyer disproved this
statement in 1915! Turkey had nothing to do
with the development of new routes
to the Indies. On the contrary, the Turks had
every reason to keep the old Eastern

Mediterranean routeopen, sincethey made money
from it.6
In 1957 Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff
published a book that has become a
standard treatise for graduate students of history,
The Modern Researcher, in
which they pointed out how since 1915,
textbooks have perpetuated this
particular error. Probably several of the half-dozen
authors of the offending
textbooks encountered The Modern Researcher in
graduate school. Somehow
the information did not stick. This may be because
blaming Turks fits with the
West’s archetypal conviction that followers of
Islam are likely to behave
irrationally or nastily. In proposing that
Congress declare Columbus Day a
national holiday in 1963, Rep. Roland Libonati
put it this way: “His Christian
faith gave to him a religious incentive to thwart
the piratical activities of the
Turkish marauders preying upon the trading ships
of the Christian world.” Of
course, recent developments, most especially the
terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, reinforce this archetype of a threatening
Islam. College students today
are therefore astonished to learn that Turks
and Moors allowed Jews and
Christians freedom of worship at a timewhen
European Christians tortured or
expelled Jews and Muslims. Not a single textbook
tells that the Portuguese fleet
in 1507 blocked the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to

stop tradealong the old route,
because Portugal controlled the new route, around
Africa.7
Most textbooks note the increase in international
trade and commerce, and
somerelate the rise of nation-states under
monarchies. Otherwise, they do a poor
job of describing the changes in Europe that
led to the Age of Exploration. Some
textbooks even invoke the Protestant Reformation,
although it didn’t begin until
twenty-five years after 1492.
What is going on here? We must pay
attention to what the textbooks are
telling us and what they are not telling us.
The changes in Europe not only
prompted Columbus’s voyages and the probable
contemporaneous trips to
America by Portuguese, Basque, and Bristol
fishermen, but they also paved the
way for Europe’s domination of the world for
the next five hundred years.
Except for the invention of agriculture, this was
probably the most consequential
development in human history. Our history books
ought to discuss seriously
what happened and why, instead of supplying
vague, nearly circular
pronouncements such as this from The American
Tradition: “Interest in practical
matters and the world outside Europe led to

advances in shipbuilding and
navigation.”
Perhaps foremost among the significant factors
the textbooks leave out are
advances in military technology. Around 1400,
European rulers began to
commission ever bigger guns and learned to
mount them on ships. Europe’s
incessant wars gave rise to this arms race, which also
ushered in refinements in
archery, drill, and siege warfare. Eventually
China, the Ottoman Empire, and
othernations in Asia and Africa would fall prey to
European arms. In 1493, the
Americas began to succumb.8
We live with this arms race still. But the West’s
advantage in military
technology over the rest of the world, jealously
maintained from the 1400s on,
remains very much contested. Just as the thirteen
British colonies tried to outlaw
the sale of guns to Native Americans,9 the United
States now tries to outlaw the
sale of nuclear technology to Third World
countries. A key pointof George W.
Bush’s foreign policy has been to deny nuclear
weapons and other“weapons of
mass destruction” to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea
and keep them out of the hands
of terrorists like al-Qaeda. Since money is to
be made in the arms trade,
however, and since all nations need military
allies, the arms trade with non-
Western nations persists. The Western advantage in

military technology is still a
burning issue. Nonetheless, not a single
textbook mentions arms as a cause of
European world domination.
In the years before Columbus’s voyages, Europe
also expanded the use of new
forms of social technology—bureaucracy,
double-entry bookkeeping, and
mechanical printing. Bureaucracy, which today
has negative connotations, was
actually a practical innovation that allowed rulers
and merchants to manage far-
flung enterprises efficiently. So did double-
entry bookkeeping, based on the
decimal system, which Europeans first picked
up from Arab traders. The
printing press and increased literacy allowed news
of Columbus’s findings to
travel across Europe much farther and faster
than news of the Vikings’
expeditions.
A third important development was ideological or
even theological: amassing
wealth and dominating other people came to
be positively valued as the key
means of winning esteem on earthand salvation in
the hereafter. As Columbus
put it, “Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes
treasure; and he who has it does
all he wants in the world, and can even lift
soulsup to Paradise.”10 In 1005 the

Vikings intended only to settle Vineland, their
name for New England and the
maritime provinces of Canada. By 1493 Columbus planned
to plunder Haiti.11
The sources are perfectly clear about Columbus’s
motivation: in 1495, for
instance, Michele de Cuneo wrote about
accompanying Columbus on his 1494
expedition into the interior of Haiti: “After
we had rested for several days in our
settlement, it seemed to the Lord Admiral that it
was time to put into execution
his desire to search for gold, which was
the main reason he had started on so
greata voyage full of so many dangers.”12
Columbus was no greedier than the
Spanish, or later the English and French. But
most textbooks downplay the
pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to
the Americas when they describe
Columbus and later explorers and colonists. Even the
Pilgrims left Europe partly
to make money, but you would never know
it from our textbooks. Their authors
apparently believe that to have America
explored and colonized for economic
gain is somehow undignified.
A fourth factor affecting Europe’s readiness to
embrace a “new” continent
was the particular nature of European
Christianity. Europeans believed in a
transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized
conquest. (Followers of
Islam share this characteristic.) Typically,
after “discovering” an island and

encountering a tribe of American Indians new to
them, the Spaniards would read
aloud (in Spanish) what came to be called
“the Requirement.” Here is one
version:
I implore you to recognize the Church as a
lady and in the name of the
Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his
mandates. If you do
not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I
will enter powerfully
against you all. I will make war everywhere
and every way that I can. I
will subject you to the yoke and obedience to
the Church and to his
majesty. I will take your women and children and
make them slaves. . . .
The deaths and injuries that you will receive from
here on will be your
own fault and not that of his majesty nor of
the gentlemen that
accompany me.13
Having thus satisfied their consciences by
offering the Native Americans a
chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards
then felt free to do whatever they
wanted with the people they had just “discovered.”
A fifth development that caused Europe’s reaction to
Columbus’s reports
about Haitito differ radically from reactions to

earlier expeditions was Europe’s
recent success in taking over and exploiting various
island societies. On Malta,
Sardinia, the Canary Islands, and, later, in
Ireland, Europeans learned that
conquest of this sort was a routeto wealth. As
described below, textbooks now
do tell about a sixth factor: the diseases
Europeans brought with them that aided
their conquest. New and more deadly forms of
smallpox, influenza, and bubonic
plague had arisen in Europe sincethe Vikings
had sailed.14
Why don’t textbooks mention arms as a
facilitator of exploration and
domination? Why do they omit most of the foregoing
factors? If crude factors
such as military power or religiously sanctioned
greed are perceived as reflecting
badly on us, who exactly is “us”? Who are
the textbooks written for (and by)?
Plainly, descendants of the Europeans.
High school students don’t usually think about
the rise of Europe to world
domination. It is rarely presented as a
question. It seems natural, a given, not
somethingthat needs to be explained. Deepdown,
our culture encourages us to
imagine that we are richer and more powerful
because we’re smarter. (It’s
interesting to speculate as to who, exactly, is
this “we.”) Of course, thereare no
studies showing Americans to be more
intelligent than, say, Iraqis. Quite the

contrary: Jared Diamond begins his recent
bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steelby
introducing a friend of his, a New Guinea
tribesman, who Diamond thinks is at
least as smart as Diamond, even though
his culture must be considered
“primitive.” Still, sincetextbooks don’t identify or
encourage us to thinkabout
the real causes, “we’re smarter” festers as a
possibility. Also left festering is the
notion that “it’s natural” for one group to
dominate another.15 While history
brims with examples of national domination, it
also is full of counterexamples.
The way American history textbooks treat Columbus
reinforces the tendency not
to think about the process of domination.
The traditional picture of Columbus
landing on the American shore shows him
dominating immediately, and this is
based on fact: Columbus claimed everything
he saw right off the boat. When
textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking
the land and dominating
the natives were inevitable, if not natural.
This is unfortunate, because
Columbus’s voyages constitute a splendid
teachable moment. As official
missions of a nation-state, they exemplify the new
Europe. Merchants and rulers
collaborated to finance and authorize them. The
second expedition was heavily
armed. Columbus carefully documented the

voyages, including directions,
currents, shoals, and descriptions of the residents as
ripe for subjugation. Thanks
to the printing press, detailed news of Haitiand
later conquests spread swiftly.
Columbus had personal experience of the Atlantic
islands recently taken over by
Portugal and Spain, as well as with the slave
trade in West Africa. Most
important, his purpose from the beginning
was not mere exploration or even
trade, but conquest and exploitation, for which he
used religion as a rationale.16
If textbooks included these facts, they might
induce students to think
intelligently about why the West dominates the world
today.
The textbooks concede that Columbus did not
start from scratch. Every
textbook account of the European exploration of
the Americas begins with
Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal,
between 1415 and 1460. Henry is
portrayed as discovering Madeira and the Azores
and sending out ships to
circumnavigate Africa for the first time.The textbook
authors seemunaware that
ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians sailed at least as
far as Ireland and England,
reached Madeira and the Azores, traded with the
aboriginal inhabitants of the
Canary Islands, and sailed all the way around
Africa before 600 BC. Instead, the
textbooks credit Bartolomeu Dias with being the
first to round the Cape of Good

Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488.
Omitting the accomplishments of the
Phoenicians is ironic, because it was Prince
Henry’s knowledge of their feats
that inspired him to replicate them.17 But this
information clashes with another
social archetype: our culture views modern
technology as a European
development. So the Phoenicians’ feats do not
conform to the textbooks’ overall
story line about how white Europeans taught
the rest of the world how to do
things. None of the textbooks credits the
Muslims with preserving Greek
wisdom, enhancing it with ideasfrom China, India,
and Africa, and then passing
on the resulting knowledge to Europe via Spain
and Italy. Instead, they show
Henry inventing navigation and imply that before
Europe therewas nothing, at
least nothing modern. Several books tell how “the
Portuguese designed a new
kind of sailing ship—the caravel,” in the words of
Boorstin and Kelley.
In fact, Henry’s work was based mostly on
ideas that were known to the
ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians and had been
developed further in Arabia,
North Africa, and China. Even the word
the Portuguese applied to their new
ships, caravel, derived from the Egyptian caravos.18
Cultures do not evolve in a

vacuum; diffusion of ideas is perhaps the most
important cause of cultural
development. Contact with other cultures often
triggers a cultural flowering.
Anthropologists call this syncretism: combining
ideasfrom two or more cultures
to form something new. Children in
elementary school learn that Persian and
Mediterranean civilizations flowered in antiquity owing
to their location on trade
routes. Here with Henry at the dawn of
European world domination, textbooks
have a golden opportunity to apply this same
idea of cultural diffusion to
Europe. They squander it. Not only did Henry have to
develop new instruments,
according to The American Way, but “people didn’t
know how to buildseagoing
ships, either.”19 Students are left without a
clue as to how aborigines ever
reached Australia, Polynesians reached
Madagascar, or prehistoric peoples
reached the Canaries. By “people” Way means, of
course, Europeans—a
textbook example of Eurocentrism.
These books are expressions of what the
anthropologist Stephen Jett calls “the
doctrine of the discovery of America by
Columbus.”20 Table 1 provides a
chronological list of expeditions that may have
reached the Americas before
Columbus, with comments on the quality of the
evidence for each as of 2006.21
While the list is long, it is still probably
incomplete. A map found in Turkey

dated 1513 and said to be based on material
from the library of Alexander the
Great includes coastline details of South
America and Antarctica. Ancient
Roman and Carthaginian coins keep turning up all
over the Americas, causing
somearchaeologists to conclude that Roman seafarers
visited the Americas more
than once.22 Native Americans also crossed the
Atlantic: anthropologists
conjecture that Native Americans voyaged east
millennia ago from Canada to
Scandinavia or Scotland. Two American Indians
shipwrecked in Holland around
60 BC became major curiosities in Europe.23
The evidence for each of these journeys offers
fascinating glimpses into the
societies and cultures that existed on both sides of
the Atlantic and in Asia
before 1492. Theyalso reveal controversies among
those who study the distant
past. If textbooks allowed for controversy, they
could show students which
claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer
ground. As they challenged
students to make their own decisions as to what
probably happened, they would
also be introducing students to the various
methods and forms of evidence—oral
history, written records, cultural similarities,
linguistic changes, human genetics,
pottery, archaeological dating, plantmigrations—that
researchers use to derive

knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately,
textbooks seem locked into a
rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and Mark
H. Lytle, coauthors of the
textbook The United States—A History of the
Republic, have also written After
the Fact, a book for college history majors in
which they emphasize that history
is not a set of facts but a series of
arguments, issues, and controversies.24
Davidson and Lytle’s high school textbook, however,
like its competitors,
presents history as answers, not questions.
TABLE 1. EXPLORERS OF AMERICA
New evidence that emerges, as archaeologists,
historians, and biologists
compare American cultures and life forms with
cultures and life forms in Africa,
Europe, and Asia, may confirm or disprove these
arrivals. Keeping up with such
evidence is a lot of work. To tell about
earlier explorers, textbook authors would
have to familiarize themselves with sources such
as those cited in the three
preceding notes. It’s easier just to retell the
old familiar Columbus story.
Mostof the textbooks I studied at least mention
the expeditions of the Norse.

These daring sailors reached America in a
series of voyages across the North
Atlantic, establishing communities on the Faeroe
Islands, Iceland, and
Greenland. The Norse colony on Greenland lasted
five hundred years (982-c.
1500), as long as the European settlement of
the Americas until now. From
Greenland a series of expeditions, some
planned, some accidental, reached
various parts of North America, including Baffin
Land, Labrador,
Newfoundland, and possibly New England.
Mosttextbooks that mention the Viking expeditions
minimize them. Land of
Promise writes, “They merely touched the shore
briefly, and sailed away.”
Perhaps the authors of Promise did not know
that, around 1005, Thorfinn and
Gudrid Karlsefni led a partyof 65 or 165 or
265 homesteaders (the old Norse
sagas vary), with livestock and supplies, to settle
Vineland. They lasted two
years; Gudrid gave birth to a son. Then conflict
with Native Americans caused
them to give up. This trip was no isolated incident:
Norse were still exporting
wood from Labrador to Greenland 350 years
later. Some archaeologists and
historians believe that the Norse got as far down
the coast as North Carolina.
The Norse discoveries remained known in

western Europe for centuries and
were never forgotten in Scandinavia. Columbus surely
learned of Greenlandand
probably also of North America if he visited
Iceland in 1477 as he claimed to
have done.25
It may be fair to say that the Vikings’ voyages
had little lasting effect on the
fate of the world. Should textbooks therefore
leave them out? Is impact on the
present the sole reason for including an event or
fact? It cannot be, of course, or
our history books would shrink to twenty-page
pamphlets. We include the Norse
voyages, not for their ostensible geopolitical significance,
but because including
them gives a more complete picture of the past.
Moreover, if textbooks would
only intelligently compare the Norse voyages to
Columbus’s second voyage,
they would help students understand the changes
that took place in Europe
between 1000 and 1493. As we shall see,
Columbus’s second voyage was ten
times larger than the Norse attempts at
settlement. The new European ability to
mobilize was in part responsible for Columbus’s
voyages taking on their
awesome significance.
Although seafarers from Africa and Asia may
also have made it to the
Americas, they never make it into history
textbooks. The best known are the
voyages of the Phoenicians, probably launched from

Morocco or West Africa
but ultimately deriving from Egypt, that are
said to have reached the Atlantic
coast of Mexico in about 750 B.C. Organic
material associated with colossal
heads of basalt that stand along the eastern
coastof Mexico has been dated to at
least 750 B.C. The stone heads may be
realistic portraits of West Africans,
perhaps part of the Phoenician group, according
to anthropologist Ivan Van
Sertima, who has done much to bring these
images into popular
consciousness.26 The first non-native person to
describe these heads, Jose
Melgar, concluded in 1862, “[T]here had doubtless
been blacks in this region.”
Perhaps around the same time, natives
elsewhere in Mexico created small
ceramic and stone sculptures of what seemto be
Caucasoidand Negroid faces.
As Alexandervon Wuthenau, who collected many
such terra-cotta statues, put it,
“It is contradictory to elementary logic and to
all artistic experience that an
Indian could depict in a masterly way the
head of a Negro or of a white person
without missing a single racial characteristic,
unless he had seen such a
person.”27 Some scholars have dismissed
the Caucasoid images as “stylized”
Indian heads and question their antiquity, sincemost
were purchased, rather than

found by archaeologists who could date them
from their surroundings. Mayan
specialists claim that the “Negroid faces” may
represent jaguars or human
babies. Some pointout that natives found near
the sites today have broad noses
and thicklips, but of course, if Africans had come
to the area, in antiquity or as
part of the slavetradeafter 1492, that would hardly
be surprising.28 Van Sertima
and others have adduced additional bits of
evidence, including similarities in
looms and other cultural elements, and information
in Arab historical sources
about extensive ocean navigation by Africans
and Phoenicians in the eighth
century BC.29
What is the importance today of these
possible African and Phoenician
predecessors of Columbus? Like the Vikings, they
provide a fascinating story,
one that can hold high school students on the edge of
their seats. We might also
realize another kind of importance by
contemplating the particular meaning of
Columbus Day. Italian Americans infer something
positive about their “national
character”from the exploits of their ethnic ancestors.
The American sociologist
George Homans once quipped, explaining why
he had written on his own
ancestors in East Anglia, rather than on some
larger group elsewhere: “They
may be humans, but not Homans!” Similarly,
Scandinavians and Scandinavian

Americans have always believed the Norse sagas
about the Vikings, even when
most historians did not, and finally confirmed
them by conducting
archaeological research in Newfoundland.
If Columbus is especially relevant to western
Europeans and the Vikings to
Scandinavians, what is the meaning to African
Americans of the pre-Columbian
voyagers from Africa? After visiting the von
Wuthenau museum in Mexico City,
the Afro-Carib scholar Tiho Narva wrote,
“With his unique collection
surrounding me, I had an eerie feeling that veils
obscuring the past had been torn
asunder. . . . Somehow, upon leaving the
museum I suddenly felt that I could
walk taller for the rest of my days.”30 Van
Sertima’s book has been reprinted
more than twenty times, and he is lionized by
black undergraduates across
America. Rap music groups chant “but we
already had been there” in verses
about Columbus.31 Obviously, African Americans
want to see positive images
of “themselves” in American history. So do we
all.
Rockheads nine feet tall face the ocean in
southeastern Mexico. Archaeologists
call them Olmec heads after their name
for the Indians who carved them.

According to an archaeologist who helped
uncover them, the faces are
“amazingly Negroid.” Today some archaeologists
believe that the mouth lines
resemble jaguarlike expressions Mayan children
still make. Others think the
statues are of “fat babies” or Indian kings or
resemble sculptures in Southeast
Asia.
As with the Norse, including the Phoenicians and
Africans gives a more
complete and complex picture of the past,
showing that navigation and
exploration did not begin with Europe in the
1400s. Like the Norse, the
Phoenicians and Africans illustrate human possibility,
in this case black
possibility, or, more accurately, the prowess of a
multiracial society.32 Unlike
the Norse, the Africans and Phoenicians seemto
have made a permanent impact
on the Americas. The huge stone statues in
Mexico imply as much. It took
enormous effort to quarry these basalt blocks,
each weighing ten to forty tons,
move them from quarries seventy-five miles
away, and sculpt them into heads
six to ten feet tall. Wherever they were from, the
human models for theseheads
were important people, people to be worshiped
or obeyed or at least
remembered. 33 However, most archaeologists think
they were Mayan, so

including the Afro-Phoenicians must be done as a
mere possibility—an ongoing
controversy.
Of all the textbooks I surveyed, only two even
mention the possibility of
African or Phoenician exploration. The American
Adventure simply poses two
questions: “What similarities are there between
the great monuments of the
Maya and those of ancient Egypt?” and “Might
windblown sailors from Asia,
Europe, Africa, or the South Pacific have
mingled with the earlier inhabitants of
the New World?” The textbook supplies no
relevant information and even
claims “You should be able to deal with these
questions without doing research.”
Nonsense. Most classrooms will simply ignore
the questions.34 The United
States—A History of the Republic mentions pre-
Columbian expeditions only to
assure us that we need not concern ourselves
with them: “None of these
Europeans, Africans, or Asians left lasting traces
of their presence in the
Americas, nor did they develop any lasting
relationships with the first
Americans.”
American history textbooks promote the belief
that most important
developments in world history are traceable to
Europe. To grant too much
human potential to pre-Columbian Africans might

jar European American
sensibilities. As Samuel Marble put it, “The
possibility of African discovery of
America has never been a tempting one for
American historians.”35 Teachers
and curricula that present African history and African
Americans in a positive
light are oftencondemned for being Afrocentric.
White historians insist that the
case for the Afro-Phoenicians has not been proven;
we must not distort history to
improve black children’s self-image, they say. They
are right that the case hasn’t
been proven, but textbooks should include the Afro-
Phoenicians as a possibility,
a controversy.
Standard history textbooks and courses discriminate
against students who
have been educated by rap songs or by Van
Sertima. Imagine an eleventh-grade
classroom in American history in earlyfall. The text is
Life and Liberty; students
are reading Chapter 2, “Exploration and
Colonization.” What happens when an
African American girl shoots up her hand to
challenge the statement “Not until
1497 to 1499 did the Portuguese explorer Vasco da
Gama sail around Africa”?
From rap songs the girl has learned that
Phoenicians beat da Gama by more than
two thousand years. Does the teacher take time to
research the question and find
that the student is right, the textbook wrong?
More likely, s/he puts down the

student’s knowledge: “Rap songs aren’t appropriate
in a history class!” Or s/he
humors the child: “Yes, but that was long ago
and didn’t lead to anything. Vasco
da Gama’s discovery is the important one.”
These responses allow the class to
move “forward” to the next topic. They also contain
sometruth: the Phoenician
circumnavigation didn’t lead to any new trade
routes or national alliances,
because the Phoenicians were already trading with
India through the Red Sea
and the Persian Gulf. Textbooks don’t name
Vasco da Gama because something
came from his “discovery,” however. They name
him because he was white.
Two pages later, Life and Liberty tells us that
Hernando de Soto “discovered
[the] Mississippi River.” Of course, it had been
discovered and named
Mississippi by ancestors of the American Indians
who were soon to chase de
Soto down it. Textbooks portray de Soto in
armor, not showing that by the time
he reached the river, his men and women had
lost almost all their clothing in a
fire set by Natives in Alabama and were
wearing replacements woven from
reeds. De Soto’s “discovery” had no larger
significance and led to no trade or
white settlement.36 His was merely the first white
face to gaze upon the
Mississippi. That’s why most American history
textbooks include him. From

Erik the Red to Peary at the North Pole to
the first man on the moon, we
celebrate most discoverers because they were first and
because they were white,
not because of events that flowed or did not
flow from their accomplishments.
My hypothetical teacher subtly changed the ground
rules for da Gama, but they
changed right back for de Soto. In this way
students learnthat black feats are not
considered important while white ones are.37
Comparing two other possible pre-Columbian
expeditions, from the west
coasts of Africa and Ireland, provides an
interesting vantage pointfrom which to
consider this debate. When Columbus reached Haiti,
he found the Arawaks in
possession of somespear points made of
“guanine.” The Arawaks said they got
them from black traders who had come from the
south and east. Guanine proved
to be an alloyof gold,silver, and copper,
identical to the gold alloypreferred by
West Africans, who also called it “guanine.”
Islamic historians have recorded
stories of voyages west from Mali in West Africa
around 1311, during the reign
of Mansa Bakari II. From time to time in
the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries,
shipwrecked African vessels—remnants, perhaps, of
transatlantic trade—washed
up on Cape Verde. From contacts in West
Africa, the Portuguese heard that
African traders were visiting Brazil in the mid-
1400s; this knowledge may have

influenced Portugal to insist on moving the
pope’s “line of demarcation” farther
west in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).38 Traces
of diseases common in Africa
have been detected in pre-Columbian corpses in
Brazil. Columbus’s son
Ferdinand, who accompanied the admiral on his
third voyage, reports that people
they met or heard about in eastern Honduras
“are almost black in color, ugly in
aspect,” probably Africans. The first Europeans to
reach Panama—Balboa and
company—reported seeing black slaves in an
Indian town. The Indians said they
had captured them from a nearby black
community. Oral history from Afro-
Mexicans contains tales of pre-Columbian
crossings from West Africa. In all,
then, data from diverse sources suggest the
possibility of pre-Columbian
voyages from West Africa to America.39
In contrast, the evidence for an Irish trip to
America comes from only one side
of the Atlantic. Irish legends written in the
ninth or tenth century tell of “an
abbot and seventeen monks who journeyed to the
‘promised land of the saints’
during a seven-year sojourn in a leather
boat” centuries earlier. The stories
include details that are literally fabulous: each
Easter the priest and his crew
supposedly conducted Mass on the back of a

whale. They visited a “pillar of
crystal” (perhaps an iceberg) and an “island of
fire.” We cannot simply dismiss
theselegends, however. When the Norse first reached
Iceland, Irish monks were
living on the island, whose volcanoes could
have provided the “island of fire.”40
How do American history textbooks treat these
two sets of legendary
voyagers? Five of the twelve textbooks in my
original sample admitted the
possibility of an Irish expedition. Challenge of
Freedom gave the fullest account:
Some people believe that . . . Irish
missionaries may have sailed to the
Americas hundreds of years before the first
voyages of Columbus.
According to Irish legends, Irish monks
sailed the Atlantic Ocean in
order to bring Christianity to the people
they met. One Irish legend in
particular tells about a land southwest of the
Azores. This land was
supposedly discovered by St. Brendan, an Irish
missionary, about 500
AD.
Not one textbook—old or new—mentionsthe West
Africans, however.
While leaving out Columbus’s predecessors,
American history books continue
to make mistakes when they get to the last
“discoverer.” They present cut-and-

dried answers, mostly glorifying Columbus, always
avoiding uncertainty or
controversy. Often their errors seemto be copied
from othertextbooks. Let me
repeat the collective Columbus storythey tell, this time
italicizing everything in
it that we have solid reason to believe is true.
Born in Genoa, of humble parents, Christopher
Columbus grew up to
become an experienced seafarer, venturing as far as
Iceland and West
Africa. His adventures convinced him that the world
must be round and
that the fabled riches of the East—spices and
gold—could be had by
sailing west, superseding the overland routes,
which the Turks had closed
off to commerce. To get funding for his
enterprise, he beseeched
monarch after monarch in Western Europe. After at
first being dismissed
by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus
finally got his chance
when Isabella decided to underwrite a modest
expedition. Columbus
outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Niña,
the Pinta, and the Santa
Maria, and set forth from Spain. After an arduous
journey of more than
two months, during which his mutinous crew
almost threw him
overboard, Columbus discovered the West Indies

on October 12, 1492.
Unfortunately, although he made three more
voyages to America, he
never knew he had discovered a New
World. Columbus died in
obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his
daring American
history would have been very different, for in
a sense he made it all
possible.
As you can see, textbooks get the date right, and
the names of the ships. Most
of the rest that they tell us is untrustworthy. Many
aspects of Columbus’s life
remain a mystery. He claimed to be from Genoa,
Italy, and thereis evidence that
he was. There is also evidence that he wasn’t:
Columbus didn’t seemto be able
to write in Italian, even when writing to
people in Genoa. Some historians
believe he was Jewish, a converso or convert to
Christianity, probably from
Spain. (Spain was pressuring its Jews to convert
or leave the country.) He may
have been a Genoese Jew. Still other historians
claim he was from Corsica,
Portugal, or elsewhere.41
What about Columbus’s class background? One
textbook tells us he was poor,
“the son of a poor Genoese weaver,” while another
assures us he was rich, “the
son of a prosperous wool-weaver.” Each book is
certain, but people who have
spent years studying Columbus say we cannot be

sure.
We do not even know for certain where
Columbus thought he was going.
Evidence suggests he was seeking Japan, India,
and Indonesia; other evidence
indicates he was trying to reach “new” lands
to the west. Historians have
asserted each viewpoint for centuries.
Because “India was known for its great
wealth,” Las Casas points out, it was in
Columbus’s interest “to induce the
monarchs,always doubtful about his enterprise, to
believe him when he said he
was setting out in search of a western route
to India.”42 After reviewing the
evidence, Columbus’s recent biographer Kirkpatrick
Sale concluded “we will
likely never know for sure.” Sale noted
that such a conclusion is “not very
satisfactory for those who demand certainty in
their historical tales.”43
Predictably, all our textbooks are of this type:all
“know” he was seeking Japan
and the East Indies. Thus authors keep their readers
from realizing that historians
do not know all the answers, hence history is
not just a process of memorizing
them.
The extent to which textbooks sometimes
disagree, particularly when each
seems so certain of what it declares, can be

pretty scary. What was the weather
like during Columbus’s 1492 trip? According to
Land of Promise, his shipswere
“storm-battered”; but American Adventures says they
enjoyed “peaceful seas.”
How long was the voyage? “After more than two months
at sea,” according to
The Challenge of Freedom, the crews saw land;
but The American Adventure
says the voyage lasted “nearly a month.” What
were the Americas like when
Columbus arrived? “Thickly peopled” in one book,
quoting Columbus; “thinly
spread,” according to another.
To make a better myth, American culture
has perpetuated the idea that
Columbus was boldly forging ahead while
everyone else, even his own crew,
imagined the world was flat. The 1991 edition of
The American Pageant is the
only textbook that still repeated this hoax. “The
superstitious sailors . . . grew
increasingly mutinous,” according to Pageant,
because they were “fearful of
sailing over the edge of the world.” In truth,
few people on both sides of the
Atlantic believed in 1492 that the world was
flat. MostEuropeans and Native
Americans knew the world to be round. It
looks round. It casts a circular shadow
on the moon. Sailors see its roundness when
shipsdisappear over the horizon,
hull first, then sails.
Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing

the flat-earth fablein 1828. In
his bestselling biography of Columbus, Irving
described Columbus’s supposed
defense of his round-earth theory before the
flat-earth savants at Salamanca
University. Irving himself surely knew the
story to be fiction.44 He probably
thought it added a nice dramatic flourish and
would do no harm. But it does. It
invites us to believe that the “primitives” of
the world, admittedly including pre-
Columbian Europeans, had only a crude
understanding of the planet they lived
on, until aided by a forward-thinking
European. It also turns Columbus into a
man of science who corrected our faulty geography.
Most textbooks include a portrait of Columbus.
These head-and-shoulder
pictures have no value whatsoever as historical
documents, because not one of
the countless images we have of the man was painted
in his lifetime. To make
the pointthat theseimages are inauthentic, the Library
of Congress sells this T-
shirt featuring six different Columbus faces.
Intense debunking of the flat-earth legend,
especially in 1992, the Columbus
quincentenary, has made an impact. By 1994,
even Pageant had removed its
flat-earth language. Now the “superstitious sailors .
. . grew increasingly

mutinous” merely because they were “fearful of
sailing into the oceanic
unknown.” Unfortunately, teachers who themselves
learned the flat-earth story
will never infer from that modestly revised
sentence that it was wrong.45
Boorstin and Kelley confront the legend more directly
than othertextbooks but
again with wholly ineffectual words: “In
Columbus’s timeall educated people
and most sailors believed that the earthwas a
sphere.” To be sure, the sentence
quietly notes that not everyone believed in flat-
earth geography. But it still
implies that the round-earth idea was unusual. Not
only students but also
teachers read textbooks like Boorstin and Kelley without
challenging their belief
that Columbus proved the world round. Thus many
teachers still implicitly relay
to their students the flat-earth legend.
American culture perpetuates the image of
Columbus boldly forging ahead while
everyone else imagined the world was flat. A
character in the movie Star Trek V,
for instance, repeats the Washington Irving lie:
“The people of your world once
believed the earth to be flat; Columbus proved it
was round.” Every October,
Madison Avenue makes use of the flat-earth theme.
This ad seeks clients for

daring and courageous stockbrokers! With images
like these in our culture,
history textbooks need to disabuse students of the
flat-earth myth.
Even the death of Columbus has been changed to
make a better story. Having
Columbus come to a tragic end—sick, poor,
and ignorant of his great
accomplishment—adds melodramatic interest.
“Columbus’s discoveries were
not immediately appreciated by the Spanish
government,” according to The
American Adventure. “He died in neglect in 1506.”
“He finally reaped only
misfortune and disgrace,” conclude Boorstin and Kelley.
They add that he “died
still believing that he had sailed to the coast of
Asia.” In fact, Spain
“immediately appreciated” Columbus’s “discoveries,”
which is why they
immediately outfitted him for a much larger
second voyage. In 1499 Columbus
“reaped” a major gold strike on Haiti. He
and his successors then forced
hundreds of thousands of Natives to mine the
gold for them. Money from the
Americas continued to flow in to Columbus in Spain,
perhaps not what he felt he
deserved, but enough to keep all wolves far from
his door. Columbus died well-
off and left his heirs well-endowed, even with the title,
“Admiral of the Ocean
Sea,” now carried by his eighteenth-generation

descendant. Moreover,
Columbus’s own journal shows clearly that he
knew he had reached a “new”
continent.46
Some of the details the textbook authors pile on
are harmless, I suppose, such
as the fabrications about Isabella’s sending a
messenger galloping after
Columbus and pawning her jewels to pay for the
expedition.47 All of the
enhancements humanize Columbus, however, and
magnify his greatness, to
induce readers to identify with him. Here is a
passage from Land of Promise:
It is October, 1492. Three small, storm-
battered ships are lost at sea,
sailing into an unknown ocean. A frightenedcrew
has been threatening to
throw their stubborn captain overboard, turn the
shipsaround, and make
for the safety of familiar shores.
Then a miracle: The sailors see some green
branches floating on the
water. Land birds fly overhead. From
high in the ship’s rigging the
lookout cries, “Land, land ahead!” Fears turn to
joy. Soon the grateful
captain wades ashore and gives thanks to
God.
As Columbus cruised the coastof Venezuela on

his third voyage, he passed the
Orinoco River. “I have come to believe
that this is a mighty continent, which
was hitherto unknown,” he wrote. “I am greatly
supported in this view by reason
of this greatriver and by this sea which is fresh.”
Columbus knew that no mere
island could sustain such a large flow
of water. When he returned home, he
added a continent to the islands in his coat of
arms. Its presence at the bottom of
the lower left quadrant visually rebukes the
authors of American history
textbooks.
Now, really. Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria
were not “storm-battered.” To make a
better myth, the textbook authors want the voyage
to seemharder than it was, so
they invent bad weather. Columbus’s own journal
reveals that the three ships
enjoyed lovely sailing. Seas were so calm that
for days at a time sailors were
able to converse from one ship to another.
Indeed, the only time they
experienced even moderately high seas was on
the last day, when they knew
they were near land.
To make a better myth, to make the
trip seemlonger than it was, most of the
textbooks overlook Columbus’s stopover in the Canary
Islands. The voyage
across the unknown Atlantic took one month, not
two.

To make a better myth, the textbooks
describe Columbus’s shipsas tiny and
inefficient, when actually “these threevessels
were fully suited to his purpose,”
as naval author Pietro Barozzi has pointed
out.48
To make a better myth, several textbooks
exaggerate the crew’s complaints
into a near-mutiny. The primary sources differ.
Some claim the sailors
threatened to go back home if they didn’t
reach land soon. Other sources claim
that Columbus lost heartand that the captains of the
othertwo shipspersuaded
him to keep on. Still othersources suggest that the
threeleaders met and agreed
to continue on for a few more days and
then reassess the situation. After
studying the matter, Columbus’s biographer Samuel
Eliot Morison reduced the
complaints to mere griping: “They were all getting
on each other’s nerves, as
happens even nowadays.” 49 So much for the
crew’s threat to throw Columbus
overboard.
Such exaggeration is not entirely harmless. Another
archetype lurksbelow the
surface: that those who direct social enterprises
are more intelligent than those
nearer the bottom. Bill Bigelow, a high school
history teacher, has pointed out
that “the sailors are stupid, superstitious, cowardly,

and sometimes scheming.
Columbus, on the other hand, is brave,
wise, and godly.” These portrayals
amount to an “anti-working class pro-boss
polemic.”50 Indeed, even in 2006,
Pageant still characterizes the sailors as “a motley
crew,” even though they now
grasp that the world is round.
False entries in the log of Santa Maria
are interpreted to form another piece of
the myth. “Columbus was a true leader,” says A
History of the United States.
“He altered the records of distances they had
covered so the crew would not
think they had gone too far from home.”
Salvador de Madariaga has
persuasively argued that to believe this, we would
have to thinkthe others on the
voyage were fools. Columbus had “no special
method, available only to him,
whereby distances sailed could be more accurately
reckoned than by the other
pilots and masters.” Indeed, Columbus was less
experienced as a navigator than
the Pinzon brothers, who captained Niña and Pinta.51
During the return voyage,
Columbus confided in his journal the real reason
for the false log entries: he
wanted to keep the routeto the Indies secret.52
To make a better myth, our textbooks find
space for many otherhumanizing
particulars. They have the lookout cry “Tierra!” or
“Land!” Most of them tell us
that Columbus’s first act after going ashore was

“thanking God for leading them
safely across the sea”—even though the
surviving summary of Columbus’s own
journal states only that “before them all, he took
possession of the island, as in
fact he did, for the King and Queen, his Sovereigns.”
53 Many of the textbooks
tell of Columbus’s three later voyages to
the Americas, but most do not find
space to tell us how Columbus treated the lands
and the people he “discovered.”
Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena
that revolutionized race
relations and transformed the modern world: the
taking of land, wealth, and
laborfrom indigenous people in the Western
Hemisphere, leading to their near
extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade,
which created a racial
underclass.
Columbus’s initial impression of the Arawaks,
who inhabited most of the
islands in the Caribbean, was quitefavorable. He
wrote in his journal on October
13, 1492: “At daybreak greatmultitudes of men
cameto the shore, all young and
of fine shapes, and very handsome. Their hair
was not curlybut loose and coarse
like horse-hair. All have foreheads much broader
than any people I had hitherto
seen.Their eyes are largeand very beautiful. They are

not black, but the colorof
the inhabitants of the Canaries.” (This
reference to the Canaries was ominous,
for Spain was then in the process of
exterminating the aboriginal people of those
islands.) Columbus went on to describe the
Arawaks’ canoes, “some large
enough to contain 40 or 45 men.” Finally, he
got down to business: “I was very
attentive to them, and strove to learnif they
had any gold.Seeing someof them
with little bits of metal hanging at their noses, I
gathered from them by signsthat
by going southwardor steering round the island
in that direction, therewould be
found a king who possessed great cups
full of gold.” At dawn the next day,
Columbus sailed to the other side of the island,
probably one of the Bahamas,
and saw two or three villages. He ended his
description of them with these
menacing words: “I could conquer the whole of
them with fifty men and govern
them as I pleased.” 54
On his first voyage, Columbus kidnappedsometen to
twenty-five American
Indians and took them back with him to Spain.55
Only seven or eight arrived
alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets,
and other exotica, they caused
quitea stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella
provided Columbus with seventeen
ships, twelve hundred to fifteen hundred men,
cannons, crossbows, guns,
cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage.

One way to visualize what happened next is with
the help of the famous
science fiction story War of the Worlds. H.
G. Wells intended his tale of
earthlings’ encounter with technologically
advanced aliens as an allegory. His
frightenedBritish commoners (New Jerseyites in
Orson Welles’s famed radio
adaptation) were analogous to the “primitive”
peoples of the Canaries or
America, and his terrifying aliens represented the
technologically advanced
Europeans. As we identify with the helpless
earthlings, Wells wanted us also to
sympathize with the natives on Haitiin 1493, or
on Australia in 1788, or in the
upper Amazon jungle today.56
When Columbus and his men returned to Haitiin
1493, they demanded food,
gold, spun cotton—whatever the Natives had that
they wanted, including sex
with their women. To ensure cooperation,
Columbus used punishment by
example. When an Indian committed even a
minor offense, the Spanish cut off
his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was
sent back to his village as living
evidence of the brutality the Spaniards were capable of.
After a while, the Natives had had enough. At
first their resistance was mostly

passive. They refused to plant food for
the Spanish to take. They abandoned
towns near the Spanish settlements. Finally, the
Arawaks fought back. Their
sticks and stones were no more effective against
the armed and clothed Spanish,
however, than the earthlings’ rifles against the
aliens’ death rays in War of the
Worlds.
The attempts at resistance gave Columbus an excuse to
make war. On March
24, 1495, he set out to conquer the Arawaks.
Bartolomé de Las Casas described
the forceColumbus assembledto put down the
rebellion.
Since the Admiral perceived that dailythe people of
the land were taking
up arms, ridiculous weapons in reality . . .
he hastened to proceed to the
country and disperse and subdue, by force of
arms, the people of the
entire island . . . For this he chose
200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with
many crossbowsand small cannon, lances, and
swords, and a still more
terrible weapon against the Indians, in addition to
the horses: this was 20
hunting dogs, who were turned loose and
immediately tore the Indians
apart.57
Naturally, the Spanish won. According to
Kirkpatrick Sale, who quotes
Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father:

“The soldiers mowed down
dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to
rip open limbs and bellies,
chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer
them on sword and pike, and
‘with God’s aid soon gained a complete
victory, killing many Indians and
capturing others who were also killed.’ ”58
Having as yet found no fields of gold,
Columbus had to return somekind of
dividend to Spain. In 1495 the Spanish on Haiti
initiated a greatslaveraid. They
rounded up fifteen hundred Arawaks, then selected
the five hundred best
specimens (of whom two hundred would die en
route to Spain). Another five
hundred were chosen as slaves for the Spaniards
staying on the island. The rest
were released. A Spanish eyewitness described the
event: “Among them were
many women who had infants at the breast.
They, in order the better to escape
us, since they were afraid we would turn to catch
them again, left their infants
anywhere on the ground and started to flee like
desperate people; and somefled
so far that they were removed from our settlementof
Isabela seven or eightdays
beyond mountainsand across huge rivers; wherefore
from now on scarcely any
will be had.” 59 Columbus was excited. “In the
name of the Holy Trinity, we can

send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which
could be sold,” he wrote to
Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496. “In Castile,
Portugal, Aragon . . . and the Canary
Islands they need many slaves, and I do not
thinkthey get enough from Guinea.”
He viewed the Indian death rate optimistically:
“Although they die now, they
will not always die. The Negroes and Canary
Islanders died at first.” 60
In the words of Hans Koning, “There now
began a reign of terror in
Hispaniola.” Spaniards hunted American Indians
for sport and murdered them
for dog food. Columbus, upset because he
could not locate the gold he was
certain was on the island, set up a tribute
system. Ferdinand Columbus described
how it worked:
[The Indians] all promised to pay tribute to the
Catholic Sovereigns
every threemonths, as follows: In the Cibao,
where the gold mines were,
every person of 14 years of age or upward
was to pay a largehawk’s bell
of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds
of cotton. Whenever
an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive
a brassor copper token
which he must wear about his neck as
proof that he had made his
payment. Any Indian found without such a token
was to be punished.61

With a fresh token, a Native was safe for
threemonths, much of which time
would be devoted to collecting more gold.Columbus’s
son neglected to mention
how the Spanish punished those whose tokens
had expired: they cut off their
hands.62
All of these gruesome facts are available in
primary-source material—letters
by Columbus and by othermembers of his
expeditions—and in the work of Las
Casas, the first greathistorian of the Americas, who
relied on primary materials
and helped preserve them. I have quoted a
few primary sources in this chapter.
Mosttextbooks make no use of primary sources. A
few incorporate brief extracts
that have been carefully selected or edited to reveal
nothing unseemly about the
Great Navigator. American Journey, for example,
quotes the passage I include
above, about the Arawaks being “handsome,”
but stops at that point. Nothing
about how Columbus could conquer them “with
fifty men and govern them as I
pleased.”63
The tribute system eventually broke down
because what it demanded was
impossible. To replace it, Columbus installed the
encomienda system, in which
he granted or “commended” entire Indian
villages to individual colonists or

groups of colonists. Since it was not called
slavery, this forced-labor system
escaped the moral censure that slavery received.
Following Columbus’s
example, Spain made the encomienda system
official policy on Haiti in 1502;
otherconquistadors subsequently introduced it to
Mexico, Peru, and Florida.64
The tribute and encomienda systems caused
incredible depopulation. On Haiti
the colonists made the Arawaks mine gold for them,
raise Spanish food, and
even carry them everywhere they went. They
couldn’t stand it. Pedro de
Cordoba wrote in a letter to King
Ferdinand in 1517, “As a result of the
sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians
choose and have chosen
suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed
mass suicide. The women,
exhausted by labor, have shunned conception
and childbirth. . . . Many, when
pregnant, have taken somethingto abortand have
aborted. Others after delivery
have killed their children with their own hands, so as
not to leave them in such
oppressive slavery.”65
Beyond acts of individual cruelty, the Spanish
disrupted the Native ecosystem
and culture. Forcing Indians to work in mines
rather than in their gardens led to
widespread malnutrition. The intrusion of rabbits
and livestock caused further
ecologicaldisaster. Diseases new to the Americans

played a huge role, including
swine flu, probably carried by pigs that Columbus
brought to Haition his second
voyage in 1493.66 Some of the Arawaks tried
fleeing to Cuba, but the Spanish
soon followed them there. Estimates of Haiti’s pre-
Columbian population range
as high as eightmillion people. When Christopher
Columbus returned to Spain,
he left his brother Bartholomew in charge of
the island. Bartholomew took a
census of Indian adults in 1496 and cameup
with 1.1 million. The Spanish did
not count children under fourteen and could
not count Arawaks who had escaped
in the mountains. Kirkpatrick Sale estimates that a
more accurate total would
probably be in the neighborhood of three
million. “By 1516,” according to
Benjamin Keen, “thanks to the sinister Indian
slave trade and labor policies
initiated by Columbus, only some 12,000
remained.” Las Casas tells us that
fewer than two hundred full-blooded Haitian
Indians were alive in 1542. By
1555, they were all gone.67
Thus nasty details like cutting off hands have
somewhat greater historical
importance than nice touches like “Tierra!” Columbus
not only sent the first
slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more
slaves—about five thousand—

than any other individual. To her credit, Queen
Isabella opposed outright
enslavement and returned some American Indians to
the Caribbean. But other
nations rushed to emulate Columbus. In 1501
the Portuguese began to de-
populate Labrador, transporting the now extinct
Beothuk Indians to Europe and
Cape Verde as slaves. After the English
established beachheads on the Atlantic
coast of North America, they encouraged coastal
tribes to capture and sell
members of more distant tribes. Charleston, South
Carolina, became a major port
of exporting American Indian slaves. The Pilgrims
and Puritans sold the
survivors of the Pequot War into slavery in
Bermuda in 1637. The French
shipped virtually the entire Natchez nation in
chains to the West Indies in
1731.68
American History reproduces Columbus Landing in
the Bahamas, the first of
eighthuge “historical” paintings in the rotunda of
the U.S. Capitol (above). The
1847 painting by John Vanderlyn illustrates the heroic
treatment of Columbus in
most textbooks. An alternative representation of
Columbus’s enterprise might be
Theodore de Bry’s woodcut, created around 1588
(opposite). De Bry based this
engraving on accounts of Indians who impaled
themselves, drank poison,

jumped off cliffs, hanged themselves, and killed
their children. The artist
squeezed all of these fatal deeds into one
picture! De Bry’s images became
important historical documents in their own right.
Accompanied by Las Casas’s
writings, they circulated throughout sixteenth-century
Europe and gave rise to
the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty, which
otherEuropean countries used to
denounce Spain’s colonialism, mostly out of envy.
No textbook includes any
visual representation of the activities of Columbus
and his men that is otherthan
glorious.
A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade
was sexual. As soon as the
1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it
even reached Haiti, Columbus
was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to
rape.69 On Haiti, sex slaves
were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed.
Columbus wrote a friend in
1500, “A hundred castellanoes are as easily
obtained for a woman as for a farm,
and it is very general and thereare plenty of
dealers who go about looking for
girls; those from nine to ten are now in
demand.” 70
The slave trade and the new diseases destroyed
whole American Indian

nations. Enslaved Indians died. To replace the
dying Haitians, the Spanish
imported tens of thousands more Indians from
the Bahamas, which “are now
deserted,” in the words of the Spanish historian
PeterMartyr, reporting in
1516.71 Packed in below deck, with hatchways
closed to prevent their escape,
so many slaves died on the trip that “a ship
without a compass, chart, or guide,
but only following the trail of dead Indians who had
been thrown from the ships
could find its way from the Bahamas to
Hispaniola,”72 lamented Las Casas.
Puerto Rico and Cubawere next.
Because the Indians died, Indian slavery then led to
the massive slave trade
the otherway across the Atlantic, from Africa.
This trade also began on Haiti,
initiated by Columbus’s son in 1505. Predictably,
Haitithen became the site of
the first large-scale slave revolt, when blacks
and American Indians banded
together in 1519. The uprising lasted more than a
decade and was finally brought
to an end by the Spanish in the 1530s.73
One of the new textbooks, The Americans, reveals
the conflict on Haiti. This
book also quotes Las Casas to show how Haiti
was only the beginning: “This

tactic begun here [will soon] spread throughout
theseIndies and will end when
there are no more land or people to subjugate and
destroy in this part of the
world.” One of my original twelve, The American
Adventure, associated
Columbus with slavery. One old book and one new one let
it go with the phrase
“Columbus proved to be a far better
admiral than governor” or its equivalent.
The otherbooks, old and new, mostly adore him.
Clearly most textbooks are not about teaching the
history of Columbus. Their
enterprise seems to be Building Character. They
therefore treat Columbus as an
origin myth: He was good and so are we.74
In 1989 President George H. W.
Bush invoked Columbus as a role model for the
nation: “Christopher Columbus
not only opened the door to a New World, but
also set an example for us all by
showing what monumental feats can be accomplished
through perseverance and
faith.”75 The columnist Jeffrey Hart went even further:
“To denigrate Columbus
is to denigrate what is worthy in human
history and in us all.”76 Textbook
authors who are pushing Columbus to buildcharacter
obviously have no interest
in telling what he did with the Americas once
he reached them—even though
that’s half of the story, and perhaps the more
important half.
As Kirkpatrick Sale poetically sums up,

Columbus’s “second voyage marks
the first extended encounter of European and Indian
societies, the clash of
cultures that was to echo down through five
centuries.”77 The authors of The
Americans have read Sale, for they write, “[Haiti]
signaled the start of a cultural
clashthat would continue for the next five centuries.”
These are not mere details
about Haitibetween 1493 and 1500 that the other
textbooks omit or glossover.
They are facts crucial to understanding American and
European history. Captain
John Smith, for example, used Columbus as a
role model in proposing a get-
tough policy for the Virginia Indians in 1624:
“The manner how to suppress
them is so often related and approved, I
omit it here: And you have twenty
examples of how the Spaniards got the West Indies,
and forced the treacherous
and rebellious infidels to do all manner of
drudgery work and slavery for them,
themselves living like soldiers upon the fruits of
their labors.”78 The methods
unleashed by Columbus are, in fact, the larger part of
his legacy. After all, they
worked. The island was so well pacified that Spanish
convicts, given a second
chance on Haiti, could “go anywhere,take any
woman or girl, take anything, and
have the Indians carry him on their backs as
if they were mules.”79 In 1499,

when Columbus finally found gold on Haiti
in significant amounts, Spain
became the envy of Europe. After 1500,
Portugal, France, Holland, and England
joined in conquering the Americas. These
nations were at least as brutal as
Spain. The English, for example, unlike the
Spanish, did not colonize by making
use of Native labor but simply forced the
Indians out of the way. Many
American Indians fled English colonies to Spanish
territories (Florida, Mexico)
in search of more humane treatment.
Columbus’s voyages caused almost as much
change in Europe as in the
Americas. Crops, animals, ideas, and diseases began
to cross the oceans
regularly. Perhaps the most far-reaching impact of
Columbus’s findings was on
European Christianity. In 1492 all of Europe
was in the grip of the Catholic
Church. As the Encyclopedia Larousse puts it, before
America, “Europe was
virtually incapable of self-criticism.”80 After
America, Europe’s religious
uniformity was ruptured. For how were thesenew peoples
to be explained? They
were not mentioned in the Bible. American
Indians simply did not fit within
orthodox Christianity’s explanation of the moral
universe. Moreover,unlike the
Muslims, who might be written off as “damned
infidels,” American Indians had
not rejected Christianity, they had just never
encountered it. Were they doomed

to hell? Even the animals of America posed a
religious challenge.According to
the Bible, at the dawn of creation all animals
livedin the Garden of Eden. Later,
two of each species entered Noah’s ark and ended
up on Mt. Ararat. Since Eden
and Mt. Ararat were both in the Middle East, where
could thesenew American
species have come from? Such questions
shook orthodox Catholicism and
contributed to the Protestant Reformation, which
began in 1517.81
Politically, nations like the Arawaks—without
monarchs, without much
hierarchy—stunned Europeans. In 1516 Thomas More’s
Utopia, probably based
on an account of the Incan empire in Peru,
challenged European social
organization by suggesting a radically different
and superior alternative. Other
social philosophers seized upon American
Indians as living examples of
Europe’s primordial past, which is what John Locke
meant by the phrase “In the
beginning, all the world was America.”
Depending upon their political
persuasion, some Europeans glorified American
Indian nations as examples of
simpler, better societies from which European
civilization had devolved, while
others maligned them as primitive and
underdeveloped. In either case, from

Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau down to
Marx and Engels, European
philosophers’ concepts of the good society were
transformed by ideas from
America.82
America fascinated the masses as well as the
elite. In The Tempest,
Shakespeare noted this universal curiosity: “They
will not give a doit to relieve a
lambe beggar, they will lay out ten to see a
dead Indian.”83 Europe’s fascination
with the Americas was directly responsible, in fact,
for a rise in European self-
consciousness. From the beginning America was
perceived as an “opposite” to
Europe in ways that even Africa never
had been. In a sense, there was no
“Europe” before 1492. People were simply Tuscan,
French, and the like.Now
Europeans began to see similarities among
themselves, at least as contrasted
with Native Americans. For that matter, therewere no
“white” people in Europe
before 1492. With the transatlantic slave
trade, first Indian, then African,
Europeans increasingly saw “white” as a race
and race as an important human
characteristic.84
Columbus’s own writings reflect this increasingracism.
When Columbus was
selling Queen Isabella on the wonders of the
Americas, the Indians were “well
built” and “of quick intelligence.” “They have
very good customs,” he wrote,

“and the king maintains a very marvelousstate, of a
style so orderly that it is a
pleasure to see it, and they have good memories and
they wish to see everything
and ask what it is and for what it is used.”
Later, when Columbus was justifying
his wars and his enslavement of the Natives, they
became “cruel” and “stupid,”
“a people warlike and numerous,whose customs
and religion are very different
from ours.”
It is always useful to think badly about
people one has exploited or plans to
exploit. Modifying one’s opinions to bring
them into line with one’s actions or
planned actions is the most common outcome of
the process known as
“cognitive dissonance,” according to social
psychologist Leon Festinger. No one
likes to thinkof himself or herself as a bad
person. To treat badly another person
whom we consider a reasonable human being
creates a tension between act and
attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase
what we have done, and to
alter our future behavior may not be in our
interest. To change our attitude is
easier.85
Columbus gives us the first recorded example of
cognitive dissonance in the
Americas, for although the Natives may have changed

from hospitableto angry,
they could hardly have evolved from intelligentto
stupid so quickly. The change
had to be in Columbus.
The Americas affected more than the mind. African
and Eurasian stomachs
were also affected. Almost half of all major crops
now grown throughout the
world originally came from the Americas.
According to Alfred Crosby Jr.,
adding corn to African diets caused the population
to grow, which helped fuel
the African slave trade to the Americas.
Adding potatoes to European diets
caused the population to explode in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
which in turn helped fuel the European emigration
to the Americas and
Australia. Crops from America also played a
key role in the ascendancy of
England, Germany, and, finally, Russia; the rise of
thesenorthern nations shifted
the power base of Europe awayfrom the
Mediterranean.86
Shortly after ships from Columbus’s second
voyage returned to Europe,
syphilis began to plague Spain and Italy.
There is likely a causal connection.
On
the other hand, more than two hundred drugs
derive from plants whose
pharmacological uses were discovered by American
Indians.87

Economically, exploiting the Americas transformed
Europe, enriching first
Spain, then, through trade and piracy, other
nations. Columbus’s gold finds on
Haitiwere soon dwarfed by discoveries of gold
and silver in Mexico and the
Andes. European religious and political leaders quickly
amassed so much gold
that they applied gold leaf to the ceilings of their
churches and palaces, erected
golden statues in the corners, and strung vines
of golden grapes between them.
Marx and Engels held that this wealth “gave to
commerce, to navigation, to
industry an impulse never before known.” Some
writers credit it with the rise of
capitalism and eventually the industrial revolution.
Capitalism was probably
already under way, but at the least, American
riches played a major role in the
transformation. Gold and silver from America
replaced land as the basis for
wealth and status, increasing the power of
the new merchant class that would
soon dominate the world.88 Where Muslim nations
had once rivaled Europe, the
new wealth undermined Islamic power. American
gold and silver fueled a 400
percent inflation that eroded the economies of
most non-European countries and
helped Europe to develop a global market
system. Africa suffered: the trans-
Saharan trade collapsed, because the Americas
supplied more gold and silver
than the Gold Coast ever could. African traders
now had only one commodity

that Europe wanted: slaves. In anthropologist Jack
Weatherford’s words,
“Africans thus became victims of the discovery of
America as surely as did the
American Indians.”89
These vast changes were given the term “the
Columbian exchange” in 1972
by Alfred W. Crosby Jr., in his book of that
title. In the 1990s the term caught
on, owing to the quincentenary. Not one textbook in
my original sample told of
thesegeopolitical implications of Columbus’s
encounter with the Americas, but
gradually the concept seeped into American history
textbooks. Today most
books credit American Indians with having
developed important crops. Authors
also recognize that Europeans (and Africans)
brought diseases as well as
livestock to the Americas. The two-way flow of
ideas, however, still goes
unnoticed, especially from west to east.
Instead, Eurocentrism blinds textbook authors to
contributions to Europe,
whether from Arab astronomers, African navigators, or
American Indian social
structure. By operating within this limited viewpoint,
our history textbooks never
invite us to think about what happened to
reduce mainland Indian societies,
whose wealth and cities awed the Spanish, to

the impoverished peasantry they
are today. They also rob us of the chance to
appreciatehow important American
Indian ideas have been in the formation of
the modern world. Thus, they keep
students from understanding what caused the
world to develop as it has—
including why Europe (and its extensions: the United
States, Canada, etc.) won.
Some people have attacked the portrait of
Columbus presented here as too
negative. But I am not proposing that we should
begin courses of American
history by crying that Columbus was bad and so
are we. Textbooks should show
that neither morality nor immorality can simply be
conferred upon us by history.
Merely being part of the United States, without
regard to our own acts and ideas,
does not make us moral or immoral beings.
History is more complicated than
that.
Again we must pause to consider: Who are “we”?
Columbus is not a hero in
Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish
in culture than the United
States and might be expected to take pridein
this hero of Spanish history. Why
not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian
than the United States, and
Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and
European. “No sensible Indian
person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can
celebrate the arrival of

Columbus.” 90 Cherishing Columbus is a
characteristic of white history, not
American history.
Columbus’s conquest of Haitican be seen as an
amazing feat of courage and
imagination by the first of many brave empire
builders. It can also be understood
as a bloody atrocity that left a legacy of
genocide and slavery that endures in
somedegree to this day. Both views of Columbus
are valid; indeed, Columbus’s
importance in history owes precisely to his being
both a heroic navigator and a
greatplunderer.If Columbus were only the former, he
would merely rival Leif
Eriksson. Columbus’s actions exemplify both meanings of
the word exploit—a
remarkable deed and also a taking advantage
of. The worshipful biographical
vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our
textbooks serve to indoctrinate
students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism
that is strikingly
inappropriate in today’s postcolonial era. In the
words of the historian Michael
Wallace, the Columbus myth “allows us to accept
the contemporary division of
the world into developed and underdeveloped
spheres as natural and given,
rather than a historical product issuing from a
process that began with
Columbus’s first voyage.” 91

We understand Columbus and all European explorers
and settlers more clearly
if we treat 1492 as a meeting of threecultures
(Africa was soon involved),rather
than a discovery by one, and several of the new
books do this.The term New
World is itself part of the problem, for people
had lived in the Americas for
thousands of years. The Americas were new only to
Europeans. Discover is
another part of the problem, for how can one person
discover what another
already knows and owns? Textbook authors are
strugglingwith this issue, trying
to move beyond colonized history and
Eurocentric language. Boorstin and
Kelley begin their first chapter with the sentence,
“The discovery of America”—
by which they mean Columbus’s—“was the
world’s greatest surprise.” Five
pages later, the authors try to take back the
word: “It was only for the people of
Europe that America had to be ‘discovered.’
Millions of Native Americans were
already here!” Taking back words is ineffectual,
however. Boorstin and Kelley’s
whole approach is to portray whites discovering
nonwhites rather than a mutual
multicultural encounter. Indeed, they are so
Eurocentric that they don’t even
notice they left out “the people of Africa and
Asia” from their sentence of people
who had yet to “discover” America.
The point isn’t idle.Words are important—they

can influence, and in some
cases rationalize, policy. In 1823 Chief
Justice John Marshall of the U.S.
Supreme Court decreed that Cherokees had certain
rights to their land in Georgia
by dint of their “occupancy” but that whites
had superior rights owing to their
“discovery.” How American Indians managed to occupy
Georgia without having
previously discovered it Marshall neglected to
explain.92
The process of exploration has itself typically
been multiracial and
multicultural. African pilots helped Prince
Henry’s ship captains learntheir way
down the coast of Africa.93 On Christmas Day
1492, Columbus needed help.
Santa Maria ran aground off Haiti. Columbus
sent for help to the nearest
Arawak town, and “all the people of the town”
responded, “with very big and
many canoes.” “They cleared the decks in a
very short time,” Columbus
continued, and the chief “caused all our goods
to be placed together near the
palace, until some houses that he gave us where
all might be put and guarded
had been emptied.” 94 On his final voyage Columbus
shipwrecked on Jamaica,
and the Arawaks therekept him and his crew of more
than a hundred alive for a
whole year until Spaniards from Haitirescued them.

So it has continued. William Erasmus, a
Canadian Indian, pointed out,
“Explorers you call greatmen were helpless. They were
like lost children, and it
was our people who took care of them.”95 Native
Americans cured Cartier’s
men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535. They
repaired Francis Drake’s Golden
Hind in California so he could complete his round-
the-world voyage in 1579.
Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific
Northwest was made possible by
tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help
from two Shoshone guides,
Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters.
When Admiral Peary
discovered the North Pole, the first person
there was probably neither the
European American Peary nor the African American
Matthew Henson, his
assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and
women on whom the entire
expedition relied.96 Our histories fail to mention
such assistance. They portray
proud Western conquerors bestriding the world
like the Colossus at Rhodes.
So long as our textbooks hide from us the
roles that people of color have
played in exploration, from at least 6000
BC to the twentieth century, they
encourage us to lookto Europe and its extensions
as the seat of all knowledge
and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,”
they imply that whites are the

only people who really matter. So long as they
simply celebrate Columbus,
rather than teach both sides of his exploit,
they encourage us to identify with
white Western exploitation rather than study it.
The passage in the left-hand column of the
opposing page is one of the many
legends that hang about Columbus like
barnacles—“myths, all without
substance.”97 The passage in the right-hand
column is part of a
contemporaneous account of an Arawak cacique
(leader) who had fled from
Haitito Cuba.
The reader will have already guessed that the passage
on the left comes from
an American history textbook, in this case American
Adventures. Since the
incident probably never happened, including it in a
textbook is hard to defend.
One way to understand its inclusion is by
examining what it does in the
narrative. The incident is melodramatic. It creates a
mild air of suspense, even
though we can be sure, of course, that
everything will turn out all right in the
end. Surely the passage encourages identification
with Columbus’s enterprise,
makes Columbus the underdog—riding a mule,
shabby of cloak—and thus
places us on his side.

A man riding a mule moved slowly down a
dusty road in Spain. He
wore an old and shabby cloak over his shoulders.
Though his face
seemed young, his red hair was already turning
white. It was earlyin
the year 1492 and Christopher Columbus was leaving
Spain.
Twice the Spanish king and queen had refused
his request for ships.
He had wasted five years of his life trying to
get their approval. Now
he was going to France. Perhaps the French
king would give him the
shipshe needed.
Columbus heard a clattering sound. He turned
and looked up the
road.A horse and rider came racing toward
him. The rider handed
him a message, and Columbus turned his mule around.
The message
was from the Spanish king and queen, ordering
him to return.
Columbus would get his ships.
Learning that Spaniards were coming, one day [the
cacique] gathered
all his people together to remind them of
the persecutions that the
Spanish had inflicted on the people of Hispaniola:
“Do you know why they persecute us?”

They replied: “They do it because they are cruel
and bad.”
“I will tell you why they do it,” the cacique stated,
“and it is this—
because they have a lord whom they love very much,
and I will show
him to you.”
He held up a small basket made from
palms full of gold, and he
said, “Here is their lord, whom they serve and
adore. . . . To have this
lord, they make us suffer, for him they persecute
us, for him they have
killed our parents, brothers, all our people. . .
. Let us not hide this
lord from the Christians in any place, for even if
we should hide it in
our intestines,they would get it out of us;
therefore let us throw it in
this river, under the water, and they will not
know where it is.”
Whereupon they threw the gold into the river.98
The passage on the right was recorded by Las Casas,
who apparently learned
it from Arawaks on Cuba. Unlike the mule
story, the cacique’s story teaches
important facts: that the Spanish sought gold,
that they killed Indians, that
Indians fled and resisted. (Indeed, after futile

attempts at armed resistance on
Cuba, this cacique fled “into the brambles.”
Weeks later, when the Spanish
captured him, they burned him alive.) Nonetheless, no
history textbook includes
the cacique’s storyor anything like it. Doing so
might enable us to identify with
the Natives’ side. By avoiding the names and stories
of individual Arawaks and
omitting their points of view, authors
“otherize” the Indians. Readers need not
concern themselves with the Indians’ ghastly fate,
for American Indians never
appear as recognizable human beings. Textbooks
themselves, it seems, practice
cognitive dissonance.
Excluding the passage on the right, including the
passage on the left,
excluding the probably true, including the improbable,
amounts to colonialist
history. This is the Columbus storythat has dominated
American history books.
All around the globe, however, the nations that
were “discovered,” conquered,
“civilized,” and colonized by European powers
are now independent, at least
politically. Europeans and European Americans
no longer dictate to them as
master to native and therefore need to stop
thinking of themselves as superior,
morally and technologically. A new and more
accurate history of Columbus—
provided to students by just one of these
textbooks (The Americans)—could
assist this transformation.

Of course, this new history must not judge
Columbus by standards from our
own time. In 1493 the world had not
decided, for instance, that slavery was
wrong. Some American Indian nations enslaved
otherIndians. Africans enslaved
other Africans. Europeans enslaved other Europeans.
To attack Columbus for
doing what everyone else did would be
unreasonable.
However, someSpaniards of the time—Bartolomé de
Las Casas, for example
—opposed the slavery, land-grabbing, and forced
labor that Columbus
introduced on Haiti. Las Casas began as an
adventurer and became a plantation
owner. Then he switched sides, freed his
Natives, became a priest, and fought
desperately for humane treatment of the Indians.
When Columbus and other
Europeans argued that American Indians were
inferior, Las Casas pointed out
that Indians were sentient and rational human
beings, just like anyone else.
When otherhistorians tried to overlook or defend
the Indian slavetrade, begun
by Columbus, Las Casas denounced it as
“among the most unpardonable
offenses ever committed against God and mankind.”
He helped prompt Spain to
enact laws against American Indian slavery.99

Although these laws came too
late to help the Arawaks and were oftendisregarded,
they did help someIndians
survive. Centuries after his death, Las Casas was
still influencing history: Simon
Bolívar used Las Casas’s writings to justify the
revolutions between 1810 and
1830 that liberated Latin America from Spanish
domination.
When history textbooks leave out the
Arawaks, they offend Native Americans.
When they omit the possibility of African
and Phoenician precursors to
Columbus, they offend African Americans. When
they glamorize explorers such
as de Soto just because they were white, our
histories offend all people of color.
When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an
interesting idealist with whom we
all might identify. When they glorify Columbus,
our textbooks prod us toward
identifying with the oppressor. When textbook
authors omit the causes and
process of European world domination, they offer
us a history whose purpose
must be to keep us unaware of the important
questions. Perhaps worst of all,
when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of
a pious, heroic Columbus, they
provide feel-good history that bores everyone.
3.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
Considering that virtually none of the standard
fare
surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of
authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural
perception, why is it so apparently ingrained?
Is it
necessary to the American psyche to perpetually
exploit
and debase its victims in order to justify its
history?
—MICHAEL DORRIS1
European explorers and invaders discovered an
inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it
would possibly be so still, for neither the
technology
nor the social organization of Europe in the
16th and
17th centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its
own
resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles
from
home.
—FRANCIS JENNINGS2
The Europeans were able to conquer America
not
because of their military genius, or their
religious

motivation, or their ambition, or their greed.
They
conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological
warfare.
—HOWARD SIMPSON3
It is painful to advert to these things.
But our
forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere,
were
nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under
a
cloud; and, in history, truth should be held
sacred, at
whatever cost . . . especially against the
narrow and
futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing
forward in
pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking
backwards to
cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.
—COL. THOMAS ASPINWALL4
OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, I have asked
hundreds of college students,
“When was the country we now know as the
United States first settled?” This is
a generous way of phrasing the question; surely
“we now know as” implies that

the original settlement antedated the founding of
the United States. I initially
believed—certainly I had hoped—that students would
suggest 30,000 BC or
someotherpre-Columbian date.
They did not. Their consensus answer was “1620.”
Obviously, my students’ heads have been filled
with America’sorigin myth,
the story of the first Thanksgiving. Textbooks
are among the retailers of this
primal legend.
Part of the problem is the word settle. “Settlers”
were white, a student once
pointed out to me. “Indians” didn’t settle.
Students are not the only people
misled by settle. The film that introduces visitors
to Plimoth Plantation tells how
“they went about the work of civilizing a hostile
wilderness.” One Thanksgiving
weekend I listened as a guide at the Statue
of Liberty talked about European
immigrants “populating a wild East Coast.” As
we shall see, however, if
American Indians hadn’t already settled New
England, Europeans would have
had a much tougher job of it.
Starting the story of America’s settlement
with the Pilgrims leaves out not
only American Indians but also the Spanish. The first
non-Native settlers in “the
country we now know as the United States”
were African slaves left in South

Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a
settlementattempt. In 1565 the
Spanish massacred the French Protestants who
had settled briefly at St.
Augustine, Florida, and established their own fort
there. Between 1565 and 1568
Spaniards explored the Carolinas,building several forts
that were then burned by
the Indians. Some later Spanish settlers were our
first pilgrims, seeking regions
new to them to secure religious liberty: thesewere
Spanish Jews, who settled in
New Mexico in the late 1500s.5 Few Americans
know that one-third of the
United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to
Natchez to Florida, has been
Spanish longer than it has been “American,” and
that Hispanic Americans lived
here before the first ancestor of the Daughters of
the American Revolution ever
left England. Moreover,Spanish culture left an
indelible mark on the American
West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle,
sheep, pigs, and the basicelements
of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary:
mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and
so on.6 Horses that escaped from the Spanish and
propagated triggered the rapid
flowering of a new culture among the Plains
Indians. “How refreshing it would
be,” wrote James Axtell, “to find a textbook
that began on the West Coast before
treating the traditional eastern colonies.”

Why don’t they? Perhaps because most textbook
authors are WASPs (White
Anglo-Saxon Protestants). The forty-six authors of
the eighteen texts I surveyed
ranged from Bauer and Berkin to Williams
and Wood, but only two were
Spanish-surnamed: Linda Ann DeLeon, an author of
Challenge of Freedom, and
J. Klor de Alva, an author of The Americans.
Surely it is no coincidence that the
books by these last two offer by far the
fullest accounts of early Spanish
settlements in “what is now the United
States,” including mention of the
missions the Spanish set up from the Carolinas to
the Gulf of Mexico and from
San Diego to San Francisco.7 Within our
lifetimes, the school-age population of
the United States is destined to become
majority minority, with Hispanic,
African, Asian, and Native Americans totalling
more than 51 percent. At that
point, probably after much hand-wringing and tooth-
gnashing, the history books
will give more attention to our Hispanic past—which
they always should have
done. Meanwhile, the Spanish are seen as
intruders, while the British are seen as
settlers.8
Beginningthe storyin 1620 also omits the Dutch,
who were living in what is
now Albany by 1614. Indeed, should English
be required for proper settling,
1620 is not even the date of the first permanent

English settlement, for in 1607,
the London Company sent settlers to Jamestown,
Virginia.
No matter. The mythic origin of “the country
we now know as the United
States” is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is
1620. Here is a representative
account from The American Tradition:
After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose
the land around Plymouth
Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had
arrived in December
and were not prepared for the New England winter.
However, they were
aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and
showed them how to
grow corn. When warm weather came, the
colonists planted, fished,
hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter.
After harvesting
their first crop, they and their Indian friends
celebrated the first
Thanksgiving.9
My students also remember that the Pilgrims had been
persecuted in England
for their religious beliefs, so they had moved to
Holland. They sailed on the
Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower
Compact, the forerunner to our
Constitution, according to my students. Times
were rough, until they met

Squanto, who taught them how to put a small
fish as fertilizer in each little corn
hill, ensuring a bountiful harvest. But when I
ask my students about the plague,
they just stare back at me. “What plague? The Black
Plague?” No, I sigh, that
was threecenturies earlier.
The Black Plague does provide a useful
introduction, however. William
Langer has written that the Black (or bubonic)
Plague “was undoubtedly the
worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind.”10 In
the years 1348 through
1350, it killed perhaps 30 percent of the
population of Europe. Catastrophic as
that was, the disease itself comprised only part of
the horror. According to
Langer, “Almost everyone, in that medieval time,
interpreted the plague as a
punishment by God for human sins.” Thinking
the day of judgment was
imminent, farmers did not plant crops. Many
people gave themselves over to
alcohol. Civiland economic disruption may have caused as
much death as the
disease itself. The entire culture of Europe
was affected: fear, death, and guilt
became prime artistic motifs. Milder plagues—
typhus, syphilis, and influenza, as
well as bubonic—continued to ravage Europe
until the end of the seventeenth
century.11
The warmer parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa
have historically been the

breeding ground for most human illnesses. Humans
evolved in tropical regions;
tropical diseases evolved alongside them. People
moved to cooler climates only
with the aid of cultural inventions—clothing,
shelter, and fire—that helped
maintain warm temperatures around their bodies.
Microbes that live outside their
human hosts during part of their life cycle
had trouble coping with northern
Europe and Asia.12 When people migrated to
the Americas across the newly
drained Bering Strait, if the archaeological
consensus is correct, the changes in
climate and physical circumstance threatened even
those hardy parasites that had
survived the earlier slow migration northward
from Africa. These first
immigrants entered the Americas through a frigid
decontamination chamber. The
first settlers in the Western Hemisphere thus
probably arrived in a healthier
condition than most people on earthhave enjoyed before
or since. Many of the
diseases that had long shadowed them simply could
not survive the journey.13
Neither did some animals. People in the
Western Hemisphere had no cows,
pigs, horses, sheep, goats, or chickens before
the arrival of Europeans and
Africans after 1492. Many diseases—from
anthrax to tuberculosis, cholera to

streptococcus, ringworm to various poxes—are passed
back and forth between
humans and livestock. Since earlyinhabitants of
the Western Hemisphere had no
livestock, they caught no diseases from them.14
Europe and Asia were also made unhealthy by a
subtler factor: social density.
Organisms that cause disease need a constant
supply of new hostsfor their own
survival. This requirement is nowhere clearer than in
the case of smallpox,
which cannot survive outside a living human
body. But in its enthusiasm, the
organism oftenkills its host. Thus the pestilence creates its
own predicament: it
requires new victims at regular intervals. The
various influenza viruses must
likewise move on, for if their victims survive,
they enjoy a period of immunity
lasting at least a few weeks, and sometimes
a lifetime.15 Small-scale societies
like the Paiute Indians of Nevada, living in
isolated nuclear and extended
families, could and did suffer post-Columbian
smallpox epidemics, transmitted
to them by more urban neighbors, but they could
not sustain such an organism
over time.16 Even residents of villages did not
experience sufficient social
density. Villagers might encounter three
hundred people each day, but these
would usually be the same threehundred people.
Coming into repeated contact
with the same few others does not have the same
consequences as meeting new

people, either for human culture or for
culturing microbes.
Some areas in the Americas did have high
social density.17 Incan roads
connected towns from northern Ecuador to
Chile.18 Fifteen hundred to two
thousand years ago the population of Cahokia,
Illinois, numbered about forty
thousand. Trade linked the Great Lakes to
Florida, the Rockies to what is now
New England.19 We are therefore not dealing with
isolated bands of “primitive”
peoples. Nonetheless, most of the Western Hemisphere
lacked the social density
found in much of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
And nowhere in the Western
Hemisphere were there sinkholes of sickness
like London or Cairo, with raw
sewage running in the streets.
The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also
partly attributable to the
basic hygiene practiced by the region’s inhabitants.
Residents of northern
Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it
unhealthy, and rarely removed all
of their clothing at one time,believing it immodest.
The Pilgrims smelled bad to
the Indians. Squanto “tried, without success, to
teach them to bathe,” according
to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.20

For all these reasons, the inhabitants of North
and South America (like
Australian aborigines and the peoples of the
far-flung Pacific islands) were “a
remarkably healthy race”21 before Columbus.
Ironically, their very health
proved their undoing, for they had built up no
resistance, genetically or through
childhood diseases, to the microbes that Europeans
and Africans would bring to
them.
In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, a
pandemic swept southern New
England. For decades, English and French fishermen
had fished off the
Massachusetts coast. After filling their hulls with
cod, they would go ashore to
lay in firewood and freshwater and perhaps capture
a few American Indians to
sell into slavery in Europe. It is likely that
these fishermen transmitted some
illness to the people they met.22 The plague
that ensued made the Black Death
pale by comparison. Some historians thinkthe disease
was the bubonic plague;
others suggest that it was viral hepatitis, smallpox,
chicken pox, or influenza.
Within three years the plague wiped out
between 90 to 96 percent of the
inhabitants of coastal New England. Native
societies lay devastated. Only “the
twentieth person is scarce left alive,” wrote
Robert Cushman, an English
eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all

previous human experience.23
Unable to cope with so many corpses, the
survivors abandoned their villages and
fled, oftento a neighboring tribe. Because they
carried the infestation with them,
American Indians died who had never encountered a
white person. Howard
Simpson describes the horrific scenes that the
Pilgrims saw: “Villages lay in
ruinsbecause there was no one to tend them.
The ground was strewn with the
skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians
who had died and none was left to
bury them.”24
The biggest single change in the treatment of
Native Americans is the
inclusion of this illustration in most of the new
textbooks. The first edition of
Lies My Teacher Told Me decried the absence of
any treatment of the repeated
epidemics that ravaged Native populations. No book
included this illustration or
any otherrepresentation of disease.
These Aztec drawings depicting smallpox,
coupled with the words of William
Bradford, convey somethingof the horror of the
epidemic around Plymouth:“A
sorerdisease cannot befall [the Indians], they fear it
more than the plague. For
usually they that have this disease have them
in abundance, and for want of

bedding and linenand otherhelps they fall into a
lamentable condition as they
lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and
mattering and running one into
another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to
the mats they lie on. When they
turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as
it were, and they will be all of a
gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being
very sore, what with cold and
other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.” Quoted
in Simpson, Invisible
Armies, 8.
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics,
most of which we know to
have been smallpox, struck repeatedly.
European Americans also contracted
smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure,
but they usually recovered,
including, in a later century, the “heavily
pockmarked George Washington.”
Native Americans usually died. The impact of
the epidemics on the two cultures
was profound. The English Separatists, already
seeing their lives as part of a
divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to
infer that God was on their side.
John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
called the plague
“miraculous.” In 1634 he wrote to a friend in
England: “But for the natives in
theseparts, God hath so pursued them, as for

300 miles space the greatest part of
them are swept awayby the smallpox which still
continues among them. So as
God hath thereby cleared our title to this place,
those who remain in theseparts,
being in all not 50, have put themselves under
our protection. . . .” 25 God, the
Original Real Estate Agent!
Many Natives likewise inferred that their god
had abandoned them. Robert
Cushman reported that “those that are left, have their
courage much abated, and
their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a
people affrighted.” After a
smallpox epidemic the Cherokee “despaired so much
that they lost confidence in
their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects
of the tribe.” 26 After all,
neither American Indians nor Pilgrims had access to
the germtheory of disease.
Native healers could supply no cure;their
medicines and herbs offered no relief.
Their religion provided no explanation. That of
the whites did. Like the
Europeans three centuries before them, many
American Indians surrendered to
alcohol, converted to Christianity, or simply killed
themselves.27
These epidemics probably constituted the most
important geopolitical event of
the earlyseventeenth century. Their net result
was that the English, for their first
fifty years in New England, would face no
real Indian challenge. Indeed, the

plague helped prompt the legendarily warm
reception Plymouth enjoyed from
the Wampanoags. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader,
was eager to ally with the
Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened
his villages that he feared the
Narragansetts to the west.28 When a land
conflict did develop between new
settlers and old at Saugus in 1631, “God
ended the controversy by sending the
small pox amongst the Indians,” in the words of
the Puritan minister Increase
Mather. “Whole towns of them were swept away,
in someof them not so much
as one Soul escaping the Destruction.” 29 By the
time the Native populations of
New England had replenished themselves to some
degree, it was too late to
expel the intruders.
Today, as we compare European technology with
that of the “primitive”
American Indians, we may conclude that European
conquest of America was
inevitable, but it did not appear so at the
time. Historian Karen Kupperman
speculates:
The technology and culture of Indians on
America’s east coast were
genuine rivals to those of the English, and
the eventual outcome of the
rivalry was not at first clear. . . . One

can only speculate what the
outcome of the rivalry would have been if
the impact of European
diseases on the American population had not been
so devastating. If
colonists had not been able to occupy lands
already cleared by Indian
farmers who had vanished, colonization would have
proceeded much
more slowly. If Indian culture had not been
devastated by the physical
and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization
might not have
proceeded at all.30
After all, Native Americans had driven off
Samuel de Champlain when he had
tried to settle in Massachusetts in 1606. The
following year, Abenakis had
helped expel the first Plymouth Company settlement
from Maine.31 Alfred
Crosby has speculated that the Norse might
have succeeded in colonizing
Newfoundland and Labrador if they had not had the
bad luck to emigrate from
Greenland and Iceland, distant from European disease
centers.32 But this is
“what if” history. The New England plagues were no
“if.” They continued west,
racing in advance of the line of culture contact.
Everywhere in America, the first European explorers
encountered many more
Indians than did their successors. A century
and a half after Hernando de Soto
traveled the southeastern United States, French

explorers there found the
population less than a quarter of what it
had been when de Soto had passed
through, with attendant catastrophic effects on Native
culture and social
organization. 33 Likewise, on their famous 1804-06
expedition, Lewis and Clark
encountered far more Natives in Oregon than lived
there a mere twenty years
later.34
Henry Dobyns has put together a heartbreaking
list of ninety-three epidemics
among Native Americans between 1520 and
1918. He has recorded forty-one
eruptions of smallpox, four of bubonic plague,
seventeen of measles and ten of
influenza (both often deadly among Native
Americans), and twenty-five of
tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and other
diseases. Many of these
outbreaks reached truly pandemic proportions,
beginning in Florida or Mexico
and stopping only when they reached the Pacific
and Arctic oceans.35 Disease
played the same crucial role in Mexico and Peru as
it did in Massachusetts. How
did the Spanish manage to conquer what is
now Mexico City? “When the
Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send
the Indians smallpox,
and there was a great pestilence in the
city.” When the Spanish marched into

Tenochtitlan, therewere so many bodies that they
had to walk on them. Mostof
the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that
fact itself helped to crush
Aztec morale.36
The pestilence continues today. Miners and
loggers recently introduced
European diseases to the Yanomamos of northern
Brazil and southern
Venezuela, killing a fourth of their total
population in 1991 alone. Charles
Darwin, writing in 1839, put it almost
poetically: “Wherever the European had
trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.” 37
Europeans were never able to “settle” China,
India, Indonesia, Japan, or much
of Africa, because too many people already
livedthere. The crucial role played
by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred
from two simple population
estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of
the Americas at one
hundred million in 1492, while William Langer
suggests that Europe had only
about seventy million people when Columbus
set forth.38 The Europeans’
advantages in military and social technology
might have enabled them to
dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated
China, India, Indonesia,
and Africa, but not to “settle” the hemisphere.
For that, the plague was required.
Thus, apart from the European (and African)
invasion itself, the pestilence is

surely the most important event in the history of
America.
The first epidemics wreaked havoc, not only with
American Indian societies,
but also with estimates of pre-Columbian Native
American population. The
result has been continuing controversy among
historians and anthropologists. In
1840 George Catlin estimated aboriginal numbers in
the United States and
Canada at the time of white contact to be
perhaps fourteen million. He believed
only two million still survived. By 1880, owing to
warfare and deculturation as
well as illness, Native numbers had dropped to
250,000, a decline of 98
percent.39 In 1921 James Mooney asserted
that only one million Native
Americans had lived in what is now the
United States in 1492. Mooney’s
estimate was accepted until the 1960s and 1970s,
even though the arguments
supporting it, based largely on inference rather
than evidence, were not
convincing. Colin McEvedy provided an example of
the argument:
The high rollers, of course, claim that native
numbers had been reduced
to theselow levels [between one million and two
million] by epidemics
of smallpox, measles, and other diseases introduced
from Europe—and

indeed they could have been. But there is
no record of any continental
[European] population being cut back by the
sort of percentages needed
to get from twenty million to two or one million.
Even the Black Death
reduced the population of Europe by only a
third.40
Note that McEvedy has ignored both the data and also
the reasoning about
illness summarized above, relying on what
amounts to common sense to
disprove both.Indeed, he contended, “No good can
come of affronting common
sense.” But pre-Pilgrim American epidemiology is
not a field of everyday
knowledge in which “common sense” can be
allowed to substitute for years of
relevant research. By “common sense” what
McEvedy really meant was
tradition, and this tradition is Eurocentric. Our
archetypes of the “virgin
continent” and its corollary, the “primitivetribe,”
subtly influenced estimates of
Native population: scholars who viewed Native
American cultures as primitive
reduced their estimates of precontact populations
to match the stereotype. The
tiny Mooney estimate thus “made sense”—resonated
with the archetype. Never
mind that the land was, in reality, not a virgin
wilderness but recently
widowed.41
The very death rates that some historians and

geographers now find hard to
believe, the Pilgrims knew to be true. For
example, William Bradford described
how the Dutch, rivals of Plymouth,traveled to an
Indian village in Connecticut
to trade. “But their enterprise failed, for it
pleased God to afflict these Indians
with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1,000,
over 950 of them died, and many
of them lay rotting above ground for want of
burial. . . .” 42 This is precisely the
95 percent mortality that McEvedy rejected. On the
opposite coast, the Native
population of California sank from three
hundred thousand in 1769 (by which
time it had already been cut in half by various
Spanish-borne diseases) to thirty
thousand a century later, owing mainly to
the gold rush, which brought “disease,
starvation, homicide, and a declining birthrate.”43
For a century after Catlin, historians and
anthropologists “overlooked” the
evidence offered by the Pilgrims and otherearly
chroniclers. Beginningwith P.
M. Ashburn in 1947, however, research has
established more accurate estimates
based on careful continent-wide compilations of
small-scale studies of first
contact and on evidence of early plagues. Most
current estimates of the
precontact population of the United States
and Canada range from ten to twenty

million.44
None of my original twelve textbooks, most of
which were published in the
1980s, lets its readers in on the furious debate
of the 1960s and early 1970s,
telling how and why estimates changed. Instead, they
simply stated numbers—
very different numbers. “As many as ten million,”
American Adventures
proposed. “There were only about 1,000,000 North
American Indians,” opined
The American Tradition. “Scattered across the North
American continent were
about 500 different groups, many of them
nomadic.”Like otherAmericans who
have not studied the literature, the authors of these
textbooks were still under the
thrall of the “virgin land” and “primitivetribe”
archetypes; their most common
American Indian population estimate was the
discredited figure of one million,
which five textbooks supplied. Only two
provided estimates of ten to twelve
million, in the range supported by contemporary
scholarship. Two hedged their
bets by suggesting one to twelve million, which
might reasonably prompt
classroom discussion of why estimates are so vague.
Three omitted the subject
altogether. The new books are even worse: none of
them even raises the subject
of population estimates.
The problem is not so much the estimates as
the attitude. Presenting a

controversy seems somehow radical. It invites
students to come to their own
conclusions. Textbook authors don’t let that
happen. They see their job as
presenting “facts” for children to “learn,” not
encouraging them to think for
themselves. Such an approach keeps students
ignorant of the reasoning,
arguments, and weighing of evidence that go into
social science.
About the plagues, my twelve original textbooks
told even less. Only threeof
them even mentioned Indian disease as a factor
at Plymouth or anywhere in New
England.45 Today, most new textbooks do include
“Old World” diseases as part
of the Columbian Exchange. It’s about time!
After all, in colonial times,
everyone knew about the plague. Even before
the Mayflower sailed, King James
of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in
his great goodness and bounty
towards us” for sending “this wonderful plague
among the salvages [sic].”46
Two hundred years later the oldest American
history in my collection—J. W.
Barber’s Interesting Events in the History of
the United States, published in 1829
—still recalled the plague:
A few years before the arrival of the
Plymouth settlers, a verymortal

sickness raged with great violence among the
Indians inhabiting the
eastern parts of New England. “Whole towns
were depopulated. The
living were not able to bury the dead; and their
bodies were found lying
above ground, many years after. The
Massachusetts Indians are said to
have been reduced from 30,000 to 300 fighting men. In
1633, the small
pox swept off greatnumbers.”47
Unfortunately, the Pilgrims’ arrival in Massachusetts
poses another historical
controversy that textbook authors take pains to
duck. The textbooks say the
Pilgrims intended to go to Virginia, where there
existed an English settlement
already. However, “the first land they sighted was Cape
Cod, well north of their
target,” explains The American Journey. “Because it
was Novemberand winter
was fast approaching, the colonists decided to drop
anchor in Cape Cod Bay.”
Winter’s onset cannot have been the reason,
however, for the weather would be
much milder in Virginia than Massachusetts.
Moreover, the Pilgrims spent six
full weeks—until December 26—scouting around Cape
Cod looking for the best
spot. How did the Pilgrims wind up in Massachusetts in
the first place, when
they set out for Virginia? “Violent storms blew their
ship off course,” according
to sometextbooks; others blame an “error in
navigation.” Both explanations may

be wrong. Some historians believe the Dutch
bribed the captain of the
Mayflower to sail north so the Pilgrims would
not settle near New Amsterdam.
Others hold that the Pilgrims went to Cape Cod on
purpose.48
Bear in mind that the Pilgrims numbered only about
35 of the 102 settlers
aboard the Mayflower; the rest were ordinary folk
seeking their fortunes in the
new Virginia colony. Historian George Willison has
argued that the Pilgrim
leaders, wanting to be far from Anglican
control, never planned to settle in
Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of
Guiana, in South America,
versus the Massachusetts coast, and, according to
Willison, they intended a
hijacking.
Certainly the Pilgrims already knew quite a
bit about what Massachusetts
could offer them, from the fine fishing
along Cape Cod to that “wonderful
plague,” which offered an unusual opportunity
for English settlement. According
to some historians, Squanto, a Wampanoag
from the village of Patuxet,
Massachusetts, had provided Ferdinando Gorges, a
leader of the Plymouth
Company in England, with a detailed description of
the area. Gorges may even

have sent Squanto and Capt. Thomas Dermer as
advance men to wait for the
Pilgrims, although Dermer sailed away when
the Pilgrims were delayed in
England. In any event, the Pilgrims were familiar
with the area’s topography.
Recently published maps that Samuel de Champlain
had drawn when he had
toured the area in 1605 supplemented the information
that had been passed on by
sixteenth-century explorers. John Smith had
studied the region and named it
“New England” in 1614, and he even offered to
guide the Pilgrim leaders. They
rejected his services as too expensive and carried
his guidebook along instead.49
These considerations prompt me to believe that
the Pilgrim leaders probably
ended up in Massachusetts on purpose. But
evidence for any conclusion is soft.
Some historians believe Gorges took credit
for landing in Massachusetts after
the fact. Indeed, the Mayflower may have had no
specific destination. Readers
might be fascinated if textbook authors
presented two or more of the various
possibilities, but, as usual, exposing students to
historical controversy is taboo.
Each textbook picks just one reason and presents it
as fact.
Only one of all the textbooks I surveyed adheres to
the hijacking possibility.
“The New England landing cameas a rude surprise
for the bedraggled and tired

[non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower,”
says Land of Promise. “[They]
had joined the expedition seeking economic
opportunity in the Virginia tobacco
plantations.” Obviously, these passengers were
not happy at having been taken
elsewhere, especially to a shore with no
prior English settlement to join.
“Rumors of mutiny spread quickly.” Promise then
ties this unrest to the
Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a fresh
interpretation of why the
colonists adopted the agreement and why it was
so democratic: “To avoid
rebellion, the Pilgrim leaders made a remarkable
concession to the other
colonists. They issued a call for every male on
board, regardless of religion or
economic status, to join in the creation of a
‘civil body politic.’ ” The compact
achieved its purpose: the majority acquiesced.
Among the Pilgrims’ sources of information about
New England were probably
the maps of Samuel de Champlain, including this
chart of Patuxet (Plymouth)
when it was still an Indian village, before
the plague of 1617.
Actually, the hijacking hypothesis does not showthe
Pilgrims in such a bad
light. The compact provided a graceful solution to
an awkward problem.

Although hijacking and false representation doubtless were
felonies then as now,
the colony did survive with a lower death
rate than Virginia, so no permanent
harmwas done. The whole storyplaces the
Pilgrims in a somewhat dishonorable
light, however, which may explain why only one
textbook selects it.
The “navigation error” story lacks plausibility:
the one parameter of ocean
travel that sailors could and did measure
accurately in that era was latitude—
distance north or south from the equator.
The “storms” excuse is perhaps still
less plausible, for if a storm blew them off course,
when the weather cleared they
could have turned southwardagain, sailing out to
sea to bypass any shoals. They
had plenty of food and beer, after all.50
But storms and pilot error leave the
Pilgrims pure of heart, which may explain why
most textbooks choose one of the
two.
Regardless of motive, the Mayflower Compact
provided a democratic basis
for the Plymouth colony. Since the framers of
our Constitution in fact paid the
compact little heed, however, it hardly
deserves the attention textbook authors
lavish on it. But textbook authors clearly want to
package the Pilgrims as a pious
and moral band who laid the antecedents of our

democratic traditions.Nowhere
is this motive more embarrassingly obvious
than in John Garraty’s American
History. “So far as any record shows, this was
the first time in human history
that a group of people consciously created a
government where none had existed
before.” Here Garraty paraphrases a Forefathers’
Day speech, delivered in
Plymouth in 1802, in which John Adams
celebrated“the only instance in human
history of that positive, original social compact.”
George Willison has dryly
noted that Adams was “blinking several salient
facts—above all, the
circumstances that prompted the compact, which was
plainly an instrument of
minority rule.”51 Of course, Garraty’s paraphrase
also exposes his ignorance of
the Republic of Iceland, the Iroquois Confederacy,
and countless otherpolities
antedating 1620. Such an account simply
invites students to become
ethnocentric.
In their pious treatment of the Pilgrims, history
textbooks introduce the
archetype of American exceptionalism—the notion
that the United States is
different from—and better than—all othernations on
the planet. How is America
exceptional? Well, we’re exceptionally good,
for one thing. As Woodrow
Wilson put it, “America is the only idealistic nation
in the world.” 52 And we’re
exceptionally strong and hardy, too: as we face

the future, in the words of The
American Pageant, “the world’s oldest republic had an
extraordinary tradition of
resilience and resourcefulness to draw on.” (Never
mind that tiny San Marino
may have formed as a republic in AD 301, Iceland
became a republic in 930, and
Switzerland around 1300.) These stellar
qualities are evident from the
“beginning,” here at Plymouth Rock, according to
our textbooks. The Pilgrims
“were equipped,” Boorstin and Kelley inform
us, “with just the right
combination of hopes and fears, optimism and
pessimism, self-confidence and
humility to be successful settlers. And this was
one of the most fortunate
coincidences in our history.” Such a happy
portrait of the Pilgrims can be
painted only by omitting the facts about the plague,
the possible hijacking, and
their Indian relations.
To highlight that happy picture, textbooks
underplay Jamestown and the
sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of
Plymouth Rock as the
archetypal birthplace of the United States.
Virginia, according to T. H. Breen,
“ill-served later historians in search of the mythic
origins of American culture.”
53 Historianscould hardly tout Virginia as moral
in intent, for, in the words of

the first history of Virginia written by a
Virginian: “The chief Design of all
Parties concern’d was to fetch away the Treasure
from thence, aiming more at
sudden Gain, than to form any regular
Colony.” 54 The Virginians’ relations
with American Indians were particularly unsavory:
in contrast to Squanto, a
volunteer, the English in Virginia took Indian
prisoners and forced them to teach
colonists how to farm.55 In 1623 the English
indulged in the first use of
chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating
a treaty with tribes near the
Potomac River, headed by Chiskiack. The English
offered a toast “symbolizing
eternal friendship,” whereupon the chief, his
family, advisors, and two hundred
followers dropped dead of poison.56 Besides,
the early Virginians engaged in
bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their
earlydays digging random
holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold
instead of planting crops. Soon
they were starving and digging up putrid Native
corpses to eat or renting
themselves out to American Indian families as
servants—hardly the heroic
founders that a greatnation requires. 57
Textbooks indeed cover the Virginia colony,
and they at least mention the
Spanish settlements, but they still devote 50
percent more space to
Massachusetts. As a result, and owing also to
Thanksgiving, of course, students

are much more likely to remember the Pilgrims as
our founders.58 They are then
embarrassed when I remind them of
Virginia and the Spanish, for when
prompted, students do recall having heard of
both.But neither our culture nor
our textbooks give Virginia the same archetypal status
as Massachusetts. That is
why almost all my students know the name of
the Pilgrims’ ship, while almost
no students remember the names of the three
ships that brought the English to
Jamestown. (For the next timeyou’re on Jeopardy!
they were Susan Constant,
Discovery , and Godspeed.)
Despite having ended up many miles from
other European enclaves, the
Pilgrims hardly “started from scratch” in a
“wilderness.” Throughout southern
New England, Native Americans had repeatedly
burned the underbrush, creating
a parklike environment. After landing at
Provincetown, the Pilgrims assembleda
boat for exploring and began looking around for
their new home. They chose
Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields,
recently planted in corn,and its
useful harbor and “brook of freshwater.” It
was a lovely site for a town. Indeed,
until the plague, it had been a town, for
“New Plimoth” was none other than
Squanto’s village of Patuxet. The invaders followed a

pattern: throughout the
hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in
the middle of Native populations—
Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout
New England, colonists
appropriated American Indian cornfields for their
initial settlements, avoiding
the backbreaking laborof clearing the land of forest
and rock.59 (This explains
why, to this day, the names of so many towns
throughout the region—
Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in field.)
“Errand into the wilderness”
may have made a lively sermon title in 1650,
a popular book title in 1950, and an
archetypal textbook phrase in 2000, but it
was never accurate. The new settlers
encountered no wilderness: “In this bay wherein
we live,” one colonist noted in
1622, “in former time hath livedabout two
thousand Indians.” 60
Moreover,not all the Native inhabitants had
perished, and the survivors now
facilitatedEnglish settlement. The Pilgrims began
receiving Indian assistance on
their second full day in Massachusetts. A
colonist’s journal tells of sailors
discovering two American Indian houses:
Having their guns and hearing nobody, they entered
the houses and found
the people were gone. The sailors took somethings
but didn’t dare stay. .
. . We had meant to have left somebeads
and otherthings in the houses

as a sign of peace and to show we meant
to trade with them. But we
didn’t do it because we left in such haste.
But as soon as we can meet
with the Indians, we will pay them well for what we
took.
It wasn’t only houses that the Pilgrims robbed.
Our eyewitness resumes his
story:
We marched to the place we called Cornhill,
where we had found the
corn before. At another place we had seen before,
we dug and found
somemore corn,two or threebaskets full, and a bag of
beans. . . . In all
we had about ten bushels, which will be enough
for seed. It was with
God’s help that we found this corn,for how else
could we have done it,
without meeting someIndians who might trouble
us.
From the start, the Pilgrims thanked God,
not the American Indians, for
assistance that the latter had (inadvertently) provided—
setting a pattern for later
thanksgivings. Our journalist continues:
The next morning, we found a place like a
grave. We decided to dig it up.
We found first a mat, and under that a fine

bow. . . . We also found
bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We
took several of the prettiest
things to carryawaywith us, and covered the body up
again.61
A place “like a grave”!
Although Karen Kupperman says the Pilgrims
continued to rob graves for
years,62 more help camefrom a live Indian, Squanto.
Here my students return to
familiar turf, for they have all learned the
Squanto legend. Land of Promise
provides a typical account:
Squanto had learned their language, he explained,
from English
fishermen who ventured into the New England waters
each summer.
Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn,
squash, and pumpkins.
Would the small band of settlers have survived
without Squanto’s help?
We cannot say. But by the fall of 1621,
colonists and Indians could sit
down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to
God (later celebrated
as the first Thanksgiving).
What do most books leave out about
Squanto? First, how he learned English.
According to Ferdinando Gorges, around 1605 an
English captain stole Squanto,
who was then still a boy, along with four Penobscots
and took them to England.

There Squanto spent nine years, three in
the employ of Gorges. At length,
Gorges helped Squanto arrange passage back to
Massachusetts. Some historians
doubt that Squanto was among the five Indians
stolen in 1605.63 All sources
agree, however, that in 1614 an English slave
raider seized Squanto and two-
dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery
in Málaga, Spain. What
happened next makes Ulysses look like a homebody.
Squanto escaped from
slavery, escaped from Spain, and made his way
back to England. After trying to
get home via Newfoundland, in 1619 he talked
Thomas Dermer into taking him
along on his next trip to Cape Cod.
It happens that Squanto’s fabulous odyssey provides a
“hook” into the plague
story, a hook that our textbooks choose
not to use. For now Squanto set foot
again on Massachusetts soil and walked to his
home village of Patuxet, only to
make the horrifying discovery that “he was the sole
member of his village still
alive. All the others had perished in the
epidemic two years before.” 64 No
wonder Squanto threw in his lot with the
Pilgrims.
Now that is a story worth telling! Compare
the pallid account in Land of

Promise: “He had learned their language from English
fishermen.” 65
As translator,ambassador, and technical advisor,
Squanto was essential to the
survival of Plymouth in its first two years. Like
otherEuropeans in America, the
Pilgrims had no idea what to eat or how to raise
or find food until American
Indians showed them. William Bradford called
Squanto “a special instrument
sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.
He directed them how to set
their corn,where to take fish, and to procure
othercommodities, and was also
their pilot to bring them to unknown places for
their profit.” Squanto was not the
Pilgrims’ only aide: in the summer of 1621
Massasoit sent another Indian,
Hobomok, to live among the Pilgrims for several
years as guide and
ambassador.66
“Their profit” was the primary reason most
Mayflower colonists made the trip.
As Robert Moore has pointed out, “Textbooks
neglect to analyze the profit
motive underlying much of our history.” 67
Profit, too, came from American
Indians, by way of the fur trade, without which
Plymouth would never have paid
for itself. Hobomok helped Plymouth set up fur-
trading postsat the mouth of the
Penobscot and Kennebec rivers in Maine; in
Aptucxet, Massachusetts; and in
Windsor, Connecticut.68 Europeans had neither the

skill nor the desire to “go
boldly where none dared go before.” They went to
the Indians.69
Squanto’s travels acquainted him with more of
the world than any Pilgrim
encountered. He had crossed the Atlantic perhaps
six times, twice as an English
captive, and had livedin Maine, Newfoundland, Spain,
and England, as well as
Massachusetts.
All this brings us to Thanksgiving. Throughout
the nation every fall,
elementary-school children reenact a little
morality play, The First
Thanksgiving, as our national origin myth,
complete with Pilgrim hats made out
of construction paper and Indian braves with
feathers in their hair. Thanksgiving
is the occasion on which we give thanks to
God as a nation for the blessings that
He [sic] hath bestowed upon us. More than
any other celebration, more even
than such overtly patriotic holidays as
Independence Day and Memorial Day,
Thanksgiving celebrates our ethnocentrism.We have
seen, for example, how
King James and the early Pilgrim leaders gave
thanks for the plague, which
proved to them that God was on their side.
The archetypes associated with
Thanksgiving—God on our side, civilization
wrested from wilderness, order

from disorder, through hard work and good Pilgrim
character traits—continue to
radiate from our history textbooks. Many
decades ago, in an analysis of how
American history was taught in the 1920s, Bessie
Pierce pointed out the political
uses to which Thanksgiving is put: “For these
unexcelled blessings, the pupilis
urged to follow in the footsteps of his
forbears, to offer unquestioning obedience
to the law of the land, and to carryon the work
begun.” 70
Thanksgiving dinner is a ritual, with all the
characteristics that Mircea Eliade
assigns to the ritual observances of origin
myths:
1. It constitutes the history of the acts of
the founders, the Supernaturals.
2. It is considered to be true.
3. It tells how an institutioncameinto existence.
4. In performing the ritual associated with
the myth, one “experiences
knowledge of the origin” and claims one’s
patriarchy.
5. Thus one “lives” the myth, as a religion.71
My Random House dictionary lists as its main
heading for the Plymouth
colonists not Pilgrims but Pilgrim Fathers. Until
recently, the Library of

Congress similarly cataloged its holdings for Plymouth
under Pilgrim Fathers,
and of course fathers was capitalized, meaning
“fathers of our country,” not of
Pilgrim children. Thanksgiving has thus moved from
history into the field of
religion, “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah has
called it. To Bellah, civil religions
hold society together. Plymouth Rockachieved iconographic
status around 1880,
when some enterprising residents of the town
rejoined its two pieces on the
waterfront and built a Greek templet around it.
The templet became a shrine, the
Mayflower Compact became a sacred text, and
our textbooks began to play the
same function as the Anglican Book of Common
Prayer, teaching us the
meaning behind the civil rite of Thanksgiving. 72
The religious character of Pilgrim history shines
forth in an introduction by
Valerian Paget to William Bradford’s famous
chronicle Of Plimoth Plantation:
The eyes of Europe were upon this little English handful
of unconscious
heroes and saints, taking courage from them
step by step. For their
children’s children the same ideals of Freedom
burned so clear and
strong that . . . the little episode we
have just been contemplating,
resulted in the birth of the United States of
America, and, above all, of
the establishment of the humanitarian ideals it

typifies, and for which the
Pilgrims offered their sacrifice upon the altar of the
Sonship of Man.73
In this invocation, the Pilgrims supply not only
the origin of the United States,
but also the inspiration for democracy in Europe
and perhaps for all goodness in
the world today! I suspect that the original
colonists, Separatists and Anglicans
alike, would have been amused.
The civil ritual we practice marginalizes Native
Americans. Our archetypal
image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the
groaning boards in the woods, with
the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best next to
their almost naked Indian
guests. As a holiday greeting card puts it, “I is
for the Indians we invited to share
our food.” The silliness of all this reaches its
zenith in the handouts that
schoolchildren have carried home for decades,
complete with captions such as,
“They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and
squash. The Indians had never
seen such a feast!” When Native American
novelist Michael Dorris’s son
brought home this “information” from his New
Hampshire elementary school,
Dorris pointed out that “the Pilgrims had literally
never seen ‘such a feast,’ since
all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous

to the Americas and had been
provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.” 74
This notion that “we” advanced peoples provided for
the Natives, exactly the
converse of the truth, is not benign. It
reemerges time and again in our history to
complicate race relations. For example, we are told
that white plantation owners
furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet
every shred of food, shelter,
and clothing on the plantations was raised, built,
woven, or paid for by black
labor. Today Americans believe as part of
our political understanding of the
world that we are the most generous nation on
earth in terms of foreign aid,
overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow
from almost every Third World
nation runs toward the United States.
The true history of Thanksgiving reveals
embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did
not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had
observed autumnal harvest
celebrations for centuries. Although George
Washington did set aside days for
national thanksgiving, our modern celebrations date
back only to 1863. During
the CivilWar, when the Union needed all the
patriotism that such an observance
might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed
Thanksgiving a national holiday.
The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until
the 1890s did they even get
included in the tradition. For that matter, they were

not commonly known as “the
Pilgrims” until the 1870s.75
The ideological meaning American history has
ascribed to Thanksgiving
compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving
legend makes Americans
ethnocentric. After all, if our culture has God
on its side, why should we
consider othercultures seriously? This ethnocentrism
intensified in the middle of
the last century. In Race and Manifest Destiny,
Reginald Horsman has shown
how the idea of “God on our side”was used to
legitimize the open expression of
Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-à-vis Mexicans,Native
Americans, peoples of the
Pacific, Jews, and even Catholics.76 Today,
when textbooks promote this
ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave
students less able to learn
from and deal with people from othercultures.
On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship.
In 1970, for example, the
Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked
the Wampanoags to select a
speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of
the Pilgrims’ landing. Frank James
“was selected, but first he had to showa copy of
his speech to the white people
in charge of the ceremony.When they saw what he
had written, they would not

allow him to read it.” 77 James had written:
Today is a time of celebrating for you . .
. but it is not a time of
celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart
that I look back upon what
happened to my People. . . . The Pilgrims
had hardly explored the shores
of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed
the graves of my
ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and
beans. . . . Massasoit, the
greatleader of the Wampanoag, knew thesefacts;
yet he and his People
welcomed and befriended the settlers . . .
little knowing that . . . before
50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags . . .
and otherIndians living near
the settlers would be killed by their guns or
dead from diseases that we
caught from them. . . . Although our way of
life is almost gone and our
language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags
still walk the lands of
Massachusetts. . . . What has happened cannot
be changed, but today we
work toward a better America, a more Indian
America where people and
nature once again are important.78
What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce
censored was not some
incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing
James would have said, had he
been allowed to speak, was false, excepting
the word wheat. Most of our

textbooks also omit the facts about grave
robbing, Indian enslavement, and so
on, even though they were common knowledge in
colonial New England. Thus
our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a
process of gaining perspective
but of deliberate forgetting. Instead of these
important facts, textbooks supply
the feel-good minutiae of Squanto’s helpfulness, his
name, the fish in the corn-
hills, sometimes even the menu and the
number of American Indians who
attended the prototypical first Thanksgiving.
I have focused here on untoward detail only
because our histories have
suppressed everything awkward for so long.
The Pilgrims’ courage in setting
forth in the late fall to make their way on a
continent new to them remains
unsurpassed. In their first year the Pilgrims, like the
American Indians, suffered
from diseases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half of
them died. It was not
immoral of the Pilgrims to have taken over
Patuxet. They did not cause the
plague and were as baffled as to its origin
as the stricken Indian villagers.
Massasoit was happy that the Pilgrims were using
the bay, for the Patuxet, being
dead, had no more need for the site. Pilgrim-Indian
relations started reasonably
positively. The newcomers did eventually pay

the Wampanoags for the corn they
had dug up and taken. Plymouth, unlike many
other colonies, usually paid
Indians for the land it took.In someinstances
Europeans settled in Indian towns
because Natives had invited them, as protection
against another tribe or a nearby
competing European power. 79 In sum, U.S.
history is no more violent and
oppressive than the history of England, Russia,
Indonesia, or Burundi—but
neither is it exceptionally less violent.
The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad
history but honest and
inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled
to give moral instruction,
the way origin myths have always done,
they could accomplish this aim by
allowing students to learn both the “good” and
the “bad” sides of the Pilgrim
tale. Conflict would then become part of the story,
and students might discover
that the knowledge they gain has implications for
their lives today. Correctly
taught, the issues of the era of the first
Thanksgiving could help Americans grow
more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than
more ethnocentric. Ironically,
Plymouth, Massachusetts, the place where the
myth began, now provides a
model. Native Americans and non-Native allies
did not take the suppression of
Frank James’s speech in 1970 lyingdown. That
year and every Novembersince,
they have organized a counter-parade—“the National

Day of Mourning”—that
directly negates the traditional Thanksgiving
celebration. After years of conflict,
Plymouth agreed to allow both parades and also
paid for two new historical
markers telling the Wampanoag’s side of the story.
Textbooks need to learnfrom Plymouth.Origin myths
do not come cheaply. To
glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial
omissions and the invented details
with which our textbooks retail the Pilgrim
archetype are close cousins of the
overt censorship practiced by the Massachusetts
Department of Commerce in
denying Frank James the right to speak. Surely,
in history, “truth should be held
sacred, at whatever cost.”
4.
RED EYES
To understand the making of Anglo-America is
impossible without close and sustained attention to
its
indigenous predecessors, allies, and nemeses.
—JAMES AXTELL1
The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other
Europeans would question the morality of their

enterprise. They therefore [prepared] . . .
quantities of
propaganda to overpower their own
countrymen’s
scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard
form as an ideology with conventional assumptions
and
semantics. We live with it still.
—FRANCIS JENNINGS2
Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I
could not
have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3
There is not one Indian in the whole of
this country who
does not cringe in anguish and frustration
because of
thesetextbooks. There is not one Indian child
who has
not come home in shame and tears.
—RUPERT COSTO4
Old myths never die—they just become embedded in
the
textbooks.

—THOMAS BAILEY5
HISTORICALLY, AMERICAN INDIANS have
been the most lied-about
subset of our population. That’s why Michael
Dorris said that, in learning about
Native Americans, “Onedoes not start from pointzero,
but from minus ten.” 6
High school students start below zero because of
their textbooks, which
unapologetically present Native Americans
through white eyes. Today’s
textbooks should do better, especially since
what historians call Indian history
(though really it is interracial) has flowered
sincethe 1970s, and the information
on which new textbooks might be based
currently rests on library shelves.
Textbooks’ treatment of Native peoples has
improved in recent years. In 1961
the bestselling Rise of the American Nation
contained ten illustrations featuring
Native people, alone or with whites (of 268
illustrations); most of thesepictures
focused on the themes of primitive life and savage
warfare. Twenty-five years
later, the retitled Triumph of the American Nation
contained fifteen illustrations
of American Indians; more important, no longer
were Native Americans
depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather,
they were people who
participated in struggles to preserve their identities

and their land. Included were
Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus Attucks (first
casualty of the Revolution, who
was also part black in ancestry), Sequoyah (who
invented the Cherokee
alphabet), and Navajo code-talkers in World War II.
In 2003, the successor,Holt
American Nation, had forty-three illustrations of
American Indians. Some other
textbooks published after 2000 continue this
trend of giving more attention to
Native Americans. The Americans stands out
for its honest coverage of someof
the events this chapter will treat, and American
Journey, the middle-school
textbook, is closebehind.
Nevertheless, the authors of American history
textbooks still “need a crash
course in cultural relativism and ethnic
sensitivity,” as James Axtell put it in
1987. Even The Americans, the best of thesebooks,
devotes its first two pages to
a reproduction of Benjamin West’s 1771
painting, Penn’s Treaty with the
Indians. Painted almost a century after the
event, West followed the usual
convention of depicting fully clothed Europeans—
even with hats, scarves, and
coats—presenting tradegoods to nearly naked
Americans. In reality, of course,
no two groups of people have ever been dressed so
differently at one spot on the

earth’s surface on the same day. The artistdidn’t
really try to portray reality. He
meant to show“primitive” (American Indian)
and “civilized” (European).
A nearly naked American Indian shakes
William Penn’s hand, sculpted in
sandstone in the United States Capitol. Having
been in Philadelphia in August, I
can report that if this negotiation occurred then,
Penn was near death through
heat exhaustion. Having also been in
Philadelphia after Thanksgiving, I can
report that if this negotiation took place in
winter, the Natives were suffering
from frostbite.
Axtell also criticizes textbooks for still using
such terms as half-breed,
massacre, and war-whooping.7 Reserving milder terms
such as frontier initiative
and settlers for whites is equally biased. If
we cast off our American-ness and
imagine we come from, say, Botswana, this
typical sentence (from The
American Journey) appears quitejarring: “In 1637 war
broke out in Connecticut
between settlers and the Pequot people.” Surely
the Pequots, having lived in
villages in Connecticut probably for thousands of
years, are “settlers.” The
English were newcomers, having been therefor at
most threeyears; traders set

up camp in Windsor in 1634. Replacing
settlers by whites makes for a more
accurate but “unsettling” sentence. Invaders is more
accurate still, and still more
unsettling.
Even worse are the authors’ overall interpretations,
which continue to be
shackled by the “conventional assumptions and
semantics” that have
“explained” Indian-white relations for centuries,
according to Axtell. Textbook
authors still writehistory to comfort descendants of
the “settlers.”
Our journey into a more accurate history of
American Indian peoples and their
relations with European and African invaders cannot
be a happy excursion.
Native Americans are not and must not be props
in a sort of theme park of the
past, where we go to have a good time and see
exotic cultures. “What we have
done to the peoples who were living in North
America” is, according to
anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.”8 If we
look Indian history squarely
in the eye, we are going to get red eyes.This is
our past, however, and we must
acknowledge it. It is time for textbooks to send
white children home, if not with
red eyes,at least with thought-provoking questions.
Mostof today’s textbooks at least try to be
accurate about American Indian
cultures. Thirteen of the eighteen textbooks I

surveyed begin by devoting more
than five pages to precontact Native societies.9
From the start, however,
American Indian societies pose a problem for
textbooks.10 Their authors are
consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology,
ethnobotany, linguistics, physical
anthropology, folklore studies, cultural anthropology,
ethnohistory, and other
related disciplines. Scholars in these fields
can tell us much, albeit tentatively,
about what happened in the Americas before
Europeans and Africans arrived.
Unfortunately, the authors of history textbooks
treat archaeology et al. as dead
disciplines to be mined for answers. These
fields study dead people, to be sure,
but they are alive with controversy. Every year
headlines appear about charcoal
possibly forty thousand years old found in
cooking fires in Brazil, new datesfor
an archaeological dig in Pennsylvania, or more
speculative claims that somenew
human remain, artifact, or idea hails from
China, Europe, or Africa. In 2007
came evidence that a comet may have exploded in
the earth’s atmosphere
thirteen thousand years ago, setting much of
North America on fire. Possibly the
resulting firestorm killed off the larger mammals,
like horses and mastodons,
and decimated the human population.11

“Possibly,” however, does not fit with textbook
style, which is to present
definitive answers. Only The American Adventure
admits uncertainty: “This
page may be out of date by the time it is read.”
Adventure goes on to present
competing claims that humans have been in the
Americas for twelve thousand,
twenty-one thousand, and forty thousand years. As a
result, although Adventure
is one of the oldest of all the textbooks I
surveyed, its pre-Columbian pages have
not gone out of date.12 Most othertextbooks retain
their usual authoritative tone.
Regardingthe date of the first human settlementof
the Americas, estimates vary
from twelve thousand years before the present to
more than seventy thousand
BP.13 Some scientists believe that the original
settlers camein successive waves
over thousands of years; genetic similarities
convince others that most Natives
descendedfrom a single small band.14 Most
textbook authors simply choose one
date and present it as undisputed fact. Some
newer books add “probably,” as in:
people “probably followed the animal herds,” from
Holt American Nation. But
then, like the others, they supply one date for
students to memorize.
Authors need to go further. Walking across
Beringia (the isthmus across the
Bering Strait) is only a hypothesis. They ought
to give othertheories, including
boats, a hearing. They would not have to do all

the work themselves, either, but
could set students loose on the Web and in
the library, arming them and their
teachers with ideas about what to look for
and how to assess reputed new
findings. The school year might then begin with a
debate among students who
have chosen different dates and routes—each
marshaling evidence from
glottochronology (dating linguistic changes), genetics,
archaeology, and other
disciplines to bolster their conclusion.
Students would be excited. They would
realize, at the start, that history still remains to
be done—that it is not just an
inert body of facts to be memorized.
We can see the absence of intellectual excitement
from the beginning. How
did people get here? Every book says
something like this, from Boorstin and
Kelley:
So much of the earth’s water had frozen
into ice that it lowered the level
of the sea in the Bering Strait. Then as they
tracked wild game they could
walk across the 56 miles from Siberia to
Alaska. Without knowing it,
they had discovered two largecontinentsthat were
completely empty of
people but were full of wild game. . . .
In the thousands of years

afterwards many other groups followed. These
small bands spread all
across North and South America.
Actually, while most scholars still accept a
“Beringia” crossing, archaeological
evidence is slim, and more and more
archaeologists believe boat crossings,
accidental or purposeful, may have been the
method. After all, people got to
Australia at least forty thousand years ago, and no
matter how much ice piledup
on land during the Ice Age, you could never
walk to Australia, across the deep
ocean divide known as Wallace’s Line. Of
course, archaeologists have unearthed
no evidence of boats anywhere in the world
dating back more than ten thousand
years. But then, no artifacts survive from so long
ago otherthan stone tools, and
no humans were ever so primitive as to fashion
stone boats. Absence of evidence
is not evidence of absence. 15
Textbook writers like Beringia, I believe, because it
fits their overall storyline
of unrelenting progress. The people themselves
are pictured as primitive
savages, vaguely Neanderthalian. This archetype—not
very bright, enmeshed in
wars with nature and otherhumans—probably underlies
authors’ certainty that
they must have walked. Unlike us, the
original Americans didn’t have to be
intelligent—they just had to walk.16 And they
certainly weren’t bright, for

“without knowing it, they had discovered two large
continents.” This is a
startling assertion. Somehow our authors, writing at
least eleven thousand years
after the fact, know what thesefirst settlers thought—or,
rather, know that they
did not thinkthey had reached new continents. John
Garraty’s American History
makes the same claim: “They did not know
that they were exploring a new
continent.” Now, continent means “a large
land mass, surrounded by water.”
How could humans confront the vastness of
Canada—itself larger than Australia
—and not know they were exploring a largeland
mass? These first settlers must
have been stunningly stupid.17
The depiction of mental dullness persists as Garraty
tells of “the wanderers”
who “moved slowly southwardand to the east. . .
. Many thousand years passed
before they had spread over all of North and
South America.”Actually, many
archaeologists believe that people reached most parts of
the Americas within a
thousand years, far too rapidly to allow easy
archaeological determination of the
direction and timing of their migration.
Archaeological findsdo not growolder
as we move northwest through the Yukon and
across Alaska.18 Moreover,even
if the first Americans did arrive on foot,

they were just as surely explorers as
Columbus.
Garraty drones on, continuing to imply that
the first settlers were rather dim:
“None of the groups made much progress in
developing simple machines or
substituting mechanical or even animal power
for their own muscle power.” But
this was not the Americans’ “fault.” No “animal
power” was available. For that
matter, in Europe and Asia before 1769, most
“simple machines” depended on
horses, oxen, water buffalo, mules, or cattle—
beasts unknown in the Americas.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
suggests that the availability of at
least someof theseanimals for domestication was a
critical factor in developing
not only machines but also the division of laborwe
call “civilization.”19
All of the textbooks are locked into the old
savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized
school of anthropology dating back to L.
H. Morgan and Karl Marx around
1875. Their authors may well have encountered
such thinking in anthropology
courses when they were undergraduates; it is no
longer taught today, however.
Garraty exemplifies the evolutionary stereotype:
“Those who planted seeds and
cultivated the land instead of merely hunting and
gathering food were more
secure and comfortable.” Apparently he has not
encountered the “affluent

primitive” theory, which persuaded anthropologists
some forty years ago that
gatherer-hunters livedquitecomfortably. American History
then makes an even
sillier mistake: “These agricultural people were
mostly peaceful, though they
could fight fiercely to protect their fields.
The hunters and wanderers, on the
otherhand, were quitewarlike because their need to
move about brought them
frequently into conflict with other groups.” Here
Garraty conflates civil and
civilization . Decades ago, most anthropologists
challenged this outmoded
continuum, determining that hunters and gatherers
were relatively peaceful,
compared to agriculturalists, and that modern
societies were more warlike still.
We have only to remember the history of the
twentieth century to see at once
that violence can increase with civilization.
Most textbooks do confer civilization on some
Natives—the Aztecs, Incas,
and Mayans—based on the premise, embraced by
the Spanish conquistadors
themselves, that wealth equals civilization. In
the words of The American
Adventure : “Unlike the noncivilized peoples of
the Caribbean, the Aztec were
rich and prosperous.” Boorstin and Kelley cannot
easily concede even that
much. After devoting a page to the advanced

civilizations of the Mayans, Incas,
and Aztecs, Boorstin and Kelley proceed to put
them down: “Unlike the peoples
of Europe, they had not built shipsto crossthe oceans.
They had not reached out
to the world. In their isolation they found it
hard to learnnew ways. When the
Spanish came, it seemed that the Incas, the
Mayas and the Aztecs had ceased to
progress. They were ripe for conquest.”
Among otherthings, that paragraph is simply bad
history. In fact, the rate of
change was accelerating in the Western Hemisphere
before the Spanish came.
The Incas had taken less than the previous
century to assemble their huge
empire. The Aztecs had come to dominate central
Mexico by alliance and force
still more recently.
To Boorstin and Kelley, the Natives to the north
in what is now the United
States lagged even further behind the
“unprogressive” Aztecs, Mayans, and
Incas. Of course, if Boorstin and Kelley had
looked around the world in 1392,
they would have seen no such decisive
differences between American and
European cultures. This is a secular form of
predestination: historians observe
that peoples were conqueredand come up with
reasons why that was right. In
sociology we call this “blaming the victim.” The
authors of The American
Pageant take the same approach:

Unlike the Europeans, who would soon arrive
with the presumption that
humans had dominion over the earth and with the
technologies to alter
the very face of the land, the Native Americans
had neither the desire nor
the means to manipulate nature aggressively. .
. . They were so thinly
spread across the continent that vast areaswere
virtually untouchedby a
human presence. In the fateful year 1492,
probably no more than 4
million Native Americans padded through the
whispering, primeval
forests and paddled across the sparkling virgin
waters of North America.
They were blissfully unaware that the historic isolation of
the Americas
was about to end forever.
This passage exemplifies the unfortunate results
when publishers try to keep a
legacy text in print forever. These clichés about
Native Americans were known
to be false in 1956, when Bailey wrote
the first edition of this seemingly ageless
text. Chapter 3 shows what is wrong with
this wilderness scenario. For one
thing, the numbers are all wrong. In the central
valley of Mexico alone lived
about twenty-five million people. In the rest of
North America lived perhaps

twenty million more. Furthermore, the image of
the moccasined Indian
“padding” through the virgin forest won’t do; a
majority of Native Americans in
what is now the United States farmed. Pageant
originated more than half a
century ago and is now in its thirteenth
printing. In 1956, it may have been
written by its “author,” Thomas Bailey. Who
wrote the current edition is
anyone’s guess.
In the late 1990s, someone—certainly not Bailey,
long deceased, and probably
not either of the other two listed authors—
realized that the book needed to
mention the Columbian Exchange and the post-1492
epidemics that decimated
American Indians. As a result, a later page
tells of these staggering population
declines, without acknowledging the contradiction
between that passage and this
one. Thomas Bailey’s own book thus proves him right:
“Old myths never die—
they just become embedded in the textbooks.”
Boorstin and Kelley are even less
competent; they still omit the Columbian Exchange
entirely.
Even the best textbooks cannot resist contrasting
“primitive” Americans with
modern Europeans. Part of the problem is that
the books are really comparing
rural America to urban Europe—Massachusetts to
London. Comparing
Tenochtitlan (nowMexico City)to rural Scotland might

produce a very different
impression, for when Cortés arrived,
Tenochtitlan was a city of one hundred
thousand to three hundred thousand, whose central
market was so busy and
noisy “that it could be heard more than four
miles away,” according to Bernal
Díaz, who accompanied Cortés.20 It would be
even better if authors could
forsake the entire primitive-to-civilized continuum
altogether. After all, from the
perspective of the average inhabitant, life may
have been just as “advanced” and
far more pleasant in Massachusetts or Scotland as in
Aztec Mexico or London.
For a long timeNative Americans have been
rebuking textbook authors for
reserving the adjective civilized for European cultures. In
1927 an organization
of Native leaders called the Grand Council
Fire of American Indians criticized
textbooks as “unjust to the life of our people.”
They went on to ask, “What is
civilization? Its marks are a noble religion
and philosophy, original arts, stirring
music, rich story and legend. We had these.
Then we were not savages, but a
civilized race.”21
Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures
reinforces ethnocentrism so
long as it does not challenge the primitive-to-

civilized continuum. This
continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of
civilized in everyday
conversation—“refined or enlightened”—with “having a
complex division of
labor,” the only definition that anthropologists
defend. When we consider the
continuum carefully, it immediately becomes
problematic. Was the Third Reich
civilized, for instance? Mostanthropologistswould answer
yes. In what ways do
we prefer the civilized Third Reich to the
more primitive Arawak society that
Columbus encountered? If we refuse to label
the Third Reich civilized, are we
not using the term to mean “polite,
refined”? If so, we must consider the
Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider
Columbus and his Spaniards
primitive, if not savage. Ironically, societies
characterized by a complex division
of labor are often marked by inequality
and support large specialized armies.
Precisely these “civilized” societies are likely to
resort to savage violence in
their attempts to conquer “primitive” societies.22
Thoughtless use of the terms civilized and
civilization blocks any real inquiry
into the worldview or the social structure of
the “uncivilized” person or society.
In 1990 President George H. W. Bush
condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait
with the words, “The entire civilized world is
against Iraq”—an irony, in that
Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates valleys are the earliest

known seat of civilization.
The three new “from scratch” textbooks in
my sample of new histories do a
somewhat better job than the legacy texts. They
recognize diversity among
Native societies. They tell about the League of
Five Nations among the Iroquois
in the Northeast, potlatches among the
Northwestern coastal Indians, cliff
dwellings in the Southwest, and caste divisions
among the Natchez in the
Southeast. In the process of presenting ten or
twenty different cultures in six or
eightpages, however, textbooks can hardly reach a
high level of sophistication.
So they seize upon the unusual. No matter
that the Choctaws were more
numerous and played a much larger role in
American history than the Natchez—
they were also more ordinary. Students will not
find among the Native
Americans portrayed in their history textbooks many
“regular folks” with whom
they might identify.
After contact with Europeans and Africans,
American Indian societies
changed rapidly. Native Americans took into their
cultures not only guns,
blankets, and kettles, but also new foods, ways of
building houses, and ideas
from Christianity. MostAmerican history textbooks

emphasize the changes in
only one group, the Plains Indians. The rapid
efflorescence of this colorful
culture after the Spaniards introduced the horse to
the American West supplies
an exhilarating example of syncretism—blending
elements of two different
cultures to create something new.23 The
transformation in the Plains cultures,
however, was only the tip of the cultural-change
iceberg. An even more
profound metamorphosis occurred as Europeans
linked Native peoples to the
developing world economy. This process continues to
affect formerly
independent cultures to this day. In the early
1970s, for example, Lapps in
Norway replaced their sled dogs with
snowmobiles, only to find themselves
vulnerable to Arab oil embargoes.24 In the 1990s
many Native American groups
gained not onlywealth but also new respect from
their non-Native neighbors
when their new casinos and hotels connected them to
the world economy. This
connecting seems inevitable, hence perhaps is
neither to be praised nor decried
—but it should not be ignored, because it is
crucial to understanding how
Europeans took over America.
In Atlantic North America, members of Indian
nations possessed a variety of
sophisticated skills, from the ability to weave
watertight baskets to an
understanding of how certain plants can be used to

reduce pain. At first, Native
Americans traded corn,beaver, fish, sassafras, and
othergoods with the French,
Dutch, and English, in return for axes,blankets,
cloth, beads, and kettles. Soon,
however, Europeans persuaded Natives to specialize in
the fur and slavetrades.
Native Americans were better hunters and
trappers than Europeans, and with the
guns the Europeans sold them, they became better
still. Other Native skills began
to atrophy. Why spend hours making a
watertight basket when in one-tenth the
time you could trap enough beavers to tradefor a
kettle? Even agriculture, which
the Native Americans had shown to the
Europeans, declined, because it became
easier to tradefor food than to growit. Everyone
acted in rational self-interest in
joining such a system—that is, Native
Americans were not mere victims—
because everyone’s standard of living improved, at
least in theory.
Some of the rapid changes in eastern Indian
societies exemplify syncretism.
When the Iroquois combined European guns and
Native American tactics to
smash the Hurons, they controlled their own culture
and chose which elements
of European culture to incorporate, which to
modify, which to ignore. Native
Americans learned how to repair guns, cast
bullets, buildstronger forts, and fight

to annihilate.25 Native Americans also became
well known as linguists, often
speaking two European languages (French, English, Dutch,
Russian, or Spanish)
and at least two American Indian languages.
English colonists sometimes used
Natives as interpreters when dealing with the
Spanish or French, not just with
otherNative American nations.
These developments were not all matters of happy
economics and voluntary
syncretic cultural transformation, however. Natives
were operating under a
military and cultural threat, and they knew it.
They quickly deduced that
European guns were more efficient than their bowsand arrows.
Europeans soon
realized that trade goods could be used to
win and maintain political alliances
with American Indian nations. To deal with the new
threat and because whites
“demanded institutions reflective of their own
with which to relate,” many
Native groups strengthened their tribal
governments.26 Chiefs acquired power
they had never had before. These governments
often ruled unprecedentedly
broad areas, because the heightened warfare
and the plagues had wiped out
smaller tribes or caused them to merge
with larger ones for protection. Large
nations became ethnic melting pots, taking in
whites and blacks as well as other
Indians. New confederations and nations developed,
such as the Creeks,

Seminoles, and Lumbees. 27 The tribes also
became more male-dominated, in
imitation of Europeans or because of the
expanded importance of war skills in
their cultures.28
Tribes that were closest to the Europeans got
guns first, guns that could be
trained on interior peoples who had not yet
acquired any. Suddenly somenations
had a greatmilitary advantage over others. The result
was an escalation of Indian
warfare. Native nations had engaged in conflict
before Europeans came, of
course. Tribes rarely fought to the finish,
however. Some tribes did not want to
take over the lands belonging to othernations, partly
because each had its own
sacred sites. For a nation to exterminate its
neighbors was difficult anyway, since
all enjoyed roughly the same level of military
technology. Now all this changed.
European powers deliberately increased the level of
warfare by playing one
Native nation off another. The Spanish, for
example, used a divide-and-conquer
strategy to defeat the Aztecs in Mexico. In
Scotland and Ireland, the English had
played tribes against one another to extend
British rule. Now they did the same
in North America.29
Like African slaves, Indian slaves escaped when

they could. This notice comes
from the Boston Weekly News-Letter for October 4,
1739.
For many tribes the motive for the increased
combat was the enslavement of
otherNatives to sell to the Europeans for more
guns and kettles. As northern
tribes specialized in fur, certain southern tribes
specialized in people. Some
Native Americans had enslaved each otherlong before
Europeans arrived. Now
Europeans vastly expanded Indian slavery.30 I
had expected to find in our
textbooks the cliché that Native Americans did
not make good slaves, but only
two books, Triumph of the American Nation and
The American Tradition, say
even that. American History buries a sentence, “A
few Indians were enslaved,”
in its discussion of the African slavetrade.
Otherwise, the textbooks are silent on
the subject of the Native American slavetradein
what is now the United States
—except for one surprising standout. The American
Pageant contains a
paragraph that tells how the Carolina colonists enlisted
the coastal Savannah
Indians to bring them slaves from the
interior, making “manacled Indians . . .
among the young colony’s major exports.” Pageant
goes on to tell how Indian
captives wound up enslaved in the West Indies
and New England.31
Europeans’ enslavement of Native Americans

has a long history. Ponce de
Leon went to Florida not really to seek the
mythical fountain of youth; his main
business was to seek gold and capture slaves for
Hispaniola.32 In New England,
Indian slavery led directly to African slavery:
the first blacks imported there, in
1638, were brought from the West Indies in
exchange for Native Americans
from Connecticut.33 On the eve of the New York City
slaverebellion of 1712, in
which Native and African slaves united, about
one resident in four was enslaved
and one slavein four was American Indian. A 1730
census of South Kingston,
Rhode Island, showed 935 whites, 333 African
slaves, and 223 Native American
slaves.34
As Pageant (alone) implies, the center of Native
American slavery, like
African American slavery, was South Carolina. Its
population in 1708 included
3,960 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400
Indian slaves, and 120 indentured
servants, presumably white. These numbers do
not reflect the magnitude of
Native slavery, however, because they omit the export
trade. From Carolina, as
from New England, colonists sent enslaved American
Indians (who might
escape) to the West Indies (where they could
never escape), in exchange for

enslaved Africans. Charleston shipped more than ten
thousand Natives in chains
to the West Indies in one year.35 Farther west,
so many Pawnee Indians were
sold to whites that Pawnee became the name
applied in the plains to all slaves,
whether they were of Indian or African origin.36
On the West Coast, Pierson
Reading, a manager of John Sutter’s huge
grant of Indian land in central
California, extolled the easy life he led in 1844:
“The Indians of California make
as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in
the south.” In the Southwest,
whites enslaved Navajos and Apaches right up to
the middle of the CivilWar.37
Intensified warfare and the slave trade rendered
stable settlements no longer
safe, helping to de-agriculturize Native Americans.
To avoid being targets for
capture, American Indians abandoned their
cornfields and their villages and
began to live in smaller settlements from which
they could more easily escape to
the woods. Ultimately, they had to trade with
Europeans even for food.38 As
Europeans learned from Natives what to growand
how to growit, they became
less dependent upon Indians and Indian
technology, while American Indians
became more dependent upon Europeans
and European technology.39 Thus,
what worked for the Native Americans in the
shortrun worked against them in
the long.In the long run, it was Indians who were

enslaved, Indians who died,
Indian technology that was lost, Indian cultures
that fell apart. By the time the
pitiful remnant of the Massachuset tribe converted to
Christianity and joined the
Puritans’ “praying Indian towns,” they did so in
response to an invading culture
that told them their religion was wrong and Christianity
was right. This process
exemplifies what anthropologists call cultural
imperialism. Even the proud
Plains Indians, whose syncretic culture combined
horses and guns from the
Spanish with Native art, religion, and hunting styles,
showed the effects of
cultural imperialism: the Sioux word for white
man, wasichu, means “one who
has everything good.” 40
The textbook Life and Liberty is distinguished by
its graphic presentation of
change in Native societies. It confronts students
with this provocative pair of
illustrations and asks, “Which shows Indian
life before Europeans arrived and
which shows Indian life after? What
evidence tells you the date?” Thus Life and
Liberty helps students understand that Europeans
did not “civilize” or “settle”
“roaming” Indians, but had the opposite impact.
To be anthropologically literate about culture
contact, students should be

familiar with the terms syncretism and cultural
imperialism, or at least the
concepts they denote. None of the textbooks I
studied mentions either term, and
most of them tell little about the process of cultural
change, again except for the
Plains Indian horse culture, which, as a
consequence, comes across as unique.
Even the best of the new textbooks are short on
analysis. They don’t treat the
crucial importance of incorporation into the global
economy, which helps to
explain why sometimes Europeans traded and
coexisted with Natives and other
times merely attacked them. Nor do they tell
how contact worked to de-skill
Native Americans.
Just as American societies changed when they
encountered whites, so
European societies changed when they encountered
Natives. Textbooks
completely miss this side of the mutual
accommodation and acculturation
process.41 Instead, their view of white-
Indian relations is dominated by the
archetype of the frontier line. Textbooks present
the process as a moving line of
white (and black) settlement—American Indians
on one side, whites (and
blacks) on the other. Pocahontas and Squanto
aside, the Natives and Europeans
don’t meet much in textbook history, except as

whites remove Indians farther
west. In reality, whites and Native Americans
in what is now the United States
worked together, sometimes lived together, and
quarreled with each other for
325 years, from the first permanent Spanish
settlement in 1565 to the end of
Sioux and Apache autonomy around 1890.
The term frontier hardly does justice to this
process, for it implies a line or
boundary. Contact, not separation, was the rule.
Frontier also locates the
observer somewhere in the urban East, from
which the frontier is “out there.”
Textbook authors seemnot to have encountered the
trick question, “Which came
first, civilization or the wilderness?” The answer is
civilization, for only the
“civilized” mind could define the world of
Native farmers, fishers, and gatherers
and hunters, coexisting with forests, crops, and
animals, as a “wilderness.”
Calling the area beyond secure European control
frontier or wilderness makes it
subtly alien. Such a viewpoint is intrinsically
Eurocentric and marginalizes the
actions of nonurban people, both Native and non-
Native.42
The band of interaction was amazingly
multicultural. In 1635 “sixteen
different languages could be heard among
the settlers in New Amsterdam,”
languages from North America, Africa, and Europe.43In
1794, when the zone of

contact had reached the eastern Midwest, a single
northern Ohio town, “the
Glaize,” was made up of hundreds of Shawnee,
Miami, and Delaware Indians;
British and French traders and artisans; several
Nanticokes, Cherokees, and
Iroquois; a few African American and white
American captives; and whites who
had married into or been adopted by Indian
families. The Glaize was truly
multicultural in its holidays, observing Mardi
Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, the
birthday of the British queen, and American Indian
celebrations.44 In 1835,
when the contact area was near the West Coast,
John Sutter, with permission of
the Mexican authorities, recruited Native Americans
to raise his wheat crop;
operate a distillery, a hat factory, and a blanket
company; and builda fort (now
Sacramento). Procuring uniforms from Russian
traders and officers from
Europe, Sutter organized a two-hundred-man
Indian army, clothed in tsarist
uniforms and commanded in German!45
Our history textbooks still obliterate the interracial,
multicultural nature of
frontier life. Boorstin and Kelley tell us, “A focus
of community life was the fort
built by John Sutter,” but they never mention that
the “community” was largely
American Indians. American History devotes almost a

page to Sutter’s Fort
without ever hinting that Native Americans were
anything other than enemies:
“Gradually he built a fortified town, which
he called Sutter’s Fort. The entire
place was surrounded by a thickwall 18 feet
high (about 6 meters) topped with
cannon for protection against unfriendly Indians.”
No reader would infer from
that account that friendly Indians built the fort.
Historian Gary Nash tells us that interculturation took
place from the start in
Virginia, “facilitated by the fact that some
Indians lived among the English as
day laborers, while a number of settlers fled to
Indian villages rather than endure
the rigors of life among the autocratic English.”46
Indeed, many white and black
newcomers chose to live an American Indian
lifestyle. In his Letters from an
American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de
Crévecoeur wrote, “There must be
in the Indians’ social bond somethingsingularly
captivating, and far superior to
be boasted of among us; for thousands of
Europeans are Indians, and we have no
examples of even one of those Aborigines
having from choice become
Europeans.” 47 Crévecoeur overstated his case:
as we know from Squanto’s
example, some Natives chose to live among
whites from the beginning. The
migration was mostly the otherway, however. As
Benjamin Franklin put it, “No
European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards

bear to live in our
societies.”48
Europeans were always trying to stop the
outflow. Hernando de Soto had to
post guards to keep his men and women from
defecting to Native societies. The
Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it
a crime for men to wear long
hair. “People who did run away to the Indians
might expect very extreme
punishments, even up to the death penalty,” Karen
Kupperman tells us, if caught
by whites.49 Nonetheless, right up to the end of
independent Native nationhood
in 1890, whites continued to defect, and
whites who lived an Indian lifestyle,
such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in
white society.
Communist Eastern Europe erected an Iron
Curtain to stop its outflow but
could never explain why, if communist
societies were the most progressive on
earth, they had to prevent people from
defecting. American colonial
embarrassment similarly went straight to the heart
of their ideology, also an
ideology of progress. Textbooks in Eastern Europe
and the United States have
handled the problem in the same way: by omitting
the facts. Not one American
history textbook mentions the attraction of Native

societies to European
Americans and African Americans.
African Americans frequently fled to American
Indian societies to escape
bondage. What did whites find so alluring?
According to Benjamin Franklin,
“All their government is by Counsel of the Sages.
There is no Force; thereare no
Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or
inflict Punishment.” Probably
foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native
societies in the eastern United
States attracted the admiration of European
observers.50 Frontiersmen were
taken with the extent to which Native
Americans enjoyed freedom as
individuals. Women were also accorded more status
and power in most Native
societies than in white societies of the time,which
white women noted with envy
in captivity narratives. Although leadershipwas
substantially hereditary in some
nations, most American Indian societies north of
Mexico were much more
democratic than Spain, France, or even
England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. “There is not a Man in
the Ministry of the Five Nations,
who has gain’d his Office, otherwise than by
Merit,” waxed Lt. Gov.
Cadwallader Colden of New York in 1727. “Their
Authority is only the Esteem
of the People, and ceases the Moment that Esteem
is lost.” Colden applied to the
Iroquois terms redolent of “the natural rights of

mankind”: “Here we see the
natural Origin of all Power and Authority among
a free People.”51
Indeed, Native American ideas are partly
responsible for our democratic
institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of
liberty, fraternity, and equality
found their way to Europe to influence social
philosophers such as Thomas
More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau. These European thinkers
then influenced Americans such as Franklin,
Jefferson, and Madison.52 In recent
years historians have debated whether
American Indian ideas may also have
influenced our democracy more directly. Through
150 years of colonial contact,
the Iroquois League stood before the colonies as
an object lesson in how to
govern a largedomain democratically.The terms
used by Lt. Gov. Colden find
an echo in our Declaration of Independence fifty
years later.
After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians
at Bushy Run in 1763, he
demanded the release of all white captives. Most
of them, especially the
children, had to be “bound hand and foot”and
forcibly returned to white society.
Meanwhile, the Native prisoners “went back to
their defeated relations with

great signs of joy,” in the words of the
anthropologist Frederick Turner (in
Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls
these scenes “infamous and
embarrassing.”
In the 1740s the Iroquois wearied of dealing
with several often bickering
English colonies and suggested that the colonies
form a union similar to the
league. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin, who had spent
much time among the
Iroquois observing their deliberations, pleaded with
colonial leaders to consider
his Albany Plan of Union: “It would be a
strange thingif six nations of ignorant
savages should be capable of forming a scheme
for such a union and be able to
execute it in such a manner as that it has
subsisted ages and appears insoluble;
and yet that a like union should be
impracticable for ten or a dozen English
colonies.”53
The colonies rejected the plan. But it was a
forerunner of the Articles of
Confederation and the Constitution. Both the
Continental Congress and the
Constitutional Convention referred openly to
Iroquois ideas and imagery. In
1775 Congress formulated a speech to the
Iroquois, signed by John Hancock,
that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. “The

Six Nations are a wise people,”
Congress wrote, “let us harken to their council
and teach our children to follow
it.” 54
As a symbol of the new United States,
Americans chose the eagle clutching a
bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle
and the arrows were symbols of
the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily
broken, no one can break six
(or thirteen) at once.
John Mohawk has argued that American Indians are
directly or indirectly
responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free
speech, democracy, and “all
those things which got attached to the Bill of
Rights.” Without the Native
example, “do you really believe that all those
ideas would have found birth
among a people who had spent a millennium
butchering otherpeople because of
intolerance of questions of religion?”55 Mohawk
may have overstated the case
for Native democracy, since heredity played a
major role in officeholding in
many American Indian societies. His case is
strengthened, however, by the fact
that wherever Europeans went in the Americas, they
projected monarchs (“King
Philip”) or other undemocratic leaders ontoNative
societies. To some degree,
this projecting was done out of European self-

interest, so they could claim to
have purchased tribal land as a result of dealing
with one person or faction. The
practice also betrayed habitual European thought:
Europeans could not believe
that nations did not have such rulers, sincethat was
the only form of government
they knew.
For a hundred years after our Revolution,
Americans credited Native
Americans as a source of their democratic
institutions. Revolutionary-era
cartoonists used images of American Indians to
represent the colonies against
Britain. Virginia’s patriot rifle companies wore Indian
clothes and moccasinsas
they fought the redcoats. When colonists took action
to oppose unjust authority,
as in the Boston Tea Party or the antirent
protests against Dutch plantations in
the Hudson River valley during the 1840s,
they chose to dress as American
Indians, not to blame Indians for the
demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol
identified with liberty.56
Of course, Dutch traditions influenced Plymouth as
well as New York. So did
English common law and the Magna Carta.
American democracy seems to be
another example of syncretism, combining ideas
from Europe and Native
America. The degree of Native influence is hard to
specify, sincethat influence
came through several sources. Textbooks might

present it as a soft hypothesis
rather than hard fact. But they should not leave it
out. In all the textbooks I
surveyed, discussion of any intellectual influence of
Native Americans on
European Americans was limited to a single
caption in one book, Discovering
American History, beneath a wampum belt paired
with Benjamin Franklin’s
famous cartoon of a divided, hence dying
snake. “Franklin’s Albany Plan might
have been inspired by the Iroquois League” is the
caption. “The wampum belt
expresses the unity of tribes achieved through
the League. Compare it with
Franklin’scartoon.” The otherbooks are silent.
But, then, textbooks leave out most
contributions of Native Americans to
American culture. Our regional cuisines—the dishes
that make American food
distinctive—often combine Indian with European and
African elements.
Examples range from New England pork and beans
to New Orleans gumbo to
Texas chili.57 Mutual acculturation between Native
and African Americans—
owed to shared experience in slavery as
well as escapes by blacks to Native
communities—accounts for soul food being part
Indian, from corn bread and
grits to greens and hush puppies.58 Native place
names dot our landscape, from

Okefenokee to Alaska. Native farming methods
were not “primitive.” Farmers in
some tribes drew two or three times as much
nourishment from the soil as we
do.59 Place names, too, showintellectual
interchange. Whites had to be asking
Indians, “Where am I?” “What is this place
called?” “What is that animal?”
“What is the name of that mountain?”
Although textbooks “appreciate” Native cultures,
the possibility of real
interculturation, especially in matters of the
intellect, is foreign to them. This is a
shame, for authors thereby ignore much of
what has made America distinctive
from Europe. In a travel narrative, Peter Kalm
wrote in 1750, “The French,
English, Germans, Dutch, and otherEuropeans, who
have livedfor several years
in distant provinces, near and among the
Indians, grow so like them in their
behavior and thought that they can only be
distinguished by the difference of
their color.”60 In the famous essay, “The
Frontier in American History,”
Frederick Jackson Turner told how the frontier masters
the European, “strips off
the garments of civilization,” and requires him to be
an Indian in thought as well
as dress. “Before longhe has gone to planting
Indian corn and plowing with a
sharp stick.” Gradually he builds somethingnew,
“but the outcome is not the old
Europe.” It is syncretic; it is American.61

Acknowledging how aboriginal we are culturally—how
the United States and
Europe, too, have been influenced by Native
American as well as European
ideas—would require significant textbook rewriting. If
we recognized American
Indians as important intellectual antecedents of
our political structure, we would
have to acknowledge that acculturation has been a
two-way street, and we might
have to reassess the assumption of primitive Indian
culture that legitimizes the
entire conquest.62 In 1970 the Indian Historian
Press produced a critique of our
histories, Textbooks and the American Indian. One of
the press’s yardsticks for
evaluating books was the question, “Does the
textbook describe the religions,
philosophies, and contributions to thought of the
American Indian?” 63
Unfortunately, the answer must still be no.
In the nineteenth century, Americans knew of
Native American contributions to
medicine. Sixty percent of all medicines patented in
the century were distributed
bearing Indian images, including Kickapoo Indian
Cough Cure, Kickapoo Indian
Sagwa, and Kickapoo Indian Oil. In this century,
America has repressed the
image of Indian as healer.
Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as

a unitary whole. The
American Way describes Native American religion in
these words: “These
Native Americans [in the Southeast] believed
that nature was filled with spirits.
Each form of life, such as plants and
animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held
spirits too. People were never alone. They shared
their lives with the spirits of
nature.” Way is trying to show respect for
Native American religion, but it
doesn’t work. Stated flatly like this, the beliefs
seemlike make-believe, not the
sophisticated theology of a higher civilization.
Let us try a similarly succinct
summary of the beliefs of many Christians today:
“These Americans believed
that one greatmale god ruledthe world. Sometimes
they divided him into three
parts, which they called father, son, and holy
ghost. They ate crackers and wine
or grape juice, believing that they were eating
the son’s body and drinking his
blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would
live on forever after they
died.”
Textbooks never describe Christianity this way.
It’s offensive. Believers would
immediately argue that such a depiction fails to
convey the symbolic meaning or
the spiritual satisfaction of communion.

Textbooks could present American Indian
religions from a perspective that
takes them seriously as attractive and persuasive
belief systems.64 The
anthropologist Frederick Turner has pointed out that
when whites remark upon
the fact that Indians perceive a spirit in every
animal or rock, they are
simultaneously admitting their own loss of a deep
spiritual relationship with the
earth. Native Americans are “part of the
total living universe,” wrote Turner;
“spiritual health is to be had only by accepting
this condition and by attempting
to live in accordance with it.” Turner contends
that this life view is healthier than
European alternatives: “Ours is a shockingly
dead view of creation. We
ourselves are the only things in the universe to
which we grant an authentic
vitality, and because of this we are not fully
alive.”65 Thus, Turner shows that
taking Native American religions seriously might
require reexamination of the
Judeo-Christian tradition. No textbook would suggest
such a controversial idea.
Similarly, textbooks give readers no clue as to
what the zone of contact was
like from the Native side. They emphasize
Native Americans such as Squanto
and Pocahontas, who sided with the invaders. And
they invert the terms,
picturing white aggressors as “settlers” and often
showing Native settlers as

aggressors. “The United States Department of
Interior had tried to give each
tribe both land and money,” says The American Way,
describing the U.S. policy
of forcing tribes to cede most of their
land and retreat to reservations. Whites
were baffled by Native ingratitude at being
“offered” this land, Way claims:
“White Americans could not understand the
Indians. To them, owning land was
a dream come true.” In reality, whites of
the time were hardly baffled. Even Gen.
Philip Sheridan—who is notorious for having said,
“The only good Indian is a
dead Indian”—understood. “We took away their
country and their means of
support, and it was for this and against this they
made war,” he wrote. “Could
anyone expect less?”66 The textbooks have turned
history upside down.
Let us try a right-side-up view. “After King
Philip’s War, there was
continuous conflict at the edge of New England. In
Vermont the settlers worried
about savages scalping them.” This description is
accurate, provided the reader
understands that the settlers were Native American,
the scalpers white. Even the
best of our American history books fail to show
the climate of white actions
within which Native Americans on the border
of white control had to live. It was

so bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the
Catawbas in North Carolina
“fled in every direction” in 1786 when a
solitary white man rode into their
village unannounced. And the Catawbas were a
friendly tribe!67
From the opposite coast, here is a storythat
might help make such dispersal
understandable: “An old white settler told his
son who was writing about life on
the Oregon frontier about an incident he
recalled from the cowboys and Indians
days. Some cowboys cameupon Indian families
without their men present. The
cowboys gave pursuit, planning to rape the
squaws, as was the custom. One
woman, however, pushed sand into her vagina to
thwart her pursuers.”68 The act
of resistance is what made the incident
memorable. Otherwise, it was entirely
ordinary. Such ordinariness is what our
textbooks leave out. They do not
challenge our archetypal Laura Ingalls Wilder
picture of peaceful white settlers
suffering occasional attacks by brutal Indians. If
they did, the fact that so many
tribes resorted to war, even after 1815
when resistance was clearly doomed,
would become understandable.
Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre shows a motif
common in nineteenth-century
lithographs: Indians invading the sanctity of the

white settlers’ homes. Actually,
whites were invading Indian lands and oftenIndian
homes, but pictures such as
this, not the reality, remain the archetype.
Our history is full of wars with Native American
nations. “For almost two
hundred years,” notes David Horowitz, “almost
continuous warfare raged on the
American continent, its conflict more threatening than
any the nation was to face
again.” American Indian warfare absorbed 80
percent of the entire federal
budget during George Washington’s administration
and dogged his successors
for a century as a major issue and
expense. Yet most of my original twelve
textbooks barely mentioned the topic. The
American Pageant still offers a table
of “Total Costs and Number of Battle Deaths
of Major U.S. Wars” that
completely omits Indian wars. Pageant
includes the Spanish-American War,
according it a toll of 385 battle deaths, but
leaves out the Ohio War of 1790-95,
which cost 630 dead and missing U.S. troops in
a single battle, the Battle of
Wabash River.69
At least today’s textbooks no longer blame the
Natives for all the violence, as
did most textbooks written before the civil rights
movement. Historiansused to

say, “Civilizedwar is the kind we fight against them,
whereas savage war is the
atrocious kind that they fight against us.”70 Not
one of the eighteen history
books I examined portrays Natives as savages.
The authors of the newer books
are careful to admit brutality on both sides.
Some mention the massacres of
defenseless Native Americans at Sand Creek
and Wounded Knee. Like much of
our “knowledge” about Native Americans, the
“savage” stereotypederived not
only from old textbooks but also from our
popular culture—particularly from
Western movies and novels, such as the popular
“Wagons West” series by Dana
Fuller Ross. These paperbacks, which have
sold hundreds of thousands of
copies, claim boldly, “The general outlines of
history have been faithfully
followed.” Titled with state names, the
novels’ covers warn that “marauding
Indian bands are spreading murder and mayhem
among terror-stricken settlers.”
71 In the Hollywood West, wagon trains
were invariably encircled by savage
Indian hordes. Native Americans rode round
and round the “settlers,” while John
Wayne picked them off from behind wagon
wheels and boxes. Hollywood
borrowed the haplessly circling Indians from
Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West
Show, where they had to ride in a circle,
presenting a broadside target, because
they were in a circus tent!

In the real West, among 250,000 whites and
blacks who journeyed across the
Plains between 1840 and 1860, only 362 pioneers
(and 426 Native Americans)
died in all the recorded battles between the two
groups. Much more common,
American Indians gave the new settlers directions,
showed them water holes,
sold them food and horses, bought cloth
and guns, and served as guides and
interpreters.72 These activities are rarely depicted in
movies, novels, or our
textbooks. Inhaling the misinformation of the popular
culture, students have no
idea that Natives considered European warfare far
more savage than their own.
Mostnew textbooks do tell about New England’s first
Indian war, the Pequot
War of 1636-37, which provides a case study of
the intensified warfare
Europeans brought to America. Allied with the
Narragansetts, traditional
enemies of the Pequots, the colonists attacked at
dawn. Surrounding the Pequot
village, whose inhabitants were mostly
women, children, and old men, the
English set it on fire and shot those who tried
to escape the flames. William
Bradford described the scene: “It was a fearful
sight to see them thus frying in
the fire and the streams of blood quenchingthe
same, and horrible was the stink
and scentthereof; but the victory seemed a sweet
sacrifice, and they gave praise

thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully
for them.”73 The slaughter
shocked the Narragansetts, who had wanted merely to
subjugate the Pequots, not
exterminate them. The Narragansetts reproached
the English for their style of
warfare, crying, “It is naught, it is naught,
because it is too furious, and slaystoo
many men.” In turn, Capt. John Underhill
scoffed, saying that the Narragansett
style of fighting was “more for pastime, than to
conquer and subdue enemies.”
Underhill’s analysis of the role of warfare in
Narragansett society was correct,
and might accuratelybe applied to other tribes as
well. Through the centuries,
whites frequently accused their Native allies
of not fighting hard enough. The
Puritans tried to erasethe Pequots even from memory,
passing a law making it a
crime to say the word Pequot. Bradford
concluded proudly, “The rest are
scattered, and the Indians in all quarters are so
terrified that they are afraid to
give them sanctuary.”74 None of these
quotations entered our older textbooks,
which devoted just one and a quarter sentences to
this war on average. While no
new book quotes Bradford—theydon’t oftenquote
anyone!—they do tell how
the English colonists destroyed the Pequots. Perhaps as
a result, future college
students, unlike mine, will no longer come up
with savage when asked for five

adjectives that apply to Indians.
Today’s textbooks also give considerable attention to
perhaps the most violent
Indian war of all, King Philip’s War. This war began
in 1675, when white New
Englanders executed threeWampanoag Indians and
the Wampanoags attacked.
One reason for the end of peace was that the
fur trade, which had linked Natives
and Europeans economically, was winding down in
Massachusetts.75 Pathways
to the Present presents students with the Native
side of this conflict by quoting a
Native leader, Miantonomo: “Our fathers had plenty
of deer and skins, our plains
were full of deer, as also our woods, and of
turkeys, and our coves full of fish
and fowl. But theseEnglish having gotten our
land, they with scythes cut down
the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their
cows and horses eat the grass, and
their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall be
starved.” The Americans also
quotes Miantonomo, and several otherrecent books
do a decent job explaining
King Philip’s War, which is important, because
this was no minor war. “Of some
90 Puritan towns, 52 had been attacked and 12
destroyed,” according to Nash.
“At the end of the war several thousand English
and perhaps twice as many
Indians lay dead.”76 King Philip’s War cost more
American lives in combat,
Anglo and Native, in absolute terms than the
French and Indian War, the

Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or
the Spanish-American War.
In proportion to population, casualties were greater
than in any otherAmerican
war.77
War with American Indians started in New Mexico, in
1598, when residents
of Acoma pueblo killed thirteen Spanish
conquistadors who were trying to take
over their town.78 It spread to the Southeast
where, “because of fierce and
implacable Indian resistance, the Spanish were
unable to colonize Florida for
over a hundred years.”79 Except for a few minor
skirmishes, it ceased in 1890
with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Our histories
can hardly describe each war,
because there were so many. But precisely
because there were so many, to
minimize Indian wars misrepresents our history.
Most textbook maps, like that above, show
“French Territory,” “British
Territory,” “Spanish Territory,” and sometimes
“Disputed Territory,” with no
mention of Indians at all. In mapsthat include
Indian nations, such as the map
opposite from D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of
America (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), 1: 209, the function of
Indians as buffers between the
colonial powers is graphically evident.

We must also admit the Indian-ness of someof
our otherwars. From 1600 to
1754 Europe was often at war, including three
world wars—the War of the
League of Augsburg (1689-97), known in the
United States as King William’s
War; the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13),
known here as Queen
Anne’s War; and the War of the Austrian Succession
(1744-48), known here as
King George’s War. In North America the major
European powers, England,
France, and Spain, buffered from each other
by Indian land, fought mainly
through their Indian allies. Native Americans
inadvertently provided a gift of
relative peace to the colonies by absorbing the
shock of combat themselves.
Another world war, the Seven Years War (1754-
63), in the United States
called the French and Indian War, was also fought
in North America mostly by
Native Americans on both sides. Native
Americans not only fought in the
American Revolution but were its first cause,
for the Proclamation of 1763,
which placated Native American nations by
forbidding the colonies from making
land grants beyond the Appalachian continental
divide, enraged many colonists.
They saw themselves as paying to support a

British army that onlyobstructed
them from seizing Indian lands on the
western frontier. After hostilities with
Britain broke out, however, the fledgling United
Colonies in 1775 were initially
more concerned about relations with Indian nations
than with Europe, so they
sent Benjamin Franklin first to the Iroquois, then to
France.80 Native Americans
also played a large role in the War of 1812
and participated as well in the
Mexican War and the CivilWar.81 In each war Natives
fought mostly against
otherNatives. In each, the larger number aligned
against the colonies, later the
United States, correctly perceiving that, for
geopolitical reasons, opponents of
the United States offered them better
chances of being accorded human rights
and retaining their land.
Even in describing the French and Indian War,
sometextbooks leave out the
Indians! One of the worst defeats American
Indians ever inflicted on white
forces was the rout of General Braddock in 1755 in
Pennsylvania. Braddock had
1,460 men, including eight Indian scouts and a
detachment of Virginia militia
under George Washington. Six hundred to 1,000
Native Americans and 290
French soldiers opposed them, but you would
never guess any Indians were
there from The American Tradition: “On July 9, as

they were approaching the
fort, the French launched an ambush. Braddock’s
force was surrounded and
defeated. The red-coated British soldiers,
unaccustomed to fighting in the
wilderness [sic], suffered over 900 casualties.
Braddock, mortally wounded,
murmured as he died, “We shall know better
how to deal with them another
time.” Tradition thus renders Braddock’s last words
meaningless, for “them”
refers not to the French but to Native
Americans.
Above is one of many old lithographs that
show American Indians attacking
Braddock.Some textbooks today make the Indians
invisible.
Below is the image from The Americans in
2007 titled “The British general
Edward Braddock met defeat and death near Fort
Duquesne in 1755.” No one
could infer that Natives had anything to do with
his defeat from this image.
In our Revolution, most of the Iroquois Confederacy
sided with the British
and attacked white Americans in New York and
northern Pennsylvania. In 1778
the United States suffered a major defeat
when several hundred Tories and

Senecas routed 400 militia and regulars at Forty
Fort, Pennsylvania, killing 340.
After the Revolution, although Britain gave up,
its Native American allies did
not. Our insistence on treating the Indians as if
we had defeated them led to the
Ohio War of 1790-95 and later to the War of 1812.
The never-ending source of dispute was land.
To explain this constant
conflict, half of the textbooks I examined,including
several current ones, rely on
the cliché that Native Americans held some
premodern understanding of land
ownership. When students learn from
American Journey, for example, that the
Dutch “bought Manhattan from the Manhates
people for a small amount of
beads and other goods,” presumably they are
supposed to smile indulgently.
What a bargain! What foolish Indians, not to
recognize the potential of the
island! Not one book points out that the Dutch
paid the wrong tribe for
Manhattan. Doubtless the Canarsees, native to
Brooklyn, were quite pleased
with the deal which, just for the record, probably
didn’t involve beads at all, but
more than $2,400 worth of metal kettles, steel
knives and axes, guns, and
blankets, in today’s dollars. The Weckquaesgeeks,
who livedon Manhattan and
really owned it, weren’t so happy. For years
afterward they warred sporadically
with the Dutch. Perhaps the most famous street in
America, Wall Street, was

named for the wall the Dutch built to protect
New Amsterdam from the
Weckquaesgeeks, evidence that the Dutch hardly
imagined they had bought
Manhattan from its real owners. But our history
books leave out this part of the
story. The authors of one book, American
Pageant, may actually know that the
Dutch paid the wrong tribe. The way they phrase
it, however—the Dutch bought
“Manhattan Island from the Indians (who did not
actually ‘own’ it) for virtually
worthless trinkets”—again merely invites readers to
infer that Native Americans
did not believe in land ownershipand could not
bargain intelligently.82
Europeans were forever paying the wrong
tribe or paying a small faction
within a much larger nation. Often they
didn’t really care; they merely sought
justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions
might even have worked in
their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or
faction against another. The
biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe
took place in 1803. All the
textbooks tell how Jefferson “doubled the size of the
United States by buying
Louisiana from France.” Not one points out that it
was not France’s land to sell
—it was Indian land. The French never consulted
with the Native owners before

selling; most Native Americans never even knew
of the sale. Indeed, France did
not really sell Louisiana for $15 million. France
merely sold its claim to the
territory. The United States was still paying Native
American tribes for
Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century. We
were also fighting them for it:
the Army Almanac lists more than fifty Indian wars in
the Louisiana Purchase
from 1819 to 1890. To treat France as
the seller, as all our textbooks do, is
Eurocentric. Equally Eurocentric are the maps
textbooks use to showthe Lewis
and Clark expedition. Even the newest maps still
blandly label huge expanses
“Spanish Territory,” “British Territory,” and
“French Territory,” making Native
Americans invisible and implying that the United
States bought vacant land from
the French. Although the Mandans hosted the
expedition during the winter of
1804-05 and the Clatsops did so the next winter,
even these tribes drop out.
Apparently Lewis and Clark did it all on
their own.
Some recent textbooks still chide Natives
for not understanding that when
they sold their land, they transferred not only the
agricultural rights, but also the
rights to the property’sgame, fish, and sheer
enjoyment. “To Native Americans,
no one owned the land—it was therefor everyone to
use,”in the words of The
Americans. Nonsense! American Indians and

Europeans had about the same
views of land ownership, although Natives did
not think that individuals could
buy or sell, only whole villages. Authors seem
unaware that most land sales
before the twentieth century, including sales among
whites, transferred primarily
the rights to farm, mine, and otherwise
develop the land, not the right to bar
passage across it. Undeveloped private land was
considered public and
accessible to all, within limits of good conduct.83
Moreover, tribal negotiators
typically made sure that deeds and treaties
specifically reserved hunting, fishing,
gathering, and traveling rights to Native
Americans.84
Most textbooks do state that conflict over land
was the root cause of our
Indian wars. Pathways to the Present, for
example, begins its discussion of the
War of 1812 by telling how Tecumseh met with Gov.
William Henry Harrison
of Indiana Territory to complain about whites
encroaching upon Indian land.
Other recent textbooks likewise emphasize
conflict with the Indians, who were
seen as backed by the British, as the key cause
of this dispute. All along the
boundary, from Vermont to the Georgia Piedmont, white
Americans wanted to
push the boundary of white settlementever farther

into Indian country. This is a
significant change for the better; earlier
textbooks simply repeated the pretext
offered by the Madison administration—Britain’s refusal
to showproper respect
to American ships and seamen—even though it
made no sense. After all,
Britain’s maritime laws caused no war until the frontier
states sent War Hawks
— senators and representatives who promised
military action to expand the
boundaries of the United States—toCongress in
1810. Whites along the frontier
wanted the war, and along the frontier most of
the war was fought, beginning in
November 1811 when Harrison replied to
Tecumseh’s complaint by attacking
the Shawnees and allied tribes at the Battle
of Tippecanoe. The United States
fought five of the seven major land battles of
the War of 1812 primarily against
Native Americans.85
All but two textbooks miss the key result of
the war. Some authors actually
cite the “StarSpangled Banner” as the main outcome!
Others claim that the war
left “a feeling of pride as a nation” or
“helped Americans to win European
respect.” The American Adventure excels, pointing
out, “The American Indians
were the only real losers in the war.” Triumph of
the American Nation expresses
the same sentiments, but euphemistically: “After
1815 the American people
began the exciting task of occupying the

western lands.” All the other books
miss the key outcome: in return for our leaving
Canada alone, Great Britain gave
up its alliances with American Indian nations in
what would become the United
States. Without war materiel and otheraid from
European allies, future Indian
wars were transformed from major international
conflicts to domestic mopping-
up operations. This result was central to the
course of Indian-U.S. relations for
the remainder of the century. Thus Indian
wars after 1815, while they cost
thousands of lives on both sides, would never
again amount to a serious threat to
the United States.86 Although Native Americans
won many battles in
subsequent wars, therewas never the slightest
doubt over who would win in the
end.
Another result of the War of 1812 was the
loss of part of our history. As
historian Bruce Johansen put it, “A century of
learning [from Native Americans]
was coming to a close. A century and more of
forgetting—of calling history into
service to rationalize conquest—was
beginning.”87 After 1815 American
Indians could no longer play what sociologists
call the role of conflict partner—
an important otherwho must be taken into
account—so Americans forgot that

Natives had ever been significant in our
history. Even terminology changed:
until 1815 the word Americans had generally
been used to refer to Native
Americans; after 1815 it meant European
Americans.88
Ironically, several textbooks that omit King
Philip’s War and the Native
American role in the War of 1812 focus instead on
such minor Plains wars as
Geronimo’s Apache War of 1885-86, which
involved maybe forty Apache
fighters.89 The Plains wars fit the post-1815
story line of the textbooks, since
they pitted white settlers against semi-nomadic
Indians. The Plains Indians are
the Native Americans textbooks love to mourn:
authors can lament their passing
while considering it inevitable, hence
untroubling.
The textbooks also fail to show how the
continuous Indian wars have
reverberated through our culture. Carleton Beals
has written that “our
acquiescence in Indian dispossession has molded
the American character.”90 As
soon as Natives were no longer conflict partners,
their image deteriorated in the
minds of many whites. Kupperman has shown
how this process unfolded in
Virginia after the Indian defeat in the 1640s: “It
was the ultimate powerlessness
of the Indians, not their racial inferiority, which
made it possible to see them as

people without rights.”91 Natives who had been
“ingenious,” “industrious,” and
“quick of apprehension” in 1610 now became
“sloathfull and idle, vitious,
melancholy, [and] slovenly.”This is another
example of the process of cognitive
dissonance. Like Christopher Columbus, George
Washington changed his
attitudes toward Indians. Washington held positive
views of Native Americans
earlyin his life, but after unleashing attacks upon
them in the Revolutionary War
and the Ohio War in 1790, he would come to
denounce them as “animals of
prey.”92
This process of rationalization became unofficial
national policy after the War
of 1812. In 1845 William Gilmore Simms wrote,
“Our blinding prejudices . . .
have been fostered as necessary to justify the
reckless and unsparing hand with
which we have smitten [American Indians] in
their habitations and expelled
them from their country.” In 1871 Francis A. Walker,
Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, considered American Indians beneath
morality: “When dealing with
savage men, as with savage beasts, no question of
national honor can arise.”
Whatever action the United States cared to
take “is solely a question of
expediency.”93 Thus, cognitive dissonance destroyed

our national idealism.
From 1815 on, instead of spreading
democracy, we exported the ideology of
white supremacy. Gradually we sought American
hegemony overMexico, the
Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin,
and, indirectly, over other nations.
Although European nations professed to be shocked
by our actions on the
western frontier, before long they were emulating
us. Britain exterminated the
Tasmanian aborigines; Germany pursued total
war against the Herrero of
Namibia. Mostwestern nations have yet to face
this history. Ironically, Adolf
Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we
treated Native Americans than
American high schoolers today who rely on their
textbooks. Hitler admired our
concentration camps for American Indians in the
west and according to John
Toland, his biographer, “often praised to his
inner circle the efficiency of
America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven
combat” as the model for
his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom
people).94
Were therealternatives to this history of war? Of
course, therewere. Indeed,
France, Russia, and Spain all pursued different
alternatives in the Americas.
Since the alternatives to war remain roads
largely not taken in the United States,
however, they are tricky topics for historians. As
Edward Carr noted, “History is,

by and large, a record of what people did,
not of what they failed to do.”95 On
the otherhand, making the present seeminevitable
robs history of all its life and
much of its meaning. History is contingent
upon the actions of people. “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 memorable.96
White Americans chose among real
alternatives and were oftendivided among themselves.
At various points in our
history, our anti-Indian policies might have gone
another way. For example, one
reason the War of 1812 was so unpopular in
New England was that New
Englanders saw it as a naked attempt by
slaveowners to appropriate Indian land.
Peaceful coexistence of whites and Native
Americans presents itself as
perhaps the most obvious alternative to war,
but was it really possible? In
thinking about this question, we must take care not to
compare a static Indian
culture to changing modern culture. We have
seen the rapid changes in
independent Native cultures—giving up farming in
response to European
military actions, the flowering of multilingualism,
development of more formal

hierarchies, the entire Plains Indian culture.
Such changes would no doubt have
continued. Thus we are not talking about bow-
and-arrow hunters living side by
side with computerized urbanites.
We should keep in mind that the thousands of white
and black Americans who
joined American Indian societies must have
believed that coexistence was
possible. From the start,however, white conduct
hindered peaceful coexistence.
A thousand little encroachments eventually made
it impossible for American
Indians to farm near whites. Around Plymouth,the
Indians leased their grazing
land but retained their planting grounds. Too late
they found that this did not
keep colonists from letting their livestock roam
free to ruin the crops. When
Native Americans protested, they usually found
that colonial courts excluded
their testimony. On the other hand, “the Indian
who dared to kill an
Englishman’s marauding animals was promptly hauled
into a hostile court.”97
The precedent established on the Atlantic coast—that
American Indians were not
citizens of the Europeans’ state and lacked
legal rights—prevented peaceful
white-Indian coexistence throughout the colonies
and later the United States.
Even in Indian Territory, supposedly under Native
control, whether Indians were
charged with offenses on white land or whites on
Indian land, trial had to be held

in a white courtin Missouri or Arkansas, miles
away.98
Since many whites had a material interest in
dispossessing American Indians
of their land, and sinceEuropean and African populations
grew ever larger while
plagues continued to reduce the Native population,
plainly the United States was
going to rule. In this sense war only
prolonged the inevitable. Another
alternative to war would have been an express
commitment to racial harmony: a
predominantly European but nonracist United States
that did not differentiate
racially between Indians and non-Indians.99 U.S.
history provides several
examples of relatively nonracist enclaves. Sociologists
call them triracial
isolates because their heritage is white, black,
and red, as it were. For centuries
these communities occupied swamps and other
undesirable lands, wanting
mostly to be left alone. The Revolutionary War
hero Crispus Attucks, an escaped
slaveof Wampanoag, European, and African ancestry,
was a member of such an
enclave. The Lumbee Indians in North Carolina
comprise the largest of these
groups. Other triracial isolates include the
Wampanoags in Massachusetts, the
Seminolesin Florida, and smaller bands from
Louisiana to Maine.100

The first English settlement in North America,
Roanoke Island in 1585,
probably did not die out but was absorbed into the
nearby Croatoan Indians,
“thereby achieving a harmonious biracial society
that always eluded colonial
planters,” in the words of historian J. F. Fausz.
Eventually the English and
Croatoans may have become part of the Lumbees. The
English never learned the
outcome of the “Lost Colony,” however. Frederick
Turner has suggested that
they did not want to thinkabout the possibility
that English settlers had survived
by merging with Native Americans. Instead, Fausz
tells us, “tales of the ‘Lost
Colony’ cameto epitomize the treacherous nature of
hostile Indians and served
as the mythopoetic ‘bloody shirt’ for justifying
aggressions against the Powhatan
years later.” Triracial isolates have generally
won only contempt from their
white neighbors, which is why they have chosen
rural isolation. Our textbooks
isolate them, too: none mentions the term or the
peoples.101
A related possibility for Natives, Europeans,
and Africans was intermarriage.
Alliance through marriage is a common way for
two societies to deal with each
other, and Indians in the United States
repeatedly suggested such a policy.102
Spanish men married Native women in California
and New Mexico and

converted them to Spanish ways. French fur
traders married Native women in
Canada and Illinois and converted to Native ways.
Not the English. Textbooks
might usefully pass on to students the old
cliché—the French penetrated Indian
societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the
English expelled them—for it
offers a largely accurate summary of European-
Indian relationships.103 In New
England and Virginia, English colonists quickly moved
to forbid interracial
marriage. 104 Pocahontas stands as the first and
almost the last Native to be
accepted into British-American society, which we
may therefore call “white
society,” through marriage. After her, most
interracial couples found greater
acceptance in Native society. There their
children oftenbecame chiefs, because
their bicultural background was an asset in the
complex world the tribes now had
to navigate. 105 In Anglo society “half-breeds”
were not valued but stigmatized.
Another alternative to war was the creation of an
American Indian state within
the United States. In 1778, when the
Delaware Indians proposed that Native
Americans be admitted to the union as a
separate state, Congress refused even to
consider the idea.106 In the 1840s, Indian
Territory sought the right enjoyed by

other territories to send representatives to
Congress, but white Southerners
stopped them.107 The Confederacy won the backing of
most Native Americans
in Indian Territory, however, by promising to admit
the territory as a state if the
South won the CivilWar. After the war Native
Americans proposed the same
arrangement to the United States. Again the
United States said no, but eventually
admitted Indian Territory as the white-dominated
state of Oklahoma—ironically,
the name means [landfor] red people in
Choctaw.
Our textbooks pay no attention to any of these
possibilities. Instead, they
dwell on another road not taken: total one-
way acculturation to white society.
The overall story line most American history
textbooks tell about American
Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them;
they wouldn’t or couldn’t do it; so
we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic
than the account in earlier
textbooks, this account falls into the trap of
repeating as history the propaganda
used by policy makers in the nineteenth century
as a rationale for removal—that
Native Americans stood in the way of
progress. The only real difference is the
tone. Back when white Americans were doing
the dispossessing, justifications
were shrill. They denounced Native cultures as
primitive, savage, and nomadic.
Often writers invoked the hand or blessings of

God, said to favor those who “did
more” with the land.108 Now that the dispossessing is
done, our histories since
1980 can see more virtue in the conquered
cultures. But they still pictured
American Indians as tragically different, unable or
unwilling to acculturate.
When they stress Natives’ alleged unwillingness to
acculturate, American
histories slip into the story line of the official
seal of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony. “Come Over and Help Us” is white settler
propaganda, which grew into
an archetype of well-meaning Europeans and
tragically different Indians.
The trouble is, it wasn’t like that. The problem
was not Native failure to
acculturate. In reality, many European Americans
did not really want Indians to
acculturate. It wasn’t in their interest. At
times this was obvious, as when the
Massachusetts legislature in 1789 passed a
law prohibiting teaching Native
Americans how to read and write “under
penalty of death.” 109 President
Thomas Jefferson told a delegation of Cherokees
in 1808, “Let me entreat you
therefore, on the lands now given [sic] you to
begin every man a farm, let him
enclose it, cultivate it, builda warm house on
it, and when he dies let it belong to
his wife and children after him.”110 In reality,

the Cherokees already were
farmers who were visiting Jefferson precisely to ask
the president to assign their
lands to them in severalty (as individual
farms) and to make them citizens.111
Jefferson put them off. The American Way asks students,
“Why were the Indians
moved further west?” Its teachers’ edition
provides the answer: “They were
moved so the settlers could use the land for
growing crops.” We might add this
catechism: “What were the Indians doing
on the land?” “They were growing
crops!” When Jefferson spoke to the Cherokees,
whites had been burning Native
houses and cornfields for 186 years, beginning in
Virginia in 1622.
A census taken among the Cherokee in
Georgia in 1825 (reported in Vogel, ed.,
This Country Was Ours, 289) showed that they
owned “33 grist mills, 13 saw
mills, 1 powder mill, 69 blacksmith shops,
2 tan yards, 762 looms, 2,486
spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,923 plows, 7,683
horses, 22,531 black cattle,
46,732 swine, and 2,566 sheep.” Some
Cherokees were wealthy planters,
including Joseph Vann, who cultivated three
hundred acres, operated a ferry,
steamboat, mill, and tavern, and owned this
mansion. It aroused the envy of the
sheriff and other whites in Murray County,
who evicted Vann in 1834 and

appropriated the house for themselves, according to
Lela Latch Lloyd.
No matter how thoroughly Native Americans
acculturated, they could not
succeed in white society. Whites would not
let them. “Indians were always
regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to
live within white society except
on its periphery,” according to Nash.112 Native
Americans who amassed
property, owned European-style homes, perhaps
operated sawmills, merely
became the first targets of white thugs who
coveted their land and
improvements. In time of war the position of
assimilated Indians grew
particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During
the French and Indian
War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white
towns, were hatcheted by their
neighbors, who then collected bounties from
authorities who weren’t careful
whose scalp they were paying for, so long as
it was Indian. Through the
centuries and across the country, this pattern
recurred. In 1860, for instance,
California ranchers killed 185 of the 800 Wiyots, a
tribe allied with the whites,
because they were angered by othertribes’ cattle
raids.113
The new textbooks do a splendid job telling

how the “Five Civilized
Tribes”—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks,
and Seminoles—
acculturated successfully, but were exiled to
Oklahoma anyway. Nevertheless,
authors never let these settled Indians
interfere with the traditional story line.
Forgetting how whites forced Natives to roam,
forgetting just who taught the
Pilgrims to farm in the first place, our culture
and our textbooks still stereotype
Native Americans as roaming primitive hunting
folk, hence unfortunate victims
of progress. As Boorstin and Kelley put it, “North
of Mexico, most of the people
lived in wandering tribes and led a simple
life. North American Indians were
mainly hunters and gatherers of wild food. An
exceptional few—in Arizona and
New Mexico—settled in one place and became
farmers.”
Ironically, to Native eyes,Europeans were the
nomads. As Chief Seattle put it
in 1855, “To us the ashes of our ancestors
are sacred and their resting place is
hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves
of your ancestors and
seemingly without regret.” In contrast, Indian
“roaming” consisted mainly of
moving from summer homes to winter homes
and back again.114
One way to understand why acculturation couldn’t
work for most Natives is to
imagine that the United States allowed lawless

discrimination against all people
whose last name starts with the letter L.
How long would we last? The first non-
L people who wanted our homes or jobs could
force us out, and we would be
without resources. People around us would
then blame us L people for being
vagrants. That is what happened to Native
Americans. In Massachusetts,
colonists were constantlytempted to pick quarrels with
Indian families because
the result was likely to be acquiring their
land.115 In Oregon, 240 years later, the
process continued. Ten thousand whites had moved
onto the Nez Percé
reservation by 1862, so a senator from Oregon
suggested that the United States
should remove the nation. Senator William
Fessendenof Maine pointed out the
problem: “There is no difficulty, I take it, in
Oregon in keeping men off the
lands that are owned by white men. But when
the possessor happens to be an
Indian, the question is changed altogether.”116
Without legal rights,
acculturation cannot succeed. Inmuttooyahlatlat, known
to whites as Chief
Joseph, said this eloquently: “We ask that the same
law shall work alike on all
men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by
the law. If a white man breaks
the law, punish him also. Let me be a free man—
free to travel, free to stop, free

to work, free to trade where I choose,
free to talk and think and act for
myself.”117 It was not to be. Mostcourts simply
refused to hear testimony from
Native Americans against whites. After noting
how non-Indians could rise
through the ranks of Native societies,
anthropologist PeterFarb summed up the
possibilities in white society: “At almost no
time in the history of the United
States, though, were the Indians afforded similar
opportunities for voluntary
assimilation.” 118 The acculturated Native simply
stood out as a target.
The authors of history textbooks occasionally
announce their intentions in
writing. In the teachers’ edition of The American
Way, for instance, Nancy
Bauer states: “It is the goal of this book that its
readers will understand America,
be proud of its strengths, be pleased in
its determination to improve, and
welcome the opportunity to join as active citizens
in The American Way.” That
the author could not possibly pay reasonable
attention to Indian history follows
logically. It is understandable that textbook authors
might writehistory in such a
way that descendants of the “settlers” can feel good
about themselves by feeling
good about the past. Feeling good is a human
need, but it imposes a burden that
history cannot bear without becoming simpleminded.
Casting Indian history as a
tragedy because Native Americans could not or

would not acculturate is feel-
good history for whites. By downplaying Indian
wars, textbooks help us forget
that we wrested the continent from Native Americans.
Today’s college students,
when asked to compile a list of U.S. wars,
never think to include Indian wars,
individually or as a whole. The Indian-white
wars that dominated our history
from 1622 to 1815 and were of considerable importance
until 1890 have mostly
disappeared from our national memory.
The answer to minimizing the Indian wars is
not maximizing them. Telling
Indian history as a parade of white villains
might be feel-good history for those
who want to wallow in the inference that
America or whites are bad. What
happened is more complex than that, however, so the
history we tell must be
more complex. Textbooks are beginning to reveal
someof the divisions among
whites that lent considerable vitality to the
alternatives to war. Several tell of
Roger Williams of Salem, who in the 1630s
challenged Massachusetts to
renounce its royalpatent to the land, asserting, “The
natives are the true owners
of it,” unless they sold it. (The Puritans
renouncedWilliams, and he fled to
Rhode Island.) 119 Mostauthors now mention Helen
Hunt Jackson, who in 1881

paid to provide copies of her famous indictment
of our Native American
policies, A Century of Dishonor, to every member
of Congress.120 All recent
textbooks tell how Andrew Jackson and John Marshall
waged a titanic struggle
over Georgia’s attempt to subjugate the Cherokees.
Chief Justice Marshall found
for the Cherokees, whereupon President Jackson
ignored the Court, reputedly
with the words, “John Marshall has made his
decision; now let him enforce it!”
But no textbook brings any suspense to the issue
as one of the dominant
questions throughout our first century as a nation.
None tells how several
Christian denominations—Quakers, Shakers, Moravians,
some Presbyterians—
and a faction of the Whig Party mobilized
public opinion on behalf of fair play
for the Native Americans.121 By ignoring the
Whigs, textbooks make the
Cherokee removal seem inevitable, another
example of unacculturated
aborigines helpless in the way of progress.
Native Americans would have textbooks
note that, despite all the wars, the
plagues, the pressures against their cultures,
American Indians still survive,
physically and culturally, and still have
government-to-government relations
with the United States. As recently as 1984, a
survey of American history
textbooks complained that “contemporary issues
important to Native peoples

were entirely excluded.”122 The books I examined
did better. The American
Indian Movement (AIM) spurred three major
Indian takeovers in the early
1970s: Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay,
the Bureau of Indian Affairs in
Washington, D.C., and Wounded Knee, South
Dakota. Most new textbooks
competently explain the causes and results of all
three.
Anti-Indian racism eased considerably during
the twentieth century. Taking
advantage of their special status as “dependent
domestic nations,” as decreed by
Chief Justice Marshall longago, many tribes
developed gaming establishments
and hotels to builda solid relationship with the
global economy. Ironically, the
very fact that the United States is beginning to
let Natives acculturate
successfully, albeit on Anglo terms, poses a
new threat to Native coexistence.
Poverty and discrimination long helped to isolate
American Indians. If they can
now get good jobs, as some can, buy new
vehicles and satellite televisions, as
somehave, and commute to the city for part of
their life, as somedo, it is much
harder to maintain the intangible values that make
up the core of Indian cultures.
123 Only one textbook—one of the oldest I
studied—raises the key question now

facing Native Americans: Can distinctively Indian
cultures survive? Discovering
American History treats this issue in an
exemplary way, inviting students to
experience the dilemma through the words of
Native American teenagers. Newer
textbooks cannot raise this issue because they
remain locked into non-Indian
sources and a non-Indian interpretive framework.
Textbooks still define Native
Americans in opposition to civilization and
still conceive of Indian cultures in
what anthropologistscall the ethnographic present—frozen
at the time of white
contact. When textbooks show sympathy for
“the tragic struggle of American
Indians to maintain their way of life,” they
exemplify this myopia. Native
Americans never had “a” way of life; they had
many. American Indians would
not have maintained those ways unchanged
over the last five hundred years,
even without European and African immigration. Indians
have long struggled to
change their ways of life. That autonomy we
took from them. Even today we
divide Native American leadershipinto “progressives”
who want to acculturate
and “traditionals” who want to “remain Indian.”
Textbook authors do not put
other Americans into this straitjacket. We non-Indians
choose what we want
from the past or from othercultures. We jettisoned our
medical practices of the
1780s while retaining the Constitution. But Native
American medical

practitioners who abandon their traditional ways to
embrace pasteurization from
France and antibiotics from England are seen as
compromising their Indian-ness.
We can alter our modes of transportation or
housing while remaining
“American.” Indians cannot and stay “Indian” in
our eyes.
Perhaps Native Americans can break through
the dilemma of acculturation
and become modern and Indian. Certainly their
artists have accomplished this.
Only since the 1930s have Inuit artists in
Canada been carving soapstone, a
material that in the previous century their ancestors
used for making pots. This
sculpture, Dancing to My Spirit, by Nalenik
Temela, is a beautiful example of
syncretism.
Improved histories might increase the chances for
syncretism on both sidesof
our ideological frontier. If we knew the extent
to which American Indian ideas
have shaped American culture, the United States
might recognize Native
American societies as cultural assets from which
we could continue to learn. At
present, none of our textbooks hints at
this possibility; even the more
enlightened ones merely champion better
treatment for Indians while stopping
short of suggesting that our society might still

benefit from American Indian
ideas.
Even if no Natives remained among us, however, it
would still be important
for us to understand the alternatives foregone, to
remember the wars, and to
learn the unvarnished truths about white-Indian
relations. Indian history is the
antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American
exceptionalism, the notion that
European Americans are God’s chosen people.
Indian history reveals that the
United States and its predecessor British
colonies have wrought great harm in
the world. We must not forget this—not to wallow
in our wrongdoing, but to
understand and to learn, that we might not
wreak harmagain. We must temper
our national pride with critical self-knowledge,
suggests historian Christopher
Vecsey: “The study of our contact with
Indians, the envisioning of our dark
American selves, can instill such a strengthening
doubt.”124 History through red
eyes offers our children a deeper understanding
than comes from encountering
the past as a storyof inevitable triumph by the
good guys.

5.
“GONE WITH THE WIND”
THE INVISIBILITY OF RACISM IN AMERICAN
HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be livedagain.
—MAYA ANGELOU1
The black-white rift stands at the very center of
American history. It is the greatchallenge to which
all
our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If
we
forget that—if we forget the greatstain of slavery
that
stands at the heart of our country, our
history, our
experiment—we forget who we are, and we make
the
greatrift deeper and wider.
—KEN BURNS2
We have got to the place where we cannot
use our
experiences during and after the CivilWar for the
uplift
and enlightenment of mankind.

—W.E . B . DUBOIS3
More Americans have learned the story of
the South
during the years of the CivilWar and
Reconstruction
from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind
than
from all of the learned volumes on this period.
—WARREN BECK ANDMYLES CLOWERS4
WHEN WAS THE COUNTRY we now know as
the United States first settled?
If we forget the lesson of the last chapter
for the moment—that Native
Americans settled—the best answer might be
1526. In the summer of that year,
five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves
founded a town perhaps
near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in
present-day South Carolina. Disease and
disputes with nearby Indians caused many deaths
in the early months of the
settlement. In November the slaves rebelled, killed
some of their masters, and
escaped to the Indians. By then only 150 Spaniards
survived; they retreated to
Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind and probably

merged with nearby Indian
nations.5
This is cocktail-party trivia, I suppose. American
history textbooks cannot be
faulted for not mentioning that the first non-Native
settlers in the United States
were black. Educationally, however, the incident has
its uses. It shows that
Africans (is it too early to call them
African Americans?) rebelled against
slavery from the first. It points to the
important subject of three-way race
relations—Indian-African-European—which most
textbooks completely omit.6
It teaches that slavery cannot readily survive
without secure borders. And,
symbolically, it illustrates that African Americans,
and the attendant subject of
black-white race relations, were part of American history
from the first European
attempts to settle.
Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is
the domination of black
America by white America. Race is the
sharpest and deepest division in
American life. Issues of black-white relations
propelled the Whig Party to
collapse, prompted the formation of the Republican
Party, and caused the
Democratic Party to label itself the “white
man’s party” for almost a century.
One of the first times Congress ever overrode a
presidential veto was for the
1866 Civil Rights Act, passed by Republicans

over the wishes of Andrew
Johnson. Senators mounted the longest filibuster in
U.S. history, more than 534
hours, to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights
bill. Thomas Byrne Edsall has shown
how race prompted the sweeping political realignment of
1964-72, in which the
white South went from a Democratic bastion to
a Republican stronghold.7 Race
still affects politics; George W. Bush won just 11
percent of the black vote but
57 percent of the white vote in 2004.
Almost no genre of our popular culture goes
untouched by race. From the
1850s through the 1930s, except perhaps during
the Civil War and
Reconstruction, minstrel shows, which derived in
a perverse way from plantation
slavery, were the dominant form of popular
entertainment in America. During
most of that period Uncle Tom’s Cabin was
our longest-running play, mounted
in thousands of productions. America’s first
epic motion picture, Birth of a
Nation; first talkie, The Jazz Singer; and biggest
blockbuster ever, Gone With the
Wind, were substantially about race relations. The
most popular radioshowof all
time was Amos ’n’ Andy, two white men posing
as humorously incompetent
African Americans. 8 The most popular television
miniseries ever was Roots,

which changed our culture by setting off an
explosion of interest in genealogy
and ethnic background. In music, race relations
provide the underlying thematic
material for many of our spirituals, blues
numbers, reggae songs, and rap pieces.
The struggle over racial slavery may be the
predominant theme in American
history. Until the end of the nineteenth
century, cotton—planted, cultivated,
harvested,and ginned mostly by slaves—was by
far our most important export. 9
Our graceful antebellum homes, in the North as
well as in the South, were built
largely by slaves or from profits derived from
the slaveand cotton trades. Black-
white relations became the central issuein the
CivilWar, which killed almost as
many Americans as died in all our otherwars
combined.Black-white relations
were the principal focus of Reconstruction after the
CivilWar; America’sfailure
to allow African Americans equal rights
led eventually to the struggle for civil
rights a century later.
The subject also pops up where we least suspect
it—at the Alamo, throughout
the Seminole Wars, even in the expulsion of
the Mormons from Missouri.10
Studs Terkel is right: race is our “American
obsession.” 11 Since those first
Africans and Spaniards landed on the Carolina shore
in 1526, our society has

repeatedly been torn apartand sometimes bound
together by this issueof black-
white relations.
Over the years white America has told itself
varying stories about the
enslavement of blacks. In each of the last two
centuries America’smost popular
novel was set in slavery—Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The
two books tell very different
stories: Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents slavery as
an evil to be opposed, while
Gone With the Wind suggests that slavery was
an ideal social structure whose
passing is to be lamented. Until the civil
rights movement, American history
textbooks in this century pretty much agreed
with Mitchell. In 1959 my high
school textbook presented slavery as not such a
bad thing. If bondage was a
burden for African Americans, well, slaves were a
burden on Ole Massa and Ole
Miss, too. Besides, slaves were reasonably happy
and well fed. Such arguments
constitute the “magnolia myth,” according to
which slavery was a social
structure of harmony and grace that did no real
harmto anyone, white or black.
A famous 1950 textbook by Samuel Eliot Morison
and Henry Steele Commager
actually said, “As for Sambo, whose wrongs
moved the abolitionists to wrath

and tears, there is some reason to believe
that he suffered less than any other
class in the South from its ‘peculiar
institution.’”12Peculiar institution meant
slavery, of course, and Morison and Commager
here provided a picture of it that
camestraight from Gone With the Wind.
This is not what textbooks say today. Since
the civil rights movement,
textbooks have returned part of the way toward
Stowe’s devastating indictment
of the institution. The discussion in American
History begins with a passage that
describes the living conditions of slaves in
positive terms: “They were usually
given adequate food, clothing, and shelter.” But
the author immediately goes on
to pointout, “Slaves had absolutelyno rights. It
was not simply that they could
not vote or own property. Their owners had
complete control over their lives.”
He concludes, “Slavery was almost literally
inhuman.” American Adventures
tells us, “Slavery led to despair, and despair
sometimes led black people to take
their own lives. Or in some cases it led
them to revolt against white
slaveholders.” Life and Liberty takesa flatter view:
“Historians do not agree on
how severely slaves were treated”; the book goes on to
note that whipping was
common in someplaces, unheard of on other
plantations. Life and Liberty ends
its section on slave life, however, by quoting
the titles of spirituals—“All My

Trials, Lord, SoonBe Over”—and by citing
the inhumane details of slavelaws.
No one could read any of these three books
and think well of slavery. Indeed,
most textbooks I studied portray slavery as
intolerable to the slave.13
Today’s textbooks also showhow slavery increasingly
dominated our political
life in the first half of the nineteenth century.
They tell that the cotton gin made
slavery more profitable.14 They tell how in the
1830s Southern states and the
federal government pushed the Indians out of
vast stretches of Mississippi,
Alabama, and Georgia, and slavery expanded. And they
tell that in the decades
between 1830 and 1860, slavery’s ideological
demands grew shriller, more
overtly racist. No longer was it enough for
planters and slave traders to
apologize for slavery as a necessary evil. Now they
came to view slavery as a
“positive value to the slaves themselves,” in
the words of Triumph of the
American Nation. This ideological extremism was
matched by harsher new laws
and customs. “Talk of freeing the slaves became
more and more dangerous in
the South,” in the words of The United
States—A History of the Republic.
Merely to receive literature advocating abolition
became a felony in some
slaveholding states. Southern states passed new

ordinances interfering with the
rights of masters to free their slaves. The legal
position of already free African
Americans became ever more precarious, even
in the North, as white
Southerners prevailed on the federal government to
make it harder to restrict
slavery anywhere in the nation.15
Meanwhile, many Northern whites, as well as
some who lived below the
Mason-Dixon Line, grew increasingly unhappy,
disgusted that their nation had
lost its idealism.16 The debate over slavery loomed
ever larger, touching every
subject. In 1848 Thomas Hart Benton, a senator
from Missouri, likened the
ubiquity of the issueto a biblical plague: “You
could not look upon the table but
therewere frogs. You could not sit down at
the banquet table but there were
frogs. You could not go to the bridal couch
and lift the sheets but there were
frogs. We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no
measures proposed, without
having this pestilence thrust before us.”17
Slavery was the underlying reason that South
Carolina, followed by ten other
states, left the Union. In 1860, leaders of
the state were perfectly clear about why
they were seceding. On Christmas Eve, they signed
a “Declaration of the
Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify
the Secession of South Carolina
from the Federal Union.” Their first grievance was

“that fourteen of the States
have deliberately refused, for years past, to
fulfill their constitutional
obligations,” specifically this clause, which they
quote: “No person held to
service or labour in one State, under the
laws thereof, escaping into another,
shall, in consequence of any law or regulation
therein, be discharged from such
service or labour, but shall be delivered up . .
.” This is of course the Fugitive
Slave Clause, under whose authority Congress
had passed the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850, which South Carolina of course
approved. This measure required
officers of the law and even private citizens in
free states to participate in
capturing and returning African Americans when
whites claimed them to be
their slaves. This made the free states complicit
with slavery. They wriggled
around, trying to avoid full compliance.
Pennsylvania, for example, passed a law
recognizing the supremacy of the federal act
but pointing out that
Pennsylvaniansstill had the right to determine pay for
their officers of the law,
and they refused to pay for time spent capturing
and returning alleged slaves.
South Carolina attacked such displays of states’
rights:
But an increasinghostility on the part of the non-

slaveholding States to
the institutionof slavery, has led to a disregard of
their obligations. . . .
The States of Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York,
Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana,
Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws
which either nullify
the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt
to execute them.
Thus South Carolina opposed states’ rights when
claimed by free states. This
is understandable. Historically, whatever faction
has been out of power in
America has pushed for states’ rights. White
Southerners dominated the
executive and judicial branches of the federal
government throughout the 1850s
—and through the Democratic Party, the
legislative branch as well—so of course
they opposed states’ rights. Slave owners were
delighted when Supreme Court
Chief Justice Taney decided in 1857 that
throughout the nation, irrespective of
the wishes of state or territorial
governments, blacks had no rights that whites
must respect. Slave owners pushed President
Buchanan to use federal power to
legitimize slaveholding in Kansas the next year. Only
after they lost control of
the executive branch in the 1860 election did
slave owners begin to suggest
limiting federal power.

South Carolina’s leaders went on to condemn
New York for denying “even
the right of transit for a slave” and other
Northern states for letting African
Americans vote. Before the Civil War,
these matters were states’ rights.
Nevertheless, South Carolina claimed the right to
determine whether New York
could prohibit slavery within New York or
Vermont could define citizenship in
Vermont. Carolinians also contested the rights of
residents of otherstates even to
think differently about their peculiar institution,
giving as another reason for
secession that Northerners “have denounced as
sinful the institutionof slavery.”
In short, slavery permeates the document from
start to finish. Of course, the
election of Lincoln provided the trigger, but the
abiding purpose of secession
was to protect, maintain, and enhance slavery. Nor
was South Carolina unusual;
otherstates used similar language when they
seceded.
Despite this clear evidence, before 1970 many
textbooks held that almost
anything but slavery—differences over tariffs and
internal improvements, the
conflict between agrarian South and industrial North,
and especially “states’
rights”—led to secession. This was a form of
Southern apologetics.18 Never was

thereany excuse for such bad scholarship, and in
the aftermath of the civil rights
movementmost textbook authors came to agree
with Abraham Lincoln in his
Second Inaugural “that [slavery] was somehow the
cause of the war.” As The
United States—A History of the Republic put it
in 1981, “At the center of the
conflict was slavery, the issuethat would not go
away.”
To my surprise, our newest history textbooks have
backtracked on this issue.
American Journey states, for example:
Southerners justified secession with the theory of
states’ rights. The
states, they argued, had voluntarily chosen to
enter the Union. They
defined the Constitution as a contract among
the independent states. Now
because the national government had violated that
contract—by refusing
to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and by
denying the Southern states
equal rights in the territories—the states
were justified in leaving the
Union.
As we have seen, the national government
had not refused to enforce the
Fugitive Slave Act, and states, Northern or
Southern, have no “rights in the
territories,” being separate from them, so
this paragraph confuses more than it
explains. Several otherrecent textbooks are equally

confusing. Pathways to the
Present provides a box comparing “The Aims of
the South” to “The Aims of the
North.” It quotes a House Resolution of
July 25, 1861, to showthat the United
States was fighting “to preserve the Union,” which
was accurate at that pointin
the war. (Ending slavery was not a war aim until
1863.) But its quote for
Southern war aims, drawn from Jefferson Davis’s
inaugural address, says only,
“We have vainly endeavored to secure
tranquility and obtain respect for the
rights which we were entitled.” What rights?
Why did the South secede?
Pathways is silent. Boorstin and Kelley never
discuss why the South seceded at
all, other than citing the trigger provided by
the election of Lincoln. Why not
simply quote South Carolina’s “Declaration”?
After all, South Carolina wrote it
precisely to “justify secession.”19
Except for backsliding on slavery’s role underlying
secession, most textbooks
now handle the topicwith depth and understanding.
Why did they improve? To
ask this is to engage in “historiography”—looking
at the writing of history. Who
wrote this textbook? Of what background? To what
audience? When? Before the
1960s, publishershad been in thrall to the white
South. In the 1920s, Florida and

otherSouthern states passed laws requiring
“Securing a Correct History of the
U.S.,Including a True and Correct History of the
Confederacy.” 20 Many states
required textbooks to call the CivilWar “the War
between the States,” as if no
single nation had existed that secession had rent
apart. (I cannot find evidence
that anyone called it “the War between the States”
while it was going on.)
In the fifteen years between 1955 and 1970,
however, the civil rights
movementdestroyed segregation as a formal system
in America. The movement
did not succeed in transforming American race
relations, but it did help African
Americans win more power. Today many school
boards, curricular committees,
and high school history departments include
African Americans or white
Americans who have cast off the ideology of white
supremacy. Thus when an
account is written influenceswhat is written.
Contemporary textbooks can now
devote more space to the topicof slavery and
can use that space to give a more
accurate portrayal.21
Americans seemperpetually startled at slavery.
Children are shocked to learn
that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned
slaves. Interpreters at
Colonial Williamsburg say that many visitors are
surprised to learnthat slavery
existed there—in the heartof plantation Virginia! Very

few adults today realize
that our society has been slave much longer
than it has been free. Even fewer
know that slavery was important in the North,
too, until after the Revolutionary
War. The first colony to legalize slavery was not
Virginia but Massachusetts. In
1720, of New York City’s population of seven
thousand, sixteen hundred were
African Americans, most of them slaves. Wall Street
was the marketplace where
owners could hire out their slaves by the day or
week.22
Mosttextbooks downplay slavery in the North,
however, so slavery seems to
be a sectional rather than national problem. Indeed,
even the expanded coverage
of slavery comes across as an unfortunate
but minor blemish, compared to the
overall storyline of our textbooks. James Oliver
Horton has pointed out that “the
black experience cannot be fully illuminated
without bringing a new perspective
to the study of American history.”23 Textbook
authors have failed to present any
new perspective. Instead, they shoehorn their
improved and more accurate
portrait of slavery into the old “progress as usual”
story line. In this saga, the
United States is always intrinsically and
increasingly democratic, and
slaveholding is merely a temporary aberration,

not part of the big picture.
Ironically, the very success of the civil rights
movementallows authors to imply
that the problem of black-white race relations has
now been solved, at least
formally. This enables textbooks to discuss slavery
without departing from their
customarily optimistic tone.
While textbooks now show the horror of
slavery and its impact on black
America, they remain largely silent regarding the
impact of slavery on white
America, North or South. Textbooks have trouble
acknowledging that anything
might be wrong with white Americans or
with the United States as a whole.
Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was
like for slaves is the easy part.
After all, slavery as an institutionis dead.
We have progressed beyond it, so we
can acknowledge its evils. Even the Museum of
the Confederacy in Richmond
mounted an exhibit on slavery that did not
romanticize the institution.24 Without
explaining slavery’s relevance to the present,
however, its extensive coverage is
like extensive coverage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff—just
more facts for hapless
eleventh graders to memorize.
Slavery’s twin legacies to the present are the social
and economic inferiorityit
conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it
instilled in whites. Both
continue to haunt our society. Therefore,

treating slavery’s enduring legacy is
necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is
not over yet.
To function adequately in civic life in our
troubled times, students must learn
what causes racism. Although it is a complicated
historical issue, racism in the
Western world stems primarily from two related
historical processes:taking land
from and destroying indigenous peoples and
enslaving Africans to work that
land. To teach this relationship, textbooks would
have to show students the
dynamic interplay between slavery as a
socioeconomic system and racism as an
idea system. Sociologists call these the social
structure and the superstructure.
Slavery existed in many societies and periods
before and after the African slave
trade. Made possible by Europe’s advantages in
military and social technology,
the slavery started by Europeans in the
fifteenth century was different, because it
became the enslavement of one race by another.
Increasingly, whites viewed the
enslavement of whites as illegitimate, while
the enslavement of Africans became
acceptable. Unlike earlier slaveries, children of
African American slaves would
be slaves forever and could never achieve
freedom through intermarriage with
the owning class. The rationale for this differential

treatment was racism. As
Montesquieu, the French social philosopher who
had such a profound influence
on American democracy, ironically observed in 1748:
“It is impossible for us to
suppose these creatures to be men, because,
allowing them to be men, a
suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not
Christian.”25 Here
Montesquieu presages cognitive dissonance by
showing how “we” molded our
ideas(about blacks) to rationalize our actions.
Historianshave chronicled the rise of racism in
the West. Before the 1450s,
Europeans considered Africans exotic but not
necessarily inferior. As more and
more nations joined the slavetrade, Europeans
cameto characterize Africans as
stupid, backward, and uncivilized. Amnesia set
in; Europe gradually found it
convenient to forget that Moors from Africa
had brought to Spain and Italy
much of the learning that led to the
Renaissance. Europeans had known that
Timbuktu, with its renowned university and library,
was a center of learning.
Now, forgetting Timbuktu,Europe and European
Americans perceived Africa as
the “dark continent.”26 By the 1850s many
white Americans, including some
Northerners, claimed that black people were so
hopelessly inferior that slavery
was a proper form of education for them; it
also removed them physicallyfrom
the alleged barbarism of the “dark continent.”

The superstructure of racism has long outlived the
social structure of slavery
that generated it. The following passage from Margaret
Mitchell’sGone With the
Wind, written in the 1930s, shows racism
alive and well in that decade. The
narrator is interpreting Reconstruction:
The former field hands found themselves
suddenly elevated to the seats
of the mighty. There they conducted themselves
as creatures of small
intelligence might naturally be expected to do.
Like monkeys or small
children turned loose among treasured objects
whose value is beyond
their comprehension, they ran wild—either from
perverse pleasure in
destruction or simply because of their ignorance.27
White supremacy permeates Mitchell’s romantic
bestseller.Yet in 1988, when
the American Library Association asked library
patrons to name the best book in
the library, Gone With the Wind won an actual
majority against all otherbooks
ever published!28
The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery
is the idea that it is
appropriate, even “natural,” for whites to be on
top, blacks on the bottom. In its

core our culture tells us—tells all of us, including
African Americans—that
Europe’s domination of the world cameabout
because Europeans were smarter.
In their core, many whites and some
people of color believe this. White
supremacy is not only a residue of slavery, to
be sure. Developments in
American history sinceslavery ended have maintained
it. Nine of the eighteen
textbooks do list racism (or racial discrimination,
race prejudice, etc.) in their
indexes, but in several, the word never appears in
the text. Racism is merely the
indexer’s handle for paragraphs on slavery,
segregation, and the like. Only one
book, Pathways to the Present, defines the term.29
Worse yet, only three textbooks discuss what
might have caused racism (or
racial prejudice, etc.).The closest any of the
textbooks comes to explaining the
connection between slavery and racism is this
single sentence from The
American Pageant, after telling how slaveowners
“increasingly livedin a state
of imagined siege”: “Their fears bolstered an
intoxicating theory of biological
racial superiority. . . .” The American
Tradition includes a similar but much
vaguer sentence: “In defense of their ‘peculiar
institution,’ southerners became
more and more determined to maintain their
own way of life,” but such a
statement hardly suffices to show today’s
students the origin of racism in our

society—it doesn’t even use the word. The
American Adventure offers by far the
longest treatment: “[African Americans] looked
different from members of
white ethnic groups. The colorof their skin made
assimilation difficult. For this
reason they remained outsiders.” Here Adventure
has retreated from history to
lay psychology. Unfortunately for its argument,
skin color in itself does not
explain racism. Jane Elliot’s famous experiments in
Iowa classrooms have
shown that children can quickly develop
discriminatory behavior and prejudiced
beliefs based on eye color. Conversely, the
leadership positions that African
Americans frequentlyreached among American Indian
nations from Ecuador to
the Arctic showthat people do not automatically
discriminate against others on
the basisof skin color.30
Events and processes in American history, from
the time of slavery to the
present, are what explain racism. Except for the
half sentence quoted above from
Pageant, however, not one textbook connects history
and racism. Half-formed
and uninformed notions rush in to fill the
analytic vacuum textbooks thus leave.
Adventure’s threesentences imply that it is natural
to exclude people whose skin
color is different. White students may conclude that

all societies are racist,
perhaps by nature, so racism is all right.
Black students may conclude that all
whites are racist, perhaps by nature, so to
be antiwhite is all right. The
elementary thinking in Adventure’s threesentences is
all too apparent. Yet this is
the most substantial treatment of the causes of
racism among all the textbooks I
examined,old or new. Six pages titled “Segregation
and Discrimination” in We
Americans tell about lynching (but include no
illustration), segregation laws, and
harsh racial etiquette, but say nothing about
their causes.
Instead of analyzing racism, textbooks still subtly
exemplify it. Consider a late
passage (page 1,083!) in Holt American Nation
extolling the value of DNA
testing: “Since Jefferson had no sons,scientists
compared DNAfrom male-line
descendants of Jefferson’s paternal grandfather
with DNAfrom descendants of
Eston Hemings, SallyHemings’s youngest son. They
found a match. Since the
chances of a match were less than one percent,
Jefferson very likely was Eston
Hemings’s father.” Holt fails to notice that the
last five words of the paragraph
contradict the first five. Jefferson did have at
least one son, Eston Hemings.
Changing had no sons to acknowledged no sons would
fix the paragraph; surely
the awkwardness was overlooked because Jefferson
had no white sons,hence no

“real” sons.
In omitting racism or treating it so poorly,
history textbooks shirk a critical
responsibility. Not all whites are or have been racist.
Moreover,levels of racism
have changed over time.31 If textbooks were to
explain this, they would give
students someperspective on what caused racism in
the past, what perpetuates it
today, and how it might be reduced in the
future.
Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat how
slavery affected African
Americans, they minimize white complicity in it.
They present slavery virtually
as uncaused, a tragedy, rather than a wrong
perpetrated by some people on
others. Some books maintain the fiction that
planters did the work on the
plantations. “There was always much work to be
done,” according to Triumph of
the American Nation, “for a cotton grower also
raised most of the food eaten by
his family and slaves.” Although managing a
business worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars was surely time-consuming,
the truth as to who did most of
the work on the plantation is surely captured more
accuratelyby this quotation
from a Mississippi planter lamenting his
situation after the war: “I never did a

day’s work in my life, and don’t know how to
begin. You see me in thesecoarse
old clothes; well, I never wore coarse clothes in
my life before the war.”32
The emotion generated by textbook descriptions of
slavery is sadness, not
anger. For there’s no one to be angry at.
Somehow we ended up with four
million slaves in America but no owners. This is
part of a pattern in our
textbooks: anything bad in American history
happened anonymously. 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, thereis no
known case of anyone’s creating a
problem for anyone else.”33
Certainly the Founding Fathers never created one.
“Popular modern depictions
of Washington and Jefferson,” historian David
Lowenthal points out, “are utterly
at variance with their lives as eighteenth-
century slave-holding planters.” 34
Textbooks play their part by minimizing slavery in
the lives of the founders. As
with Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, and Christopher
Columbus, authors cannot
bear to reveal anything bad about our heroes. In
2003 an Illinois teacher told her
sixth graders that most presidents before
Lincoln were slave owners. Her
students were outraged—not with the presidents, but

with her, for lyingto them.
“That’s not true,” they protested, “or it would be
in the book!” They pointed out
that their textbook devoted many pages to
Washington, Jefferson, Madison,
Jackson, and other early presidents, pages
that said not one word about their
owning slaves. Of course, she wasn’t wrong,
and we shall learnof her creative
response to her students in the last chapter of
this book.
In real life the Founding Fathers and their wives
wrestled with slavery.
Textbooks canonize Patrick Henry for his “Give
me liberty or give me death”
speech. Not one tells us that eightmonths after
delivering the speech he ordered
“diligent patrols” to keep Virginia slaves from
accepting the British offer of
freedom to those who would join their side.
Henry wrestled with the
contradiction, exclaiming, “Would anyone believe I
am the master of slaves of
my own purchase!”35 Almost no one would today,
because only two of all the
textbooks I examined, Land of Promise and
The American Adventure, even
mention the inconsistency.36 Henry’s understanding of
the discrepancy between
his words and his deeds never led him to
act differently, to his slaves’ sorrow.
Throughout the Revolutionary period he added

slaves to his holdings, and even
at his death, unlike some other Virginia
planters, he freed not a one.
Nevertheless, Triumph of the American Nation quotes
Henry calling slavery “as
repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with
the Bible and destructive of
liberty,” without ever mentioning that he held slaves.
American Adventures
devotes three whole pages to Henry,
constructing a fictitious melodrama in
which his father worries, “How would he
ever earn a living?” Adventures then
tells how Henry failed at storekeeping, “tried to
make a living by raising
tobacco,” “started another store,” “had three
children as well as a wife to
support,” “knew he had to make a living in
some way,” “so he decided to
become a lawyer.” The student who reads this
chapter and later learns that Henry
grew wealthy from the work of scores of slaves
has a right to feel hoodwinked.
None of the new textbooks does any better.
Even more embarrassing is the case of Founding Father
Thomas Jefferson.
American history textbooks use several tactics to
harmonize the contradiction
between Jefferson’s assertion that everyone has an
equal right to “Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness” and his enslavement
of 175 human beings at the
time he wrote those words. Jefferson’s
slaveholding affected almost everything
he did, from his opposition to internal

improvements to his foreign policy.37
Nonetheless, half of the books in my earlier
sample never noted that Jefferson
owned slaves. Life and Liberty offered a half-
page minibiography of Jefferson,
revealing that he was “shy,” “stammered,” and
“always worked hard at what he
did.” ElsewhereLife and Liberty noted all manner of
minutiae about him, such
as his refusal to wear a wig, that he walked
rather than rode in his inaugural
parade—but said nothing about Jefferson and slavery.
All recent textbooks mention that Jefferson owned
slaves, but that is all they
do—mention it, almost always in a subordinate
clause. Here is The Americans’
entire treatment: “Despite his elite background and
ownershipof slaves, he was
a strong ally of the small farmer and
average citizen.” American Journey is
similarly concise: “He had proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence that
‘all men were created equal’—but he was a
slaveowner.” Pathways to the
Present grants six words to Jefferson’s
complicity with the institution. They
follow four paragraphs of praise about him,
including his opposition to the
practice: “In his time,Jefferson’s commitment to
equality among white men, as
well as his opposition to slavery, were brave
and radical ideas. Today, Jefferson
remains a puzzle for historians: the author of
someof the most eloquent words

ever written about human freedom was himself
the owner of slaves.” Actually,
by 1820 Jefferson had become an ardent advocate of
the expansion of slavery to
the western territories. And he never let his
ambivalence about slavery affect his
private life. Jefferson was an average owner who
had his slaves whipped and
sold into the DeepSouth as examples, to induce
otherslaves to obey. By 1822
Jefferson owned 267 slaves. During his long life, of
hundreds of different slaves
he owned, he freedonly three, and five more at
his death—allblood relatives of
his.38
Another textbook tactic to minimize Jefferson’s
slaveholding is to admit it but
emphasize that others did no better. “Jefferson
revealed himself as a man of his
times,” states Land of Promise. Well, what
were those times? Certainly most
white Americans in the 1770s were racist.
Race relations were in flux, however,
owing to the Revolutionary War and to its
underlying ideology about the rights
of mankind that Jefferson, among others, did so
much to spread. Five thousand
black soldiers fought alongside whites in the
Continental Army, “with courage
and skill,” according to Triumph of the American
Nation. In reality, of course,
somefought “with courage and skill,” like some
white recruits, and somefailed

to fire their guns and ran off, like somewhite
recruits.39 But because thesemen
fought in integrated units for the most
part and received equal pay, their
existence in itselfhelped decrease white racism.40
Moreover, the American Revolution is one of those
moments in our history
when the power of ideasmade a real
difference. “In contending for the birthright
of freedom,” said a captain in the army, “we
have learned to feel for the bondage
of others.”41 Abigail Adams wrote her
husband in 1774 to ask how we could
“fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and
plundering from those who
have as good a right to freedom as we have.”42
The contradiction between his
words and his slaveowning embarrassed Patrick
Henry, who offered only a lame
excuse—“I am drawn along by the general
inconvenience of living here without
them”—and admitted, “I will not, I cannot justify
it.”43 Other options were
available to planters. Some, including George
Washington, valued consistency
more than Henry or Jefferson and freedtheir slaves
outright or at least in their
wills. Other slaveowners freed their male
slaves to fight in the colonial army,
collecting a bounty for each one who enlisted. In
the first two decades after the
Revolution, the number of free blacks in
Virginia soared tenfold, from two
thousand in 1780 to twenty thousand in 1800.
MostNorthern states did away

with slavery altogether. Thus, Thomas Jefferson
lagged behind many whites of
his times in the actions he took with regard to
slavery.44
Manumission gradually flagged, however, because most
of the white
Southerners who, like Jefferson, kept their
slaves, grew rich. Their neighbors
thought well of them, as people oftendo of
those richer than themselves. To a
degree the ideology of the upper class became
the ideology of the whole society,
and as the Revolution receded, that ideology
increasingly justified slavery.
Jefferson spent much of his slave-earned wealth
on his mansion at Monticello
and on books that he later donated to the
University of Virginia; these
expenditures became part of his hallowed patrimony,
giving history yet another
reason to remember him kindly.45
Other views are possible, however. In 1829,
three years after Jefferson’s
death, David Walker, a black Bostonian,
warned members of his race that they
should remember Jefferson as their greatest
enemy. “Mr. Jefferson’s remarks
respectingus have sunk deep into the hearts of
millions of whites, and never will
be removed this side of eternity.”46 For the next
hundred years, the open white

supremacy of the Democratic Party, Jefferson’s
political legacy to the nation,
would bear out the truth of Walker’s warning.
Textbooks are in good company: the Jefferson
Memorial,too, whitewashes its
subject. The third panel on its marble walls is
a hodgepodge of quotations from
widely different periods in Jefferson’s life whose
effect is to create the
impression that Thomas Jefferson was very nearly
an abolitionist. In their
original contexts, the same quotations reveal a
Jefferson conflicted about slavery
—at times its harsh critic, more often
its apologist. Perhaps asking a marble
memorial to tell the truth is demanding too
much. Should history textbooks
similarly be a shrine, however? Should they
encourage students to worship
Jefferson? Or should they help students understand
him, wrestle with the
problems he wrestled with, grasp his
accomplishments, and also acknowledge
his failures?
The idealistic spark in our Revolution, which
caused Patrick Henry such
verbal discomfort, at first made the United
States a proponent of democracy
around the world. However, slavery and its
concomitant ideas, which legitimated
hierarchy and dominance, sapped our Revolutionary
idealism. Most textbooks
never hint at this clashof ideas, let alone at
its impact on our foreign policy.

After the Revolution, many Americans
expected our example would inspire
otherpeoples. It did. Our young nation got its
first chance to help in the 1790s,
when Haitirevolted against France. Whether a
president owned slaves seems to
have determined his policy toward the second
independent nation in the
hemisphere. George Washington did, so his
administration loaned hundreds of
thousands of dollars to the French planters in
Haiti to help them suppress their
slaves. John Adams did not, and his administration
gave considerable support to
the Haitians. Jefferson’s presidency marked a
general retreat from the idealism
of the Revolution. Like other slave
owners, Jefferson preferred a Napoleonic
colony to a black republic in the Caribbean.
In 1801 he reversed U.S. policy
toward Haitiand secretly gave France the go-ahead to
reconquer the island. In so
doing, the United States not only betrayed its
heritage, but also acted against its
own self-interest. For if France had indeed been
able to retake Haiti, Napoleon
would have maintained his dream of an
American empire. The United States
would have been hemmed in by France to its
west, Britain to its north, and Spain
to its south.47 But planters in the United States
were scared by the Haitian
Revolution. They thought it might inspire slave

revolts here (which it did). When
Haiti won despite our flip-flop, the United States
would not even extend it
diplomatic recognition, lest its ambassador inflame
our slaves “by exhibiting in
his own person an example of successful
revolt,” in the words of a Georgia
senator.48 Nine of the eighteen textbooks
mention how Haitian resistance led
France to sell us its claim to Louisiana,
but none tells of our flip-flop.
Racial slavery also affected our policy toward
the next countries in the
Americas to revolt, Spain’s colonies. Haiti’s
example inspired them to seek
independence, and the Haitian government gave Simon
Bolívar direct aid. Our
statesmen were ambivalent, eager to help boot a
European power out of the
hemisphere but worried by the racially mixed
rebels doing the booting. Some
planters wanted our government to replace Spain
as the colonial power,
especially in Cuba. Jefferson suggested annexing
Cuba. Fifty years later,
diplomats in the Franklin Pierce administration signed
the Ostend Manifesto,
which proposed that the United States buy or
take the island from Spain. Slave
owners, still obsessed with Haitias a role model,
thus hoped to prevent Cuba’s
becoming a second Haiti, with “flames [that
might] extend to our own
neighboring shores,” in the words of the
Manifesto.49 In short, slavery prompted

the United States to have imperialist
designs on Latin America rather than
visions of democratic liberation for the region.
Slavery affected our foreign policy in still other
ways. The first requirement of
a slavesociety is secure borders. We do not
like to thinkof the United States as a
police state, a nation like East Germany that
people had to escape from, but the
slaveholding states were just that. Indeed, after the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,
which made it easy for whites to kidnap
and sell free blacks into slavery,
thousands of free African Americans realized they
could not be safe even in
Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and
Haiti.50 The Dred Scott
decision in 1857, which declared “A Negro
had no rights a white man was
bound to respect,” confirmed their fears.
Slaveholders dominated our foreign
policy until the Civil War. They were
always concerned about our Indian
borders and made sure that treaties with Native
nations stipulated that Indians
surrender all African Americans and return any
runaways.51
U.S. territorial expansion between 1787 and 1855 was
owed in large part to
slavers’ influence. The largest pressure group
behind the War of 1812 was
slaveholders who coveted Indian and Spanish land

and wanted to drive Indian
societies farther away from the slaveholding
states to prevent slave escapes.
Even though Spain played no real role in that
war, in the aftermath we took
Florida from Spain because slaveholders
demanded we do so. Indeed, Andrew
Jackson attacked a Seminole fort in Florida in
1816 precisely because it harbored
hundreds of runaway slaves, thus initiating the First
Seminole War.52
The Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or
nation before the arrival of
Europeans and Africans. They were a
triracial isolate composed of Creek
Indians, remnants of smaller tribes, runaway slaves,
and whites who preferred to
live in Indian society. The word Seminole is itself
a corruption of the Spanish
cimarron (corrupted to maroons on Jamaica), a
word that cameto mean runaway
slaves.53 The Seminoles’ refusal to surrender their
African American members
led to the First and Second Seminole Wars(1816-18,
1835-42). Whites attacked
not because they wanted the Everglades, which
had no economic value to the
United States in the nineteenth century, but to
eliminate a refuge for runaway
slaves. The Second Seminole War was the longest
and costliest war the United
States ever fought against Indians.54 The college
textbook America: Past and
Present tells why we fought it, putting the war in
the context of slaverevolts:

The most sustained and successfuleffort of slaves to
win their freedom
by force of arms took place in Florida
between 1835 and 1842 when
hundreds of black fugitives fought in the Second
Seminole War
alongside the Indians who had given them a haven.
The Seminoleswere
resisting removal to Oklahoma, but for the blacks
who took part, the war
was a struggle for their own freedom, and the treaty
that ended it allowed
most of them to accompany their Indian
allies to the trans-Mississippi
West.
Five of the six new textbooks do mention this
war, but onlyPathways to the
Present verges on telling that ex-slaves were the
real reason for it.
Slavery was also perhaps the key factor in the
Texas War (1835-36). The
freedom for which Davy Crockett, James Bowie,
and the rest fought at the
Alamo was the freedom to own slaves. As soon as
Anglos set up the Republic of
Texas, its legislature ordered all free black
people out of the Republic.55 Our
next major war, the Mexican War (1846-48), was
again driven chiefly by
Southern planters wanting to push the borders of

the nearest free land farther
from the slavestates.
Probably the clearest index of how slavery
affected U.S. foreign policy is
provided by the Civil War, for between 1861
and 1865 we had two foreign
policies, the Union’s and the Confederacy’s. The
Union recognized Haiti and
shared considerable ideological compatibility with
postrevolutionary Mexico.
The Confederacy threatened to invade Mexico
and then welcomed Louis
Napoleon’s takeover of it as a French colony,
because that removed Mexico as a
standard-bearer of freedom and a refuge for
runaway slaves.56 Confederate
diplomats also had their eyes on Cuba, had they won
the CivilWar.
For our first seventy years as a nation, then,
slavery made our foreign policy
more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-
determination. Textbooks
cannot showthe influence of slavery on our foreign
policy if they are unwilling
to talk about ideaslike racism that might make
whites look bad. When textbook
authors turn their attention to domestic policy,
racism remains similarly
invisible. Thus, although textbooks devote a great
deal of attention to Stephen A.
Douglas, the most important leader of the Democratic
Party at mid-century, they
suppress his racism. Recall that Douglas had
bulldozed what cameto be called

the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress in 1854.
Douglas himself, a senator
from Illinois and seeker of the presidency, was
neither for nor against slavery.
He mainly wanted the United States to
organize territorial governments in
Kansas and Nebraska, until then Indian land,
because he was connected with
interests that wanted to run a railroad through
the territory.57 He needed
Southern votes. During most of the 1840s
and 1850s, Southern planters
controlled the Supreme Court, the presidency, and at
least one house of
Congress. Emboldened by their power while
worried about their decreasing
share of the nation’s white population, slave
owners agreed to support the new
territories only if Douglas included in the bill a
clause opening them to slavery.
Douglas capitulated and incorporated what he called
“popular sovereignty” in
the bill. This meant Kansas could go slaveif it
chose to, even though it lay north
of the Missouri Compromise line, set up in 1820
to separate slavery from
freedom. So, for that matter, could Nebraska. The
result was civil war in Kansas.
While textbooks do not treat Stephen
Douglas as a major hero like
Christopher Columbus or Woodrow Wilson, they do
discuss him with sympathy.

In 1858 Douglas ran for reelection against
Abraham Lincoln in a contest that
presaged the ideologiesthat would dominate the two
major parties for the next
three decades.58 Accordingly, textbooks give the
debates an extraordinary
amount of space: an average of seven
paragraphs and two pictures.59 Authors of
my earlier sample of textbooks used this space
as if they were writing for GQ.
American History gave the debates sixteen paragraphs;
here are two of them:
Even without his tall “stovepipe” hat, the six-feet,
six-inch [the author
has added two inches] Lincoln towered over the
Little Giant. He wore a
formal black suit, usually rumpled and always
too shortfor his long arms
and legs. Douglas was what we would call a
flashy dresser. He wore
shirts with ruffles, fancy embroidered vests, a
broad felt hat. He had a
rapid-fire way of speaking that contrastedwith Lincoln’s
slow, deliberate
style. . . .
Lincoln’s voice was high pitched, Douglas’s deep.
Both had to have
powerful lungs to make themselves heard
over street noises and the
bustle of the crowds. They had no public address
systems to help them.
So we learn that Douglas was a flashy dresser
and spoke powerfully—but

where are his ideas? What did he say? All
twelve textbooks in my original
sample provided just three sentence fragments
from Douglas himself. Here is
every word of his they provided: “forever divided
into free and slavestates, as
our fathers made it,” “thinks the Negro is
his brother,” and “for a day or an
hour.” Just twenty-four words in twelve books!
While celebrating the “Little
Giant” for his “powerful speech” or “splendid
oratory,” nine textbooks silenced
him completely.
Two of the six new textbooks supply at least
a longer sentence fragment by
Douglas: “Slavery cannot exist a day or an hour
anywhere,unless it is supported
by local police regulations”—Douglas’s so-called
Freeport doctrine. Holt
American Nation provides a longer quotation.
While Pathways to the Present
doesn’t quote a word, it does summarize:
“Douglas supported popular
sovereignty on issues including slavery.” Thus four
recent textbooks do tell that
the debates had something to do with slavery.
They need to go further.
Douglas’s position was not so vague. The debates
were largely about race and
the position African Americans should eventually
hold in our society. That is
why Paul Angle chose the title Created Equal?
for his centennialedition of the

debates.60 On July 9, 1858, in Chicago,
Douglas made his position clear, as he
did repeatedly throughout that summer:
In my opinion this government of ours is
founded on the white basis. It
was made by the white man, for the benefit
of the white man, to be
administered by white men. . . .
I am opposed to taking any step that recognizes
the Negro man or the
Indian as the equal of the white man. I
am opposed to giving him a voice
in the administration of the government. I would
extend to the Negro,
and the Indian, and to all dependent races
every right, every privilege,
and every immunityconsistent with the safety and
welfare of the white
races; but equality they never should have,
either political or social, or in
any otherrespect whatever.
My friends, you see that the issues are distinctly
drawn.61
Textbook readers cannot see that the issues are
distinctly drawn, however,
because even the newest textbooks give no hint of
Douglas’s racism. Only one
book among all eighteen, American History, quotes
Douglas on race: “Lincoln
‘thinks the Negro is his brother,’ the Little
Giant sneered.” These six words in
one book, now out of print, among eighteen

textbooks, hardly do justice to
Douglas on race.
Why do textbooks censor Douglas? Since they
devote paragraphs to his
wardrobe, it cannot be for lack of space. To
be sure, textbook authors rarely
quote anyone. But more particularly, the
heroification process seems to be
operating again. Douglas’s words on race might
make us thinkbadly of him. So
let’s leave them out.
Compared to Douglas, Lincoln was an idealistic
equalitarian, but in southern
Illinois, arguing with Douglas, he, too, expressed white
supremacist ideas. Thus,
at the debate in Charleston he said, “I
am not, nor ever have been in favor of
bringing about the social and political equality of
the white and black races
[applause]—that I am not nor ever have been in
favor of making voters or jurors
of Negroes.” Most textbook authors protect
us from a racist Lincoln. By so
doing, they diminish students’ capacity to recognize
racism as a force in
American life. For if Lincoln could be racist,
then so might the rest of us be. And
if Lincoln could transcend racism, as he did on
occasion, then so might the rest
of us.
During the CivilWar, Northern Democrats countered

the Republican charge
that they favored rebellion by professing to be
the “white man’s party.” They
protested the government’s emancipation of slaves in
the District of Columbia
and its diplomatic recognition of Haiti. They
claimed Republicans had “nothing
except ‘nigger on the brain.’ ” They were enraged
when the U.S. army accepted
African American recruits. And they made race a
paramount factor in their
campaigns.
In those days before television, parties
held coordinated rallies. On the last
Saturday before the election, Democratic senators
might address crowds in each
major city; local officeholders would hold forth in
smaller towns. Each of these
rallies featured music. Hundreds of thousands of
songbooks were printed so the
partyfaithful might sing the same songs coastto
coast. A favorite in 1864 was
sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”:
THE NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM
“NIGGER DOODLE DANDY”
Yankee Doodle is no more,
Sunkhis name and station;
Nigger Doodle takeshis place,
And favors amalgamation.
CHORUS: Nigger Doodle’s all the go,

Ebony shinsand bandy,
“Loyal” people all must bow
To Nigger Doodle dandy.
The white breed is under par
It lacksthe rich a-romy,
Give us somethingblack as tar,
Give us “Old Dahomey.”
CHORUS: Nigger Doodle’s all the go, &c.
Blubber lips are killing sweet,
And kinky heads are splendid;
And oh, it makes such bullyfeet
To have the heelsextended.
CHORUS: Nigger Doodle’s all the go, &c.
I have shared theselyrics with hundreds of college
students and scores of high
school history teachers. To get audiences to take
the words seriously, I usually
try to lead them in a sing-along. Often
even all-white groups refuse. They are
shocked by what they read. Nothing in their high school
history textbooks hinted
that national politics was ever like this.
Partly because many partymembers and leaders
did not identify with the war
effort, when the United States won, Democrats
emerged as the minority party.
Republicans controlled Reconstruction. Like slavery,

Reconstruction is a subject
on which textbooks have improved sincethe civil rights
movement. The earliest
accounts, written even before Reconstruction ended,
portrayed Republican state
governments struggling to govern fairly but
confronted with immense problems,
not the least being violent resistance from
racist ex-Confederates. Textbooks
written between about 1890 and the 1960s,
however, painted an unappealing
portrait of oppressive Republican rule in the
postwar period, a picture that we
might call the Confederate myth of Reconstruction.
For years black families kept
the truth about Reconstruction alive. The
aging slaves whose stories were
recorded by WPA writers in the 1930s
remained proud of blacks’ roles during
Reconstruction. Some still remembered the names
of African Americans elected
to office sixty years earlier. “I know folks
thinkthe books tell the truth,” said an
eighty-eight-year-old former slave, “but they shore
don’t.”62 As those who knew
Reconstruction from personal experience died off,
however, even in the black
community the textbook view took over.
My most memorable encounter with the Confederate
myth of Reconstruction
cameduring a discussion with seventeen first-year
students at Tougaloo College,
a predominantly black school in Mississippi,
one afternoon in January 1970. I
was about to launch into a unit on

Reconstruction, and I needed to find out
what
the students already knew. “What was
Reconstruction?” I asked. “What images
come to your mind about that era?” The class
consensus: Reconstruction was the
time when African Americans took over the
governing of the Southern states,
including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of
slavery, so they messed up
and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take
back control of the state
governments.
I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions
glared from that statement that it
was hard to know where to begin a
rebuttal. African Americans never took over
the Southern states. All governors were white,
and almost all legislatures had
white majorities throughout Reconstruction. African
Americans did not “mess
up”; indeed, Mississippi enjoyed less corrupt
government during Reconstruction
than in the decades immediately afterward.“Whites”
did not take back control of
the state governments; rather, some white
Democrats used force and fraud to
wrest control from biracial Republican coalitions.
For young African Americans to believe such a
hurtful myth about their past
seemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their

own capability, sincetheir race had
“messed up” in its one appearance on American
history’s center stage. It also
invited them to conclude that it is only right that
whites be always in control. Yet
my students had merely learned what their
textbooks had taught them. Like
almost all Americans who finished high school
before the 1970s, they had
encountered the Confederate myth of Reconstruction in
their American history
classes. I, too, learned it from my college history
textbook. John F. Kennedy and
his ghostwriter retold it in their portrait of
L.Q.C. Lamar in Profiles in Courage,
which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Compared to the 1960s, today’s textbooks have
vastly improved their
treatments of Reconstruction. All but four of
the eighteen textbooks I surveyed
painta very different picture of Reconstruction from
Gone With the Wind.63 No
longer do histories claim that federal troops
controlled Southern society for a
decade or more. Now they pointout that military
rule ended by 1868 in all but
threestates. No longer do they say that allowing
African American men to vote
set loose an orgy of looting and corruption.
The 1961 edition of Triumph of the
American Nation condemned Republican rule in
the South: “Many of the
‘carpetbag’ governments were inefficient,
wasteful, and corrupt.” In stark
contrast, the 1986 edition explains that “The southern

reconstruction legislatures
started many needed and long overdue public
improvements . . . strengthened
public education . . . spread the tax burden
more equitably . . . [and] introduced
overdue reforms in local government and the
judicial system.” Among the
newest textbooks, only Boorstin and Kelley still
calls Congressional
Reconstruction a “vindictive act that turned the
states into conqueredprovinces.”
Like their treatment of slavery, most textbooks’ new
view of Reconstruction
represents a sea change, past due, much closer to
what the original sources for
the period reveal, and much less dominated
by white supremacy. The
improvements have continued since the first
edition of Lies appeared in 1995.
Textbooks of the 1980s and early 1990s
inadvertently still took a white
supremacist viewpoint. Their rhetoric made
African Americans rather than
whites the “problem” and assumed that the major
issue of Reconstruction was
how to integrate African Americans into the
system, economically and
politically. “Slavery was over,” said The American
Way. “But the South was
ruined and the Blacks had to be brought into a
working society.” Blacks were
already working, of course. One wonders what the

author thinks they had been
doing in slavery! 64 Similarly, according to
Triumph of the AmericanNation,
Reconstruction “meant solving the problem of
bringing black Americans into the
mainstream of national life.” Triumph supplied
an instructive example of the
myth of lazy, helpless black folk: “When
white planters abandoned their
plantations on islands off the coastof South
Carolina, black people there were
left helpless and destitute.” In reality, these
black people enlisted in Union
armies, operated the plantations themselves, and
made raids into the interior to
free slaves on mainland plantations.
This illustration of armed whites raiding a
black neighborhood in Memphis,
Tennessee, in the 1866 riot, exemplifies white-
black violence during and after
Reconstruction. Forty African Americans died in
this riot; whites burned down
every black school and church in the city.
Today’s textbooks showAfrican Americans striving to
better themselves. But
authors still soft-pedal the key problem during
Reconstruction, white violence.
The figures are astounding. The victors of the
Civil War executed but one
Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious
commandant of Andersonville
prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of

officeholders and otherUnionists,
white and black.65 In Hinds County, Mississippi,
alone, whites killed an average
of one African American a day, many of them
servicemen, during Confederate
Reconstruction—the period from 1865 to 1867
when ex-Confederates ran the
governments of most Southern states. In Louisiana
in the summer and fall of
1868, white Democrats killed 1,081
persons, mostly African Americans and
white Republicans.66 In one judicial district in
North Carolina, a Republican
judge counted 700 beatings and 12 murders.67
Moreover,violence was only the
most visible component of a broader pattern of
white resistance to black
progress.
Although the narratives in textbooks have improved, someof
the pictures have
not. Seven of the eighteen textbooks feature
this cartoon, “The Solid South”
represented as a delicate white woman. She is
weighed down by Grant and
armaments stuffed into a carpetbag, propped
up by bluecoated soldiers of
occupation. Two new textbooks do ask students to
interpret the cartoon. The new
edition of Pageant merely refers to “the
carpetbags and bayonets of the Grant

administration” as though they were fact.The other
four textbooks merely use
the drawing to illustrate Reconstruction: “The South’s
heavy burden,” captions
Triumph of the American Nation.
Attacking education was an important element of
the white supremacists’
program. “The opposition to Negro education
made itself felt everywhere in a
combination not to allow the freedmen any roomor
building in which a school
might be taught,” said Gen. O. O. Howard, head of
the Freedmen’s Bureau. “In
1865, 1866, and 1867 mobs of the baser
classes at intervals and in all parts of the
South occasionally burned school buildings and
churches used as schools,
flogged teachers or drove them away, and in
a number of instances murdered
them.” 68
Almost all textbooks include at least a
paragraph on white violence during
Reconstruction. Mosttell how that violence, coupled
with failure by the United
States to implement civil rights laws, played
a major role in ending Republican
state governments in the South, thus ending
Reconstruction. But, overall,
textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss
the point: the problem of
Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, not
African Americans, into the
new order. As soon as the federal government
stopped addressing the problem of

racist whites, Reconstruction ended. Since
textbooks find it hard to say anything
really damaging about white people, their
treatments of why Reconstruction
failed still lack clarity.
Into the 1990s, American history textbooks still
presented the end of
Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans.
Triumph in 1990 explained,
“Other northerners grew weary of the
problems of black southerners and less
willing to help them learntheir new roles as citizens.”
The American Adventure
echoed: “Millions of ex-slaves could not be
converted in ten years into literate
voters, or successful politicians, farmers, and
businessmen.” Actually, black
voters voted more wisely than most white voters.
To vote Republican during
Reconstruction was in their clear interest, and most African
Americans did, but
somewere willing to vote for those white
Democrats who made sincere efforts
to win their support. Meanwhile, increasing
numbers of white Southerners
blindly voted for white Democrats simply
because they stood for white
supremacy.
Because I, too, “learned” that African Americans
were the unsolved problem
of Reconstruction, reading Gunnar Myrdal’s An

American Dilemma was an eye-
opening experience for me. Myrdal introduced
his 1944 book by describing the
change in viewpoint he was forced to make as
he conducted his research.
When the present investigator started his inquiry,
the preconception was
that it had to be focused on the Negro people.
. . . But as he proceeded in
his studies into the Negro problem, it became
increasingly evident that
little, if anything, could be scientifically
explained in terms of the
peculiarities of the Negroes themselves. . . .
The Negro problem is
predominantly a white . . . problem.69
This is precisely the understanding many nonblacks
still need to achieve. It
goes against our culture. As one college student
said to me, “You’ll never
believe all the stuff I learned in high school
about Reconstruction—like, it
wasn’t so bad, it set up school systems. Then I
saw Gone With the Wind and
learned the truth about Reconstruction!” What
is identified as the problem
determines the frame of rhetoric and solutions
sought. Myrdal’s insight, to focus
on whites, is critical to understanding
Reconstruction. Textbooks still fail to
counter the Confederate myth of Reconstruction, so
well portrayed in Gone With
the Wind, with an analysis that has equal power.

Focusing on white racism is even more central
to understanding the period
Rayford Logan called “the nadirof American race
relations”: the years between
1890 and 1940 when African Americans were
put back into second-class
citizenship. 70 During this time white Americans,
North and South, joined hands
to restrict black civil and economic rights.
Unfortunately, most Americans do
not even know the term, and not one of
the textbooks I examined used it.
Instead, they break the period into various eras,
most of them inaccurateas well
as inconsequential, such as Gay Nineties or
Roaring Twenties. During the Gay
Nineties, for example, the United States suffered
its second-worst depression
ever, as well as the Pullman and Homestead strikes
and other major labor
disputes. Thus “GayNineties” leadslogically to the query,
“Gayfor whom?”
Although none uses the term, most textbooks do provide
sometwigs about the
nadir, while failing to provide an overview of
the forest. The finest overall
coverage, in American History, summarizes the period
in a section entitled “The
LongNight Begins”: “After the Compromise of
1877 the white citizens of the
North turned their backs on the black
citizens of the South. Gradually the
southern states broke their promise to treat
blacks fairly. Step by step they

deprived them of the right to vote and reduced them to
the status of second-class
citizens.” American History then spells out the
techniques—restrictions on
voting, segregation in public places, and
lynchings—which Southern whites
used to maintain white supremacy.
Triumph of the American Nation, on the otherhand,
sums up in these bland
words: “Reconstruction left many major
problems unsolved and created new and
equally urgent problems. This was true even though
many forces in the North
and the South continued working to reconcile the
two sections.” These sentences
are so vague as to be content-free. Frances
FitzGerald used an earlier version of
this passage to attack what she called the
“problems” approach to American
history. “These ‘problems’ seem to crop up
everywhere,” she deadpanned.
“History in these texts is a mass of
problems.”71 Five hundred pages later in
Triumph, when the authors reach the civil rights
movement, race relations again
becomes a “problem.” The authors make no
connection between the failure of
the United States to guarantee black civil rights
in 1877 and the need for a civil
rights movement a century later. Nothing
ever causes anything. Things just
happen.

In fact, during Reconstruction and the nadir, a
battle raged for the soul of the
Southern white racist and in a way for that of
the whole nation. There is a
parallel in the reconstruction of Germany after
World War II, a battle for the
soul of the German people, a battle that Nazism
lost (we hope). But in the United
States, as American History tells, racism won.
Between 1890 and 1907 every
Southern and border state “legally” disenfranchised
the vast majority of its
African American voters. Lynchings rose to an
all-time high. In 1896 the
Supreme Court upheld segregation in Plessy v.
Ferguson.
Unfortunately, the textbooks mostly misunderstand
segregation. Therefore,
they misread Brown, the 1954 Supreme Court
decision that would begin to undo
segregation. “The problem, however,”in the words of
American Journey, “was
that the facilities were separate but in no way equal.”
The Americans concurs:
“Without exception, the facilities reserved for whites
were superior to those
reserved for nonwhites.” While it was true that
“separate” rarely meant “equal,”
that was never the crux of the matter. As the
Supreme Court said in Brown,
“[Some] Negro and white schools involved have
been equalized or are being
equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula,
qualifications and salaries of
teachers, and other ‘tangible’ factors. Our

decision, therefore, cannot turn on
merely a comparison of thesetangible factors.”
Only Boorstin and Kelley gets Brown right: “The
problem, of course, was that
therereally could never be such a thingas
‘separate but equal’ facilities for the
two races. When any race was kept apart from
another, it was deprived of its
equality—which meant its right to be treated
like all othercitizens.” Textbooks
need to offer the sociological definition of
segregation: a system of racial
etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate
from the oppressor when both
are doing equal tasks, like learning the
multiplication tables, but allows intimate
closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like
cooking or cleaning for white
employers. The rationale of segregation thus
implies that the oppressed are a
pariah people. “Unclean!” was the caste
message of every “colored” water
fountain, waiting room, and courtroomBible.
“Inferior” was the implication of
every school that excluded blacks (and often
Mexicans,Native Americans, and
“Orientals”). This ideology was born in slavery and
remained alive to rationalize
the second-class citizenship imposed on African
Americans after
Reconstruction. This stigma is why separate could
never mean equal, even when
black facilities might be newer or physically

superior. Elements of this stigma
survive to harm the self-image of someAfrican
Americans today, which helps
explain why Caribbean blacks who immigrate to
the United States often
outperform black Americans.72
During the nadir, segregation increased everywhere.
Jackie Robinson was not
the first black player in major league
baseball. Blacks had played in the major
leagues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889
whites had forced them out. In
1911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys
after they won fifteen of the
first twenty-eight derbies.73 Particularly in the
South, whites attacked the richest
and most successfulAfrican Americans, just as they
had the most acculturated
Native Americans, so upward mobility offered no
way out for blacks but only
made them more of a target. In the North as
well as in the South, whites forced
African Americans from skilled occupations
and even unskilled jobs such as
postal carriers.74 Eventually our system of
segregation spread to South Africa, to
Bermuda, and even to European-controlled enclaves in
China and India.
OnceNortherners did nothing to stop what cameto be
called the “Mississippi
plan”—that state’s 1890 Constitution that
“legally” (but in defiance of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) removed
African Americans from

citizenship—they became complicit with it. All other
Southern states and places
as far away as Oklahoma followed suit by
1907, and the nation acquiesced.
American popular culture evolved to rationalize
whites’ retraction of civil and
political rights from African Americans. The
Bronx Zoo exhibited an African
behind bars, like a gorilla.75 Theatrical
productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
played throughout the nadir, but sincethe novel’s
indictment of slavery was no
longer congenial to an increasingly racist white
society, rewrites changed Uncle
Tom from a martyr who gave his life to
protect his people into a sentimental
dope who was loyal to kindly masters. In the
black community, Uncle Tom
eventually came to mean an African
American without integrity who sells out
his people’s interests. In the 1880s and 1890s,
minstrel shows featuring
bumbling, mislocuting whites in blackface grew
wildly popular from New
England to California. By presenting heavily
caricatured images of African
Americans who were happy on the plantation
and lost and incompetent off it,
theseshows demeaned black ability. Minstrel songs
such as “Carry Me Back to
Old Virginny,” “Old Black Joe,”and “My Old
Kentucky Home” told whites that
Harriet Beecher Stowe got Uncle Tom’s Cabin

all wrong: blacks really liked
slavery. Second-class citizenship was appropriate
for such a sorrypeople.76
Textbooks now abandoned their idealistic
presentations of Reconstruction in
favor of the Confederate myth, for if blacks
were inferior, then the historical
period in which they enjoyed equal rights
must have been dominated by wrong-
thinking Americans, surely motivated by private
gain. Vaudeville continued the
minstrel show portrayals of silly, lying,
chicken-stealing black idiots. So did
early silent movies. Some movies made even
more serious charges against
African Americans: D. W. Griffith’s racist epic
Birthof a Nation showed them
obsessed with interracialsex and debased by corrupt
white carpetbaggers.
These cartoons by Thomas Nast mirror the revival
of racism in the North. Left,
And Not This Man? from Harper’s Weekly, August 5,
1865, provides evidence
of Nast’s idealism in the early days after
the Civil War. Nine years later, as
Reconstruction was beginning to wind down,
Nast’s images of African
Americans reflected the increasingracism of the
times. Opposite is Colored Rule
in a Reconstructed (?) State, from the same
journal, March 14, 1874. Such
idiotic legislators could obviously be

discounted as the white North
contemplated giving up on black civil rights.
In politics, the white electorate had become
so racist by 1892 that the
Democratic candidate,Grover Cleveland, won the
White House partly by tarring
Republicans with their attempts to guarantee civil rights
to African Americans,
thereby conjuring fears of “Negro domination” in
Northern as well as Southern
white minds. From the Civil War to the
end of the century, not a single
Democrat in Congress, representing the North or
the South, ever voted in favor
of any civil rights legislation. The Supreme Court
was worse: its segregationist
decisions from 1896 (Plessy) through at least
1927 (Rice v. Gong Lum, which
barred Chinese from white schools) told the nation
that whites were the master
race. We have seen how Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency in 1912 and
proceeded to segregate the federal government. Aided
by Birth of a Nation,
which opened in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to
its zenith, boasting more than
four million members. For a time the KKK openly
dominated the state
governments of Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and
Oregon, and it probably

inducted President Warren G. Harding as a member
in a White House ceremony.
During the Wilson and Harding administrations,
perhaps one hundred race riots
took place, more than in any other period
since Reconstruction. White mobs
killed African Americans across the United
States. Some of theseevents, like the
1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as
the 1921 riot in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite
from airplanes onto a black
ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and
destroying more than eleven
hundred homes, have completely vanished from our
history books.77
Not only industrial jobs but even moving services
were reserved for whites in
somecities.
It is almost unimaginable how racist the United
States became during the
nadir. From Myakka City, Florida, to
Medford, Oregon, whites attacked their
black neighbors, driving them out and leaving
the towns all-white. Communities
with no black populations passed ordinances or
resolved informally to threaten
African American newcomers with death if they
remained overnight.Thus were
created thousands of “sundown towns”—probably a
majority of all incorporated
communities in Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and several
other Northern states.
Sundown towns ranged in size from DeLand,

Illinois, population 500, to
Appleton, Wisconsin, 57,000, and Warren, Michigan,
almost 200,000. Many
suburbs kept out Jews; in the West many towns
excluded Chinese, Mexican, or
Native Americans. Entire areas—most of the
Ozarks, the Cumberlands, the
Upper Peninsula of Michigan—became almost
devoid of African Americans.
Within metropolitan areas, whites pushed blacks
into what now became known
as “black neighborhoods” as cities grew
increasingly segregated residentially!78
African Americans were excluded from juries
throughout the South and in
many places in the North, which usually
meant they could forget about legal
redress even for obvious wrongs like assault,
theft, or arson by whites.
Lynchings offer evidence of how defenseless
blacks were, for the defining
characteristic of a lynching is that the murder
takesplace in public, so everyone
knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished.
During the nadir, lynchings
took place as far north as Duluth. Onceagain,
as Dred Scotthad proclaimed in
1857, “a Negro had no rights a white
man was bound to respect.” Every time
African Americans interacted with European
Americans, no matter how
insignificant the contact, they had to be aware of

how they presented themselves,
lest they give offense by looking someone in the
eye, forgetting to say “sir,” or
otherwise stepping out of “their place.” Always,
the threat of overwhelming
forcelay just beneath the surface.79
The nadir left African Americans in a
dilemma. An “exodus” to form new
black communities in the West did not lead to
real freedom. Migration north led
only to segregated urban ghettoes. Concentrating
on Booker T. Washington’s
plan for economic improvement while forgoing civil
and political rights could
not work, because economic gains could not
be maintained without civil and
political rights.80 “Back to Africa” was not
practicable.
Many African Americans lost hope; family
instability and crime increased.
This period of American life, not slavery, marked
the beginning of what some
social scientists have called the “tangle of
pathology” in African American
society. 81 Indeed, somehistorians date low black
morale to even later periods,
such as the greatmigration to Northern cities (1918-
70), the Depression (1929-
39), or changes in urban life and occupational
structure after World War II. This
tangle was the result, not the cause, of the
segregation and discrimination
African Americans faced. Black jockeys and
mail carriers were shut out, not

because they were inadequate, but because they
succeeded.
Recent textbooks pointout more trees in the nadirforest.
From The American
Way students learn that “By the early 1900s,
[white workers] had convinced
most labor unions not to admit Blacks.” The
Americans tells that “African
Americans found themselves forced into
segregated neighborhoods” in the
North. Boorstin and Kelley lets Woodrow Wilson
off the hook for his
administration’s extreme racism but does blame
Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer for inciting “excitable citizens” to “vent
their fears and their hatesagainst
any Americans who seemed ‘different,’ ”
including “blacks, Jews, and
Catholics.” Several books tell about lynchings,
although none includes a picture.
Three new textbooks mention the riot in Springfield,
Illinois, in 1908, in which
whites drove out two-thirdsof the black
population, trying to make Springfield a
sundown town. All of the newer texts mention
the rise of the “second” Ku Klux
Klan.
On the otherhand, ten textbooks imply or state
that Jackie Robinson was “the
first African American to play major league
baseball,” in the words of American

Journey, even though he wasn’t. Students never
learnthat blacks played in the
major leagues until the nadir, so the usual
textbook story line—generally
uninterrupted progress to the present—stays in place.
None of the books that
treat the Springfield riot tells that its aim was to
drive out the entire black
population of the city. No textbook even
mentions sundown towns. The
Americans notes that the Progressives “did little”
for African Americans, which
hardly does justice to the movement that
removed black aldermen from city
councils across the nation by enacting at-large
voting. Current authors do
emphasize that African Americans were not mere
victims but did respond to the
new oppression that surrounded them. In the
process, however, Journey goes too
far. “African Americans rose to the challenge of
achieving equality,” it assures
us; subsequent subheadings are “Equality for
African Americans” and “Other
Successes.” No nadir here! And none of
the textbooks that do more-or-less
recognize the nadirever analyzes the causes of the
worsening.
Textbook authors would not have to invent their
descriptions of the nadirfrom
scratch. African Americans have left a rich
and bitter legacy from the period.
Students who encounter Richard Wright’s narrative of
his childhood in Black
Boy, read Ida B. Wells’s description of a

lynching in The Red Record, or sing
aloud Big Bill Broonzy’s“If You’re Black, Get
Back!” cannot but understand
the plight of a people envisioning a
narrowing of their options. No book can
convey the depths of the black experience
without including material from the
oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my
original sample let African
Americans speak for themselves about the
conditions they faced.
It is also crucial that students realize that the
discrimination confronting
African Americans during the nadir (and
afterward) was national, not just
Southern. Few textbooks pointthis out. Therefore, most of
my first-year college
students have no idea that in many locales until
after World War II, the North,
too, was segregated: that blacks could not buy
houses in communities around
Minneapolis, could not work in the construction
trades in Philadelphia, would
not be hired as department store clerks in
Chicago, and so on. As late as the
1990s and 2000s, some Northern suburbs still
effectively barred African
Americans. So did hundreds of independent run-
down towns more than half a
century after the Brown decision.
Even The American Adventure forgets its own good
coverage of the nadirand

elsewhere offers this simplistic view of the
period: “The years 1880-1910
seemed full of contradictions. . . . During
Reconstruction many people tried hard
to help the black people in the South. Then,
for years, most white Americans
paid little attention to the blacks. Little by
little, however, there grew a new
concern for them.” The trouble is, many white
high school graduates share this
worldview. Even if white concern for blacks
has been only sporadic, they would
argue, why haven’t African Americans shaped
up in the hundred-plus years
sinceReconstruction ended? After all, immigrantgroups
didn’t have everything
handed to them on a platter, either.
Lynch mobs oftenposed for the camera. They
showed no fear of being identified
because they knew no white jury would convict
them. Mississippi: Conflict and
Change, a revisionist state history textbook I
co-wrote, was rejected by the
Mississippi StateTextbook Board partly because it
included this photograph. At
the trial that ensued, a rating committee member
stated that material like this
would make it hard for a teacher to control
her students, especially a “white lady
teacher” in a predominantly black class. At
this point the judge took over the
questioning. “Didn’t lynchings happen in
Mississippi?” he asked. Yes, admitted

the rating committee member, but it was all so
long ago, why dwell on it now?
“It is a history book, isn’t it?” asked
the judge, who eventually ruled in the
book’s favor. None of the eighteen textbooks in
my sample includes a picture of
a lynching. I hasten to reassure that no
classroom riots resulted from our book or
this photograph.
It is true that someimmigrantgroups faced harsh
discrimination, from the NO
IRISH NEED APPLY signs in Boston to the
lynching of Italian Americans in
New Orleans to the pogroms against Chinese work
camps in California. Some
white suburban communities in the North shut
out Jews and Catholics until
recent years. Nonetheless, the segregation and
physical violence aimed at
African Americans has been of a higher
order of magnitude. If African
Americans in the nadir had experienced only
white indifference, as The
American Adventure implies, rather than overt
violent resistance, they could
have continued to win Kentucky Derbies, deliver mail,
and even buy houses in
white neighborhoods.Their problem was not black
failure or white indifference
—it was white racism.
Although formal racial discrimination grows

increasingly rare, as young
Americans grow up, they cannot avoid
coming up against the rift of race
relations. They will encounter predominantly black
athletic teams cheered by
predominantly white cheerleaders on television,
self-segregated dining rooms on
college campuses, and arguments about
affirmative action in the workplace.
More than any othersocial variable (except sex),
race will determine whom they
marry. Most of their friendship networks will
remain segregated by race, and
most churches, lodges, and other social
organizations will be overwhelmingly
either black or nonblack. The ethnic incidents
and race riots of tomorrowwill
provoke still more agonizing debate.
Since the nadir, the climate of race relations
has improved, owing especially
to the civil rights movement. But massive racial
disparities remain, inequalities
that can only be briefly summarized here. In 2000,
African American and Native
American median family incomes averaged only 62
percent of white family
income; Hispanics averaged about 64 percent as
much as whites. Money can be
used to buy many things in our society, from
higher SAT scores to the ability to
swim, and African American, Hispanic, and Native
American families lag in
their access to all those things. Ultimately,
money buys life itself, in the form of
better nutrition and health care and freedom from

danger and stress. It should
therefore come as no surprise that in 2000,
African Americans and Native
Americans had median life expectancies at birth
that were six years shorter than
whites’.
On average, African Americans still have worse
housing, lower scores on IQ
tests, and higher percentages of young men in
jail. The sneaking suspicion that
African Americans might be inferior goes
unchallenged in the hearts of some
blacks and many whites. It is all too easy to
blame the victim and conclude that
people of color are themselves responsible
for being on the bottom. Without
causal historical analysis, theseracial disparities
are impossible to explain.
When textbooks make racism invisible in
American history, they obstruct our
already poor ability to see it in the present.
The closest they come to analysis is
to present a vague feeling of optimism: in
race relations, as in everything, our
society is constantlygetting better. We used to
have slavery; now we don’t. We
used to have lynchings; now we don’t. Baseball
used to be all white; now it isn’t.
The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments
of black-white relations,
implying that race relations have somehow steadily

improved on their own. This
cheery optimism only compounds the problem,
because whites can infer that
racism is over. “The U.S. has done more
than any other nation in history to
provide equal rights for all,” The American
Tradition assures us. Of course, its
authors have not seriously considered the levels
of human rights in the
Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in
Choctaw society in 1800, because
they don’t mean their declaration as a serious
statement of comparative history
—it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.
High school students “have a gloomy view of
the state of race relations in
America today,” according to nationwide polls.
Students of all racial
backgrounds brood about the subject.82
Another poll reveals that for the first
time in this century, young white adults have
less tolerant attitudes toward black
Americans than those over thirty. One reason is
that “the under-30 generation is
pathetically ignorant of recent American history.”83
Too young to have
experienced or watched the civil rights movementas
it happened, these young
people have no understanding of the past and
present workings of racism in
American society.
Educators justify teaching history because it gives
us perspective on the present.

If thereis one issuein the present to which
authors should relate the history they
tell, the issue is racism. But as long as history
textbooks make white racism
invisible in the twentieth century, neither they nor
the students who use them
will be able to analyze race relations intelligently in
the twenty-first.
6.
JOHN BROWN ANDABRAHAM LINCOLN
THE INVISIBILITY OF ANTIRACISM IN AMERICAN
HISTORY
TEXTBOOKS
It is not only radical or currently unfashionable
ideas
that the texts leave out—it is all ideas,
including those
of their heroes.
—FRANCES FITZGERALD1
You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly
disposed of now. But this question is still to be
settled—
this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is
not yet.
—JOHN BROWN, 18592

I am here to plead his cause with you. I
plead not for
his life, but for his character—his immortal life; and so
it becomes your cause wholly, and is not
his in the
least.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “A PLEA FOR
CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN,” 18593
We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the
country,
and more; you can go home and try to bring
the people
to your views, and you may say anything you like
about
me, if that will help. . . . When the
hour comes for
dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing
to do my
duty though it cost my life.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO ABOLITIONIST
UNITARIAN MINISTERS, 18624
PERHAPS THE MOST telling criticism Frances
FitzGerald made in her 1979
survey of American history textbooks, America
Revised, was that they leave out

ideas. As presented by textbooks of the 1970s,
“American political life was
completely mindless,” she observed.5
Why would textbook authors avoid even those
ideaswith which they agree?
Taking ideasseriously 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 ideaswould make history
contingent: things could go either
way, and have on occasion. The “right” people,
armed with the “right” ideas,
have not always won. When they didn’t, the
authors would be in the
embarrassing position of having to disapprove of
an outcome in the past.
Including ideas would introduce uncertainty. This is
not textbook style.
Textbooks unfold history without real drama or
suspense, only melodrama.
On the subject of race relations, John Brown’s
statement that “this question is
still to be settled” seems almost as relevant
today, and almost as ominous, as
when he spoke in 1859. The opposite of
racism is antiracism, of course, or what
we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism,
and it is still not clear whether it
will prevail. In this struggle, our history textbooks
offer little help. Just as they
underplay white racism, they also neglect racial
idealism. In so doing, they
deprive students of potential role models to call

upon as they try to bridge the
new fault lines that will spread out in the future
from the greatrift in our past.
Since ideas and ideologies played an
especially important role in the Civil
War era, American history textbooks give a
singularly inchoate view of that
struggle. Just as textbooks treat slavery without
racism, they treat abolitionism
without much idealism.6 Consider the most radical
white abolitionist of them all,
John Brown.
The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery
and Reconstruction, has
changed in American history textbooks. From
1890 to about 1970, John Brown
was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane,
and after 1970 he has slowly
been regaining his sanity. Before reviewing six more
textbooks in 2006-07, I had
imagined that they would maintain this trend,
portraying Brown’s actions so as
to render them at least intelligible if not
intelligent. In their treatment of Brown,
however, the new textbooks don’t differ much
from those of the 1980s, so I shall
discuss them all together. Since Brown himself
did not change after his death—
except to molder more—his mental health in
our textbooks provides an
inadvertent index of the level of white
racism in our society. Perhaps our new

textbooks suggest that race relations circa 2007 are not
much better than circa
1987.
In the eighteen textbooks I reviewed, Brown
makes two appearances:
Pottawatomie, Kansas, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Recall that the 1854 Kansas-
Nebraska Act tried to resolve the question of
slavery through “popular
sovereignty.” The practical result of leaving the
slavery decision to whoever
settled in Kansas was an ideologically motivated
settlementcraze. Northerners
rushed to live and farm in Kansas Territory
and make it “free soil.” Fewer
Southern planters moved to Kansas with their
slaves, but slave owners from
Missouri repeatedly crossed the Missouri River to
vote in territorial elections
and to establish a reignof terror to driveout
the free-soil farmers. In May 1856
hundreds of pro-slavery “border ruffians,” as they
cameto be called, raided the
free-soil town of Lawrence,Kansas, killing two people,
burning down the hotel,
and destroying two printing presses. An older
textbook, The American Tradition,
describes Brown’s action at Pottawatomie flatly:
“In retaliation, a militant
abolitionist named John Brown led a
midnight attack on the proslavery
settlement of Pottawatomie. Five people were killed
by Brown and his
followers.” The 2006 edition of The American Pageant
provides a much fuller

account, but one that is far from neutral.
The fanatical figure of John Brown now stalked
upon the Kansas
battlefield. Spare, gray-bearded, and iron-willed,
he was obsessively
dedicated to the abolitionist cause. The power of
his glittering gray eyes
was such, so he claimed, that his stare could
forcea dog or cat to slink
out of a room. Becoming involved in dubious
dealings, including horse
stealing, he moved to Kansas from Ohio with a
part of his largefamily.
Brooding over the recent attack on Lawrence,
“Old Brown” of
Osawatomie led a band of his followers to
Pottawatomie Creek in May
1856. There they literally hacked to pieces
five surprised men, presumed
to be proslaveryites. This fiendish butchery besmirched
the free-soil
cause and brought vicious retaliationfrom the
proslavery forces.
Pageant’s prose is typical of books written
during the nadir of race relations,
1890-1940 (when most white Americans,
including historians, felt that blacks
should not have equal rights), and comes as
something of a shock at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. In this
rendering, those who fought for

black equality had to be wrongheaded.
Indeed, the first edition of this textbook came
out in 1956, long before the
changes wrought by the civil rights movement
had any chance to percolate
through our culture and influence the writing of
our history textbooks. The
choice of language—from “fanatical figure” and
“dubious dealings” to “fiendish
butchery”—is hardly objective. One man’s “stalk” is
another’s “walk.” Bias is
also evident in the choice of details included
and omitted. The account
throughout makes Northerners the initial
aggressors, omitting mention of the
earlier murders by pro-slavery Southerners.
Actually, free-staters, being in the
majority, had tried to win Kansas democratically and
legally; it was pro-slavery
forces who had used terror and threats to try to
control the state. No reader of
Pageant would guess that pro-slavery men had
recently killed five free-state
settlers, including the two slain in the Lawrence raid.
Nor had Brown moved to
Kansas “with his largefamily”; rather, he had
moved to the Adirondacks, hoping
his sonswould join him there, but five sons and
their families instead went to
Kansas, hoping to farm in peace. They
then asked their father for aid when
threatened by their pro-slavery neighbors. Other
errors include “presumed to be
proslaveryites” (theywere), and “literally hacked to
pieces” (theyweren’t).7

Of all eighteen textbooks, another of the new
books, Pathways to the Present,
is the most sympathetic to Brown but never
goes beyond neutrality. It compactly
describes Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid:
On October 16, 1859, the former Kansas raider
John Brown and a small
group of men attacked the federal arsenal at
Harpers Ferry, Virginia. . . .
Brown and his followers hoped to seize the
weapons and give them to
enslaved people to start a slaveuprising.
United States troops under the command of
Colonel Robert E. Lee
cornered and defeated Brown’s men. Convicted of
treason, Brown was
sentenced to be hanged. Just before his execution,
he wrote a note that
would prove to be all too accurate: “I John
Brown am now quitecertain
that the crimes of this guilty land will never be
purged away, but with
blood.”
Eight otherbooks, new and older, are negative,
although they don’t imply that he
was crazy. The othernine are openly hostile. Several
textbooks, including four
of the six recent ones, emphasize the claim
that no slaves actually joined Brown.

Boorstin and Kelley makes the pointat length:
“The partyforcibly ‘freed’ about
30 slaves. Taking thesereluctant people with them,
Brown and his men retreated
to the arsenal. Ironically, the first person to
die in the affair—killed by John
Brown and his men—was an already-free black
gunned down by these
‘liberators.’ ”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)
would love theseaccounts,
because they can be taken to imply that African
Americans had no interest in
freedom. The UDC erected a monument in Harpers
Ferry to Haywood Shepherd,
the free black man referred to by Boorstin and
Kelley. At its dedication in 1931,
they claimed he was “representative of Negroes of
the neighborhood, who would
not take part.” But this is bad history. Hannah
Geffert and Jean Libby have
shown that Brown drew considerable support from
enslaved African Americans
around Harpers Ferry. His men armed the thirty
mentioned by Boorstin and
Kelley, including somewho camefrom nearby plantations
that the raiders never
visited.8 These newly freed men then stopped
the eastbound passenger train,
guarded it, helped the raiders find other slave
owners, and probably killed an
armed white resident of the town who
refused to halt when challenged. (After
the raid the state indicted eleven of them for these
actions.) Well after the raid,

local African Americans continued the resistance
to slavery that Brown’s raid
had triggered: Libby notes that many slaves
from the area were listed as
“fugitive” in the 1860 census, and “the barns of all
of the jurors of John Brown’s
trial were burned—a time-honored signal of
revolution.” 9 Thus, the UDC
interpretation that textbooks supply, implying that
the slaves themselves were
not sympathetic to the cause of abolition, is
simply inaccurate.
Four textbooks still linger in the former era when
Brown’s actions proved him
mad. “John Brown was almost certainly insane,”
opines American History. The
American Way tells a whopper: “[L]ater Brown was
proved to be mentally ill.”
The 2006 American Pageant, like its predecessor,
characterizes Brown as
“deranged,” “gaunt,” “grim,” and “terrible,” says
that “thirteen of his near
relatives were regarded as insane, including his mother
and grandmother,” and
terms the Harpers Ferry raid a “mad
exploit.” Other books finesse the sanity
issueby calling Brown merely “fanatical.” Not
one author, old or new, has any
sympathy for the man or takesany pleasure in his
ideals and actions.
For the benefit of readers who, like me, grew up

reading that Brown was at
least fanatic if not crazed, let’s consider the
evidence. To be sure, some of
Brown’s lawyers and relatives, hoping to save his
neck, suggested an insanity
defense. But no one who knew Brown thought
him crazy. He favorably
impressed people who spoke with him after his
capture, including his jailer and
even reporters writing for Democratic newspapers,
which supported slavery.
Governor Wise of Virginia called him “a man of
clear head” after Brown got the
better of him in an informal interview. “They
are themselves mistaken who take
him to be a madman,” Governor Wise said.
In his message to the Virginia
legislature he said Brown showed “quick and
clear perception,” “rational
premises and consecutive reasoning,” “composure
and self-possession.”10
After 1890, textbook authors inferred Brown’s
madness from his plan, which
admittedly was far-fetched. Never mind that
John Brown himself presciently
told Frederick Douglass that the venture would make
a stunning impact even if it
failed. Nor that his twenty-odd followers can hardly
all be considered crazed,
too.11 Rather, we must recognize that the
insanity with which historians have
charged John Brown was never psychological. It
was ideological. Brown’s
actions made no sense to textbook writers
between 1890 and about 1970. To

make no sense is to be crazy.
At left is John Brown as he appeared in
1858. He looked like a middle-aged
businessman—which he was. He grew a beard
later that year, partly as a modest
attempt to disguise himself after becomingwanted
for helping eleven African
Americans escape slavery in Missouri. Few
Americans recognize this portrait.
At right is John Brown as he looked in 1937 to
John Steuart Curry, who painted
a version of his portrait on the walls of
the Kansas StateCapitol. This Brown is
gaunt and deranged, which he had become in
our culture by 1937. Astoundingly,
at the start of the new millennium, American
Journey chose a variant of this
painting as its only portrait of Brown. Many
Americans can name this man.
Clearly, Brown’s contemporaries did not consider
him insane. Brown’s
ideological influence in the month before his
hanging, and continuing after his
death, was immense. He moved the boundary of
acceptable thoughts and deeds
regarding slavery. Before Harpers Ferry, to be
an abolitionist was not quite
acceptable, even in the North. Just talking
about freeing slaves—advocating
immediate emancipation—was behavior at the outer
limit of the ideological
continuum. By engaging in armed action,

including murder, John Brown made
mere verbal abolitionism seemmuch less radical.
After an initial shock waveof revulsion against
Brown, in the North as well as
in the South, Americans were fascinated to hear
what he had to say. In his 1859
trial John Brown captured the attention of the nation
like no otherabolitionist or
slaveowner before or since. He knew it:
“My whole life before had not afforded
me one half the opportunity to plead for the
right.”12 In his speech to the court
on November2, just before the judge sentenced
him to die, Brown argued, “Had
I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the
powerful, it would have been all right.”
He referred to the Bible, which he saw in
the courtroom, “which teaches me that
all things whatsoever I would that men should
do to me, I should do even so to
them. It teaches me further, to remember them
that are in bonds as bound with
them. I endeavored to act up to that
instruction.” Brown went on to claim the
high moral ground: “I believe that to have
interfered as I have done, as I have
always freely admitted I have done, in
behalf of His despised poor, I did no
wrong but right.” Although he objected that his
impending death penalty was
unjust, he accepted it and pointed to graver
injustices: “Now, if it is deemed

necessary that I should forfeit my life for the
furtherance of the ends of justice,
and mingle my blood further with the blood of
my children and with the blood of
millions in this slavecountry whose rights are
disregarded by wicked, cruel, and
unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”13
Brown’s willingness to go to the gallows for
what he thought was right had a
moral forceof its own. “It seems as if no
man had ever died in America before,
for in order to die you must first have lived,”
Henry David Thoreau observed in
a eulogy in Boston. “These men, in teaching
us how to die, have at the same
time taught us how to live.” Thoreau went on to
compare Brown with Jesus of
Nazareth, who had faced a similar death at
the hands of the state.14
During the rest of November, Brown provided
the nation graceful instruction
in how to face death. In Larchmont, New York,
George Templeton Strong wrote
in his diary, “One’s faith in anything is terribly
shaken by anybody who is ready
to go to the gallows condemning and denouncing
it.”15 Brown’s letters to his
family and friends softened his image, showed
his human side, and prompted an
outpouring of sympathy for his children and soon-
to-bewidow, if not for Brown
himself. His letters to supporters and remarks to
journalists, widely circulated,
formed a continuing indictment of slavery.

We see his charisma in this letter
from “a conservative Christian”—so the author signed
it—written to Brown in
jail: “While I cannot approve of all your
acts, I stand in awe of your position
sinceyour capture, and dare not oppose you lest I be
found fighting against God;
for you speak as one having authority, and
seem to be strengthened from on
high.”16 When Virginia executed John Brown on
December 2, making him the
first American sincethe founding of the nation to be
hanged as a traitor, church
bells mourned in cities throughout the North.
Louisa May Alcott, William Dean
Howells, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier,
and Walt Whitman were
among the poets who responded to the event.
“The gaze of Europe is fixedat this
moment on America,”wrote Victor Hugo from
France. Hanging Brown, Hugo
predicted, “will open a latent fissure that
will finally split the Union asunder.
The punishment of John Brown may consolidate
slavery in Virginia, but it will
certainly shatter the American Democracy. You
preserve your shame but you
kill your glory.”17
Brown remained controversial after his death.
Republican congressmen kept
their distance from his felonious acts. Nevertheless,
Southern slaveowners were

appalled at the showof Northern sympathy for Brown
and resolved to maintain
slavery by any means necessary, including
quitting the Union if they lost the
next election. Brown’s charisma in the North,
meanwhile, was not spent but only
increased owing to what many cameto view as
his martyrdom. As the war came,
as thousands of Americans found themselves
making the same commitment to
face death that John Brown had made, the
force of his example took on new
relevance. That’s why soldiers marched into battle
singing “John Brown’s
Body.” Two years later, church congregations
sang Julia Ward Howe’s new
words to the song: “As He died to make
men holy, let us die to make men
free”—and the identification of John Brown and
Jesus Christ took another turn.
The next year saw the 54th Massachusetts Colored
Regiment parading through
Boston to the tune, en route to its heroic
destiny with death in South Carolina,
while William Lloyd Garrison surveyed the
cheering bystanders from a balcony,
his hand resting on a bust of John
Brown. In February 1865 another
Massachusetts colored regiment marched to the tune
through the streets of
Charleston, South Carolina.18
That was the high point of old John Brown. At
the turn of the century, as
Southern and border states disfranchised African
Americans, as lynchings

proliferated, as blackfaceminstrel shows came to
dominate American popular
culture, white America abandoned the last shards
of its racial idealism. A history
published in 1923 makes plainthe connection to
Brown’s insanity: “The farther
we get awayfrom the excitement of 1859 the more
we are disposed to consider
this extraordinary man the victim of mental
delusions.”19 Not until the civil
rights movement of the 1960s was white
America freed from enough of its
racism to accept that a white person did
not have to be crazy to die for black
equality. In a sense, the murders of Mickey
Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in
Mississippi, James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo in
Alabama, and various otherwhite
civil rights workers in various otherSouthern states
during the 1960s liberated
textbook writers to see sanity again in John
Brown. Rise of the American Nation,
written in 1961, calls the Harpers Ferry plan “a
wild idea, certain to fail,” while
in Triumph of the American Nation, published in
1986, the plan becomes “a bold
idea, but almost certain to fail.”20
Frequently in American history the ideological
needs of white racists and
black nationalists coincide. So it was with their
views of John Brown. During the
heyday of the Black Power movement, I

listened to speaker after speaker in a
Mississippi forum denounce whites. “They are
your enemies,” thundered one
black militant. “Not one white person has
ever had the best interests of black
people at heart.” John Brown sprang to my
mind, but the speaker anticipated my
objection: “You might say John Brown did, but
remember, he was crazy.” John
Brown might provide a defense against such
global attacks on whites, but,
unfortunately, American history textbooks have erased
him as a usable character.
No black person who met John Brown thought
him crazy. Many black leaders
of the day—Martin Delaney, Henry Highland
Garnet, Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Tubman, and others—knew and respected
Brown. Only illness kept
Tubman from joining him at Harpers Ferry.
The day of his execution black-
owned businesses closed in mourning across
the North. Frederick Douglass
called Brown “one of the greatest heroes known
to American fame.”21 A black
college deliberately chose to locate at
Harpers Ferry, and in 1918 its alumni
dedicated a memorial stone to Brown and his
men “to commemorate their
heroism.” The stone stated, in part, “That this
nation might have a new birth of
freedom, that slavery should be removed forever
from American soil, John
Brown and his 21 men gave their lives.”

Quite possibly textbooks should not portray this
murderer as a hero,although
other murderers, from Christopher Columbus to
Nat Turner, get the heroic
treatment. However, the flat prose that textbooks
use for Brown is not really
neutral. Textbook authors’ withdrawal of sympathy
from Brown is perceptible;
their tone in presenting him is different from
the tone they employ for almost
everyone else. We see this, for instance, in their
treatment of his religious
beliefs. John Brown was a serious Christian, well
read in the Bible, who took its
moral commands to heart. Yet every recent
textbook except Pathways to the
Present does not credit Brown with religiositybut
instead blames him for it.22
“Brown believed that God had called on him to
fight slavery,” The Americans
says twice. But Brown never believed God
commanded him in the sense of
giving him instructions; rather, he thought deeply
about the moral meaning of
Christianity and decided that slavery was
incompatible with it. Boorstin and
Kelley calls Brown “the self-proclaimed antislavery
messiah.” But Brown never
thought of himself as a messiah. On the
contrary, he tried to get Frederick
Douglass or Harriet Tubman to join him, believing
enslaved African Americans
would be much more likely to follow them

than him.
By way of comparison, consider Nat Turner, who in
1831 led the most
important slaverevolt sincethe United States became
a nation. John Brown and
Nat Turner both killed whites in cold blood.
Both were religious, but, unlike
Brown, Turner did see visions and hear voices. In
most textbooks, Turner has
become somethingof a hero.Several textbooks call
Turner “deeply religious” or
“a gifted preacher.” None calls him “a
religious fanatic.” They reserve that term
for Brown. The closest any textbook comes to
suggesting that Turner might have
been crazy is this passage from American History:
“Historians still argue about
whether or not Turner was insane.” But the author
immediately goes on to
qualify: “The point is that nearly every
slave hated bondage. Nearly all were
eager to see something done to destroy
the system.” Thus even American
History emphasizes the political and social
meaning of Turner’s act, not its
psychological genesis in an allegedly questionable
mind.
The textbooks’ withdrawal of sympathy from Brown
is also apparent in what
they include and exclude about his life before
Harpers Ferry. “In the 1840s he
somehow got interested in helping black
slaves,” according to American
Adventures. Brown’s interest is no mystery: he

learned it from his father, who
was a trustee of Oberlin College, a center of
abolitionist sentiment. If Adventures
wanted, it could have related the well-known
storyabout how young John made
friends with a black boy during the War of
1812, which convinced him that
blacks were not inferior. Instead, its sentence reads
like a slur. Textbook authors
make Brown’s Pottawatomie killings seemequally
unmotivated by neglecting to
tell that the violence in Kansas had hitherto been
perpetrated primarily by the
pro-slavery side. Indeed, slavery sympathizers had
previously killed six free-soil
settlers. Several months after Pottawatomie, at
Osawatomie, Kansas, Brown had
helped thirty-five free-soil men defend themselves
against several hundred
marauding pro-slavery men from Missouri,
thereby earning the nickname
“Osawatomie John Brown.” Not one textbook
mentions what Brown did at
Osawatomie, where he was the defender, but
fourteen of eighteen tell what he
did at Pottawatomie, where he was the attacker.23
Our textbooks also handicap Brown by not letting
him speak for himself.
Even his jailer let Brown put pen to paper!
Twelve of the eighteen textbooks I
studied do not provide even a phrase he spoke
or wrote. Brown’s words, which

moved a nation, therefore cannot move most
students today.
Textbook authors may avoid Brown’s ideas
because they are tinged with
Christianity. Religion has been one of the great
inspirations and explanations of
human enterprise in this country. Yet textbooks,
while they may mention
religious organizations such as the Shakers or
Christian Science, never treat
religious ideasin any period seriously.24 An in-
depth portrayal of Mormonism,
Christian Science, or the Methodism of the Great
Awakening would be
controversial. Mentioning atheism or Deism would
be even worse. “Are you
going to tell kids that Thomas Jefferson didn’t
believe in Jesus? Not me!” a
textbook editor exclaimed to me. Treating
religious ideas neutrally,
nonreligiously, simply as factors in society, won’t
do, either, for that would
likely offend some adherents.The textbooks’
solution is to leave out religious
ideas entirely.25 Quoting John Brown’s courtroom
paraphrase of the Golden
Rule—“whatsoever I would that men should do to
me, I should do even so to
them”—would violate the taboo.
Ideological contradiction is terribly important in
history. Ideas have power.
The ideasthat motivated John Brown and the example he
set livedon long after
his body lay a-moldering in the grave. Yet

American history textbooks give us
no way to understand the role of ideasin our
past.
Conceivably, textbook authors ignore John
Brown’s ideas because in their
eyes his violent acts make him ineligible for
sympathetic consideration. When
we turn from Brown to Abraham Lincoln, we
shift from one of the most
controversial to one of the most venerated
figures in American history.
Textbooks describe Abraham Lincoln with sympathy,
of course. Nonetheless,
they also minimize his ideas, especially on the subject
of race. In life Abraham
Lincoln wrestled with the race question more openly
than any other president
except perhaps Thomas Jefferson, and, unlike
Jefferson, Lincoln’s actions
sometimes matched his words. Most of our
textbooks say nothing about
Lincoln’s internal debate. If they did showit, what
teaching devices they would
become! Students would see that speakers modify
their ideas to appease and
appeal to different audiences, so we cannot
simply take their statements literally.
If textbooks recognized Lincoln’s racism,
students would learn that racism not
only affects Ku Klux Klan extremists but
has been “normal” throughout our
history. And as they watched Lincoln struggle with

himself to apply America’s
democratic principles across the color line,
students would see how ideas can
develop and a person can grow.
In conversation, Lincoln, like most whites of his
century, referred to blacks as
“niggers.”In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he
sometimes descendedinto explicit
white supremacy, as we saw in the last
chapter. Lincoln’s ideasabout race were
more complicated than Douglas’s, however. The day
after Douglas declared for
white supremacy in Chicago, saying the issues
were “distinctly drawn,” Lincoln
replied and indeed drew the issuedistinctly:
I should like to know if taking this old
Declaration of Independence,
which declares that all men are equal upon
principle, and making
exceptions to it—where will it stop? If one
man says it does not mean a
Negro, why does not another say it does not mean
some otherman? If
that Declaration is not . . . true, let us
tear it out! [Cries of “no, no!”] Let
us stick to it then, let us stand firmly by it
then.26
No textbook quotes this passage, and every book
but one leaves out Lincoln’s
thundering summation of what his debates
with Douglas were really about:
“That is the issuethat will continue in this country
when thesepoor tongues of

Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is
the eternal struggle between these
two principles—right and wrong—throughout the
world.”27
Lincoln’s realization of the basichumanity of African
Americans may have
derived from his father, who moved the family
to Indiana partly because he
disliked the racial slavery that was sanctioned in
Kentucky.Or it may stem from
an experience Lincoln had on a steamboat trip in
1841, which he recalled years
later when writing to his friend Josh Speed:
“You may remember, as I well do,
that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there
were on board ten or twelve
slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was
continual torment to me, and
I see somethinglike it every time I touch
the Ohio, or any otherslave-border.”
Lincoln concluded that the memory still had “the
power of making me
miserable.”28 No textbook quotes this letter or
anything like it.
As early as 1835, in his first term in
the Illinois House of Representatives,
Lincoln cast one of only five votes opposing a
resolution that condemned
abolitionists. Textbooks imply that Lincoln was
nominated for president in 1860
because he was a moderate on slavery, but, in
fact, Republicans chose Lincoln

over front-runner William H. Seward partly
because of Lincoln’s “rock-solid
antislavery beliefs,” while Seward was considered
a compromiser.29
As president, Lincoln understood the importance
of symbolic leadership in
improving race relations. For the first time the United
States exchanged
diplomats with Haitiand Liberia. In 1863 Lincoln
desegregated the White House
staff, which initiated a desegregation of the
federal government that lasted until
Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House
to black callers, notably
Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle
with his own racism, asking
aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting
(euphemistically termed
colonizing ) African Americans to Africa or
Latin America.
Most of the textbooks mention that Lincoln
“personally” opposed slavery.
Two even quote his 1864 letter: “If slavery
isn’t wrong, then nothing is
wrong.”30 However, most textbook authors take pains
to separate Lincoln from
undue idealism about slavery. They venerate Lincoln
mainly because he “saved
the Union.” By far their favorite statement of
Lincoln’s,quoted or paraphrased
by fifteen of the eighteen books, is his letter
of August 22, 1862, to Horace
Greeley’s New York Tribune:

My paramount object in this struggle is to
save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I
could save the Union without
freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing all the
slaves, I would do it; and if I could
save it by freeing someand leaving
others alone, I would also do that. What I
do about slavery and the
colored race I do because I believe it helps
to save this Union; and what I
forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it
would help to save the
Union. . . .
By emphasizing this quote, most textbooks present a
Lincoln who was morally
indifferent to slavery and certainly did not care
about black people. As Pathways
to the Present puts it, “Lincoln came to regard
ending slavery as one more
strategy for ending the war.” Ironically, this is
also the Lincoln whom black
nationalists present to African Americans to
persuade them to stop thinking well
of him.31
To present such a Lincoln, the textbooks have to
remove all context. The very
first thingthey omit is the next pointLincoln made: “.
. . I have here stated my
purpose according to my view of official duty,and I
intend no modification of

my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere
could be free.” That
says something quite different about slavery, of
course. So all but three
textbooks leave that part out.
Next, they remove the political context. Every
historian knows that the
fragment of Lincoln’s letter to Greeley that most
textbooks quote does not
simply represent his intent regarding slavery.
Lincoln wrote the letter to seek
support for the war from residents of New
York City, one of the most
Democratic (and therefore white supremacist) cities
in the North. He could never
hope to win that support by claiming the war would
end slavery. They would be
against it on that ground. So he made the
only appeal he could: support the war
and it will hold the nation together. He was
speaking not to Greeley, who wanted
slavery to end, but to antiwar Democrats and
antiblack Irish Americans, as well
as to governors of the border states and
the many other Northerners who
opposed emancipating the slaves. Saving the Union
had never been Lincoln’s
sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of
the eleventh-hour Crittenden
Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to
preserve the Union by
preserving slavery forever.32 Not one author
explains the political context or the

intended audience for the Greeley letter. Nor does
a single textbook quote
Lincoln’s encouragement that same summer to Unitarian
ministers to “go home
and try to bring the people to your
views,” because “we shall need all the
antislavery feeling in the country, and more.” If
they did, students would
understand that Lincoln’s response to the issueof
slavery in America was hardly
indifference.
When textbooks discuss the Emancipation
Proclamation, they explain
Lincoln’s actions in realpolitik terms. “By
September 1862,” says Triumph of
the American Nation, “Lincoln had reluctantly decided
that a war fought at least
partly to free the slaves would win European
support and lessen the danger of
foreign intervention on the side of the
Confederacy.” To be sure, international
and domestic political concerns did impinge on
Abraham Lincoln, master
politician that he was. But so did considerations of
right and wrong. Political
analysts then and now believe that Lincoln’s September
1862 announcement of
emancipation cost Republicans the control of
Congress the following November,
because Northern white public opinion would
not evolve to favor black freedom
for another year.33 Textbook authors suppress the
possibility that Lincoln acted
at least in part because he thought it was
right. From Indian wars to slavery to

Vietnam, textbook authors not only sidestep putting
questions of right and wrong
to our past actions but even avoid acknowledging
that Americans of the time did
so.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the great masters of
the English language.
Perhaps more than any other president he
invoked and manipulated powerful
symbols in his speeches to move public
opinion, often on the subject of race
relations and slavery. Textbooks, in keeping with
their habitof telling everything
in the authorial monotone, dribble out Lincoln’s
words threeand four at a time.
The only complete speech or letter any of them
provide is the Gettysburg
Address, and only six of the eighteen textbooks
dispense even that. Lincoln’s
three paragraphs at Gettysburg comprise one of
the most important speeches
ever given in America and take up only a fourth
of a page in the textbooks that
include them. Nonetheless, five books do not
even mention the speech, while
five others provide only the last sentence or phrase
from it: “government of the
people, by the people, for the people.” Silliest of
all is the new edition of The
American Pageant, which devotes an entire page to
the address but uses most of
it to showthe manuscript in Lincoln’s handwriting,

so much reduced to fit on the
page that it is rendered illegible!34 Pageant
provides more words about the
Address than are in the original—and fails to
include a single phrase that
Lincoln wrote.
The words, however, are important, and it is
important to get students to think
about them. Lincoln understood that fighting a
war for freedom was
ideologically more satisfying than fighting simply to
preserve a morally neutral
Union. To save the Union, it was necessary to
find rationales for the war other
than “to save the Union.” At Gettysburg he
provided one.
Lincoln was a fine lawyer who knew full well
that the United States was
conceived in slavery, for the Constitution specifically
treats slavery in at least
five places. Nevertheless he began, “Four score
and seven years ago, our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Thus Lincoln wrapped the
Union cause in the rhetoric of the Declaration
of Independence, which
emphasized freedom even while many of its
signers were slaveowners.35In so
doing, Lincoln was at the same time using the
Declaration to redefine the Union
cause, suggesting that it ultimately implied
equal rights for all Americans,

regardless of race.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil
war,” Lincoln continued, “testing
whether that nation or any nation, so conceived
and so dedicated, can long
endure.” Again, Lincoln knew better: by 1863
other nations had joined us in
democracy. For that matter, every European nation
and most American nations
had outlawed slavery. How did our CivilWar test
whether they could endure?
Here Lincoln was wrapping the Union cause in
the old “last best hope of
mankind” cloak, a secular version of the idea of
a special covenant between the
United States and God.36 Although bad history,
such rhetoric makes for great
speeches. The president thus appealed to the antiwar
Democrats of the North to
support the war effort for the good of all
mankind.
After invoking a third powerful symbol—“the
brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here”—Lincoln closed by identifying
the cause for which so
many had died:“that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom.”
To what freedom did he refer? Black freedom, of
course. As Lincoln well knew,
the war itself was undermining slavery, for what
began as a war to save the

Union increasingly had become a war for black
freedom. Citizens at the time
understood Lincoln perfectly. Indeed, throughout
this period Americans
purchased copies of political speeches, read them,
discussed issues, and voted at
rates that now seem impossibly high. The
Chicago Times, a Democratic
newspaper, denounced the address precisely because
of “the proposition that all
men are created equal.” The Union dead,
claimed the Times, “were men
possessing too much self-respect to declare
that Negroes were their equals, or
were entitled to equal privileges.”37
Textbooks need not explain Lincoln’swords at
Gettysburg as I have done.
The Gettysburg Address is rich enough to survive
various analyses.38 But of the
six books that do reprint the speech, four merely
put it in a box by itself in a
corner of the page. Pathways to the Present
offers a rather empty summation
afterward. Only Life and Liberty asks intelligent
questions about it.39 As a
result, I have yet to meet a high school
graduate who has devoted any time to
thinking about the Gettysburg Address.
The strange career of the log cabin in which
Abraham Lincoln was born
symbolizes in a way what textbooks have done to
Lincoln. The actual cabin fell

into disrepair probably before Lincoln became
president. According to research
by D. T. Pitcaithley, the new cabin, a hoax
built in 1894, was leased to two
amusement park owners, went to Coney Island,
where it got commingled with
the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another
hoax), and was finally shrunk to
fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky,where,
reassembled, it still stands. The
cabin also became a children’s toy: Lincoln
Logs, invented by Frank Lloyd
Wright’s son John in 1920, came with
instructions on how to build both
Lincoln’s log cabin and Uncle Tom’s cabin!
The cabin still makes its archetypal
appearance in our textbooks, signifying the
rags-to-riches legend of Abraham
Lincoln’s upward mobility. No wonder one college
student could only say of
him, in a much-repeated blooper, “He was born in
a log cabin which he built
with his own hands.”
Even worse is textbook treatment of Lincoln’s Second
Inaugural. In this
towering speech, one of the masterpieces of
American oratory, Lincoln
specifically identified differences over slavery as
the primary cause of the Civil
War, then in its fourth bloody year.40
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of
those offenses which,
in the providence of God, must needs come,
but which, having continued

through his appointed time,he now wills to remove,
and that he gives to
both North and South this terrible war, as the
woe due to those by whom
the offense came, shall we discern therein
any departure from those
divine attributes which the believers in a living
God always ascribe to
him?
Lincoln continued in this vein by invoking the
doctrine of predestination, a more
vital element of the nation’s idea system then than
now:
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that
this mighty scourge of
war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all
the wealth piled by the bondman’s two
hundred and fifty years of
unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every
drop of blood drawn with
the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the
sword, as was said three
thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The
judgmentsof the Lord
are true and righteous altogether.”
This last is an astonishing sentence. Its length
alone astounds. Politicians don’t
talk like that nowadays. When students read this
passage aloud, slowly and

deliberately, they do not fail to perceive it as a
searing indictment of America’s
sins against black people. The Civil War was
by far the most devastating
experience in our nation’s history. Yet we had it
coming, Lincoln says here. And
in his rhetorical context, sin or crime, not mere
tragedy, is the fitting and proper
term. Indeed, this indictment of U.S. race
relations echoes John Brown’s last
note: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that
the crimes of this guilty land
will never be purged away, but with Blood.”41
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural made such an impact on
Americans that when the
president was shot, a month later, farmers in
New York and Ohio greeted his
funeral train with placards bearing its phrases.
But onlyThe United States—A
History of the Republic includes any of the
material quoted above.42 Seven other
textbooks restrict their quotation to the speech’s
final phrase, about binding up
the nation’s wounds “with malice toward none.”
Ten ignore the speech
altogether.
Like Helen Keller’s concern about the injustice of
social class, Lincoln’s
concern about the crime of racism may appear
unseemly to textbook authors.
Mustwe remember Lincoln for that? Let’s
leave it out! Such an approach to
Lincoln might be called the Walt Disney
interpretation: Disney’s exhibit at the

1964 New York World’s Fair featured an animated
sculpture of Lincoln that
spoke for several minutes, choosing his words
carefully to say nothing about
slavery.
Having disconnected Abraham Lincoln from
considerations of right and
wrong, several textbooks present the CivilWar
the same way. In reality, U.S.
soldiers, who began fighting to save the Union
and not much more, ended by
fighting for all the vague but portentous ideasin
the Gettysburg Address. From
1862 on, Union armies sang “Battle Cry of
Freedom,” composed by George
Root in the summer of that year:
We will welcome to our numbers the loyaltrue and
brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
And although he may be poor, not a man shall be
a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.43
Triumph of the American Nation includes this
evocative photograph of the crew
of the USSHunchback in the Civil War. Such
racial integration disappeared
during the nadirof race relations in the United
States, from 1890-1940.
Surely no one can sing these lines even
today without perceiving that both

freedom and the preservation of the Union were
war aims of the United States
and without feeling someof the power of that
potent combination. This power is
what textbooks omit: they give students no inkling
that ideasmatter.
The actions of African Americans played a
big role in challenging white
racism. Slaves fled to Union lines. After
they were allowed to fight, the
contributions of black troops to the war effort
made it harder for whites to deny
that blacks were fully human.44 A Union
captain wrote to his wife, “A great
many [whites] have the idea that the entire Negro
race are vastly their inferiors
—a few weeks of calm unprejudiced life here would
disabuse them, I think—I
have a more elevated opinion of their abilities than I
ever had before.”45 Unlike
historians of a few decades ago, today’s textbook
authors realize that trying to
present the war without the actions of African
Americans makes for bad history.
All eighteen textbooks at least mention that more than
180,000 blacks fought in
the Union army and navy. Several of the
textbooks include an illustration of
African American soldiers and describe the unequal
pay they received until late
in the war.46 Discovering American History
mentions that Union soldiers
trapped behind Confederate lines found slaves to

be “of invaluable assistance.”
Only The United States—A History of the Republic,
however, takesthe next step
by pointing out how the existence and success of
black troops decreased white
racism.47
Opposite: This is the October 15, 1864, centerfold of
Harper’s magazine, which
throughout the nineteenth century was the
mouthpiece of the Republican Party.
The words are from the Democratic platform.
The illustrations, by young
Thomas Nast, show shortcomings in the
Democratic plan. One could hardly
imagine a political party today seeking white
votes on the basisof such racial
idealism.
The Democratic platform began innocuously
enough: “We will adhere with
unswerving fidelity to the UNION under the
CONSTITUTION as the ONLY
solid foundation of our STRENGTH, SECURITY,
and HAPPINESS as a
PEOPLE.” But Nast’s illustration was a
knockout: he shows slavecatchers and
dogs pursuing hapless runaways into a swamp. He
jolts the reader to exclaim,
What about them? These are people, too!
The antiracist repercussions of the CivilWar were

particularly apparent in the
border states. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
applied only to the
Confederacy. It left slavery untouched in
Unionist Delaware, Maryland,
Kentucky, and Missouri. But the war did not. The status
of planters became
ambiguous: owning black people was no longer
what a young white man aspired
to do or what a young white woman
aspired to accomplish by marriage.
Maryland was a slavestate with considerable support
for the Confederacy at the
onset of the war. But Maryland held for the Union
and sent thousands of soldiers
to defend Washington. What happened next
provides a “positive” example of the
effects of cognitive dissonance: for Maryland whites
to fight a war against slave
owners while allowing slavery within their
own state created a tension that
demanded resolution. In 1864 the increasingly
persuasive abolitionists in
Maryland brought the issue to a vote. The
tally went narrowly against
emancipation until the large number of
absentee ballots were counted. By an
enormous margin, these ballots were for
freedom. Who cast most absentee
ballots in 1864 in Maryland? Soldiers and
sailors, of course. Just as these
soldiers marched into battle with “John Brown’s
Body” upon their lips, so their
minds had changed to favor the freedom that
their actions were forging.48

As noted in the previous chapter, songs such
as “Nigger Doodle Dandy”
reflect the racist tone of the Democrats’
presidential campaign in 1864. How did
Republicans counter? In part, they sought white
votes by being antiracist. The
Republican campaign,boosted by military victories in
the fall of 1864, proved
effective. The Democrats’ overt appeals to racism
failed, and antiracist
Republicans triumphed almost everywhere. One
New York Republican wrote,
“The change of opinion on this slavery question .
. . is a greatand historic fact.
Who could have predicted . . . this great
and blessed revolution?”49 People
around the world supported the Union because
of its ideology. Forty thousand
Canadians alone, some of them black, came
south to volunteer for the Union
cause. “Ideas are more important than battles,” said
abolitionist senator Charles
Summer, speaking as the war wound down.50
Illustrating “PUBLIC LIBERTY and PRIVATE RIGHT,”
Nast shows the New
York City draft riot of 1863: white thugs are
exercisingtheir “right” to beat and
kill African Americans, including a childheld upside
down.
Ideas made the opposite impact in the
Confederacy. Ideological contradictions
afflicted the slave system even before the

war began. John Brown knew that
masters secretly feared that their slaves might
revolt, even as they assured
abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery.
One reason his Harpers Ferry raid
prompted such an outcry in the South was that
slaveowners feared their slaves
might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown
and the “Black Republicans”
who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates
but only pushed them
toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if
Brown was truly dangerous, as slave
owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy
slaves would never revolt.
White Southerners founded the Confederacy on
the ideology of white
supremacy. According to Alexander Stephens,
vice president of the
Confederacy: “Our new government’s foundations are
laid, its cornerstone rests,
upon the greattruth that the Negro is not equal to
the white man, that slavery—
subordination to the superior race—is his natural
and normal condition.”
Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam
and Gettysburg, their two main
forays into Union states, put this ideology into
practice: they seized scores of
free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania
and sent them south into
slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union

troops when they captured
them.51 Throughout the war, points out historian
Paul Escott, “the protection of
slavery had been and still remained the central core of
Confederate purpose.”52
Textbooks downplay all this, probably because they do
not want to offend white
Southerners today.
The last chapter showed that concern for states’
rights did not motivate
secession. Moreover, as the war continued, the
Confederacy began to deny
states’ rights within the new nation. As early
as December 1862, President
Jefferson Davis denounced states’ rights as
destructive to the Confederacy. The
mountainous counties in western Virginia bolted to
the Union. Confederate
troops had to occupy east Tennessee to keep it
from emulating West Virginia.
Winn Parish, Louisiana, refused to secede
from the Union. Winston County,
Alabama, declared itself the Free State of
Winston. Unionist farmers and
woodsmen in Jones County, Mississippi,
declared the Free Stateof Jones. Every
Confederate state except South Carolina
supplied a regiment or at least a
company of white soldiers to the Union army,
as well as many black recruits.
Armed guerrilla actions plagued every Confederate
state. (With the exception of
Missouri, and the 1863 New York City draft
riots, few Union states were
afflicted with such problems.) It became dangerous

for Confederates to travel in
parts of Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee,
and Texas. The war was
fought not just between North and South but
between Unionists and
Confederates within the Confederacy (and
Missouri).53 By February 1864,
President Davis despaired: “Public meetings of
treasonable character, in the
name of state sovereignty, are being held.”
Thus states’ rights as an ideology
was contradictory and could not mobilize the white
South for the long haul.
Every recent textbook tells how the issueof states’
rights interfered with the
Confederate cause. Otherwise, however, they ignore
the role of ideas in the
South. The racial ideas of the Confederacy
proved even less serviceable to the
war effort. According to Confederate ideology,
blacks liked slavery;
nevertheless, to avert revolts and runaways,
the Confederate states passed the
“twenty nigger law,” exempting from
military conscription one white man as
overseer for every twenty slaves. Throughout
the war, Confederates withheld as
much as a third of their fighting forces
from the front lines and scattered them
throughout areaswith largeslavepopulations to prevent
slaveuprisings.54 When
the United States allowed African Americans to

enlist, Confederates were forced
by their ideology to assert that it would
not work—blacks would hardly fight
like white men. The undeniable bravery of
the 54thMassachusetts and other
black regiments disproved the idea of black
inferiority. Then came the
incongruity of truly beastly behavior by Southern
whites toward captured black
soldiers, such as the infamous Fort Pillow
massacre by troops under Nathan
Bedford Forrest, who crucified black prisoners on
tent frames and then burned
them alive, all in the name of preserving
white civilization.55
After the fall of Vicksburg, President Davis
proposed to arm slaves to fight for
the Confederacy, promising them freedom to
win their cooperation. But if
servitude was the best condition for the slave,
protested supporters of slavery,
how could freedom be a reward? Black
behavior proved that slaves did value
freedom: several textbooks show how slavery
broke down when Union armies
came near. But authors miss the ideological
confusion that slaves’ defections
caused among their former owners.
Contradiction piledupon contradiction. To
win foreign recognition, otherConfederate leaders
proposed to abolish slavery
altogether. Some newspaper editors concurred.
“Although slavery is one of the
principles that we started to fight for,” said the Jackson
Mississippian, if it must

be jettisoned to achieve our “separate nationality,
awaywith it!” A month before
Appomattox, the Confederate Congress passed a
measure to enroll black troops,
showing how the war had elevated even slave
owners’ estimations of black
abilities and also revealing complete ideological
disarray. What, after all, would
the new black soldiers be fighting for? Slavery?
Secession? What, for that
matter, would white Southern troops be
fighting for, once blacks were also
armed? As Howell Cobb of Georgia said, “If
slaves will make good soldiers our
whole theory of slavery is wrong.”56
In part, owing to these contradictions,
some Confederate soldiers switched
sides, beginning as earlyas 1862. When
Sherman made his famous march to the
sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army
actually grew in number, because
thousands of white Southerners volunteered along
the way. Meanwhile, almost
two-thirds of the Confederate army opposing
Sherman disappeared through
desertion.57 Eighteen thousand slaves also joined
Sherman, so many that the
army had to turn someaway. Compare thesefacts with
the portrait common in
our textbooks of Sherman’s marauderslooting their
way through a united South.

The increasing ideological confusion in the
Confederate states, coupled with
the increasingideological strength of the United
States, helps explain the Union
victory. “Even with all the hardships,” Carleton
Beals has noted, “the South up
to the very end still had great resources and
manpower.” Many nations and
people have continued to fight with far inferior means
and weapons. Beals thinks
that the Confederacy’s ideological contradictions were
its gravest liabilities,
ultimately causing its defeat. He shows how the
Confederate army was
disbanding by the spring of 1865 in Texas
and otherstates, even in the absence
of Union approaches. On the home front,
too, as Jefferson Davis put it, “The zeal
of the people is failing.”58
Why are textbooks silent regarding ideas or
ideologiesas a weakness of the
Confederacy?59 The Civil War was about
something, after all, and that
somethingeven influenced its outcome. Textbooks
should tell us what it was.60
This silence has a history. Throughout the
twentieth century, textbooks
presented the CivilWar as a struggle between
“virtually identical peoples.” This
is all part of the unspoken agreement, reached
during the nadirof race relations
in the United States (1890-1940), that whites in
the South were as American as
whites in the North.61 White Northerners and

white Southerners reconciled on
the backs of African Americans in those
years, while the abolitionists became
the bad guys.
As the nadir set in, Confederate Col. John S.
Mosby, “Gray Ghost of the
Confederacy,” grew frustrated at the obfuscation
that historians were throwing
up as to what the war had been about. “The
South went to war on account of
slavery,” he wrote in 1907, seeking historical
accuracy. He cited South
Carolina’s secession proclamation and noted
scornfully, “South Carolina ought
to know what was the cause for her seceding.”
By the 1920s the Grand Army of
the Republic, the organization of Union veterans,
complained that American
history textbooks presented the CivilWar with “no
suggestion” that the Union
cause was right. Apparently the United
Daughters of the Confederacy carried
more weight with publishers.62 Beyond influencing
the tone of textbooks to
portray the Confederate cause sympathetically,
the UDC was even able to erect a
statue to the Confederate dead in Wisconsin,
claiming they “died to repel
unconstitutional invasion, to protect the rights
reserved to the people, to
perpetuate the sovereignty of the states.”63
Not a word about slavery or even

disunion.
To this day, history textbooks still present Union
and Confederate
sympathizers as equally idealistic. The North fought
to hold the Union together,
while the Southern states fought, according to
The American Way, “for the
preservation of their rights and freedom to
decide for themselves.” Nobody
fought to preserve racial slavery; nobody fought
to end it. As one result, unlike
the Nazi swastika, which lies disgraced, even in
the North whites still proudly
display the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy on
den walls, license plates, T-
shirts, and high school logos. Even some(white)
Northerners vaguely regret the
defeat of the “lost cause.” It is as if racism
against blacks could be remembered
with nostalgia. 64 In this sense, long after Appomattox,
the Confederacy finally
won.
Five days after Appomattox, President Lincoln
was murdered. His martyrdom
pushed Union ideology one step further. Even
whites who had opposed
emancipation now joined to call Lincoln the great
emancipator.65 Under
Republican leadership, the nation entered
Reconstruction, a period of continuing
ideological conflict.
At first Confederates tried to maintain prewar

conditions through new laws,
modeled after their slave codes and
antebellum restrictions on free blacks.
Mississippi was the first state to pass thesedraconian
“Black Codes.” They did
not work, however. The CivilWar had changed
American ideology. The new
antiracism forged in its flames would
dominate Northern thinking for a decade.
The Chicago Tribune, the most important organ of
the Republican Party in the
Midwest, responded angrily: “We tell the white men of
Mississippi that the men
of the North will convert the state of
Mississippi into a frog pond before they
will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of
soil in which the bones of our
soldiers sleep and overwhich the flag of
freedom waves.”66 Thus black civil
rights again became the central issue in
the congressional elections of 1866.
“Support Congress and You Support the Negro,” said
the Democrats in a
campaign broadside featuring a disgusting
caricature of an African American.
“Sustain the President and You Protect the White
Man.”67 Northern voters did
not buy it. They returned “radical” Republicans to
Congress in a thunderous
repudiation of President Andrew Johnson’s
accommodation of the ex-
Confederates. Even more than in 1864, when
Republicans swept Congress in

1866, antiracism became the policy of the
nation, agreed to by most of its voters.
Despite Johnson’s opposition, Congress and the
states passed the Fourteenth
Amendment, making all persons citizens and
guaranteeing them “the equal
protection of the laws.” The passage, on behalf of
blacks, of this shining jewel of
our Constitution shows how idealistic were the
officeholders of the Republican
Party, particularly when we consider that similar
legislation on behalf of women
cannot be passed today.68
During Reconstruction a surprising variety of people
went to the new civilian
“front lines” and worked among the newly
freed African Americans in the
South. Many were black Northerners,
including several graduates of Oberlin
College. This passage from a letter by Edmonia
Highgate, a black woman who
went south to teach school, describes her life in
Lafayette Parish, Louisiana.
The majority of my pupils come from
plantations, three, four and even
eight miles distant. So anxious are they to learn
that they walk these
distances so earlyin the morning as never to be
tardy.
There has been much opposition to the School.
Twice I have been shot
at in my room. My nightschool scholars have
been shot but none killed.

A weekago an aged freedman just across the way
was shot so badly as to
break his arm and leg. The rebels here threatened
to burn down the
school and house in which I board yet
they have not materially harmed
us. The nearest military protection is 200 miles
distant at New Orleans.69
Some Union soldiers stayed in the South
when they were demobilized. Some
Northern Republican would-be politicians moved
south to organize their partyin
a region where it had not been a factor
before the war. Some went hoping to win
office by election or appointment. Many
abolitionists continued their
commitment by working in the Freedman’s Bureau
and private organizations to
help blacks obtain full civil and political rights.
In terms of party affiliation,
almost all of these persons were
Republicans; otherwise, they were a diverse
group. Still, all but one of the eighteen textbooks
routinely use the disgraceful
old tag carpetbaggers, without quotation marks and
oftenwithout noting its bias,
to describe Northern white Republicans who lived
in the South during
Reconstruction.70
The white woman at left, whom textbooks
would call a “carpetbagger,” could

hardly expect to grow rich teaching school
near Vicksburg, where this
illustration was done. This woman risked her
life to bring basic literacy to
African American children and adults during
Reconstruction.
Many whites who were born in the South
supported Reconstruction. Every
Southern state boasted Unionists,someof whom had
volunteered for the Union
army. Most of them now became
Republicans. Some former Confederates,
including even Gen. James Longstreet, second
in command under Lee at
Gettysburg, also became Republicans because they
had grown convinced that
equality for blacks was morally right. Robert
Flournoy, a Mississippi planter,
had raised a company of Confederate soldiers
but then resigned his commission
and returned home because “there was a conflict
in my conscience.” During the
war he was once arrested for encouraging blacks to
flee to Union lines. During
Reconstruction he helped organize the Republican
Party, published a newspaper,
Equal Rights, and argued for desegregating the
University of Mississippi and the
new state’s public school system.71 Republican
policies, including free public
education, never before available in the South
to children of either race,

convinced somepoor whites to vote for the party.
Many former Whigs became
Republicans rather than join their old nemesis,
the Democrats. Some white
Southerners became Republicans because they were
convinced that black
suffrage was an accomplished fact; they preferred
winning political power with
blacks on their side to losing. Others became
Republicans to make connections
or win contracts from the new Republican state
governments. Of the 113 white
Republican congressmen from the South during
Reconstruction, 53 were
Southerners, many of them from wealthy
families.72 In sum, this is another
diverse group, amounting to between one-fourth
and one-third of the white
population and in somecounties a majority.
Nevertheless, all but one textbook
still routinely apply the disgraceful old tag
scalawags to Southern white
Republicans.73
Carpetbaggers and scalawags are terms coined by
white Southern Democrats
to defame their opponents as illegitimate.
At the time, newspapers in
Mississippi, at least, used Republicans far
more often than carpetbaggers or
scalawags. Carpetbagger implies that the dregs of
Northern society, carrying all
their belongings in a carpetbag, had come
down to make their fortunes off the
“prostrate [white] south.” Scalawag means “scoundrel.”
They became the terms

of choice long after Reconstruction, during
the nadir of race relations, when
white Americans, North as well as South,
found it hard to believe that white
Northerners would have gone south to help blacks
without ulterior motives. If
authors explained when and why the terms became
popular, students would learn
somethingimportant about Reconstruction, the nadir,
and the writing of history.
The closest they come is this sentence from The
Americans: “Although the terms
scalawag and carpetbagger were negative labels
imposed by political enemies,
historians still use the terms when referring to
the two groups.” Like all the other
books, The Americans then uses the words as if
they were proper historical
labels, with no quotation marks.
Consider this phrase from Pathways to the Present
listing the victims of Klan
violence: “carpetbaggers, scalawags, freedmen who
had become prosperous—
even those who had merely learned to read.”
Why not simply say “Republicans
—black and white”? Or this from The American
Tradition: “Despite southern
white claims to the contrary, the Radical regimes
were not dominated by blacks,
but by scalawags and carpetbaggers.” In reality,
“scalawags” were Southern
whites, of course, but this sentence writes them

out of the white South, just as
die-hard Confederates were wont to do. Moreover,
referring to perfectly legal
governments as “regimes” is a way of
delegitimizing them, a technique
Tradition applies to no other administration,
not even the 1836 Republic of
Texas or the 1893 Dole pineapple takeover in Hawaii.
To be sure, newer editions of American history
textbooks no longer denounce
Northerners who participated in Southern politics
and society as “dishonest
adventurers whose only thought was to feather
their own nestsat the expense of
their fellows,” as Rise of the American Nation put it
in 1961. Again, the civil
rights movement has allowed us to rethink
our history. Having watched
Northerners, black and white, go south to
help blacks win civil rights in the
1960s, today’s textbook authors display more
sympathy for Northerners who
worked with Southern blacks during Reconstruction.74
Here is the paragraph on
“carpetbaggers” from Rise’s successor, Holt
American Nation, published in
2003:
The arrival of northern Republicans—both whites
and African
Americans—eager to participate in the state
conventions increased
resentment among many white southerners.
They called these northern
Republicans carpetbaggers. The newcomers, they joked,

were “needy
adventurers” of the “lowest class” who could
carry everything they
owned in a carpetbag—a type of cheap
suitcase.
And here is the paragraph on “scalawags”:
Former Confederates heaped even greater scorn on
southern whites who
had backed the Union cause and now supported
Reconstruction. They
called these whites scalawags, or scoundrels.
They viewed them as
“southern renegades, betrayers of their race and
country.”
The new treatment distances the author from the
derogatory terms, putting
them in the mouths of “many white
southerners,” but the terms themselves are
never discredited. Instead, they are to be
learned, which is why they are bolded.
And textbooks still invoke greed to “explain” whites
who believed blacks should
have civil and political rights. Of course, authors
might use the notion of private
gain to disparage every textbook hero from
Christopher Columbus and the
Pilgrims through George Washington to Jackie
Robinson. They don’t, though.
Textbooks attribute selfish motives only to
characters with whom they have little

sympathy,such as the idealists in Reconstruction.
The negatives then stick in the
mind, cemented by the catchy pejoratives
carpetbaggers and scalawags, while
the qualifyingphrases—many white southerners—are
likely to be forgotten.
Everyone who supported black rights in the South
during Reconstruction did
so at personal risk. At the beginning of
Reconstruction, simply to walk to school
to teach could be life-threatening. Toward
the end of the era, there were
communities in which simply to vote Republican
was life-threatening. While
some Reconstructionists undoubtedly achieved economic
gain, it was a
dangerous way to make a buck. Textbooks
need to showthe risk, and the racial
idealism that prompted most of the people who took
it.75
Instead, most textbooks deprive us of our racial
idealists, from Highgate and
Flournoy, whom they omit, through Brown, whom
they make fanatic, to
Lincoln, whose idealism they flatten. In the course
of events, Lincoln would
come to accomplish on a national scale
what Brown tried to accomplish at
Harpers Ferry: helping African Americans
mobilize to fight slavery. Finally, like
John Brown, Abraham Lincoln became a martyr
and a hero. Seven million
Americans, almost one-third of the entire Union
population, stood to watch his

funeral train pass.76 African Americans
mourned with particular intensity.
Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, walked
the streets of Washington at dawn
an hour before the president breathed his last
and described the scene: “The
colored people especially—and there were at
this timemore of them, perhaps,
than of whites—were overwhelmed with grief.” Welles
went on to tell how all
day long “on the avenue in front of the White
House were several hundred black
people, mostly women and children, weeping for
their loss,” a crowd that “did
not appear to diminish through the whole of
that cold, wet day.” In their grief
African Americans were neither misguidednor
childlike. When the hour came
for dealing with slavery, as Lincoln had surmised, he
had done his duty and it
had cost his life.77 Abraham Lincoln, racism and
all, was the blacks’ legitimate
hero,as earlier John Brown had been. In a
sense, Brown and Lincoln were even
killed for the same deed: arming black
people for their own liberation. People
around the world mourned the passing of both
men.
In Vicksburg, Mississippi, these African
Americans gathered at the courthouse
to hear the news of Lincoln’s death confirmed,
to express their grief, and

perhaps to seek protection in the face of an
uncertain future.
But when I ask my (white) college students on
the first day of class who their
heroes are in American history, only one or two in
a hundred pick Lincoln. 78
Even those who choose Lincoln know only that
he was “really great”—they
don’t know why. Their ignorance makes
sense—after all, textbooks present
Abraham Lincoln almost devoid of content. No
students choose John Brown.
Not one has ever named a white abolitionist, a
Reconstruction Republican, or a
white civil rights martyr. Yet thesesame students
feel sympathy with America’s
struggle to improve race relations. Among their
more popular choices are
African Americans, from Sojourner Truth and
Frederick Douglass to Rosa Parks
and Malcolm X.
While John Brown was on trial, the
abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke of
Brown’s place in history. Phillips foresaw that
slavery was a cause whose time
was passing, and he asked “the American people” of
the future, when slavery
was long dead in “the civilization of the
twentieth century,” this question:
“When that day comes, what will be thought of
thesefirst martyrs, who teach us

how to live and how to die?”79 Phillips meant
the question rhetorically. He
never dreamed that Americans would take no
pleasure in those who had helped
lead the nation to abolish slavery, or that
textbooks would label Brown’s small
band misguidedif not fanatic and Brown himself
possibly mad.80
Antiracism is one of America’sgreatgifts to the
world. Its relevance extends far
beyond race relations. Antiracism led to “a new
birth of freedom” after the Civil
War, and not only for African Americans. Twice,
once in each century, the
movementfor black rights triggered the movement
for women’s rights. Twice it
reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had
been atrophying. Throughout the
world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland,
movements of oppressed people
continue to use tactics and words borrowed from
our abolitionist and civil rights
movements. The clandestine earlymeetings of
anticommunists in East Germany
were marked by singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Iranians used nonviolent
methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther
King Jr., to overthrow their
hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi
on the day he died lay a biography
of John Brown. Among the heroes whose
ideas inspired the students in
Tiananmen Square and whose words spilled
from their lips was Abraham

Lincoln.81 Yet we in America, whose antiracist
idealists are admired around the
globe, seemto have lost thesemen and women as
heroes. Our textbooks need to
present them in such a way that we might again
value our own idealism.
7.
THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital
is only the fruit of labor, and could never
have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of
capital, and deserves much the higher
consideration.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN1
I had once believed that we were all masters of
our fate
—that we could mold our lives into any
form we
pleased. . . . I had overcome deafness and
blindness
sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that
anyone
could come out victorious if he threw himself
valiantly
into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more
about

the country I learned that I had spoken with
assurance
on a subject I knew little about. . . .
I learned that the
power to rise in the world is not within
the reach of
everyone.
—HELEN KELLER2
Ten men in our country could buy the whole
world and
ten million can’tbuy enough to eat.
—WILL ROGERS, 1931
The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too
easily
written as the history of its dominant class.
—KWAME NKRUMAH3
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS have eyes,ears, and
television sets (all too many
have their own TV sets), so they know a lot
about relative privilege in America.
They measure their family’s social position against
that of other families, and
their community’s position against other

communities. Middle-class students,
especially, know little about how the American
class structure works, however,
and nothing at all about how it has changed
over time. These students do not
leave high school merely ignorant of the
workings of the class structure; they
come out as terrible sociologists. “Why are
people poor?” I have asked first-year
college students. Or, if their own class position is
one of relative privilege, “Why
is your family well-off ?” The answers I’ve
received, to characterize them
charitably, are half-formed and naïve. The
students blame the poor for not being
successful.4 They have no understanding of
the ways that opportunity is not
equal in America and no notion that social
structure pushes people around,
influencing the ideasthey hold and the lives they
fashion.
High school history textbooks can take some of
the credit for this state of
affairs. Some textbooks do cover certain high
points of laborhistory, such as the
1894 Pullman strike near Chicago that President
Cleveland broke with federal
troops, or the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed
146 women in New York
City, but the most recent event mentioned in
most books is the Taft-Hartley Act
of sixty years ago. No book mentions any of the
major strikes that laborlost in
the late twentieth century, such as the 1985
Hormel meatpackers’ strike in

Austin, Minnesota, or the 1991 Caterpillar
strike in Decatur, Illinois—defeats
that signify labor’s diminished power today.5
Nor do most textbooks describe
any continuing issues facing labor, such as
the growth of multinational
corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas. With
such omissions, textbook
authors can construe labor history as something
that happened long ago, like
slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected longago. It
logically follows that
unions now appear anachronistic. The idea that they
might be necessary for
workers to have a voice in the workplacegoes
unstated.
This photograph of a sweatshop in New York’s
Chinatown, taken in the early
1990s, illustrates that the working class still works, in
America, sometimes under
conditions not so different from a century ago,
and oftenin the same locations.
These books’ poor treatment of laborhistory is
magnificent compared to their
treatment of social class. Nothing that textbooks
discuss—not even strikes—is
ever anchored in any analysis of social class.6
This amounts to delivering the
footnotes instead of the lecture! Half of the
eighteen high school American
history textbooks I examined contain no index
listing at all for social class,

social stratification, class structure, income
distribution, inequality, or any
conceivably related topic. Not one book lists upper
class or lower class. Three
list middle class, but only to assure students
that America is a middle-class
country. “Except for slaves, most of the
colonists were members of the
‘middling ranks,’ ” says Land of Promise, and nails
home the pointthat we are a
middle-class country by asking students to
“describe three‘middle-class’ values
that united free Americans of all classes.”
Several of the textbooks note the
explosion of middle-class suburbs after World War II.
Talking about the middle
class is hardly equivalent to discussing social
stratification, however. On the
contrary, as Gregory Mantsios has pointed out, “such
references appear to be
acceptable precisely because they mute class
differences.”7
Stressing how middle-class we all are is increasingly
problematic today,
because the proportion of households earning
between 75 percent and 125
percent of the median income has fallen steadily
since1967. The Reagan-Bush
administrationsaccelerated this shrinkage of the middle
class, and most families
who left its ranks fell rather than rose.8 As
late as 1970, family incomes in the

United States were only slightly less equal than in
Canada. By 2000, inequality
here was much greater than Canada’s; the United
States was becoming more like
Mexico, a very stratified society.9 The Bush II
administration, with its tax cuts
aimed openly at the wealthy, continued to
increase the gap between the haves
and have-nots. This is the kind of historical trend
one would thinkhistory books
would take as appropriate subject matter, but
only five of the eighteen books in
my sample provide any analysis of social
stratification in the United States. Even
these fragmentary analyses are set mostly in
colonial America. Boorstin and
Kelley, unusual in actually including social class in
its index, lists only social
classes in 1790 and social classes in early
America. These turn out to be two
references to the same paragraph, which tells
us that England “was a land of
rigid social classes,” while here in America “social
classes were much more
fluid.” “Onegreatdifference between colonial and
European society was that the
colonists had more social mobility,” echoes
The American Tradition. Never
mind that the most violent class conflicts in
American history—Bacon’s
Rebellion and Shays’s Rebellion—took place in
and just after colonial times.
Textbooks still say that colonial society was
relatively classless and marked by
upward mobility.

And things have only gotten rosier since.
“By 1815,” The Challenge of
Freedom assures us, two classes had withered away
and “America was a country
of middle class people and of middle class goals.”
This book returns repeatedly,
every fifty years or so, to the theme of
how open opportunity is in America. The
stress on upward mobility is striking. There is
almost nothing in any of these
textbooks about class inequalities or barriers of
any kind to social mobility.
“What conditions made it possible for poor
white immigrants to become richer
in the colonies?” Land of Promise asks.
“What conditions made/make it
difficult?” goes unasked. Boorstin and Kelley
close their sole discussion of
social class (in 1790, described above) with the
happy sentence, “As the careers
of American Presidents would soon show,
here a person might rise by hard
work, intelligence, skill, and perhaps a little
luck, from the lowest positions to
the highest.”
If only that were so! Social class is
probably the single most important
variable in society. From womb to tomb, it
correlates with almost all othersocial
characteristics of people that we can measure.
Affluent expectantmothers are
more likely to get prenatal care, receive current

medical advice, and enjoy
general health, fitness, and nutrition. Many poor
and working-class mothers-to-
be first contact the medical profession in the
last month, sometimes the last
hours, of their pregnancies. Rich babies come
out healthier and weighing more
than poor babies. The infants go home to very
different situations. Poor babies
are more likely to have high levels of poisonous
lead in their environments and
their bodies. Rich babies get more time and verbal
interaction with their parents
and higher quality day care when not with their
parents. When they enter
kindergarten, and through the twelve years that
follow, rich children benefit
from suburban schools that spend two to threetimes
as much money per student
as schools in innercities or impoverished rural
areas. Poor children are taught in
classes that are often 50 percent larger than
the classes of affluent children.
Differences such as thesehelp account for the higher
school-dropout rate among
poor children.
Even when poor children are fortunate enough to
attend the same school as
rich children, they encounter teachers who expect
only children of affluent
families to know the right answers. Social science
research shows that teachers
are oftensurprised and even distressed when poor
children excel. Teachers and
counselors believe they can predict who is

“college material.” Since many
working-class children give off the wrong signals,
even in first grade, they end
up in the “general education” trackin high
school.10 “If you are the childof low-
income parents, the chances are good that you
will receive limited and often
careless attention from adults in your high
school,” in the words of Theodore
Sizer’s bestselling study of American high
schools, Horace’s Compromise. “If
you are the childof upper-middle-income parents,
the chances are good that you
will receive substantial and careful attention.”11
Researcher Reba Page has
provided vividaccounts of how high school American
history courses use rote
learning to turn off lower-class students.12 Thus
schools have put into practice
Woodrow Wilson’s recommendation: “We want one class of
persons to have a
liberal education, and we want another class of
persons, a very much larger class
of necessity in every society, to forgo the
privilege of a liberal education and fit
themselves to perform specific difficult manual
tasks.”13
As if this unequal home and school life were
not enough, rich teenagers then
enroll in the Princeton Review or other
coaching sessions for the Scholastic
Aptitude Test. Even without coaching, affluent children

are advantaged because
their background is similar to that of the test
makers, so they are comfortable
with the vocabulary and subtle subcultural
assumptions of the test. To no one’s
surprise, social class correlates strongly with SAT scores.
All these are among the reasons that social
class predicts the rate of college
attendance and the type of college chosen more
effectively than does any other
factor, including intellectual ability, however
measured. After college, most
affluent children get white-collar jobs, most
working-class children get blue-
collar jobs, and the class differences continue. As
adults, rich people are more
likely to have hiredan attorney and to be a
member of formal organizations that
increase their civic power. Poor people are
more likely to watch TV. Because
affluent families can save some money while
poor families must spend what
they make, wealth differences are ten times
larger than income differences.
Therefore most poor and working-class families
cannot accumulate the down
payment required to buy a house, which in
turn shuts them out from our most
important tax shelter, the write-off of home
mortgage interest. Working-class
parents cannot afford to live in elite subdivisions
or hire high-quality day care,
so the process of educational inequality
replicates itself in the next generation.
Finally, affluent Americans also have longer life

expectancies than lower- and
working-class people, the largest single cause of
which is better access to health
care.14 Echoing the results of Helen Keller’s
study of blindness, research has
determined that poor health is not distributed
randomly about the social structure
but is concentrated in the lower class. Social
Security then becomes a huge
transfer system, using monies contributed by
all Americans to pay benefits
disproportionately to longer-lived affluent Americans.
Ultimately, social class determines how people
thinkabout social class. When
asked if poverty in America is the fault of
the poor or the fault of the system, 57
percent of business leaders blamed the poor;
just 9 percent blamed the system.
Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices:
only 15 percent said the poor
were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system.
(Some people replied “don’t
know” or chose a middle position.) The largest
single difference between our
two main political parties lies in how their members
thinkabout social class: 55
percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their
poverty, while only 13 percent
blamed the system for it; 68 percent of
Democrats, on the otherhand, blamed the
system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.15

Few of thesestatements are news, I know,
which is why I have not bothered
to document most of them, but the majority of
high school students do not know
or understand theseideas. Moreover,the processes
have changed over time,for
the class structure in America today is not the
same as it was in 1890, let alone in
colonial America. Yet in the most recent American
Pageant, for example, social
class goes unmentioned in the twentieth century. Many
teachers compoundthe
problem by avoiding talking about social class
in the twenty-first. A study of
history and social studies teachers “revealed that
they had a much broader
knowledge of the economy, both academically and
experientially, than they
admitted in class.” Teachers “expressed fear that
students might find out about
the injusticesand inadequacies of their economic
and political institutions.” 16
By never blaming the system, American history
courses thus present Republican
history.
Historically, social class is intertwined with all
kinds of events and processes
in our past. Our governing system was
established by rich men, following
theories that emphasized government as a
bulwark of the propertied class.
Although rich himself, James Madison worried about
social inequality and wrote
The Federalist #10 to explain how the proposed
government would not succumb

to the influence of the affluent. Madison did not
fully succeed, according to
Edward Pessen, who examined the social-class
backgrounds of all American
presidents through Reagan. Pessen found that more
than 40 percent hailed from
the upper class, mostly from the upper fringes
of that elite group, and another 15
percent originated in families located between
the upper and upper-middle
classes. More than 25 percent camefrom a solid
upper-middle-class background,
leaving just six presidents, or 15 percent, to
come from the middle and lower-
middle classes and just one, Andrew Johnson,
representing any part of the lower
class. One recent president, Bill Clinton, also
comes from a working-class
background, for a total of two. For good reason,
Pessen titled his book The Log
Cabin Myth.17 Clearly Boorstin and Kelley never
read Pessen, or they could not
have claimed that the careers of our presidents
demonstrate how persons can rise
“from the lowest positions to the highest.” In
fact, most Americans die in the
same social class in which they were born,
sociologists have shown, and those
who are mobile usually rise or fall just a single
social class.
Beer has been one of the few products (pickup trucks,
somepatent medicines,

and false-teeth cleansers are others) that advertisers
try to sell with working-
class images. Advertisers use upper-middle-class
imagery to sell most items,
from wine to nylons to toilet-bowl cleansers.
Signs of social class cover these
two models, from footwear to headgear. Note who has
the newspaper, briefcase,
lunch box, and, in a final statement,the cans and
the bottles.
Social class buys life even in the midst of danger.
While it was sad when the
greatship Titanic went down, as the old song refrain
goes, it was saddest for the
lower class: among women, only 4 of 143
first-class passengers were lost, while
15 of 93 second-class passengers drowned, along
with 81 of 179 third-class
women and girls. The crew ordered third-class
passengers to remain below deck,
holding somethereat gunpoint.18 More recently,
social class played a major role
in determining who fought in the Vietnam War:
despite the “universal” draft,
sons of the affluent won educational and medical
deferments through most of the
conflict. The all-volunteer army that fights in
Iraq relies even more on lower-
class recruits, who sign up as one way out of
poverty.19 Textbooks and teachers
ignore all this.
Teachers may avoid social class out of a
laudable desire not to embarrass their
charges. If so, their concern is misguided.

When my students from nonaffluent
backgrounds learn about the class system,
they find the experience liberating.
Once they see the social processes that have helped
keep their families poor,
they can let go of their negative self-image about
being poor. If to understand is
to pardon, for working-class children to understand
how stratification works is to
pardon themselves and their families. Knowledge of
the social-class system also
reduces the tendency of Americans from othersocial
classes to blame the victim
for being poor. Pedagogically, stratification
provides a gripping learning
experience. Students are fascinated to discover
how the upper class wields
disproportionate power relating to everything
from energy bills in Congress to
zoning decisions in small towns.
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 family quitepoor.
Her mother helps out by driving a school
bus part-time, in addition to taking care
of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with
her family in a small house, a
winterized former summer cabin, while most
of her classmates live in large

suburban homes. How is this girl to understand
her poverty? Since history
textbooks present the American past as four hundred
years of progress and
portray our society as a land of opportunity in
which folksget what they deserve
and deserve what they get, the failures of working-
class Americans to transcend
their class origin inevitably get laid at their own
doorsteps.
Within the white working-class community the
girl will probably find few
resources—teachers,church parishioners, family
members—whocan tell her of
heroes or struggles among people of her
background, for, except in pockets of
continuing class conflict, the working class usually
forgets its own history. More
than any other group, white working-class
students believe that they deserve
their low status. A subculture of shame
results. This negative self-image is
foremost among what Richard Sennett and
Jonathan Cobb have called “the
hidden injuries of class.”20 Two students of mine
provided a demonstration: they
drove around Burlington, Vermont, in a big,
nearly new, shiny black luxury car
and then in a battered ten-year-old subcompact. In
each vehicle, when they
reached a stoplight and it turned green, they
waited until they were honked at
before driving on. Motorists averaged less than seven
seconds to honk at them in
the subcompact, but in the luxury car the

students enjoyed 13.2 seconds before
anyone honked. Besides providing a good reason to
buy an expensive car, this
experiment shows how Americans unconsciously
grant respect to the educated
and successful. Since motorists of all social
stations honked at the subcompact
more readily, working-class drivers were in a
sense disrespecting themselves
while deferring to their betters. The biting quip
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t
you rich?” conveys the injury done to the self-
image of the poor when the idea
that America is a meritocracy goes unchallenged in
school.
Part of the problem is that American history
textbooks describe American
education itselfas meritocratic. A huge body of
research confirms that education
is dominated by the class structure and operates to
replicate that structure in the
next generation.21 Meanwhile, history textbooks
blithely tell of such federal
largesse to education as the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, passed
under President Lyndon Johnson. Not one textbook
offers any data on or
analysis of inequality within educational institutions.
None mentions how school
districts in low-income areas labor under
financial constraints so shocking that
Jonathan Kozol calls them “savage

inequalities.”22 No textbook ever suggests
that students might research the history of their
own school and the population it
serves. The only textbooks that relate education to
the class system at all see it as
a remedy! Schooling “was a key to upward
mobility in postwar America,”in the
words of The Challenge of Freedom. It was also
key to continued inequality.23
The tendency of teachers and textbooks to avoid
social class as if it were a
dirty little secret only reinforces the reluctanceof
working-class families to talk
about it. Paul Cowan has told of interviewing
the children of Italian immigrant
workers involved in the famous 1912 Lawrence,
Massachusetts, mill strike. He
spoke with the daughter of one of the Lawrence
workers who testified at a
Washington congressional hearing investigating the
strike. The worker, Camella
Teoli, then thirteen years old, had been scalped by
a cotton-twisting machine just
before the strike and had been hospitalized
for several months. Her testimony
“became front-page news all over America.”But Teoli’s
daughter, interviewed
in 1976 after her mother’s death, could not help
Cowan. Her mother had told her
nothing of the incident, nothing of her trip to
Washington, nothing about her
impact on America’sconscience—even though almost
every day, the daughter
“had combed her mother’s hair into a bun that
disguised the bald spot.”24 A

professional of working-class origin told me a
similar storyabout being ashamed
of her uncle “for being a steelworker.” A
certain defensiveness is built into
working-class culture; even its successful acts of
working-class resistance, like
the Lawrence strike, necessarily presuppose lower
status and income, hence
connote a certain inferiority. If the larger
community is so good, as textbooks tell
us it is, then celebrating or even passing on
the memory of conflict with it seems
somehow disloyal.
Textbooks do present immigrant history.
Around the turn of the century
immigrants dominated the American urban
working class, even in cities as
distant from seacoasts as Des Moines and
Louisville. When more than 70
percent of the white population was native
stock, less than 10 percent of the
urban working class was.25 But when textbooks
tell the immigrant story, they
emphasize Joseph Pulitzer, Andrew Carnegie, and
their ilk—immigrants who
made supergood. Several textbooks apply
the phrases rags to riches or land of
opportunity to the immigrant experience. Such
legendary successes were
achieved, to be sure, but they were the
exceptions, not the rule. Ninety-five
percent of the executives and financiers in

America around the turn of the
century camefrom upper-class or upper-middle-class
backgrounds. Fewer than 3
percent started as poor immigrants or farm
children. Throughout the nineteenth
century, just 2 percent of American industrialists
came from working-class
origins.26 By concentrating on the inspiring exceptions,
textbooks present
immigranthistory as another heartening confirmation
of America as the land of
unparalleled opportunity.
Again and again, textbooks emphasize how
America has differed from Europe
in having less class stratification and more economic
and social mobility. This is
another aspect of the archetype of American
exceptionalism: our society has
been uniquely fair. It would never occur to
historians in, say, France or
Australia, to claim that their society was
exceptionally equalitarian. Does this
treatment of the United States prepare students
for reality? It certainly does not
accuratelydescribe our country today. Social
scientists have on many occasions
compared the degree of economic equality in the
United States with that in other
industrial nations. Depending on the measure used,
the United States has ranked
sixth of six, seventh of seven, ninth of
twelve, thirteenth of thirteen, or
fourteenthof fourteen.27 In the United States
the richest fifth of the population
earns twelve times as much income as

the poorest fifth,one of the highest ratios
in the industrialized world; in Great Britain
the ratio is seven to one, in Japan
just four to one.28 In 1965 the average chief
executive officer in the United
States made 26 times what the average worker
made. By 2004, the CEO made
431 times an average worker’s pay. Meanwhile,
Japanese CEOs continue to
make about 26 times as much as their
average workers, and it is hard to claim
that the leadership of GM and Ford is that
much better than Toyota’s and
Honda’s.29 The Jeffersonian conceit of a nation
of independent farmers and
merchants is also long gone: only one working
American in thirteen is self-
employed,compared to one in eightin Western
Europe.30Thus, not only do we
have far fewer independent entrepreneurs compared to
two hundred years ago,
we have fewer compared to Europe today.
Since textbooks claim that colonial America was
radically less stratified than
Europe, they should tell their readers when
inequality set in. It surely was not a
recent development. By 1910 the top 1 percent of
the U.S. population received
more than a third of all personal income, while
the bottom fifth got less than
one-eighth.31 This level of inequality was on a
par with that in Germany or

Great Britain.32 If textbooks acknowledged inequality,
then they could describe
the changes in our class structure over time,
which would introduce their
students to fascinating historical debate.33
For example, somehistorians argue that wealth in
colonial society was more
equally distributed than it is today and that
economic inequality increased during
the presidency of Andrew Jackson—a period
known, ironically, as the age of the
common man. Others believe that the flowering of
the large corporation in the
late nineteenth century made the class
structure more rigid. Walter Dean
Burnham has argued that the Republican presidential
victory in 1896 (McKinley
over Bryan) brought about a sweeping political
realignment that changed “a
fairly democratic regime into a rather broadly
based oligarchy,” so by the 1920s,
business controlled public policy.34 Clearly the gap
between rich and poor, like
the distance between blacks and whites, was greater
at the end of the Progressive
Era in 1920 than at its beginning around
1890.35 The story is not all one of
increasingstratification, for between the Depression
and the end of World War
II, income and wealth in America gradually became
more equal. Distributions of
income then remained reasonably constant until
President Reagan took office in
1981, when inequality began to grow.36
Still other scholars think that little

change has occurred since the Revolution. Lee
Soltow, for example, finds
“surprising inequality of wealth and income” in
America in 1798. At least for
Boston, Stephan Thernstrom concludes that inequalities
in life chances owing to
social class showan eerie continuity.37 All this is
part of American history. But
it is not part of American history as taught in
high school.
To social scientists, the level of inequality is a
portentous thingto know about
a society. When we rank countries by this
variable, we find Scandinavian nations
at the top, the most equal, and agricultural
societies like Colombia and
Zimbabwe near the bottom. The policies of the
Reagan and first Bush
administrations, which openly favored the rich,
abetted a secular trendalready in
motion, causing inequality to increase measurably
between 1981 and 1992. For
the United States to move perceptibly toward
Colombia in social inequality is a
development of no small import.38 Surely
high school students would be
interested to learn that in 1950 physicians
made two and a half times what
unionized industrial workers made but now make
five times as much. Surely
they need to understand that top managers of
clothing firms, who used to earn 50

times what their American employees made,
now make 1,500 times what their
Bangladeshi workers earn. Surely it is wrong
for our history textbooks and
teachers to withhold the historical information that
might prompt and inform
discussion of thesetrends.
Why might they commit such a blunder? First
and foremost, publisher
censorship of textbook authors. “You always
run the risk, if you talk about social
class, of being labeled Marxist,” the editor
for social studies and history at one of
the biggest publishing houses told me. This editor
communicates the taboo,
formally or subtly, to every writer she works
with, and she implied that most
othereditors do, too.
Publisher pressure derives in part from textbook
adoption boards and
committees in states and school districts. These
are subject in turn to pressure
from organized groups and individuals who appear
before them. Perhaps the
most robust such lobby is still Educational
Research Analysts, led until 2004 by
Mel Gabler of Texas. Gabler’s stable of right-
wing critics regards even alleging
that a textbook contains some class analysis as a
devastating criticism. As one
writer has put it, “Formulating issues in terms
of class is unacceptable, perhaps
even un-American.”39 Fear of not winning adoption in
Texas is a prime source

of publisher angst and might help explain why
Life and Liberty limits its social-
class analysis to colonial times in England. By
contrast, “the colonies were
places of great opportunity,” even back
then. Some Texans cannot easily be
placated, however. Deborah L. Brezina, a Gabler
ally, wrote that Life and
Liberty describes America “as an unjust society,”
unfair to lower economic
groups, and therefore should not be approved.40
Such pressure is hardly new.
Harold Rugg’s Introduction to Problems of
American Culture and his popular
history textbook, written during the Depression,
included someclass analysis. In
the early 1940s, according to Frances
FitzGerald, the National Association of
Manufacturers attacked Rugg’s books, partly for
this feature, and “brought to an
end” social and economic analysis in American history
textbooks.41
More often the influence of the upper class
is less direct. The most potent
rationale for class privilege in American history has
been social Darwinism, an
archetype that still has greatpower in American culture.
The notion that people
rise and fall in a survival of the fittest may
not conform to the data on
intergenerational mobility in the United States,
but that has hardly caused the

archetype to fade away from American education,
particularly from American
history classes.42 Facts that do not fit with
the archetype, such as the entire
literature of social stratification, simply get left
out.
Textbook authors may not even need pressure from
publishers, the right wing,
the upper class, or cultural archetypes to
avoid social stratification. As part of the
process of heroification, textbook authors treat
America itselfas a hero,indeed
as the hero of their books, so they remove its
warts. Even to report the facts of
income and wealth distribution might seemcritical
of America the hero,for it is
difficult to come up with a theory of social
justice that can explain why 1 percent
of the population controls almost 40 percent of
the wealth. Could the other99
percent of us be that lazy or otherwise
undeserving? To go on to include someof
the mechanisms—unequal schooling and the like—
by which the upper class
staysupper would clearly involve criticism of
our beloved nation.
For any or all of thesereasons, textbooks minimize
social stratification. They
then do somethingless comprehensible: they fail to
explain the benefits of free
enterprise. Writing about an earlier generation
of textbooks, Frances FitzGerald
pointed out that the books ignored “the virtues as
well as the vicesof their own

economic system.”43 Teachers might mention free
enterprise with respect, but
seldom do the words become more than a
slogan.44 This omission is strange, for
capitalismhas its advantages, after all. Former
basketball star Michael Jordan,
Chrysler executive Lee Iacocca, and ice-cream makers
Ben and Jerryall got rich
by supplying goods and services that people
desired. To be sure, much social
stratification cannot be justified so neatly, because
it results from the abuse of
wealth and power by those who have these
advantages to shut out those who do
not. As a social and economic order, the
capitalist system offers much to
criticize but also much to praise. America is a
land of opportunity for many
people. And for all the distortions capitalism
imposes upon it, democracy also
benefits from the separationof power between
public and private spheres. Our
history textbooks fail to teach thesebenefits.
Publishers or those who influence them have
evidently concluded that what
American society needs to stay strong is
citizens who assent to its social
structure and economic system without thought. As a
consequence, today’s
textbooks defend our economic system mindlessly,
with insupportable pieties
about its unique lack of stratification; thus they

produce alumni of American
history courses unable to criticize or defend
our system of social stratification
knowledgeably.
But isn’t it nice simply to believe that America is
equal? Maybe the “land of
opportunity” archetype is an empowering myth—
maybe believing in it might
even help make it come true. For if students
thinkthe sky is the limit, they may
reach for the sky, while if they don’t, they
won’t.
The analogy of gender points to the problem
with this line of thought. How
could high school girls understand their
place in American history if their
textbooks told them that, from colonial America to the
present, women have had
equal opportunity for upward mobility and
political participation? How could
they then explain why no woman has been president?
Girlswould have to infer,
perhaps unconsciously, that it has been their
own gender’s fault, a conclusion
that is hardly empowering.
Textbooks do tell how women were denied the
right to vote in many states
until 1920 and faced other barriers to
upward mobility. Textbooks also tell of
barriers confronting racial minorities. The final
question Land of Promise asks
students following its “Social Mobility” section
is “What social barriers

prevented blacks, Indians, and women from
competing on an equal basis with
white male colonists?” After its passage
extolling upward mobility, The
Challenge of Freedom notes, “Not all people,
however, enjoyed equal rights or
an equal chance to improve their way of life,”
and goes on to address the issues
of sexism and racism. But neither here nor
anywhere else do Promise or
Challenge (or most other textbooks) hint that
opportunity might not be equal
today for white Americans of the lower
and working classes.45 Perhaps as a
result, even business leaders and Republicans, the
respondents statistically most
likely to engage in what sociologists call
“blaming the victim,” blame the social
system rather than African Americans for black
poverty and blame the system
rather than women for the latter’s unequal
achievement in the workplace. In
sum, affluent Americans, like their textbooks,
are willing to credit racial
discrimination as the cause of poverty among
blacks and Indians and sex
discrimination as the cause of women’s inequality
but don’t see class
discrimination as the cause of poverty in
general.46
More than math or science, more even

than American literature, courses in
American history hold the promise of telling high
school students how they and
their parents, their communities, and their society
came to be as they are. One
way things are unequal is by social class.
Although poor and working-class
children usually cannot identify the cause of
their alienation, history oftenturns
them off because it justifies rather than explains
the present. When these
students react by dropping out, intellectually if not
physically, their poor school
performance helps convince them as well as their
peers in the faster tracks that
the system is meritocratic and that they themselves
lack merit. In the end, the
absence of social-class analysis in American history
courses amounts to one
more way that education in America is rigged against
the working class.
8.
WATCHING BIG BROTHER
WHAT TEXTBOOKS TEACH ABOUT THE FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT
The historian must have no country.
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS1
What did you learn in school today, dear

little boy of
mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It’s always right and never wrong. . . .
That’s what I learned in school.
—“WHAT DID YOULEARN IN SCHOOL TODAY?,”
TOM PAXTON,19632
We have to face the unpleasant as well as
the
affirmative side of the human story, including
our own
story as a nation, our own stories of our
peoples. We
have got to have the ugly facts in order to
protect us
from the official view of reality.
—BILL MOYERS3
As long as you are convinced you have never
done
anything, you can never do anything.
—MALCOLM X4
To study foreign affairs without putting
ourselves into
others’ shoes is to deal in illusion and to
prepare

students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our
place in
the world.
—PAUL GAGNON5
SOME TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS, critics of
the new emphasis on social
and cultural history, believe that American history
textbooks have been seduced
from their central narrative, which they see as the
storyof the American state.
Methinks they protest too much. The expanded
treatments that textbooks now
give to women, slavery, modes of transportation,
developments in popular
music, and othertopics not directly related to
the state have yet to produce a new
core narrative. Therefore, they appear as unnecessary
diversions that only
interrupt the basic narrative that the textbooks
still tell: the history of the
American government. Two of the twelve textbooks
in my initial sample were
“inquiry” textbooks, mostly assembled from
primary sources. They no longer
made the storyof the state quiteso central.6 The
ten narrative textbooks in that
sample and all current textbooks continue to pay
overwhelming attention to the
actions of the executive branch of the federal
government. They still demarcate
U.S. history as a series of presidential
administrations.

Thus, for instance, Land of Promise grants
each president a biographical
vignette, even William Henry Harrison (who served
for one month), but never
mentions arguably our greatest composer, Charles
Ives; our most influential
architect, Frank Lloyd Wright; or our most
prominent non-Indian humanitarian
on behalf of Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson.
Although textbook authors include
more social history than they used to, they still regard
the actions and words of
the state as incomparably more important than what the
American people were
doing, listening to, sleeping in, living through, or
thinking about. Particularly for
the centuries before the Woodrow Wilson
administration, this stress on the state
is inappropriate, because the federal executive was
not nearly as important then
as now.
What storydo textbooks tell about our government?
First, they imply that the
state we live in today is the state created in
1789. Textbook authors overlook the
possibility that the balance of powers set forth in
the Constitution, granting some
power to each branch of the federal
government, some to the states, and
reserving some for individuals, has been
decisively altered over the last two
hundred years. The federal government they picture

is still the people’s servant,
manageable and tractable. Paradoxically, textbooks
then underplay the role of
nongovernmental institutions or private citizens in
bringing about improvements
in the environment, race relations, education, and
other social issues. In short,
textbook authors portray a heroic state, and,
like their otherheroes, this one is
pretty much without blemishes. Such an
approach converts textbooks into anti-
citizenship manuals—handbooks for acquiescence.
Perhaps the best way to show textbooks’
sycophancy is by examining how
authors treat the government when its actions
have been least defensible. Let us
begin with considerations relating to U.S. foreign
policy.
College courses in political science generally take
one of two approaches
when analyzing U.S. actions abroad. Some
professors and textbooks are quite
critical of what might be called the
American colossus. In this “American
century” (1917-2017?), the United States has been
the most powerful nation on
earthand has typically acted to maintain its
hegemony. This view holds that we
Americans abandoned our revolutionary ideology
long ago, if indeed we ever
held one, and now typically act to repress the
legitimate attempts at self-
determination of othernations and peoples.

More common is the realpolitik view. George
Kennan, who for almost half a
century was an architect of and commentator on
U.S. foreign policy, provided a
succinct statement of this approach in 1948. As
head of the Policy Planning Staff
of the StateDepartment, Kennan wrote in a
now famous memorandum:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth
but only 6.3% of its
population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be
the object of envy and
resentment. Our real test in the coming period is
to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity.
We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford
today the luxury of
altruism and world benefaction—unreal objectives such as
human rights,
the raising of living standards, and democratization.7
Under this view, the historian or political
scientist proceeds by identifying
American national interests as articulated by policy
makers in the past as well as
by historians today. Then s/he analyzes our acts and
policies to assess the degree
to which they furthered theseinterests.
High school American history textbooks do not, of
course, adopt or even hint

at the American colossus view. Unfortunately, they
also omit the realpolitik
approach. Instead, they take a strikingly different tack.
They see our policies as
part of a morality play in which the United
States typically acts on behalf of
human rights, democracy, and “the American way.”
When Americans have done
wrong, according to this view, it has been because
others misunderstood us, or
perhaps because we misunderstood the situation. But
always our motives were
good. This approach might be called the
“international good guy” view.
Textbooks do not indulge in any direct
discussion of what “good” is or might
mean. In Frances FitzGerald’s phrase, textbooks
present the United States as “a
kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the
world.”8 In so doing, they echo the
nation our leaders like to present to its
citizens: the supremely moral,
disinterested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible
world citizen. “Other
countries look to their own interests,”said President John F.
Kennedy in 1961,
pridefully invoking what he termed our “obligations”
around the globe. “Only
the United States—and we are only six percent of
the world’s population—bears
this kind of burden.”9 Today this “peacekeeping
burden” has gotten out of hand:
the United States now spends more on its armed
forces than all other nations
combined and has them stationed in 144 countries.

But under the international
good guy interpretation fostered by Kennedy and our
textbook authors, these
actions become symbols of our altruism rather
than our hegemony. Since at least
the 1920s, textbook authors have also claimed
that the United States is more
generous than any othernation in the world in
providing foreign aid.10 The myth
was untrue then;it is likewise untrue now. Today
at least twenty European and
Arab nations devote much larger proportions of
their gross domestic product
(GDP) or total governmental expenditures to
foreign aid than does the United
States.11
The desire to emphasize our humanitarian
dealings with the world influences
what textbook authors choose to include and omit.
All but one of my original
twelve textbooks contained at least a paragraph on
the Peace Corps, and the tone
of these treatments was adoring. “The Peace
Corps made friends for America
everywhere,” gushed Life and Liberty. Most recent
textbooks agree: “a huge
success” claims The Americans. Only one book admits
any problems. “Curing
the ills of needy people was not so simple,”
Boorstin and Kelley note.
“Intelligent young Americans with high ideals
seldom had enough of the

knowledge or the skills required.”
At least the Peace Corps means well. More
important and oftenless affable,
American exports are our multinational corporations.
One multinational alone,
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), which
took the lead in prompting
our government to destabilize the socialist
government of Salvador Allende, had
more impact on Chile than all the Peace Corps
workers America ever sent to
Latin America. The same might be said of
Union Carbide in India and United
Fruit in Guatemala. By influencing U.S. government
policies, otherAmerican-
based multinationals have had even more profound effects
on othernations.12 At
times the corporations’ influence has been
constructive. For example, when
President Gerald Ford was trying to persuade
Congress to support U.S. military
intervention on behalf of the UNITA rebels in
Angola’s civil war, Gulf Oil
lobbied against intervention. Gulf was happily
producing oil in partnership with
Angola’s Marxist government when it found
its refineries coming under fire
from American arms in the hands of UNITA. At
othertimes, multinationals have
persuaded our government to intervene when only
their corporate interest, not
our national interest, was at stake.

Textbook authors select images to reinforce the
idea that our country’s main
role in the world is to bring about good.
This photograph from The Americans is
captioned “A Peace Corps volunteer gives a
ride to a Nigerian girl.” I have no
quarrel with the Peace Corps, but students should
realize that its main impact has
been on the intellectual development of its own
volunteers.
All this is a matter of grave potential concern
to students, who after graduation
may get sent to fight in a foreign country, partly
because U.S. policy has been
unduly influenced by someDelaware corporation,
Texas construction company,
or New York bank. Or students may find their jobs
eliminated by multinationals
that move factories or computer programming to
Third World countries whose
citizens must work for almost nothing.13 Social
scientists used to describe the
world as stratified into a wealthy industrialized
center and a poor colonized
periphery;somenow hold that multinationals and faster
modes of transportation
and communication have made management
the new center, workers at home
and abroad the new periphery.Even if students are
not personally affected, they
will have to deal with the multinationalization of
the world. As multinational

corporations such as Wal-Mart and Mitsubishi come
to have budgets larger than
those of most governments, national economies
are becoming obsolete. Robert
Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton
administration, has pointed out, “The
very idea of an American economy is becoming
meaningless, as are the notions
of an American corporation, American capital,
American products, and
American technology.”14 Multinationals may represent a
threat to national
autonomy, affecting not only small nations but
also the United States.
When Americans try to think through the
issues raised by the complex
interweaving of our economic and political interests,
they will not be helped by
what they learned in their American history courses.
Mosthistory textbooks do
not even mention multinationals. The topicdoesn’t fit
their “international good
guy” approach. Among my original twelve textbooks,
only American Adventures
even listed multinationals in its index, and its
treatment consisted of a single
sentence: “These investments [in Europe after
World War I] led to the
development of multinational corporations—large
companies with interests in
several countries.” Even this lone statement was
inaccurate: European
multinationals date back centuries, and American
multinationals have played an
important role in our history sinceat least 1900.

Among the six new books, just two books even
mention the term, and both
pair it with “benefit.” Pathways to the Present
supplies thesetwo sentences:
Multinationals benefit consumers and workers around
the world by
providing new products and jobs and by introducing
advanced
technologies and production methods. On the other
hand, thesepowerful
big businesses sometimes skirt the law by using
their economic cloutto
unduly influence politicians or by devising
dishonest ways to keep profits
growing.
That’s not adequate. Often multinationals bribethe
elites of poor countries like
Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria. IBM,
Monsanto, Schering-Plough,
and many other companies have had
executives or corporate policies in one
country or another found to be corrupt. In
Equatorial Guinea, for example, oil
companies pay millions of dollars to the
regime’s leaders for the privilege of
taking the country’s oil—supporting their
children in luxury when they study
abroad, leasing buildings from them, and simply
paying bribes. Meanwhile,
three-fourths of Equatorial Guinea’s population
suffers from malnutrition. Why

do our oil companies do business this way?
Because they pay royalties of only
about 10 percent for taking Equatorial
Guinea’s oil—far less than they would
pay in a justly-run nation.15 In the process,
these companies comprise an
antidemocratic forcethat helps to solidify the control
of a rapacious elite on the
country. This is exactly the opposite of what U.S.
influence should accomplish,
according to either the realpolitik or
“international good guy” model. Eventually,
as in Iran, our entwinement with regimes like
Guinea’s may come back to haunt
us.
The undue impact of multinationals on governments
isn’t limited to foreign
countries. Textbooks need to discuss their
influence on U.S. foreign policy,
beginning perhaps with the administration of Woodrow
Wilson. Pressure from
First National Bankof New York helped prompt
Wilson’s intervention in Haiti,
for example. After Russia’s new communist
government nationalized all
petroleum assets, Standard Oil of New Jersey was
“the major impetus” behind
the U.S. invasion of Russia in 1918, according
to historian Barry Weisberg.16
Textbooks mystify these circumstances, however.
The closest they come to
telling the storyof economic influenceson our foreign
policy is in passages such
as this, from the current American Pageant:

Hoping to head off trouble, Washington urged
Wall Street bankers to
pump dollars into the financial vacuums in
Honduras and Haiti to keep
out foreign funds. The United States, under
the Monroe Doctrine, would
not permit foreign nations to intervene, and
consequently felt obligated to
put its money where its mouth was to
prevent economic and political
instability.
Evidently even our financial interventions were
humanitarian! The authors of
Pageant could use a shot of the realism
supplied by former Marine Corps Gen.
Smedley D. Butler, whose 1931 statement has become
famous:
I helped make Mexico safe for American oil
interests in 1914. I helped
make Haitiand Cubaa decent place for the
National City Bankboys to
collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua
for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers. . . . I
brought light to the Dominican
Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I
helped make Honduras
“right” for American fruit companies in 1903.
Looking back on it, I
might have given Al Capone a few hints.17

Business influence on U.S. foreign policy did not
start with Woodrow
Wilson’s administration. John A. Hobson, in
his 1903 book, Imperialism,
described “a constantly growing tendency” of
the wealthy class “to use their
political power as citizens of this Stateto
interfere with the political condition of
those States where they have an industrial
stake.”18 Nor did such influence end
with Wilson. Jonathan Kwitny’s fine book Endless
Enemies cites various
distortions of U.S. foreign policy owing to
specific economic interests of
individual corporations and/or to misconceived
ideological interests of U.S.
foreign policy planners. Kwitny points out that
during the entire period from
1953 to 1977, the people in charge of U.S.
foreign policy were all on the
Rockefeller family payroll. Dean Rusk and
Henry Kissinger, who ran our
foreign policy from 1961 to 1977, were dependent on
Rockefeller payments for
their very solvency.19 Nonetheless, no textbook ever
mentions the influence of
multinationals on U.S. policy. This is the case not
necessarily because textbook
authors are afraid of offending multinationals,
but because they never discuss
any influence on U.S. policy. Rather, they present
our governmental policies as
rational humanitarian responses to trying
situations, and they do not seek to
penetrate the surface of the government’s own
explanations of its actions.

Having ignored why the federal government acts as
it does, textbooks proceed
to ignore much of what the government does.
Textbook authors portray the U.S.
government’s actions as agreeable and nice, even
when U.S. government
officials have admitted motives and intentions of a
quitedifferent nature. Among
the less savory examples are various attempts by
U.S. officials and agencies to
assassinate leaders or bring down
governments of other countries. The United
States has indulged in activities of this sort at
least since the Wilson
administration, which hired two Japanese-Mexicans to
try to poison Pancho
Villa.20 I surveyed all eighteen textbooks to see
how they treated six more recent
U.S. attempts to subvert foreign governments. To
ensure that the events were
adequately covered in the historical literature, I
examined only incidents that
occurred before 1973, well before any of these
textbooks went to press. The
episodes are:
1. Our assistance to the shah’s faction in Iran in
deposing Prime Minister
Mossadegh and returning the shah to the throne in
1953;
2. Our role in bringing down the elected

government of Guatemala in 1954;
3. Our rigging of the 1957 election in
Lebanon, which entrenched the
Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt
and civil war the next
year;
4. Our involvement in the assassination of Patrice
Lumumba of Zaire in
1961;
5. Our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel
Castro of Cubaand bring
down his government by terror and sabotage;
and
6. Our role in bringing down the elected
government of Chile in 1973.
The U.S. government calls actions such as these
“state-sponsored terrorism”
when othercountries do them to us. We would be
indignant to learnof Cuban or
Libyan attempts to influence our politics or
destabilize our economy. Our
government expressed outrage at Iraq’s
Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange
the assassination of former President George H.
W. Bush when he visited
Kuwait in 1993 and retaliated with a bombing attack
on Baghdad, yet the United
States has repeatedly orchestrated similar
assassination attempts.
Our review begins auspiciously. Eight of the
twelve textbooks I reviewed for

the first edition of Lies omitted all mention of
the CIA coup that put Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi in power in Iran in
1953. All six new books do tell of
our overthrow of Mossadegh. The American Pageant
provides this account:
The government of Iran, supposedly influenced by
the Kremlin, began to
resist the power of the gigantic Western
companies that controlled
Iranian petroleum. In response, the . . .
CIA helped to engineer a coup in
1953 that installed the youthful shah of Iran, Mohammed
Reza Pahlevi,
as a kind of dictator. Though successful in
the short run in securing
Iranian oil for the West, the American intervention
left a bitter legacy of
resentment among many Iranians.
These sentences do give students some means
for understanding why Iranians
took over the American embassy in 1979, imprisoning
its occupants for more
than a year.
Iran’s continuing hostility to U.S. policies in
the Middle East may explain
why textbooks now cover our provocative actions
there more fully.
Unfortunately, other than about Iran, textbooks
have not improved in their

treatment of our foreign adventures. In Guatemala,
in 1944, college students,
urban workers, and members of Guatemala’s middle
class joined to overthrow a
dictator and set up a democratic government.
During the next ten years, elected
governments extended the vote to American Indians, to
the poor (largely
synonymous), and to women; ended forced labor
on coffee plantations; and
enacted otherreforms. All this cameto an end in
1954, when the CIA threatened
the government of Jacobo Arbenz with an armed
invasion. Arbenz had
antagonized the United Fruit Company by proposing
land reform and planning a
highway and railroad that might break their trade
monopoly. The United States
chose an obscure army colonel as the new
president, and when Arbenz panicked
and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy, we
flew our man to the capital
aboard the U.S. ambassador’s private plane. The
result was a repressive junta
that treated its Indian majority brutally for another
forty years.
Four of six recent textbooks do mention this
event. The American Journey
provides a representative treatment:
The Eisenhower administration also faced Communist
challenges in
Latin America. In 1954 the Central Intelligence
Agency helped
overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz in

Guatemala, which some
American leaders feared was leaning toward
communism.
Here Journey offers anticommunism as the sole
motive for U.S. policies. Bear in
mind that this incident took place at the height of
McCarthyism, when, as
commentator Lewis Lapham has pointed out, the
United States saw communism
everywhere: “When the duly elected Guatemalan
president, Jacobo Arbenz,
began to talk too much like a democrat,
the United States accused him of
communism.”21 Fifty years later The
American Journey maintains the U.S.
government’s McCarthyist rhetoric. So do other
textbooks, if they mention
Guatemala at all.
Not one textbook includes a word about how
the United States helped the
Christians in Lebanon fix the 1957 parliamentary
election in that then tenuously
balanced country. The next year, denied a fair
share of power by electoral
means, the Muslims took to armed combat, and
President Eisenhower sent in the
marines on the Christians’ behalf. Eight of
eighteen books discuss that 1958
intervention. Land of Promise offers the fullest
treatment:
Next, chaos broke out in Lebanon, and the

Lebanese President, Camille
Chamoun, fearing a leftist coup, asked for
American help. Although
reluctant to interfere, in July 1958 Eisenhower sent
15,000 United States
marines into Lebanon. Order was soon restored,
and the marines were
withdrawn.
This is standard textbook rhetoric: chaos seems
always to be breaking out or
about to break out, and Americans intervene
only “reluctantly.” Other than
communism, “chaos” is what textbooks usually
offer to explain the actions of
the other side. The recent edition of
American Pageant relies on the older
explanation, communism:
[B]oth Egyptian and communist plottings threatened
to engulf Western-
oriented Lebanon. After its president had called
for aid under the
Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States boldly
landed several thousand
troops and helped restore order without taking
a single life.
But communism was never a significant factor
in Lebanon, and in other
countries it oftenoffers no better explanation
than chaos. Kwitny points out that
the United States has often behaved so badly
in the Third World that some
governments and independence movements saw no
alternative but to turn to the

USSR.22 Since textbook authors are unwilling to
criticize the U.S. government,
they present opponents of the United States that
are not intelligible. This only
misleads and mystifies students. Only by disclosing
our actions can textbooks
provide readers with rational accounts of our
adversaries.
Promise goes on to tell the happy results of
our intervention: “Although there
was no immediate Communist threat to
Lebanon, Eisenhower demonstrated that
the United States could react quickly. As a
result, tensions in the region
receded.” In reality, the civil war in Lebanon
broke out again in 1975, with
mounting destruction in Beirut and throughout
the nation. In 1983 a whole lot of
chaos broke out, so President Reagan sent in
our marines again. A truckbomb
then killed 241 marines in their barracks,
prompting Reagan to withdraw the
rest. Several textbooks tell of this event, but not
one offers students anything of
substance about the continuity of conflict in
Lebanon or our role in causing it. In
2006, “chaos” broke out in Lebanon once
more in the form of a miniwar
between the Arab nationalist organization
Hezbollah and Israel. Textbooks’
shallow discussions of Lebanon’s past provide
no help to students seeking to

understand this new conflict.
Zaire or the Congo appears in the index of
just two oldertextbooks, Triumph
of the American Nation and the 1991 edition of
American Pageant. Neither book
mentions that the CIA urged the assassination of
Patrice Lumumba in 1961.23
Pageant offered an accurate account of the
beginning of the strife: “The African
Congo received its independence from Belgium in
1960 and immediately
exploded into violence. The United Nations sent in a
peacekeeping force, to
which Washington contributed much money
but no manpower.” There Pageant
stops. The account in Triumph of the American
Nation mentioned Lumumba by
name: “A new crisis developed in 1961 when
Patrice Lumumba, leader of the
pro-Communist faction, was assassinated.” Triumph
says nothing about U.S.
involvement with the assassination and concludes with
the happiest of endings:
“By the late 1960s, most scars of the civil
war seemed healed. The Congo
(Zaire) became one of the most prosperous African
nations.” Would that it were!
The CIA helped bring to power Joseph
Mobutu, a former army sergeant. By the
end of the 1960s, Triumph to the contrary, Zaire
under Mobutu had become one
of the most wretched African nations, economically
and politically. In the first
edition of this book, I predicted “in 1994,
Zaire is ripe for a ‘new’ crisis to

develop.” Indeed, soon civil war did erupt in
Zaire, forcing Mobutu to flee in
1997. Various parts of the country have faced
continued strife sincethen, killing
almost four million residents. Today’s students and
authors have no basis to
understand this new outbreak of “chaos,” however,
because not one recent book
even mentions Congo/Zaire.
Nor does any textbook, old or new, mention
our repeated attempts to
assassinate Premier FidelCastro of Cuba.24 The
federal government had tried to
kill Castro eighttimes by 1965, according to
testimony before the U.S. Senate;
by 1975 Castro had thwarted twenty-four
attempts, according to Cuba. These
undertakings ranged from a botched effort to
get Castro to light an exploding
cigarto a contract with the Mafia to murder
him. After the Bay of Pigs invasion
failed, President John F. Kennedy launched Operation
Mongoose, “a vast covert
program” to destabilize Cuba, in the words of
Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press
secretary. Salinger also has written that JFK even planned
to invade Cubawith
U.S. armed forces until forestalled by the Cuban
missile crisis.25 No textbook
tells about Operation Mongoose.
Authors’ silence about our attempts to assassinate

Castro undermines their
treatments of the assassination of JFK. Since
Kennedy probably ordered several
of the earlier attempts on Castro’s life personally,
including the Mafia contract,
Kennedy’s own assassination might be explained
as a revenge slaying. Of
course, Lee Harvey Oswald may have killed
Kennedy on his own, and Jack
Ruby may have killed Oswald on his own.
Because no textbook tells how
Kennedy tried to kill Castro, however, none
can logically suggest a Cuban or
Mafia connection in discussing Kennedy’s
death.26 Instead, authors limit
themselves to vague statements like this, from
Pathways to the Present: “Some
investigations support the theory that Oswald was
involved in a larger
conspiracy, and that he was killed in order to
protect others who had helped plan
Kennedy’s murder.”
Undaunted by its failures in Cuba, the CIA
turned its attention farther south.
Only six of eighteen textbooks even mention Chile.
“President Nixon helped the
Chilean army overthrow Chile’s elected government
because he did not like its
radical socialist policies,”Life and Liberty says
bluntly. This single sentence,
which is all that Life and Liberty offers, lies
buried in a section about President
Carter’s human rights record, but it is the
best account in any textbook. Two
recent books, The American Journey and Holt

American Nation, echo Life and
Liberty less bluntly. Three books leave the
matter of America’s involvement—
which is not in question at all—up in the
air. The other twelve leave it out
entirely.
Why leave our involvement open to question?
Historiansknow that the CIA
had earlier joined with ITT to try to defeat
Allende in the 1970 elections. Failing
this, the United States sought to disrupt the
Chilean economy and bring down
Allende’s government. The United States blocked
international loans to Chile,
subsidized opposition newspapers, labor
unions, and political parties, denied
spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a
nationwide truckers’ strike that
paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and
financed the military that staged
the bloody coup in 1973 in which
Allende was killed. The next year, CIA
Director William Colby testified that “a secret
high-level intelligence committee
led by Kissinger himself had authorized CIA
expenditures of over eightmillion
dollars during the period 1970-73 to
‘destabilize’ the government of President
Allende.”27 Secretary of State Kissinger himself
later explained, “I don’t see
why we have to let a country go Marxist
just because its people are

irresponsible.”28 Since the Chilean people’s
“irresponsibility” consisted of
voting for Allende, here Kissinger openly says that
the United States should not
and will not respect the electoral process or
sovereignty of another country if the
results do not please us.29
Do textbooks need to include all government
skullduggery? Certainly not. I
am not arguing in favor of what Paul Gagnon
calls “relentless mentioning.”30
Textbooks do need to analyze at least
some of our interventions in depth,
however, for they raise important issues. To defend
theseacts on moral grounds
is not easy.The acts diminish U.S. foreign policy to
the level of Mafia thuggery,
strip the United States of its claim to lawful
conduct, and reduce our prestige
around the world. To be sure, covert violence
may be defensibleon realpolitik
grounds as an appropriate way to deal with
international problems. It can be
argued that the United States should be
destabilizing governments in other
countries, assassinating leaders unfriendly to us,
and fighting undeclared
unpublicized wars. The six cloak-and-dagger
operations recounted here do not
support this view, however. In Cuba, for
instance, the CIA’s “pointless sabotage
operations,” in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s words,
“only increased Castro’s
popularity.” Even when they succeed, thesecovert
acts provide only a short-term

fix, keeping people who worry us out of power
for a time, but identifying the
United States with repressive, undemocratic,
unpopular regimes, hence
undermining our long-term interests.31 The historian
Ronald Kessler relates that
a CIA officer responsible for engineering
Arbenz’s downfall in Guatemala
agreed later that overthrowing elected leaders is a
shortsighted policy.32 “Was it
desirable to trade Mossadegh for the Ayatollah
Khomeini?” asks the historian
Charles Ameringer about our “success” in
Iran. Covert action always risks
blowback—retaliation from abroad that we cannot
effectively counter because
our initial acts were taken without support
from the American people. When
covert attacks fail, like the Bay of Pigs landing in
1961, they leave the U.S.
government with no viable next step shortof
embarrassed withdrawal or overt
military intervention. If instead of covert action
we had had a public debate
about how to handle Mossadegh or Castro,
we might have avoided Khomeini or
the Bay of Pigs debacle. Unless we become more
open to nationalist
governments that embody the dreams of their people,
Robert F. Smith believes
we will face “crisis after crisis.”33
This debate cannot take place in American history

courses, however, because
most textbooks do not let on about what our
government has done. Except for
Iran, most of the eighteen textbooks I surveyed leave
out all six incidents. When
authors do treat one or two, they often imply
that our actions were based on
humanitarian motives. Thus, textbook authors portray
the United States basically
as an idealistic actor, responding generously to
other nations’ social and
economic woes. Robert Leckie has referred to
“the myth of ‘the most peace-
loving nation in the world’ ” and noted
that it persists “in American folklore.” It
also persists in our history textbooks.34
These interventions raise another issue: Are they
compatible with democracy?
Covert violent operations against foreign
nations, individuals, and political
parties violate the openness on which our own
democracy relies. Inevitably,
covert international interference leads to
domestic lying. U.S. citizens cannot
possibly critique government policies if they do
not know of them. Thus, covert
violent actions usually flout the popular will.
These actions also threaten our
long-standing separation of powers, which
textbooks so justly laud in their
chapters on the Constitution. Covert actions are
always undertaken by the
executive branch, which typically lies to the
legislative branch about what it has
done and plans to do, thus preventing Congress

from playing its constitutionally
intended role.
The U.S. government lied about most of the
six examples of foreign
intervention just described.On the same day in 1961
that our Cuban exiles were
landing at the Bay of Pigs in their hapless
attempt to overthrow FidelCastro,
Secretary of StateDeanRusk said, “The American people
are entitled to know
whether we are intervening in Cubaor intend to
do so in the future. The answer
to that question is no.” Among the dead three
days later were four American
pilots. When asked about Chile in his
Senate confirmation hearings for U.S.
secretary of state in 1973, Henry Kissinger replied,
“The CIA had nothing to do
with the [Chilean] coup, to the best of my
knowledge and belief, and I only put
in that qualification in case some madman
appears down there who, without
instruction, talked to somebody.” Later
statements by CIA Director William
Colby and Kissinger himself directly contradicted
this testimony. The U.S.
Senate Intelligence Committee eventually
denounced our campaign against the
Allende government.35
President Eisenhower used national security as his
excuse when he was caught
in an obvious lie: he denied that the United

States was flying over Soviet
airspace, only to have captured airman Gary Powers
admit the truth on Russian
television. Much later, the public learned
that Powers had been just the tip of the
iceberg: in the 1950s we had at least thirty-one
flights downed over the USSR,
with more than 170 men aboard. For decades our
government lied to the families
of the lost men and never made substantial
representation to the USSR to get
them back, because the flights were illegal and
were supposed to be secret.36
Similarly, during the Vietnam War the government
kept our bombing of Laos
secret for years, later citing national
security as its excuse. This did not fool
Laotians, who knew full well we were bombing them,
but did fool Americans.
Often presidents and their advisors keep actions covert
not for reasons of tactics
abroad, but because they suspect the actions would
not be popular with Congress
or with the American people.
Over and over,presidents have chosen not to risk their
popularityby waging
the campaign required to persuade Americans to
support their secret military
policies.37 Our Constitution provides that Congress
must declare war. Back in
1918 Woodrow Wilson tried to keep our
intervention in Russia hidden from
Congress and the American people. Helen Keller
helped get out the truth: “Our
governments are not honest. They do not openly

declare war against Russia and
proclaim the reasons,” she wrote to a New York
newspaper in 1919. “They are
fighting the Russian people half-secretly and in
the dark with the lie of
democracy on their lips.”38 Ultimately, Wilson
failed to keep his invasion secret,
but he was able to keep it hidden from American
history textbooks. Therein lies
the problem: textbooks cannot report accuratelyon
the six foreign interventions
described in this chapter without mentioning that
the U.S. government covered
them up.
The sole piece of criminal government activity
that most textbooks treat is the
series of related scandals called Watergate. In
its impact on the public, the
Watergate break-in stood out. In the early 1970s
Congress and the American
people learned that President Nixon had helped
cover up a string of illegal acts,
including robberies of the Democratic National
Committee and the office of
Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist. Nixon also tried
with some success to use the
Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA, and various
regulatoryagencies to
inspire fear in the hearts of his “enemies list” of
people who had dared to oppose
his policies or his reelection. In telling of
Watergate, textbooks blame Richard

Nixon, as they should.39 But they go no
deeper. Faced with this undeniable
instance of governmental wrongdoing, they manage to
retain their uniformly
rosy view of the government. In the
representative words of Pathways to the
Present:
Many Americans lost a greatdeal of faith and
trust in their government.
However, the scandal also proved the strength of
the nation’s
constitutional system, especially its balance of
powers. When members
of the executive branch violated the law instead of
enforcing it, the
judicial and legislative branches of government
stepped in and stopped
them.
Getting rid of Richard Nixon did not solve
the problem, however, because the
problem is structural, stemmingfrom the vastly
increased power of the federal
executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways
the Iran-Contra scandal of the
Reagan and first Bush administrations, a web of
secret legal and illegal acts
involving the president, vice president, cabinet members,
special operativessuch
as Oliver North, and government officials in
Israel, Iran, Brunei, and elsewhere,
showed an executive branch more out of control
than Nixon’s.40 Textbooks’
failure to put Watergate into this perspective is
part of their authors’ apparent

program to whitewash the federal government so
that schoolchildren will respect
it. Since the structural problem in the government
has not gone away, it is likely
that students will again, in their adult lives,
face an out-of-control federal
executive pursuing criminal clandestine foreign and
domestic policies—indeed,
somehave argued that the Bush II administration’s
post-9/11 behavior amounts
to just that.41 To the extent that their
understanding of the government comes
from their American history courses, students will
be shocked by these events
and unprepared to thinkabout them.
“Our country . . . may she always be in
the right,” toasted Stephen Decatur in
1816, “but our country, right or wrong!” Educators
and textbook authors seemto
want to inculcate the next generation into blind
allegiance to our country. Going
a step beyond Decatur, textbook analyses fail to
assess our actions abroad
according to either a standard of right and
wrong or realpolitik. Instead,
textbooks merely assume that the government tried to
do the right thing. Citizens
who embrace the textbook view would presumably
support any intervention,
armed or otherwise, and any policy, protective
of our legitimate national
interests or not, because they would be persuaded
that all our policies and

interventions are on behalf of humanitarian aims.
They could never credit our
enemies with equal humanity.
This “international good guy” approach is
educationally dysfunctional if we
seek citizens who are able to thinkrationally about
American foreign policy. 42
To the citizen raised on textbook platitudes,
George Kennan’s realpolitik may be
painful to contemplate. Under the thrall of
the America-the-good archetype, we
expect more from our country. But Kennan
describes how nations actually
behave. We would not risk the decline of
democracy and the end of Western
civilization if we simply let students see a
realistic description and analysis of
our foreign policies. Doing so would also help
close the embarrassing gap
between what high school textbooks say about
American foreign policy and how
their big brothers, college textbooks in political science
courses, treat the subject.
When high school history textbooks turn to
the internal affairs of the U.S.
government, the books again part company with
political scientists. A large
chunk of introductory political science course
work is devoted to analyzing the
various forces that influence our government’s
domestic policies. High school
American history textbooks simply credit the
government for most of what gets

done. This is not surprising, for when authors
idealize the federal government,
perforce they also distort the real dynamic between
the governed and the
government. It is particularly upsetting to watch
this happen in the field of civil
rights, where the courageous acts of thousands of
citizens in the 1960s entreated
and even forced the government to act.
Between 1960 and 1968 the civil rights movement
repeatedly appealed to the
federal government for protection and for
implementation of federal law,
including the Fourteenth Amendment and other
laws passed during
Reconstruction. Especially during the Kennedy
administration, governmental
response was woefully inadequate. In Mississippi,
movementoffices displayed
this bitter rejoinder:
THERE’S A STREET IN ITTA BENA CALLED
FREEDOM.
THERE’S A TOWN IN MISSISSIPPI CALLED
LIBERTY.
THERE’S A DEPARTMENT IN WASHINGTON
CALLED
JUSTICE.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s response to
the movement’s call was
particularly important, since the FBI is the

premier national law enforcement
agency. The bureau had a long and unfortunate
history of antagonism toward
African Americans. J. Edgar Hoover and the
agency that became the FBI got
their start investigating alleged communists during
the Woodrow Wilson
administration. Although the last four years of that
administration saw more
antiblack race riots than any othertime in our history,
Wilson had agents focus
on gathering intelligence on African Americans,
not on white Americans who
were violating blacks’ civil rights. Hoover
explained the antiblack race riot of
1919 in Washington, D.C., as due to “the
numerous assaults committed by
Negroes upon white women.” In that year the
agency institutionalized its
surveillance of black organizations, not white
organizations like the Ku Klux
Klan. In the bureau’s early years, there
were a few black agents, but by the
1930s Hoover had weeded out all but two. By
the early1960s the FBI had not a
single black officer, although Hoover tried to
claim it did by counting his
chauffeurs.43 FBI agents in the South were mostly
white Southerners who cared
what their white Southern neighbors thought of them
and were themselves white
supremacists. And although this next complaint is
reminiscent of the dinerwho
protested that the soup was terrible and therewasn’t
enough of it, the bureau had
far too few agents in the South. In Mississippi

it had no office at all and relied
for its initial reports on local sheriffs and police
chiefs, oftenprecisely the people
from whom the civil rights movementsought
protection.
Even in the 1960s Hoover remained an avowed
white supremacist who
thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing
racial segregation in Brown
v. Board of Education was a terrible error.
He helped Kentucky prosecute a
Caucasian civil rights leader, Carl Braden, for
selling a house in a white
neighborhood to a black family. In August
1963 Hoover initiated a campaign to
destroy Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights
movement. With the approval
of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped
the telephones of King’s
associates, bugged King’s hotel rooms, and
made tape recordings of King’s
conversations with and about women. The FBI then
passed on the lurid details,
including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to
Senator Strom Thurmond and
other white supremacists, reporters, labor leaders,
foundation administrators,
and, of course, the president. In 1964 a
high FBI administrator sent a tape
recording of King having sex, along with an
anonymous note suggesting that
King kill himself, to the office of King’s
organization, the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC). The FBI must
have known that the incident
might not actually persuade King to commit suicide;
the bureau’s intention was
apparently to get Coretta ScottKing to divorce
her husband or to blackmail King
into abandoning the civil rights movement.44
The FBI tried to sabotage
receptionsin King’s honor when he traveled to
Europe to claim the Nobel Peace
Prize. Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in
the country” and tried to
prove that the SCLC was infested with communists.
King wasn’t the only target:
Hoover also passed on disinformation about the
Mississippi Summer Project;
othercivil rights organizations such as CORE
(Congress of Racial Equality) and
SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee); and other civil rights
leaders, including JesseJackson.45
At the same time the FBI refused to pass on to
King information about death
threats to him.46 The FBI knew these threats
were serious, for civil rights
workers were indeed being killed. In
Mississippi alone, civil rights workers
endured more than a thousand arrests at the hands
of local officials, thirty-five
shooting incidents, and six murders. The FBI repeatedly
claimed, however, that
protecting civil rights workers from violence was
not its job.47 In 1962 SNCC
sued Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to

forcethem to protect civil rights
demonstrators. Desperate to get the federal government
to enforce the law in the
DeepSouth, Mississippi civil rights workers Amzie
Moore and Robert Moses hit
upon the 1964 “Freedom Summer” idea: bring
a thousand Northern college
students, most of them white, to Mississippi
to work among blacks for civil
rights. Even this helped little: white
supremacists bombed thirty homes and
burned thirty-seven black churches in the
summer of 1964 alone.48 After the
national outcry prompted by the murders of James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi,
however, the FBI finally
opened an office in Jackson. Later that
summer, at the 1964 Democratic national
convention in Atlantic City, the FBI tapped
the phones of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther
King Jr.; in so doing, the bureau
was complying with a request from President Lyndon
Johnson.49
Because I livedand did research in Mississippi, I
have concentrated on acts of
the federal government and the civil rights
movementin that state, but the FBI’s
attack on black and interracialorganizations was
national in scope. For example,
after Congress passed the 1964 CivilRights Bill, a
bowling alley in Orangeburg,
South Carolina, refused to obey the law.
Students from the nearby black state

college demonstrated against the facility. State
troopers fired on the
demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-
eight, many of them shot in
the balls of their feet as they ran awayand threw
themselves on the ground to
avoid the gunfire. The FBI responded not by helping
to identify which officers
fired in what became known as “the Orangeburg
Massacre,” but by falsifying
information about the students to help the
troopers with their defense.50 In
California, Chicago, and elsewhere in the North,
the bureau tried to eliminate the
breakfast programs of the Black Panther
organization, spread false rumors about
venereal disease and encounters with prostitutes to
break up Panther marriages,
helped escalate conflict between otherblack groups
and the Panthers, and helped
Chicago police raid the apartment of Panther leader
Fred Hampton and kill him
in his bed in 1969.51 The FBI warned black
leader Stokely Carmichael’s mother
of a fictitious Black Panther plot to murder
her son, prompting Carmichael to
flee the United States.52 It is even possible that
the FBI or the CIA was involved
in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Raoul” in Montreal, who supplied
King’s convicted killer, James Earl Ray, with the
alias “Eric Gault,” may have
had CIA connections.53 Certainly Ray, a

country boy with no income, could
never have traveled to Montreal, arranged a false
identity, and flown to London
and Lisbon without help. Despite or because of
theseincongruities, the FBI has
never shown any interest in uncovering the
conspiracy that killed King. Instead,
shortly after King’s death in 1968, the FBI
twice broke into SNCC offices. Years
later the bureau tried to prevent King’s
birthday from becoming a national
holiday.54
The FBI investigated black faculty members at
colleges and universities from
Virginia to Montana to California. In 1970
Hoover approved the automatic
investigation of “all black student unions and
similar organizations organized to
project the demands of black students.” The
institution at which I taught,
Tougaloo College, was a special target: at one
point agents in Jackson even
proposed to “neutralize” the entire college, in
part because its students had
sponsored “out-of-state militant Negro speakers, voter-
registration drives, and
African cultural seminars and lectures . . .
[and] condemned various publicized
injustices to the civil rights of Negroes in
Mississippi.” Obviouslyhigh crimes
and misdemeanors!55
The FBI’s conduct and the federal leadershipthat
tolerated it and sometimes
requested it are part of the legacy of the 1960s,

alongside such positive
achievements as the 1964 CivilRights Act and the
1965 Voting Rights Act. As
historian Kenneth O’Reilly put it, “When the FBI
stood against black people, so
did the government.”56 How do American history
textbooks treat this legacy?
They simply leave out everything bad the
government ever did. They omit not
only the FBI’s campaign against the civil rights
movement, but also its break-ins
and undercover investigations of church groups,
organizations promoting
changes in U.S. policy in Latin America, and
the U.S. Supreme Court.57
Textbooks don’t even want to say
anything bad about state governments: all
sixteen narrative textbooks in my sample include
part of Martin Luther King’s “I
Havea Dream” speech, but fifteen of them censor
his negative comments about
the governments of Alabama and Mississippi.
Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal
government for its opposition
to the civil rights movement, many
actually credit the government, almost
single-handedly, for the advances made during
the period. In so doing, textbooks
follow what we might call the Hollywood
approach to civil rights. To date
Hollywood’s main feature film on the movement is
Alan Parker’s Mississippi

Burning.58 In that movie, the threecivil rights
workers get killed in the first five
minutes; for the rest of its two hours the movie
portrays not a single civil rights
worker or black Mississippian over the age of
twelve with whom the viewer
could possibly identify. Instead, Parker concocts
two fictional white FBI agents
who play out the hoary “good cop/bad cop” formula
and in the process double-
handedly solve the murders. In reality—that is, in
the real story on which the
movie is based—supporters of the civil rights
movement, including Michael
Schwerner’s widow, Rita, and every white
northern friend the movementcould
muster, pressured Congress and the executive branch of
the federal government
to forcethe FBI to open a Mississippi office
and make bringing the murderers to
justice a priority. Meanwhile, Hoover tapped
Schwerner’s father’s telephone to
see if he might be a communist. Everyone in
eastern Mississippi knew for weeks
who had committed the murder and that the
Neshoba County deputy sheriff was
involved. No innovative police work was required;
the FBI finally apprehended
the conspirators after bribing one of them
with $30,000 to testify against the
others.59
The twelve textbooks I studied for the first
edition of this book offered a
Parker-like analysis of the entire civil rights
movement. Like the arrests of the

Mississippi Klansmen, advances in civil rights
were simply the result of good
government. Federal initiative in itself“explained”
such milestones as the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965. John F. Kennedy
proposed them, Lyndon Baines Johnson passed
them through Congress, and thus
we have them today. Or, in the immortal
passive voice of American History,
“Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights
Act, was passed.” Several
textbooks even reversed the time order, putting
the bills first, the civil rights
movementlater. Challenge of Freedom provided a
typical treatment:
President Kennedy and his administration responded to
the call for racial
equality. In June 1963 the President asked
for congressional action on
far-reaching equal rights laws. Following
the President’s example,
thousands of Americans became involved in the
equal rights movement
as well. In August 1963 more than 200,000 people
took part in a march
in Washington, D.C.
This account reverses leader and led. In reality,
Kennedy initially tried to stop
the march and sent his vice president to Norway to
keep him away from it

because he felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil
rights. Even Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy partisan, has dryly
noted that “the best spirit of
Kennedy was largely absent from the racial
deliberations of his presidency.”60
The damage is not localized to the unfounded
boost textbooks give to
Kennedy’s reputation. The greater danger comes
from removing what scholars
call “agency” from African Americans. When
describing the attack on
segregation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme
Court decision, the bestselling
old book, Triumph of the American Nation, and
one of the bestselling current
books, The American Pageant, make no mention
that African Americans were
the plaintiffs and attorneys in Brown v. Board of
Education or that prior cases
also brought by the NAACP prepared the way.
The latest Pageant actually
claims that the Kennedys—Jack and Robert—prodded
SNCC and other civil
rights groups to register blacks to vote. All
prodding went the otherway around!
Today many young African Americans think
that desegregation was something
the federal government imposed on the black
community. They have no idea it
was something the black community forced
on the federal government.61
Meanwhile, many young white Americans
can reasonably infer that the federal
government has been nice enough to blacks.

Crediting the federal government
for actions instigated by African Americans
and their white allies surely
disempowers African American students today, and
surely helps them feel that
they “have never done anything,” as Malcolm X
put it.
Fortunately, the six recent textbooks do showsome
improvement. All six tell
how attempts by African Americans in Selma,
Alabama, to vote led to attacks by
white police. All six note that the resulting march
from Selma to Montgomery,
led by Martin Luther King Jr., prodded LBJ
and Congress to pass the 1965
Voting Rights Act. Three of the six current
textbooks—Pathways to the Present,
The Americans, and American Journey—show that
African Americans forced
the federal government to move on civil
rights more generally, although they
claim that President Kennedy personally favored
them.62 Along with American
Adventures and Discovering AmericanHistory, these
new books do show the
basic dynamics of the civil rights movement:
African Americans, often with
white allies, challenged an unjust law or
practice in a nonviolent way, which
then incited whites to respond barbarically to
defend “civilization,” in turn
appalling the nation and convincing somepeople to
change the law or practice.

These books celebrate the courage of the civil
rights volunteers. But only
Discovering American History, published in 1974,
tells how the movement
directly challenged the mores of segregation,
with the result that some civil
rights workers were killed or beaten by white
racists simply for holding hands as
an interracialcouple or eating together in a
restaurant.
Textbooks treat the environmental movementsimilarly,
telling how “Congress
passed” the laws setting up the Environmental
ProtectionAgency while giving
little or no attention to the environmental crusade.
Students are again left to infer
that the government typically does the right thingon its
own, and new books are
no better than old ones in this regard. Many
teachers don’t help; a study of
twelve randomly selected teachers of twelfth-grade
American government
courses found that about the onlyway the
teachers suggested that individuals
could influence local or national governments was
through voting.63
Textbook authors seem to believe that Americans
can be loyal to their
government only so long as they believe it has
never done anything bad.
Textbooks therefore present a U.S. government
that deserves students’
allegiance, not their criticism. “We live in the
greatest country in the world,”

wrote James F. Delong, an associate of the
right-wing textbook critic Mel
Gabler, in his critique of American Adventures.
“Any book billing itself as a
story of this country should certainly get that
heritage and pride across.”
American Adventures, in conveying the basic
dynamic of the civil rights
movement, implies that the U.S. government was
not doing all it should for civil
rights. Perhaps as a result, Adventures failed
Delong’s patriotism test: “I will not,
I can not endorse it for use in our schools.”64
The textbooks’ sycophantic presentations of the
federal government may help
win adoptions, but they don’t win students’
attention. It is boring to read about
all the good things the government did on its
own, with no dramatic struggles.
Moreover,most adultAmericans no longer trust the
government as credulously
as they did in the 1950s. From the Vietnam
War to Watergate to Iran-Contragate
to Clinton’s sex life to the mythical weapons of
mass destruction that allegedly
caused George W. Bush to invade Iraq, revelation
after revelation of misconduct
and deceit in the federal executive branch
shattered the trust of the American
people, as confirmed in poll after opinion poll. In
1964, 64 percent of Americans
still trusted the government to “do the right

thing”; thirty years later this
proportion had dwindled to just 19 percent.
Textbook authors, since they are
unwilling to say bad things about the government,
come across as the last
innocents in America. Their trust is poignant.
They present students with a
benign government whose statements should
be believed. This is hardly the
opinion of their parents, who, according to
opinion polls, remain deeply
skeptical of what leaders in the federal government
tell them. To encounter so
little material in school about the bad things
the government has done, especially
when parents and the dailynewspaper tell a
different story, “makes all education
suspect,” according to education researcherDonald Barr.65
Nor can the textbook authors’ servile approach to
the government teach
students to be effective citizens. Just as the storyof
Columbus-the-wise has as its
flip side the archetype of the superstitious unruly
crew, so the archetype of a
wise and good government implies that the correct
role for us citizens is to
follow its leadership. Without pushing the point
too far, it does seemthat many
nondemocratic states, from the Third Reich to
the Central African Empire to the
Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea,
have had citizens who gave
their governments too much rather than too little
allegiance. The United States,
on the other hand, has been blessed with

dissenters. Some of these dissenters
have had to flee the country. Since 1776,
Canada has provided a refuge for
Americans who disagreed with policies of the U.S.
government, from Tories
who fled harassment during and after the Revolution,
to free blacks who sought
haven from the Dred Scott ruling, to young men of
draftable age who opposed
the Vietnam War. No textbook mentions this Canadian
role, because no textbook
portrays a U.S. government that might ever merit
such principled opposition.66
Certainly many political scientists and historians in
the United States suggest
that governmental actions are a greater threat to
democracy than citizen
disloyalty. Many worry that the dominance of
the executive branch has eroded
the checks and balances built into the Constitution.
Some analysts also believe
that the might of the federal government vis-à-
vis state governments has made a
mockery of federalism. From the Woodrow Wilson
administration until now, the
federal executive has grown ever stronger and now
looms as by far our nation’s
largest employer. In the last fifty years, the
power of the CIA, the National
Security Council, and othercovert agencies has grown
to become, in someeyes,
a fearsome fourth branch of government.
Threats to democracy abound when

officials in the FBI, the CIA, the State
Department, and other institutions of
government determine not only our policies but
also what the people and the
Congress need to know about them.67
By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the
government, textbook authors
narcotize students from thinking about such issues as
the increasingdominance
and secrecy of the executive branch. By taking
the government’s side, textbooks
encourage students to conclude that criticism is
incompatible with citizenship.
And by presenting government actions in a
vacuum, rather than as responses to
such institutions as multinational corporations and
civil rights organizations,
textbooks mystify the creative tension between the
people and their leaders. All
this encourages students to throw up their
hands in the belief that the
government determines everything anyway, so
why bother, especially if its
actions are usually so benign. Thus, our
American history textbooks minimize
the potential power of the people and, despite
their best patriotic efforts, take a
stance that is overtly antidemocratic.
9.
SEE NO EVIL

CHOOSING NOT TO LOOK AT THE WAR IN
VIETNAM
If we do not speak of it, others will surely
rewrite the
script. Each of the body bags, all of
the mass graves
will be reopened and their contents abracadabraed into
a noble cause.
—GEORGE SWIERS, VIETNAM VETERAN1
We have destroyed their two most
cherished
institutions: the family and the village. We have
destroyed their land and their crops. . . .
We have
corrupted their women and children and killed
their
men.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.2
Without censorship, things can get terribly
confused in
the public mind.
—GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND3
He is a loverof his country who rebukes and
does not
excuse its sins.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS4
AS WE COLLEGE PROFESSORS get older, we
growever more astonished at
what our undergraduates don’t know about the
recent past. I first became aware
of this phenomenon as the 1970s inexorably
became the 1980s. Lecturing on the
Vietnam War, I increasingly got blank looks.
One in four, then one in two, and
in the 1990s four in five first-year college
students did not know the meaning of
the four-letterwords hawk and dove. On the
first day of class in 1989 I gave my
students a quiz including the open-ended question,
“Who fought in the war in
Vietnam?” Almost a fourth of my students
said the combatants were North and
South Korea! I was stunned—to me this
resembled answering “1957” to the
question “When did the War of 1812 begin?” In
fact, many recent high school
graduates know more about the War of 1812 than
about the Vietnam War.5
It makes little sense and surely does
no good to blame the students. It can
hardly be their fault. If our civic memories
begin when we are about ten years
old, then the last students to have any memory of
the Vietnam War graduated

from high school in the spring of 1983. The
war is unknown territory to the
parents of most high school students today.
So are the women’s movement,
Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis. Students
need information about the
Vietnam War from their high school American history
courses.
In the textbooks of the 1980s they did not get
much. Since the war ended in
1975, even the earliest of these books
had the benefit of hindsight in teaching
about the conflict that has oftenbeen called
“America’s longest war,” as well as
the advantage of their authors’ personal knowledge of
the event. They squander
theseadvantages.
Comparing coverage of the Vietnam War and the
War of 1812 in my original
twelve textbooks illuminates the problem. The
War of 1812 tookplace almost
two centuries ago and killed maybe two thousand
Americans. Nevertheless, the
high school history books in my original sample
devoted the same quantitative
coverage—nine pages—to the War of 1812 and
the Vietnam War. One might
argue, I suppose, that the War of 1812 was
so much more important than the
Vietnam War that it deserves as much space,
even though it took place so long

ago. Our textbooks made no such claim; most authors
didn’t know what to make
of the War of 1812 and claimed no particular
importance for it.
Since the War of 1812 lasted only half as longas
the Vietnam War, authors
treated it in far more detail. They enjoyed the
luxury of telling about individual
battles and heroes. Land of Promise, for instance,
devoted threeparagraphs to a
naval battle off Put-in-Bay Island in Lake
Erie, which works out to one
paragraph per hour of battle. Vietnam got no such
coverage.
Scant space was only part of the problem. Nine
gripping analytic pages on the
Vietnam War might prove more than adequate.6
We must ask what kind of
coverage textbooks provided.
In the original edition of Lies, I did not set
out my own account of the war and
then critique authors for presenting an analysis
different from my own. Instead,
to avoid the charge of subjectivity, I
focused on the photographs the textbooks
supplied. The Vietnam War was distinguished by a
series of images that seared
themselves into the public consciousness. I
identified seven of theseimages: five
famous photos (such as the little girl
running naked toward the camera as she
fled a napalm attack, and the bodies piledin
the ditchat the My Lai massacre)

and two generic images of the war’s
destructiveness. Photographs have been part
of the record of war in the United States
sinceMatthew Brady’s famous images
of the CivilWar. In Vietnam, television images joined
still photos to shape the
perceptions and sensibility of the American
people. Even including our two
recent wars in Iraq, Vietnam is still our most
photographed and televised war.
I asked dozens of adults old enough to
have lived during the war to tell me
what visual images they remember; the list of
images they supplied shows
remarkable overlap. A shortlist includes thesefive
specific images:
1. A Buddhist monk sitting at a Saigon
intersection immolating himself to
protest the South Vietnamese government;
2. The little girl running naked down Highway 1,
fleeing a napalm attack;
3. The national police chief executing a
terrified man, a member of the
Vietcong, with a pistol shot to the side of his
head;
4. The bodies in the ditchafter the My Lai
massacre; and
5. Americans evacuating from a Saigon
rooftop by helicopter while
desperate Vietnamese try to climb aboard.

Quang Duc, the first Buddhist monk to set himself
on fire to protest the policies
of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime that the United
States supported in South
Vietnam, shocked the South Vietnamese and the
American people. Before the
war ended, several otherVietnamese and at least
one American followed Quang
Duc’s example.
The list also included two generic images: B-52s
with bombs streaming below
them into the pockmarked countryside of Vietnam,
and a ruined city such as
Hué, nothing but rubble in view, as American
and South Vietnamese troops
move in to retake it after the Tet offensive.7
This little girl, Kim Phuc, ran screaming down
Highway 1, fleeing from an
accidental napalm attack on her village by South
Vietnamese airplanes. She had
stripped off her burning clothing as she ran. The
television footage and still
photographs of her flight were among the
most searing of the war. The
photograph violates two textbook taboos at once:
no textbook ever shows
anyone naked, and none shows such suffering, even in
time of war.
Merely reading these short descriptions
prompts most older Americans to

remember the images in sharp detail. The
emotions that accompanied them come
back vividly as well. Of course, sincethe main
American involvement in the war
took place from 1965 to 1973, Americans must be
well over forty to recall these
images today. Young people have little
chance to see or recall these images
unless their history books provide them.
In 1995 the twelve textbooks in my
original sample failed miserably. One
book, The American Pageant, included one of these
pictures: the police chief
shooting the terrified man.8 No other textbook
reproduced any of them. The
American Adventures contained an image of
our bombing Vietnam, but the
photograph showed B-52s and bombs from
below and gave no sense of any
damage on the ground. Thus, thereremained huge
roomfor improvement.
The seven cited images are important examples of
the primary materials of the
Vietnam War. Hawks (people who were pro-war) might
claim that theseimages
exaggerate the aspects of the war they portray.
However, these images have
additional claims to historical significance: they
actually made history,
prompting news stories and changing the way
viewers around the world

understood the conflict. Several of these
photographs remain “among the most
well-known images in the world even now
[1991],” according to Patrick
Hagopian, who studied the ways America
memorialized the Vietnam War.9
Leaving them out shortchanges today’s readers. As a
student of mine wrote, “To
showa photograph of one naked girl crying
after she has been napalmed changes
the entire meaning of that war to a high school
student.”
Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the national police chiefof
South Vietnam, casually shot
this man, a member of the Vietcong, on a street
in Saigon on February 1, 1968,
as an American photographer and television crew
looked on. This photograph
helped persuade many Americans that their side
was not morally superior to the
communists.10 The image is so haunting that, forty
years later, I have only to
cock my fingers like a gun and people who were
old enough to read newspapers
or watch television in 1968 immediately recall
the event and can describe it in
somedetail.
In Vietnam the United States dropped three
times as many explosives as it
dropped in all theaters of World War II, even
including our nuclear bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so textbook authors had
many images of bomb damage
to choose from. On the ground, after the Tet
offensive, in which Vietcong and
North Vietnamese troops captured cities and
towns all over South Vietnam,
American and South Vietnamese troops shelled
Hué, Ben Tre, Quang Tri, and
other cities before moving in to retake them.
Nonetheless, not one textbook
showed any damage done by our side.
That was then. Chapter 11 shows how the Vietnam
War was still considered
recent in the 1980s and early1990s, and
textbooks always slight the recent past,
no matter how important it was. How do they do
today, now that the war has
receded into the distant past for most Americans?
Left: In the My Lai massacre American combat troops
murdered women, old
men, and children. Ronald Haeberle’s photographs,
including this one, which ran
in Life magazine, seared the massacre into the
nation’s consciousness and still
affects our culture.11 MostHollywood movies made
about Vietnam include My
Lai imagery; Platoon offers a particularly vivid
example.
Right: On April, 29, 1975, this American
helicopter evacuated people from a
Saigon rooftop. The next day Saigon fell, and the

long American (and
Vietnamese) nightmare came to an end. More than
half of all Americans alive
today were younger than ten or not yet born when
this photograph was taken.
Thus, most Americans know the war only
from movies and textbooks. On
January 14, 2007, the Washington Post devoted
half a page to this image, with
the caption: “IraqEndgame: Will It LookLike This?”
Two “legacy textbooks”—Boorstin and Kelley and
The American Pageant—
descended from books originally published
half a century ago, still aimlessly
give the War of 1812 about as much space as
the Vietnam War. Neither includes
even one of the important images of the Vietnam
War. Pageant actually moved
backward:it dropped its photo of the police
chiefexecuting the Vietcong man.
The three “really new” books, along with
Holt American Nation (distantly
descended from Todd and Curti, Triumph of
the American Nation), provide
much more coverage. The Americans gives the
war more than thirty-four pages.
Still, a certain softness inhibits its treatment.
Although The Americans includes
twenty-one illustrations of the war, only one—the
monk immolating himself—
comes from my list of seven. Not one of twenty-
one photos shows any damage
the United States inflicted upon Vietnam. Pathways to
the Present also includes

the immolation image, and it and American Journey
show the evacuation from
the rooftop near our embassy. Journey also provides a
generic rubble photo. Holt
shows a landscape pockmarked by B-52 craters.
Among all six books, that’s it.
Of course, the authors and editors of textbooks
choose among thousands of
images of the Vietnam War. They might make
different selections and still do
justice to the war. But at the very least they
must show atrocities against the
Vietnamese civilian population, for these were a
frequent and even inevitable
part of this war without front lines, in which
our armed forces had only the
foggiest notion as to who was ally or opponent.
Indeed, attacks on civilians were
U.S. policy, as shown by Gen. William C.
Westmoreland’s characterization of
civilian casualties: “It does deprive the enemy of
the population, doesn’t it?”12
We evaluated our progress by body counts and drew
free-fire zones in which the
entire civilian population was treated as the
enemy. Such a strategy inevitably
led to war crimes. Any photograph of an
American soldier setting fire to a
Vietnamese hootch (house), a common sight during
the war, would get this point
across, but no textbook shows such an act.13
American Journey includes a shot
of marines climbing “a mound of rubble that

was once a tower of the fortress of
Hué.” Readers might be able to infer that our
munitions reduced the fortress to
rubble, so that photograph qualifies as the only
illustration of any destruction,
even of legitimate targets, clearly caused by
our side, to be found in any
textbook. Today’s textbooks seemto be supplying
precisely the censorship that
Gen. William Westmoreland wished for (in the quote
at the head of the chapter),
while he was in command. Unfortunately,
censorship is the cause, not the
remedy, of confusion about the war.
My Lai was not a minor event, unworthy of
inclusion in a nation’s history, but
was important precisely because it was emblematic of
much of what went wrong
with the entire war in Vietnam. My Lai was the
most famous instance of what
John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against
the War, now U.S. senator,
called “not isolated incidents but crimes committed
on a day-to-day basiswith
the full awareness of officers at all levels of
command.” Appearing before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April
1971, Kerry said, “Over one
hundred and fifty honorably discharged and many
very highly decorated
veterans testified to war crimes committed in
Southeast Asia.” He went on to
retell how American troops “had personally
raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,
taped wires from portable telephones to human

genitals and turned up the power,
cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at
civilians, razed villages in
fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle
and dogs for fun, poisoned
food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of
South Vietnam.”All this
was “in addition to the normal ravage of war,”
as Kerry pointed out in his
testimony.14
Only Discovering American History, the oldest
textbook in my sample, treats
the My Lai massacre as anything but an isolated
incident. The Americans has a
perfectly adequate paragraph on My Lai, far better
than any othernew book, but
it never mentions that attacks on civilians were a
general problem. In addition to
leaving students ignorant of the history of the
war, textbook silence on this
matter also makes the antiwar movement
incomprehensible.
Two textbook authors, James West Davidson and
Mark H. Lytle, are on
record elsewhere as knowing of the importance
of My Lai. “The American
strategy had atrocity built into it,” Lytle said to
me. Davidson and Lytle devote
most of a chapter to the My Lai massacre in
their book After the Fact. There
they tell how news of the massacre stunned the United

States. “One thing was
certain,” they write, “the encounter became a
defining moment in the public’s
perception of the war.”15 Plainly they do not
thinkhigh school students need to
know about it, however, for their high school
history textbook, The United States
—A History of the Republic, like ten other
textbooks in my sample, never
mentions My Lai.16
If textbooks omit the important photographs of the
Vietnam War, what images
do they include? Uncontroversial shots, for the
most part—servicemen on patrol,
walking through swamps, or jumping from helicopters.
Ten books showrefugees
or damage caused by the other side, but
since such damage was usually less
extensive than that caused by our bombardment, the
pictures are not very
dramatic.
The only photograph of troops in Triumph of
the American Nation shows them
happily surrounding President Johnson when he
visited the American base at
Cam RanhBay during the war.
This is an outrage, and thereis no excuse for it.
Joy Hakim shows we can do
better in her textbook A History of US,
intended for about fifth grade. She
includes the police chief shooting the terrified

man, another image of a guard
threatening a Vietnamese POW with a knife,
a photograph of a town destroyed
by “our side,” and the most famous image of
the My Lai massacre. Surprisingly,
Hakim also gives her readers the image of
the little girl running naked down
Highway 1. This is surprising because textbook
publishers typically follow the
rule of “no nudity”; as one editor told me, “in
elementary books cows don’t have
udders.” Yet her series has been a bestseller—
perhaps because it also reads
better than most standard textbooks.
What about their prose? Sadly, most
textbook authors also leave out all the
memorable quotations of the era. No textbook
quotes the trademark cadences of
Martin Luther King Jr., the first major leader
to come out against the war,
reproduced at the head of this chapter.17 Even
more famous was the dissent of
Muhammad Ali, then heavyweight boxing champion of
the world. Ali refused
induction into the military, for which his title was
stripped from him, and said,
“No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger.’ ” All
eighteen textbooks leave out that
line, too. After the Tet offensive, a U.S. army officer
involved in retaking Ben
Tre said, “It became necessary to destroy the town
to save it.” For millions of

Americans, this statement summarized America’s
impact on Vietnam. No
textbook supplies it.18 Nor does any textbook
quote John Kerry’s plea for
immediate withdrawal: “How do you ask a
man to be the last man to die for a
mistake?”19 Most books also exclude the antiwar
songs, the chants—“Hell, no;
we won’t go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many
kids did you kill today?”—and,
above all, the emotions. Indeed, the entire
antiwar movement becomes
unintelligible in many textbooks, because they do
not allow it to speak for itself.
Virtually the only people who do get quoted are
PresidentsJohnson and Nixon
and Secretary of StateHenry Kissinger.20
Three new books do better. The new Pageant
and We Americans include the
chants from the opposition. They as well as
Pathways to the Present give more
space to the antiwar movement and to the dirty
underside of the war than did
older texts. The improvement may reflect that, with
the passage of time, the
Vietnam War is no longer very recent or very
controversial, as we shall see
below. Authors may be coming to treat the
war more forthrightly, as they now
treat slavery, now that the Cold War, like formal
segregation against African
Americans, has ended.
However, their coverage is jerky, perhaps reflecting
the multiple authors who

probably wrote it. Chapter 12 explains that the
authors listed on the covers of
high school American history textbooks oftendid
not write them, especially in
their later editions. Two competing books show
this problem in their treatment
of Vietnam.
Because some of the enemy lived amidst
the civilian population, it
was difficult for U.S. troops to discern friend
from foe. A woman
selling soft drinks to U.S. soldiers might be a
Vietcong spy. A boy
standing on the corner might be ready to
throw a grenade.
—The Americans
American troops . . . never could be
sure who was a friend and who
was an enemy. The Vietnamese woman selling
soft drinks by the
roadside might be a Viet Cong ally, counting
government soldiers as
they passed. A child peddling candy might
be concealing a live
grenade.
—Pathways to the Present
It is hardly likely that independent authors
wrote thesetwo passages. Did Gerald

Danzer (or one of his “coauthors”) copy and modify
from Pathways? Did Alan
Winkler (or one of his “coauthors”) copy and modify
from The Americans? If so,
one should charge the otherwith plagiarism. No
one ever does, however—not
about high school textbooks—because everyone in
the publishing industry
knows that their “authors” did not really writethem.
Probably the publishersof
Pathways and The Americans happened to hire the
same freelancer to writeor
update both books. Still otherunnamed clerks add
photos and writecaptions and
teaching suggestions.
Using different unnamed authors for different
chapters, different features, and
different updates is not only misleading, sinceschool
systems choose textbooks
partly because they think distinguished historians
wrote them. It also makes
textbooks less coherent. Often different paragraphs in
the core narrative
contradict each other. To present contrasting
viewpoints would be fine, but that
is not what textbooks do. Instead, their treatments of
the war amount to one thing
after another, displaying little overall
organization and no point of view or
interpretation. They cannot be organized,
because they were written by what
amount to disorganized sequential committees
that never met. That’s why
Frances FitzGerald, who, in addition to America
Revised wrote Fire in the Lake,

a fine book about Vietnam, called the textbooks
she reviewed in 1979 “neither
hawkish nor dovish on the war—theyare simply
evasive.” She went on to say,
“Since it is really quitehard to discuss the
war and evade all the major issues,
their Vietnam sections make remarkable reading.”21
To somedegree, defining the issues is a matter
of interpretation, and I would
not want to fault textbooks for holding a
different interpretation from my own.
Perhaps we can agree that any reasonable
treatment of the Vietnam War would
discuss at least thesesix questions:
Why did the United States fight in Vietnam?
What was the war like before the United States
entered it? How did we
change it?
How did the war change the United States?
Why did an antiwar movementbecome so strong in
the United States?
What were its criticisms of the war in Vietnam?
Were they right?
Why did the United States lose the war?
What lesson(s) should we take from the experience?

Simply to list these questions is to recognize
that each of them is still
controversial. Take the first. Some people
still argue that the United States
fought in Vietnam to secure access to the
country’s valuable natural resources.
The “international good guy” approach noted in the
last chapter would claim that
we fought to bring democracy to Vietnam’s
people. Perhaps more common are
analyses of our internal politics: Democratic
PresidentsKennedy and Johnson,
having seen how Republicans castigated Truman
for “losing” China, did not
want to be seen as “losing” Vietnam. One realpolitik
approach stresses the
domino theory: while we know now that
Vietnam’scommunists are antagonists
of China, we didn’t then, and someleaders
believed that if Vietnam “fell” to the
communists, so would Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia,
and the Philippines. Yet
another view is that America felt its prestige was on
the line, so it did not want a
defeat in Vietnam, lest Pax Americana be
threatened in Africa, South America,
or elsewhere in the world.22 Some conspiracy
theorists go even further and
claim that big business fomented the war to help
the economy. Other historians
take a longer view, arguing that our intervention
in Vietnam derives from a
cultural pattern of racism and imperialism that
began with the first Indian war in
Virginia in 1622, continued in the nineteenth
century with “Manifest Destiny,”

and is now winding down in the “American
century.” They pointout that GIs in
Vietnam collected and displayed Vietnamese ears just as
British colonists in
North America collected and displayed Indian
scalps.23 A final view might be
that therewas no clear cause and certainly no clear
purpose, that we blundered
into the war because no subsequent administration
had the courage to undo our
1946 mistake of opposing a popular independence
movement. “The fundamental
blunder with respect to Indochina was made
after 1945,” wrote Secretary of
StateJohn Foster Dulles, when “our Government
allowed itselfto be persuaded”
by the French and British “to restore France’s
colonial position in Indochina.”24
Perhaps the seeds of America’s tragic involvement
with Vietnam were sown
at Versailles in 1918, when Woodrow Wilson
failed to hear Ho Chi Minh’s plea
for his country’s independence. Perhaps they germinated
when FDR’s policy of
not helping the French recolonize Southeast Asia
after World War II terminated
with his death. Since textbooks rarely
suggest that the events of one period
caused events of the next, unsurprisingly, none of
the textbooks I surveyed looks
before the 1950s to explain the Vietnam War.

Within the 1950s and 1960s, the historical
evidence for some of these
conflicting interpretations is much weaker than
for others, although I will not
choose sideshere.25 Textbook authors need not choose
sides, either. They could
present several interpretations, along with an
overview of the historical support
for each, and invite students to come to
their own conclusions. Such challenges
are not the textbook authors’ style, however. They
seemcompelledto present the
“right” answer to all questions, even unresolved
controversies.
So which interpretation do they choose? None of
the above! Most textbooks
simply dodge the issue. Here is a
representative analysis, from American
Adventures: “Later in the 1950s, war broke
out in South Vietnam. This time the
United States gave aid to the South
Vietnamese government.” “War broke
out”—what could be simpler? Adventures devotes
four pages to discussing why
we got into the War of 1812 but just these two
sentences to why we fought in
Vietnam. Newer textbooks simply rely on
anticommunism to explain U.S.
involvement.
Teachers are unlikely to make up for the
deficiencies in their textbooks’
treatment of the war. According to Linda
McNeil, most teachers particularly
don’t want to teach about Vietnam. “Their

memories of the Vietnam War era
made them wish to avoid topics on which
the students were likely to disagree
with their views or that would make the
students ‘cynical’ about American
institutions.” Therefore, in the 1980s, the average
teacher granted the Vietnam
War 0 to 4.5 minutes in the entire school
year. Coverage has not increased much
since then; many college students report that
their high school history courses
wound down about the time of the Korean
War.26
Neither our textbooks nor most teachers help
students think critically about
the Vietnam War and marshall historical evidence to
support their conclusions.
Never do they raise questions like “Was the
war right? Was it ethical?” Some
books appear to raise moral issues but
veer away. For example, Challenge of
Freedom asks, “Why did the United States use so
much military power in South
Vietnam?” Attempting to answer this question
could get interesting: Because our
antagonists weren’t white? Because they couldn’t
strike at the United States?
Because we had it available? Because the United
States has a history of
imperialism vis-à-vis “primitive” peoples from
our Indian wars through the
Philippine-American War of 1899-1913 to

Vietnam? Because, like most other
nations, we behave not by standards of morality
but of realpolitik? The answer
that Challenge suggests to teachers, however, shows
that the authors don’t really
want students to thinkabout why we intervened
and certainly not about whether
we should have done so, but merely to
regurgitate President Johnson’s stated
rationale for so much bombing, which the book
has previously supplied: “To
show the Vietcong and their ally,North Vietnam,
that they could not win the
war.” This answer is mystifying, sincethe
Vietcong and North Vietnam did win
the war; moreover, the authors’ claim to know
Johnson’s motivation arrives
without evidence. In the rhetorical climate created by
this textbook, for a teacher
to raise a moral question would come across
as a violation of classroom norms.
Similarly, Boorstin and Kelley mostly ask
regurgitation items like “Identify
DeanRusk,” occasionally interspersed with “Critical
Thinking” questions like
“How did the Tonkin Gulf incident lead to
our increased involvement in
Vietnam?” In fact, on August 2, 1964, a
U.S. destroyer, Maddox, was cruising
the Tonkin Gulf four miles from islands
belonging to North Vietnam. At the
same time, smaller U.S. boats were ferrying South
Vietnamese commandos to
attack someof those islands. Three North
Vietnamese patrol boats fired torpedos

at Maddox, missing; the destroyer crippled two of
them and sank the third. North
Vietnam protested to the International Control
Commission. The next day, as the
smaller U.S. boats ferried South Vietnamese
commandos to attack mainland
targets this time,Maddox returned, thought it was
again attacked, and fired in all
directions. Soonit became fairly clear that the
attacks were phantoms caused by
weather and misinterpretations of sonar.
Nevertheless, President Johnson
professed outrage and sent what came to be
called the “Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution” to Congress, where it passed
overwhelmingly. This resolution
authorized the president to do whatever he wanted
in Vietnam, and he used it
immediately to begin bombing North Vietnam.
Real “critical thinking” might
lead students to conclude that the question has it
backward: our increased
involvement in Vietnam led to the Tonkin Gulf
incident, especially since the
second attack on Maddox, upon which “our
increased involvement in Vietnam”
was predicated, never happened. (As Johnson
confided to an aide at the time,
“Those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at
flying fish.”27) Unfortunately,
except for the old Discovering AmericanHistory,
published in 1974, all high
school history textbooks I surveyed shy awayfrom

actually promptingstudents
to thinkcritically about the Vietnam War.
Ironically, students could probably get away
with critical thinking without
upsetting their parents. At least 70 percent of
Americans now consider the
Vietnam War to have been morally wrong as well as
tactically inept.28 That’s
quite a consensus. Nevertheless, the strident
arguments about the military
records of George W. Bush and John Kerry in
the 2004 presidential campaign
showed that the war can still be controversial. Fear of
controversy may be why
Florida’s Disney World, in its “American
Adventure” exhibit, a twenty-nine-
minute history of the United States, completely,
if awkwardly, leaves out the
Vietnam War. And it may explain why history
textbooks omit the images and
the issues that might trouble students—or their
parents—today.
Mystifying the Vietnam War has left students unable
to understand much public
discourse since then. Politicians across the
political spectrum invoked “the
lessons of Vietnam” as they debated intervening in
Angola, Lebanon, Kuwait,
Somalia, Bosnia, and, most recently, Iraq.
Bumper stickers reading EL
SALVADOR IS SPANISH FOR VIETNAM helped
block sending U.S. troops
to that nation. John Dumbrell and David Ryan’s

Vietnam in Iraq and Robert
Brigham’s Is Iraq Another Vietnam? draw specific
parallels between those two
seemingly endless wars.29 In 2006 Henry
Kissinger used his perverse
misreading of our Vietnam debacle—he blames
Congress for pulling out—to
advise George W. Bush to “staythe course” in
Iraq.30 “The lessons of Vietnam”
have also been used to inform or mislead discussions
about secrecy, the press,
how the federal government operates, and even
whether the military should
admit gays. High school graduates have a right to
enough knowledge about the
Vietnam War to participate intelligently in such
debates. After all, they are the
people who will be called upon to fight in
our next (and our ongoing) war—
whether it resembles Vietnam or not.31
10.
DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE:
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE RECENT PAST
We see things not as they are but as we are.
—ANAÏS NIN
Patriotism can flourish only where racism and
nationalism are given no quarter. We should
never

mistake patriotism for nationalism. A patriot is
one who
loves his homeland.A nationalist is one who
scorns the
homelands of others.
—JOHANNES RAU1
Of course the people do not want war. . . .
But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine
the
policy, and it is always a simple matter to
drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy, a
fascist
dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people
can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
easy.
All you have to do is tell them that they
are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism.
—GERMAN FIELD MARSHALL HERMANN
GOERING, NUREMBERG,APRIL 18,
19462
When information which properly belongs to

the public
is systematically withheld by those in power,
the people
soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustfulof
those who manage them, and—eventually—incapable
of
determining their own destinies.
—RICHARD M. NIXON3
MANY AFRICAN SOCIETIES divide humans
into threecategories: those still
alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani.
The recently departed whose time
on earthoverlapped with people still here are the
sasha, the living-dead. They
are not wholly dead, for they still live in the
memories of the living, who can call
them to mind, create their likeness in art,
and bring them to life in anecdote.
When the last person to know an ancestor
dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for
the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors,
the zamani are not forgotten but
revered. Many, like George Washington or Clara
Barton, can be recalled by
name. But they are not living-dead. There is a
difference.4
Because we lack theseKiswahili terms, we rarely
thinkabout this distinction
systematically, but we also make it. Consider how
we read an account of an
event we livedthrough, especially one in which

we ourselves took part, whether
a sporting event or the Iraq War. We read partly
in a spirit of criticism, assessing
what the authors got wrong as well as agreeing
with and perhaps learning from
what they got right. When we study the more
distant past, we may also read
critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive.
Especially if we are reading
for the first time about an event, we have little
ground on which to stand and
criticize what we read.
Authors of American history textbooks appear all
too aware of the sasha—of
the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption
board members were alive
in the recent past. They seem
uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani—
generalized ancestors—is more their style. By
definition, the world of the sasha
is controversial, because readers bring to it
their own knowledge and
understanding, so they may not agree with what is
written. Therefore, the less
said about the recent past, the better.
I examined how the ten narrative American histories in
my original sample
covered the five decades leading up to the 1980s.
(I excluded the 1980s because
some of the older textbooks came out in
that decade, so they could not be

expected to cover it fully.) On average, the
textbooks give forty-seven pages to
the 1930s, forty-four to the 1940s, and fewer
than thirty-fivepages to each later
decade. Even the turbulent decade of the
1960s—including the civil rights
movement, most of the Vietnam War, and the
murders of Martin Luther King
Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and John and Robert
Kennedy—got fewer than
thirty-fivepages.5
Textbooks in 2006-07 showquitea different
approach. Now the 1960s are no
longer recent history, so textbooks can give
them the emphasis they should
always have received, fifty-five pages. (That total
is greater than for any other
decade of the twentieth century.) But today’s texts,
published between 2000 and
2007, give short shrift to the new recent
past, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.6
Now they devote forty-nine pages to the 1930s
and forty-seven to the 1940s, but
fewer than twenty to the 1980s and 1990s
(even tossing in the first years of the
new millennium). Yet thesewere important decades in
which the United States
twice attacked Iraq, went through the second
presidential impeachment trial in
history, saw its closest and most disputed election in
more than a century, and
endured the terrorist strikes of 9/11/2001.
Each of these matters is still contentious,
however. Some parents are

Democrats, someRepublicans, so what authors say
about the impeachment and
trial of Bill Clinton will likely offend half the
community. An increasing
proportion of Americans believe the Iraq War to
be a bad idea, but if authors say
that, they will alienate some important people,
perhaps including school board
members. Homosexuality is even more taboo
as a subject of discussion or
learning in American high schools. Affirmative action
leads to angry debates.
The women’s movementcan still be a minefield,even
though it peaked in the
1970s. Every school district includes parents
who strongly affirm traditional sex
roles and others who do not. So let’s not say much
about feminism today; let’s
leave it in the 1970s. Thus authors tiptoe
through the sasha with extreme
caution, evading all the main issues, all the “why”
questions.
Textbook authors are not solely responsible for
the slighting of the recent past
in high school history courses. Many teachers
also lack courage or simply run
out of time.Even if textbooks gave the sasha the
space it deserves, most students
would have to read about it on their own, because
most teachers never get near
the end of the textbook. In her yearlong American
history course, fifth-grade
teacher Chris Zajac, subject of Tracy

Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren, never gets
past Reconstruction!7 Timeis not the only problem.
Like publishers, teachers do
not want to risk offending parents. The result is a
treatment of the recent past
along the line suggested by Thumper’s mom:
“If you can’tsay some-thin’ nice,
don’t say nothin’ at all.”
One excuse authors and publisherssometimes give
for their compressed and
bland accounts of the recent past in American
history textbooks is precisely that
it is so recent. We don’t know how
historians will view the period once they
have achieved the detachment that historical perspective
will bring, so the less
said, the better.
For topics in the zamani, textbook authors do
indeed use historical perspective
as a shield. By writing in an omniscient
boring tone about events in the zamani ,
authors imply that a single historic truth
exists, upon which historians have
agreed and which they now teach and students
should now memorize. Such
writing implies that our historical perspective grows
ever more accurate with the
passage of time, blessing today’s textbook
authors with cumulative historical
insight. They cannot use historical perspective to
defend their treatment of
events in the sasha, however. Without historical
perspective, textbook authors
appear naked: no particular qualification gives

them the right to narrate recent
events with the same Olympian detachment and
absolute certainty with which
they declaim on events in the zamani. As well,
textbooks are tertiary sources,
supposed to be based on secondary sources,
and these books and articles have
mostly not yet been written about the very recent
past.
As usually thought about, historical perspective
does implicitly justify
neglecting the sasha. Historianstell us how we
are too closeto recent events to
be able to step back and view them in
context. As new material becomes
available in archives, they claim, or as the
consequences of actions become
clearer over time, we can reach more “objective”
assessments. The passage of
time does not in itselfprovide perspective, however.
Information is lost as well
as gained over time. Therefore, the claim of
inadequate historical perspective
cannot excuse ignoring the sasha.
At this point we might usefully recall three
changes in perspective noted in
earlier chapters. Woodrow Wilson enjoys a
dramatically more positive ranking
now than he did in 1920. His elevated reputation
did not derive from the
discovery of fresh information on his
administration but from the ideological

needs of the late 1940s and early1950s. In
those years white historians would
hardly fault Wilson for segregating the federal
government, because no
consensus held that racial segregation was wrong.
The foremost public issueof
that postwar era was not race relations but the
containment of communism.
During the Cold War our government operated as
it did under Wilson, with
semi-declared wars, executive deception of
Congress, and suppression of civil
liberties in the name of anticommunism.
Wilson’s policies, controversial and
unpopular in 1920, had become ordinary by the
1950s. Statesmen and historians
of the 1950s rejected and even trivializedisolationism.
Interested in pushing the
United Nations, then thoroughly under U.S.
influence, they appreciated Wilson’s
efforts on behalf of the League of Nations.
Historian Gordon Levin Jr. put it
neatly: “Ultimately, in the post-World War II
period, Wilsonian values would
have their complete triumph in the bipartisan
Cold War consensus.” 8 Thus,
Wilson’s improved evaluation in today’s textbooks
can be attributed largely to
the fact that the ideological needs of the 1950s,
when Wilson was in the zamani,
were different from those of the 1920s, when he
was passing into the sasha.
Changing times can also change our view of the
more distant past. Bartolomé
de Las Casas and otherwriters and priests noted

the Spaniards’ mistreatment and
enslavement of the Caribbean Indians while
Columbus was still in the sasha.
Later, however, Columbus was lionized as a
daring man of science who
disproved the flat-earth notion and opened a new
hemisphere to progress. This
nineteenth-century Columbus appealed to a nation
concluding three hundred
years of triumphant warfare over Indian nations.
But by 1992 many Columbus
celebrations drew counter-celebrations, often
mounted by Native Americans;
now Columbus the exploiter began receiving equal
billing with Columbus the
explorer. The “new” Columbus, closer to the
Columbus of the sasha , appealed
to a nation that had to get along with dozens
of former colonies of European
powers, now new nations, often governed by people
of color. By 2007, as we
have seen, even our textbooks began to
record disastrous as well as beneficial
consequences of the Columbian Exchange.The
contrast between the 1892 and
1992 celebrations of Columbus’s first voyage again
shows the effect of different
vantage points. As Anaïs Nin put it, we see
things as we are, and “we” changed
between 1892 and 1992.
The Confederate myth of Reconstruction first
permeated the historical

literature during the nadirof race relations, from 1890 to
1940, and hung on in
textbooks until the 1960s. Reconstruction
regimes came to be portrayed as
illegitimate and corrupt examples of “Negro
domination.” Now historians have
returned to the view of Reconstruction put forth in
earlier histories, written while
Republican governments still administered the
Southern states. Eric Foner hails
the change as owed to “objectivescholarship
and modern experience,” a turn of
phrase that concisely links the two key causes.
Objective scholarship does exist
in history, which is why I risk words like
truth and lies. Unfortunately, the
passage of time does not in itself foster
objective scholarship. Mere
chronological distance did not promote a more
accurate depiction of
Reconstruction. Because the facts about
Reconstruction simply did not suit the
“modern experience” of the nadirperiod, they lay
mute during the earlydecades
of the twentieth century, overlooked by most
historians. Not until the civil rights
movementaltered “modern experience” could the
facts speak to us.9 Historical
perspective is thus not a by-product of the
passage of time. A more accurate
view derives from Leon Festinger’s theory of
cognitive dissonance, which
suggests that the social practices of the period
when history is written largely
determine that history’s perspective on the past.10
Objective scholarship must be

linked with a modern experience that permits it
to prevail.
In writing about the recent past, then,
textbook authors may not be
disadvantaged by any lack of historical perspective.
On the contrary, the recency
of events confers three potential benefits upon
them. First, since the authors
themselves lived through the events, they were
exposed to a wealth of
information from television, journalism, and
conversations with others about the
issues of the day. Second, multiple points of
view are available, each backed by
evidence, more or less convincing. Third,
authors are free to do research
themselves—consult newspapers, interview recent
history-makers, and share
their interpretations with scholars in disciplines like
political science, who are
studying theseissues. Armed with this information,
textbook authors could then
develop a story line about the recent past
that would be interesting as well as
informative. That’s what I tried to do while
writing this chapter.11 I concluded
that among the most important issues of the past
decade were the terrorist attacks
of 9/11/2001, our response in Afghanistan, and
our (second) war against Iraq.
Far more than the Clinton impeachment, for example,
thesethreeevents promise

to impact our lives in the future. What
do textbooks say about them? What
should they say?
About 9/11, surely students—like other
Americans—seek answers to four
questions. First, what happened? Second, why were
we attacked? Third, how did
we allow it to happen? Questions two and
three lead logically to the fourth
query, Will it happen again?
Perhaps because it is the easiest task,
textbooks do tell what happened on
September 11, 2001—at greatlength. Holt American
Nation and The Americans,
for example, devote five full pages to what
happened at the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. They make mistakes; Holt claims,
for instance, “For the first
time since the War of 1812, a foreign enemy
had attacked the American
homeland.” This will come as news to the
residents of Columbus, New Mexico,
where Pancho VillaStatePark maintains the memory of
Mexico’s 1916 attack
that killed two dozen Americans and left the
town a smoldering ruin. There is
also a lot of slack in these accounts—
wasted words that could be far better
employed.At one pointHolt tells us, for example: “The
collapse of the massive
buildings killed or trapped thousands of people
still inside or near the towers,
including hundreds of firefighters, police officers,
and other rescuers.” A page

later it repeats: “About 2,500 people were
killed by the attack on the World
Trade Center. This number included more than 300
firefighters and many other
rescue workers who were on the scene.”
Telling what happened answers the least
important of the four questions,
because today’s high school students already know
what happened. (In threeor
four years, however, students too young to
remember will need these
descriptions, though.) What about the “why”
question, which today’s students do
need to contemplate? In its teacher’s edition, Holt
makes clear that “why” is not
something teachers should address: “Tell students that in
this section they will
learn about the attacks of September 11, 2001,
their economic and social
consequences, and the response by Americans and
the U.S. government.”
Pathways to the Present and Boorstin and Kelley
also ignore the “why”
question. The Americans blursany causal investigation
by adding in terrorist acts
by the Irish Republican Army, Peru’s
Shining Path movement, and Japan’s
religious cult, Aum Shinrikyo. 12 Only Pageant tells
why the United States was
attacked:
Bin Laden was known to harbor venomous
resentment toward the United

States for its economic embargo against Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq, its
growing military presence in the Middle East
(especially on the sacred
soil of the Arabian Peninsula), and its support
for Israel’s hostility toward
Palestinian nationalism. Bin Laden also fed on
worldwide resentment of
America’senormous economic,military, and cultural power.
The first sentence accuratelysummarizes the “Declaration
of the World Islamic
Front for Jihad against the Jews and the
Crusaders” that Osama bin Laden,
leader of al Qaeda, which was responsible
for the 9/11 attacks, issued in 1998.13
The second sentence is also accurate and useful.
Unfortunately, other than Pageant’s two sentences,
today’s textbooks leave
students defenseless against the misinterpretations
deliberately spread by our
government. Nine days after the attacks,
President George W. Bush gave
Congress his answer to the “why” question:
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They
hate what we see right
here in this chamber—a democratically elected
government. Their
leaders are self-appointed. They hate our
freedoms—our freedom of
religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to
vote and assemble and
disagree with each other.14

What a happy thought: they hate us because
we are good!
Bush repeated variants on that paragraph throughout
the next year. Perhaps
because it is so consoling, his interpretation
took hold widely. The first and
perhaps leading book interpreting the terrorist
attacks for young people,
Understanding September 11th, by Time reporter Mitch
Frank, made a similar
claim specifically for the World Trade Center:
The Twin Towers were meant to symbolize
peace. Shortly after they
were finished in 1973, the architect who designed
them, Minoru
Yamasaki, said, “World trade means world
peace. The World Trade
Center is a living symbol of man’s
dedication to world peace. It should
become a representation of man’s belief in
humanity, his need for
individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of
men, and through
cooperation, his ability to find greatness.” The
terrorists were striking at
all of this.15
Of course, this is nonsense. If on September
10, 2001, Frank had asked a
hundred visitors to the World Trade Center
what the buildings symbolized to

them, none would have replied, “world
peace,” “individual dignity,” or “the
cooperation of men.”16 The building housed
stockbrokers and investment
bankers, after all. As the editors of American
Heritage put it in 2005, in an essay
commending efforts to restore and display the
architectural model of the Twin
Towers, they were “internationally recognizable
symbols of American economic
might.”17
The notion that terrorists attacked us because of
our values, our freedoms, or
our dedication to world peace is self-serving
but shallow and inaccurate. Such
thinking might be termed nationalist but is
hardly patriotic, to follow the
distinction made by Johannes Rau at the head of
this chapter. Nationalism does
not encourage us to critique our country and
seek its betterment. Therefore,
nationalism serves us only in the short run. In
the long run, our nation needs
citizens who question its policies rather than blindly
saluting them. Indeed,
knowledgeable Americans pointed this out to
journalist James Fallows, who
summarized in Atlantic Monthly: “The soldiers, spies,
academics, and diplomats
I have interviewed are unanimous in saying
that ‘They hate us for who we are’ is
dangerous claptrap.” Fallows himself called the idea
that they hate us for who
we are “lazily self-justifying and self-deluding.”

Michael Scheuer, first chiefof
the CIA’s bin Laden unit, agreed:
Bin Laden has been precise in telling America
the reasons he is waging
war on us. None of the reasons have anything to
do with our freedom,
liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do
with U.S. policies and
actions in the Muslim world.
In November2004, confirmation of this view came
from an interesting source: a
Pentagon report that pointed out “Muslims do not
‘hateour freedom,’ but rather
they hate our policies.” If we took this sentence
seriously, we might question or
change our policies in the Middle East. Bush’s
analysis—and most textbooks’
avoidance of any analysis—stifles such thought.18
Textbooks find it hard to question our foreign
policy because from beginning
to end they typically assume the America as
“international good guy” model we
noted in Chapter 8. Consider the first page of
Pathways to the Present, for
example, which introduces history as a
“theme” (along with geography,
economics, etc.). Here is every word it
supplies students about “history as a
theme”:
Fighting for Freedom and Democracy: Throughout

the nation’s history,
Americans have risked their lives to protect
their freedoms and to fight
for democracy both at home and abroad. Use
the American Pathways
feature on pages 410-411 to help you trace specific
events in the struggle
to protect and defend thesecherished ideas.
Turning to these pages as instructed reveals
the same heading and the same
prose, accompanied by images from the
Revolutionary War, CivilWar, World
War I, World War II, and the iconic shot of
firemen raising the U.S. flag in front
of the ruins of the World Trade Center
after 9/11/2001. Conspicuously absent
are images from our centuries of warfare against
Native Americans, the Mexican
War, Philippines War, or any otherconflict that cannot
be shoehorned into the
classification “to fight for democracy both at home
and abroad.” Our longest war
—Vietnam—rates not even a mention. To be
sure, some of our military
engagements—our 1999 intervention in Serbia-Kosovo,
perhaps, or World War
II—might fit under the “international good guy”
rubric. Others—the Seminole
Wars, the Philippines War—cannot. When
authors blandly treat our military
history under the heading “Fighting for Freedom
and Democracy,” they merely
signal students that they will not be presenting a
serious analysis.

In the middle of A History of the United
States, right after describing the end
of our war against Vietnam, Boorstin and Kelley
send students a similar signal:
“Still a superpower, the United States could
not avoid some responsibility for
keeping peace in the world. Since the
American Revolution, the nation had
served as a beacon of hope for people
who wanted to govern themselves.”
Apparently students are not supposed to have noticed
that the United States had
just spent a decade making war, not “keeping
peace,” precisely to deny the
Vietnamese the ability “to govern themselves.”
Such “analysis”makes it hard to
understand why anyone would attack a
peacekeeper, “a beacon of hope.”
The very last paragraph in Appleby, Brinkley, and
McPherson’s The
American Journey provides the most egregious example of
all:
The United States spent the last decade of
the twentieth century trying to
increase the peace and prosperity of the world.
Many Americans still
believed that their nation should serve as
an example to the world. As
President Clinton explained in his 1997 State
of the Union address:
“America must continue to be an unrelenting force
for peace—from the
Middle East to Haiti. . .”

Now, really. This is hardly “telling the truth
about history,” the title of
Appleby’s 1995 book on historiography. Such
a passage may amount to mere
pandering to the right, and if so, it seems to
have worked. In 2004, the Thomas
B. Fordham Institute, a conservative thinktank in
Washington, D.C., released A
Consumer’s Guide to High School History
Textbooks by Diane Ravitch, Chester
Finn, and others, rating six American history
textbooks. Journey won highest
ranking: “Analysis overall seems to be fair,
measured, and reasonable.”19 But
surely neither Ravitch nor Finn would claim in
a lecture on American foreign
policy, “The United States spent the last decade
of the twentieth century trying
to increase the peace and prosperity of the world.”
It’s not even clear that the
nation should have this agenda. Like all nations,
the United States seeks first to
increase its own prosperity and influence in the world.
Carrying a 2000 copyright date, Journey is the oldest
of the six new textbooks
I studied for this book, so we cannot know
for sure what its authors might have
said when the United States—no longer “trying
to increase the peace and
prosperity of the world”—preemptively attacked Iraq
three years later. But
would they have been astonished at behavior so at
odds with their assessment of

our national character?Surely not; after all, the
United States had been at war
somewhere almost every one of the sixty years
before their book cameout. To
close a textbook with that paragraph is to
confuse justification with fact, to
present ideology instead of analysis. Again, such
words do not help students
comprehend why others might attack such a
selfless, innocent nation.
Presenting a nation without sin—one that has
always conducted its Middle
Eastern policies evenhandedly and with best intentions
toward both Palestinians
and Israelis, for example—merely leaves students
ignorant, unable to understand
why others are upset with us. Such
presentations also fuel students’
ethnocentrism—the belief that ours is the finest
society in the world and all other
nations should be like us. Americans are
already more ethnocentric than any
other people, partly because the immense economic,
military, and cultural
strengths of the United States encourage us to
believe that our nation is not only
the most powerful but also the best on the planet.
Any history course that further
increases this already robust ethnocentrism only
decreases students’ ability to
learnfrom othercultures.
Besides being crippled by their “international good
guy” assumption, textbook
authors operate at a second disadvantage. Our

wars with Iraq have a history.
Chapter 8 pointed out how textbooks have done a
woeful job of discussing the
history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East.
The United States helped
Saddam Hussein seize power in the first place.
In 1963, Iraq’s Shi’ite prime
minister, Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem, “began to
threaten U.S. and British
influence,” in the words of journalists
Anthony Lappé and Stephen Marshall.
The CIA masterminded Qassem’s overthrow; in return,
Hussein and his Ba’ath
Party welcomed Western oil companies at
first. A few years later, however,
Hussein nationalized the Iraqi oil industry.
Nevertheless, sincean old principle
of war and diplomacy holds “the enemy of
my enemy is my friend,” the United
States supported Hussein when he invaded
Iran in 1980. In 1982, President
Reagan removed Iraq from the list of known
terrorist countries so we could
supply Hussein with military equipment and other
aid for his war with Iran.
During the rest of the 1980s, the United States
sold Iraq military helicopters,
computers, scientific instruments, chemicals, and
othergoods for Iraq’s missile,
chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs,
according to reporter John
King. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence
Agency supplied Iraq with

information to help its forces use chemical
weapons on Iranian troops. Although
such weapons have long been outlawed, the
United States then blocked UN
Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s
use of them. Even after the war
with Iran ended and we knew Hussein was using
these weapons on his own
people, we continued to send weapons-grade
anthrax, cyanide, and other
chemical and biological weapons to Iraq. No
textbook acknowledges our
linkages with Hussein in the past.20
Even more important to understanding 9/11 were our actions
in Iran. Chapter
8 tells of our repeated interventions on behalf of
the shah, interventions that
explain that country’s enmity toward us today.
The Iranian Revolution that
overthrew the shah is key to the subsequent
history of the Middle East. Since
most textbooks don’t portray our role in Iran
honestly, they are handicapped
when they try to explain what happened next, so
students cannot use history to
understand what happens today. Just as we
supported the shah in Iran in the
1970s, we cast our lot today with repressive
regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Egypt, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, which
prompts most Arabs and many other
Muslims to consider the United States “a great
hypocrite,” in the words of
historian ScottAppleby. We preach democracy while
supporting dictatorships.

21
Also crucial to any understanding of the Middle
East and terrorism is our tilt
toward Israel. The United States is adamant
that Iran must not have nuclear
weapons. President Bushused Iraq’s alleged attempt to
obtain nuclear weapons
to legitimize our preemptive war upon that
country. Yet we have never even
admonished Israel verbally for possessing
nuclear weapons, which we have
known about for decades.22 On the contrary,
from its formation in 1948 to
today, regardless of its nuclear weapons or other
policies, the United States has
always provided Israel critical financial and
military support.
Having passed on the “why were we attacked”
question, most textbooks also
ignore query three: How did we allow it
to happen? Authors do not want to
criticize the U.S. government, but the blame is
bipartisan. In its eight years in
office, the Clinton administration took few stepsto
improve our security against
terrorist attacks. In particular, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service has
been notoriously incompetent for years—unable to
create useful lists of people
who should not be let in to the United States,
incompetent at tracking people

once they overstay student or work visas, not even
willing to seek people who
fail to show up for court hearings related to
immigration violations. The Bush
administration did even less to make us secure,
but authors say nothing about the
president’s failure to act on the warnings he
had before 9/11/2001. In 2000, the
Clinton administration had staged rescue exercises
simulating a plane being
crashed into the Pentagon, showing that they were aware
of the possibility. “At
least three months before 9/11,” according to
Lappé and Marshall, “German
agents warned the CIA that ‘Middle Eastern
terrorists were planning to hijack
commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack
important symbols of American
culture.’” The CIA did not even relaythat warning to
airline companies. Agents
within the FBI sent memos to their superiors about
suspicious Arabs training to
fly commercial jets in U.S. flying schools, to no
avail. George W. Bush received
a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to
Strike in U.S.” more than a month
before the attacks, but took no action.23
Prompted by the families of 9/11 victims, Congress
was inspired by these
issues to call for a commission to investigate
the failure of intelligence, defense,
and law enforcement agencies to cooperate,
investigate, and forestall the
terrorists. The Americans makes George Bush the
instigator of the resulting 9/11

Commission. In reality he opposed it, and after
public opinion forced him to
agree to it, his administration cooperated only
grudgingly. All the otherbooks
omit the commission entirely.
Will it happen again? The books do not say, of
course, nor can they, but their
tone is upbeat. “The President also moved quickly to
combat terrorism at home,”
says Pathways to the Present. “Less than a month
after the 9/11 attacks, Bush
created the Office of Homeland Security.” Then follow
threelong encouraging
paragraphs about this governmental reorganization—
paragraphs that contain not
a word of critique or query. To be sure,
Pathways went to press before the
federal government’s pathetic response to Hurricane
Katrina revealed that the
Bush administration had actually downsized and
downgraded FEMA—the
Federal Emergency Management Agency—while
merging it into Homeland
Security, in the process drastically curtailing
our national ability to cope with
disasters. But authors did have available to them
widespread and expert
questioning of our preparedness against terrorist
materials coming in through our
ports, the waiver program that made it
especially easy for Saudi Arabians to get
visas, and otherproblems that Homeland Security had

not addressed. Cheerful
prose will reassure students only until the next
attack. Then they will feel
cheated.
The initial U.S. response to 9/11 was to attack
the Taliban government in
Afghanistan in October 2001. Like Hussein, this
fundamentalist Muslim regime
had initially been supported by our CIA
because they opposed the previous
communist regime in Afghanistan, which was
backed by the Soviet Union. In
the 1980s the CIA not only supplied Afghan
Muslim fundamentalists with
American advisors and antiaircraft missiles but also
helped recruit Muslims from
other countries to fight alongside the Afghans.
Unfortunately, after coming to
power these extremists sheltered Osama bin Laden
and his training camps that
produced the terrorists who attacked the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon.
After the 9/11/2001 attacks and in response to
U.S. demands, the Taliban
government offered to hand bin Laden over to a
third nation. The United States
declined the offer, calling it inadequate.24
Instead, within a month, we began
bombing Taliban forces on behalf of the
Northern Alliance, enemies of the
Taliban. With our aid the Alliance won a quick
victory. As Afghans, members of
the Alliance were able to differentiate between
Taliban supporters and other
Afghans. However, distracted by preparations for its

upcoming war on Iraq, the
Bush administration then lost focus on capturing Osama
bin Laden and on
securing Afghanistan as a neutral or favorable
state. Those mistakes in early
2002 still haunted the United States five years
later, as bin Laden remained at
largeand the Afghan government had little control
over much of Afghanistan.25
Only one textbook, Pageant, tells that the United States
had supported the
Islamic fundamentalists in their battle against
Afghanistan’s communist
government. Pageant joins otherbooks in stating,
inaccurately, that the Taliban
flatly refused to hand over bin Laden. Otherwise,
however, most textbooks give
a compact and reasonably accurate account of
how the United States with the
Northern Alliance brought down the Taliban
government. They do note that
Osama bin Laden got away. Perhaps we should
not be surprised that their
accounts are accurate: our intervention in Afghanistan
was justified and
effective, at least at first.26
The United States seems to go to war ever
more easily, partly because most of us
do not really know war’s human costs.

Our ignorance has several causes. In Iraq,
our body armor, medical care, etc., have been much
better than previously. As a
result, the ratio of combat deaths to wounded is
far lower—about 1 to 9, while in
Vietnam it was 1 to 3. It is splendid that
fewer soldiers are dying. Since many
more are wounded, however, someseverely, like this man at
Walter Reed Army
Medical Center, deaths no longer tell the full
story. The death toll shrinks further
because many war services, like driving and
guarding truckconvoys, have been
contracted out to private companies, whose
losses are omitted from official
statistics. Iraqi deaths—far more numerous than our
own—also don’t figure in
the totals. Yet the death toll forms our main
knowledge of a war’s cost, since
most of us make no personal sacrifice.
Historically, the next event is the war the United
States launched against Iraq
in March 2003. However, while chronological,
our attack on Iraq was not
obviously logical. To be sure, the Bush
administration initially claimed a
connection between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam
Hussein. Two days after we
attacked, explaining why, President Bush gave three
reasons: “to disarm Iraq of
weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam
Hussein’s support for terrorism,
and to free the Iraqi people.” Similarly, Vice President
Dick Cheney called Iraq
“the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us

under assault for many
years, but most especially on 9/11.” Even at the
time,the linkage claim made no
sense. Iraq had no connection with the 9/11 attacks
on the United States; Osama
bin Laden had nothing but contempt for Saddam
Hussein’s secular and brutal
dictatorship; and Hussein, in turn, had no interest in
letting terrorists organize in
his police state of a nation.27
Nor did the “weapons of mass destruction” claim
make sense, for Bush’s
aggressive diplomacy had persuaded Hussein to let
UN weapons inspectors back
into Iraq the previous November, and they had found
no evidence of such
weapons. Hussein’s government had also submitted
a report the next month
describing (truthfully, it turned out) how Iraq
had dismantled its WMD programs
in the 1990s. The inspectors begged Bush to let
them finish their inspections, but
Bush ordered the UN out of Iraq so the invasion
could proceed. After our initial
military victory, thorough search confirmed that no
weapons of mass destruction
existed in Iraq. Information suppressed at
the time has since made clear that
British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as
President Bush knew before the
invasion that Iraq had no WMD, or should have
known.28 Moreover, even if

Iraq’s alleged WMD programs had made the
progress claimed by the Bush
administration, they would still have lagged far
behind those of the other two
nations Bush denounced as part of the “Axis of
Evil,” Iran and North Korea.
Logically, then, we should have attacked those
countries first. Instead, we
attacked Iraq—precisely because it was the
weakest target.29 Among its other
problems, our attack on Iraq thus encouraged Iran
and North Korea—along with
any othernation wanting to forestall a possible
U.S. attack in the future—toget
nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
Clearly we attacked Iraq not
because it had WMD but because it did not.
President Bush’s third stated reason for
attacking Iraq, “to free the Iraqi
people,” is another example of the “international
good guy” school of U.S.
foreign policy. Without doubt, under Hussein
the people of Iraq—especially its
Shi’ite majority and Kurdish minority—suffered. As a
result, substantial
segments of Iraqi society initially, and correctly,
briefly viewed our troops as
liberators.As a cause of our intervention,
however, Hussein’s oppression never
figured prominently. If a people’s suffering
prompted American intervention, we
would have sent troops first to Darfur, in
southern Sudan, where the Arab-
dominated government was killing or allowing its
civilian allies to kill hundreds

of thousands of black Africans; or to
Zimbabwe, whose dictator, Robert
Mugabe, grew more repressive with each passing year. The
“international good
guy” interpretation did provide rhetorical cover
for the invasion, however, and
did convince someDemocrats to vote for the
resolution awarding the president
war powers.
If the government’s stated reasons for attacking
Iraq won’t scan, what does
explain this military adventure? Surely a huge
unstated cause is this:President
Bush and his associates hoped to gain from
it, politically and economically.
Everyone knew that Hussein’s armed forces, which
the United States had easily
defeated in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, were
now far weaker. Before the Gulf
War, Iraq had 4,280 tanks; it ended that war
with 580.30 Iraq’s armed forces
were further crippled by the “no fly zone”
imposed by the United States and its
allies since1991, which meant U.S. planes
would control Iraqi airspace from the
beginning of any hostilities. So politicians knew
it would be dangerous
politically to oppose a war that we would win in
a few weeks. Indeed, in
November 2004, electoral fallout from the
seemingly successful war and the
capture of Saddam Hussein helped President Bush
win reelection and his party
control of Congress. Economics played an even
more obvious role. Many of the

Bush family’s friends have long been involved in
the construction of the oil
industry and armed forces projects. In April
2003, the Bush administration put
the international community on notice that U.S.
companies and government
agencies, not those of other nations, would
rebuild Iraq. To no one’s surprise,
Vice President Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, has
gotten more government
money for this rebuildingthan any othercompany—and
has been charged with
more fraud and malfeasance. Meanwhile, Cheney
continues to receive $150,000
a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton
and has stock options worth
more than $18 million in it. Conversely, to help
ensure Cheney’s reelection and
that of his allies, Halliburton funneled more than
half a million dollars to the
Republican Party.31
The Bush family has historic ties to the oil
industry, and early in Bush’s
presidency, Vice President Cheney convened a
secret energy task force
comprisedmainly of oil industry insiders. In 2003 a
political insider, Tom Foley,
former speaker of the house, bluntly assailed
the good guy interpretation of U.S.
foreign policy, implicitly offering a far less
flattering picture of a U.S.
administration waging war on behalf of private oil

firms: “Our belief is that we
are not self-interested. For example, our perception is
that we didn’t go to war
against Iraq to dominate the oil market, and we’re
very offended if anyone
suggests such a thing. We always excuse
ourselves from self-interested
motives.”32 If anyone still doubted that oil played
a key role, in 2007 Dow Jones
announced that Iraq’s puppet parliament was
considering a law “which the U.S.
government has been helping to craft” that
would give giant Western oil
companies thirty-year contracts to extract Iraqi
oil. Moreover,75 percent of the
profits in the early years would go to
the foreign companies, compared to an
average of 10 percent in otheroil-producing
countries.33
No textbook suggests that reasons such as these
played any part in our
decision to go to war, our selection of Iraq as
target, or such tactical matters—
now widely understood to be blunders—as the
choice to sideline entities such as
France, Germany, and the United Nations from
participating in the rebuilding
and reorganization of Iraq. Textbooks never do.
Even though several textbooks
note the boost in the polls that Americans
gave George H. W. Bush after
America’squick victory in the Persian Gulf War,
authors never suggest domestic
politics as an explanation for war.34 Instead,
they choose to believe the reasons

officials supply for their actions, rather than
peering beneath the surface. Note
the perspective adopted in the first sentence of
the account of the Iraq War in
The Americans, for example: “In 2003, Bush
expanded the war on terrorism to
Iraq.” As we have seen, attacking Iraq had
nothing to do with “the war on
terrorism.” Soon enough, even Bush had to
admit there was no connection.35
Nevertheless, the president and vice president continued
making their now
contradicted statements linking Iraq and the 9/11
terrorist attacks. Political
scientists Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner have
shown that this imaginary
connection was the primary wellspring of public
support for the war, which
shows the truth of Herman Goering’s statement that to
get people to back a war,
“all you have to do is tell them that they
are being attacked” and denounce
opponents for their lack of patriotism. When
textbooks like The Americans
repeat the fictional tie between terrorism and
Hussein’s Iraq, they promote
support for this misguidedwar among our young.36
Whatever its reasons for going to war in Iraq,
after its initial victory the Bush
administration forgot the basicrule of any successful
occupation: decapitate the
occupied society, then rule it through the structures

already in place on the local
level. After all, Saddam Hussein used more
than half a million troops and
policemento keep Iraq quiet. At the insistence of
Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, who overruled Pentagon brass, we went in
with far fewer troops,
almost none of whom spoke Arabic. So we
had no alternative but to use the Iraqi
military to cordon off ammunition dumps, direct
traffic, accompany our forces
on patrol, and do otheruseful jobs. Instead, against
the advice of U.S. officials
with Iraq experience like Gen. Jay Garner, we simply
declared the Iraqi military
illegal. Moreover,we did so without bothering to
have it come in and disarm,
instantly creating an illegal armed forceoutside
our control. Occupying Iraq is
not rocket science. All we had to do was emulate
most successfuloccupations of
the last five hundred years. How did Germany govern
France in the 1940s, for
instance? Through the French police, local
leadership, and the imposed Vichy
government. The course we chose showed
incompetence of a high order.37
From the standpoint of realpolitik, the war
against Iraq was a poor idea from
the start.The United States had Saddam Hussein in
a box. His caving in to the
UN’s demand to readmit WMD inspectors
exemplified his dilemma: he ruledhis
nation by force, yet could hardly mobilize
significant forcevis-à-vis the UN and

the United States. Moreover,Iraq was a secular
Arab state, if not a democratic
one. By 2004, experts on the Middle East, army
commanders, and CIA officials
were telling journalist Fallows that our choice to
attack Iraq “hampered the
campaign in Afghanistan before fighting began
and wound it down prematurely,
along the way losing the chance to capture
Osama bin Laden.” It also distracted
our attention from the true sources—in Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan—of
the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks and from the
gaping holes in our domestic
security apparatus. It “overused and wore
out” the army, Fallows continues,
“without committing enough troops for a
successfuloccupation.” Worst of all, it
created new terrorists. Four months after
attacking Iraq, President Bush dared
Muslim extremists to “attack us there. My
answer is, bring them on.”38 The
extremistsresponded. Al Qaeda, which had no
presence in Iraq under Hussein,
found Iraq under Bush fertile ground for
recruits.
This graph shows Iraq’s steady slide toward
statelessness. Of course
statelessness was likely after the United States
disbanded Iraq’s government and
armed forces.

To be sure, the war did not look as misguidedor
mishandled in 2004 as in
2007, so it is hardly fair for me to
suggest that textbook authors should have
known then what is obvious now. However, for the
most part I have summarized
criticisms levied by journalists, historians, and
former government officials
between 2002 and 2004, before four of thesebooks
had gone to press. Certainly
by 2007, almost all historians and policy
analysts—as well as a majority of
American citizens—concluded that the decision to
wage war on Iraq was a
mistake. Today, Iraq, instead of being a
secular (if undemocratic) state, is
moving toward statelessness, which breeds
terrorism, or toward fundamentalist
Shi’ite control with expanded Iranian influence. Iran,
unlike Iraq, has sponsored
terrorist groups in the Middle East, so its
enhanced power resulting from our
intervention is hardly in our interest. Our
military presence as occupier generates
ever-increasing resentment among Muslims everywhere,
which in turn helps
terrorists solicit new members. Owing to internal
sabotage, Iraq hardly exports
any oil and suffers shortages of its own, so the
war has hardly helped the world
cope with its energy shortfall. American prestige abroad
has sunk to a new low,
owing partly to the illegal and inhumane

methods we have used against
“detainees” suspected of being terrorists.
All these problems, too, were
predictable from the start. Indeed, the CIA
warned the Bush administration of
the likely negative outcomes of our invasion, but
Bush and Cheney paid no heed.
For that matter, back in April 1999, an
operation of the U.S. government under
the Clinton administration, a series of war
games known as Desert Crossing,
predicted most of them. Still earlier, a paper by
Ivan Eland, director of defense
policy studies at the Cato Institute, asked,
“Does U.S. Intervention Overseas
Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record,” and
answered affirmatively.39
Yet only one textbook—again it is Pageant—
suggests the war was a mistake.
It does so by reprinting President George H. W.
Bush’s rationale for not toppling
Hussein after the Persian Gulf War:
Trying to eliminate Saddam . . . would
have incurred incalculable human
and political costs. . . . Going in and
occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally
exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have
destroyed the
precedent of international response to aggression
that we hoped to
establish. Had we gone this invasion route, the
United States could
conceivably still be an occupying power in a
bitterly hostile land. It

would have been a dramatically different—
and perhaps barren—
outcome.
As the authors note, the paragraph makes “sobering
reading in the context of his
son’s subsequent invasion of Iraq.” To
suggest that the other five textbooks
support administration policy would be too strong,
however. Probably their
authors would claim they neither support nor
decry administration policy. But
sincethey mostly adopt the administration’s terms,
and sincethey start from the
“international good guy” pointof view, authors do
come across as supportive, on
the whole. In addition, given that the quagmire in
Iraq—like any failed
enterprise—was not in America’sbest interest, even a
neutral assessment seems
inappropriate.
Even more than earlier chapters, the last pages of
U.S. history textbooks come
across as “just one damn thing after
another” (a line variously attributed to
Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Harry
Truman, historian H.A.L. Fisher,
Voltaire, and anonymous). Notwithstanding the names
of famous historians with
imposing personalities on their title pages, the
books’ final chapters seem
especially devoid of a pointof view. I suspect
this is because no one writes them

—at least no one hiredto have a pointof view.
Chapter 12 tells how publishers
oftenfarm out history textbooks, especially after their
first editions, to be written
by underlings. Many of these clerks and
freelance writers are not qualified to
have a pointof view—some have no background in
history at all, not even a BA.
Nor can they afford the time,as I could while
writing this chapter, to review the
literature and develop a sense of its most cogent
positions. They are hiredsimply
to summarize what happened in the recent past,
and summarize they do. The
product that results has even less style and is even
more boring than the rest of
theseponderousvolumes. No wonder teachers skip the
last chapters!
Nevertheless, the notion that history courses should
slight the sasha for the
distant zamani is perverse. Giving short shrift
to the sasha, the way most
textbooks do, or avoiding the recent past altogether,
the way most teachers do,
does not meet students’ needs. Authors may work
on the assumption that
covering recent events thoroughly is unnecessary
because students already know
about them. Since textbook authors tend to be
old, however, what is sasha for
them is zamani to their students. Students need
information about the recent past
to understand ongoing developments. Yet high school
juniors have almost no
personal memory of the Clinton administration, to

say nothing of anything
earlier, like the women’s movement. Soon the
disputed Florida election results
of 2000, so recent to many of us, will be
ancient history to high school students.
Moreover,when textbooks and teachers downplay the
sasha, they make it hard
for students to draw connections between the
study of the past and the issues
they are sure to face in the future, which can
only encourage students to consider
all history irrelevant.
“The past is never dead,” wrote William
Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”
Unquestionably this is truest about the sasha.
The sasha is perhaps our most
important past, because it is not dead but living-dead.
Its theft by textbooks and
teachers is the most wicked crime schools
perpetrate on high school students,
depriving them of perspective about the issues
that most affect them. The semi-
remembered factoids students carrywith them about
the Battle of Put-in-Bay or
Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand
the world into which they
move at graduation. That world is still
working out sex roles. That world faces
nations such as Pakistan, Iran, and North
Korea with growing capabilities to
make nuclear bombs. That world is

marked by growing social and economic
inequality within and between nations, which among
otherthings underlies our
inability to keep out illegal immigrants. Leaving
out the recent past ensures that
students will take away little from their
history courses that they can apply to
that world.
11.
PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT
God has not been preparing the English speaking and
Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for
nothing. . . .
He has given us the spirit of progress to
overwhelm the
forces of reaction throughout the earth. He
has made us
adept in government that we may administer
government among savage and senile people. .
. . And
of all our race He has marked the American people
as
His chosen nation to finally lead in the
redemption of
the world.
—SENATOR ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE, 19001
Americans see history as a straight line and
themselves

standing at the cutting edge of it as
representatives for
all mankind.
—FRANCES FITZGERALD2
The study of economic growth is too serious to
be left to
the economists.
—E. J. MISHAN3
It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall
not
have the benefits of this world for much longer.
The
imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle
of
world ecology can only be prevented by a radical
shift
in outlook from our present naïve conception
of this
world as a testing ground to a more mature
view of the
universe as a comprehensive matrix of life
forms.
Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially
religious,
not economic or political.
—VINE DELORIA JR.4

STEAD FAST READER, we are about to do
somethingno high school
American history class has ever accomplished in
the annals of American
education: reach the end of the textbook. What
final words do American history
courses impart to their students?
The American Tradition assures students “that the
American tradition remains
strong—strong enough to meet the many challenges
that lie ahead.” “If these
values are those on which most Americans
can agree,” says The American
Adventure, “the American adventure will surely
continue.” “Most Americans
remained optimistic about the nation’s future.
They were convinced that their
free institutions, their great natural wealth,
and the genius of the American
people would enable the U.S. to continue to
be—as it always has been—THE
LAND OF PROMISE,” Land of Promise concludes.
Even most textbooks that don’t end with their titlesclose
with the same vapid
cheer. “The American spirit surged with vitality as
the nation headed toward the
closeof the twentieth century,” the authors of The
American Pageant assured us
in 1991, ignoring opinion polls that suggest
the opposite. Fifteen years later,

“The American spirit pulsed with vitality in the
earlytwenty-first century,” they
write, but now “grave problems continued to
plague the Republic.” Life and
Liberty climbs farther out on this hollow limb:
“America will have a greatrole to
play in thesefuture events. What this nation
does depends on the people in it.”
Can’t argue with that! “Problems lie ahead,
certainly,” predicts American
Adventures. “But so do opportunities.” The American
people “need only the will
and the commitment to meet the new challenges
of the future,” according to
Triumph of the American Nation. In short, all
we must do to prepare for the
morrow is keep our collective chin up. Or as
Holt AmericanNation put it in
2003, “Americans faced the future with hope
and determination.”5
Back in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me poked
fun at textbooks for such
endings. ObviouslyLies had little influence on textbook
publishers.
Well, why not end happily? might be one
response. We don’t want to depress
high school students. After all, it’s not really
history anyway—we cannot know
for sure what’s going to come next. So let’s
end on an upbeat.

Indeed, just as we don’t know with precision
what went on thousands of years
ago, we cannot know with precision what will happen
next. Precisely for this
reason, the endings of these books provide
another site where authors might
appropriately provoke intellectual curiosity. Can
students apply ideasthey have
learned from thesehuge American history textbooks?
After all, as Shakespeare
said, “the past is prologue.” If we understand
what has caused what in the past,
we may be able to predict what will happen
next and even adopt national
policies informed by our knowledge. Surely helping
students learnto do so is the
key reason for teaching history in the first place.
If history textbooks supplied
tools for projection or examples of causation in the
past that might (or might not)
continue into the future, they would encourage
students to thinkabout what they
have just spent a year learning. What a
thrilling way to end a history textbook!
According to American History, Westward the Course
of Empire Takes Its Way
has been reproduced in more American
histories than any other picture by
Currier and Ives. Stereotypically contrasting
“primitive” Native hunters and
fishers with bustling white settlers, the picture
suggests that progress doomed the
Indian, so we need not look closely today at

the process of dispossession.
But no, the lack of intellectual excitement in
thesebooks is most pronounced
at their ends. All is well, the authors soothe
us. Just keep on keepin’ on. No need
to ponder whether the nation or all humankind
are on the right path. No need to
think at all. Not only is this boring pedagogy,
it’s bad history. Nevertheless,
endings like theseare customary.
As usual, such content-free unanimity signals
that a social archetype lurks
nearby. This one, the archetype of progress, bursts
forth in full flower on the
textbooks’ last pages but has been germinating
from their opening chapters.
For centuries, Americans viewed their own history as
a demonstration of the
idea of progress. As Thomas Jefferson put it:
Let the philosophical observer commence a journey
from the savages of
the Rocky Mountains eastwards towards our
seacoast. These he would
observe in the earliest stageof association, living
under no law but that of
nature. . . . He would next find those on
our frontiers in the pastoral state,
raising domestic animals to supply the defects of
hunting, . . . and so in
his progress he would meet the gradual shades of
improvingman until he
would reach his, as yet, most improved state in

our seaport towns. This,
in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time,of
the progress of man from the
infancy of creation to the present day. And where
this progress will stop
no one can say.6
The idea of progress dominated American culture in
the nineteenth century
and was still being celebratedin Chicago at the
Century of Progress Exposition
in 1933. As recently as the 1950s, more was
still assumed to be better. Every
midwestern town displayed civic pride in
signs marking the city limits:
WELCOME TO DECATUR, ILLINOIS, POP.
65,000 AND GROWING.
Growth meant progress, and progress provided
meaning, in some basic but
unthinking way. In Washington the secretary of
commerce routinely celebrated
when our nation hit each new milestone—
170,000,000, 185,000,000, etc.—on
his “population clock.”7 We boasted that America’s
marvelouseconomic system
had given the United States “72 percent of
the world’s automobiles, 61 percent
of the world’s telephones, and 92 percent of
the world’s bathtubs,”and all this
with only 6 percent of the world’s population.8
The future looked brighter yet:
most Americans believed their children would inherit
a better planet and enjoy

fuller lives.
This is the America in which most textbook authors
grew up and the America
they still try to sell to students today. Perhaps
textbooks do not question the
notion that bigger is better because the idea of
progress conforms with the way
Americans like to think about education:
ameliorative, leading step by step to
opportunity for individuals and progress for the
whole society. The ideology of
progress also provides hope for the future.
Certainly most Americans want to
believe that their society has been, on
balance, a boon and not a curse to
mankind and to the planet.9 History textbooks
go even further to imply that
simply by participating in society, Americans
contribute to a nation that is
constantly progressing and remains the hope of
the world. As Boorstin and
Kelley put it, near the end of A History of
the United States, “Americans—
makers of something out of nothing—have
delivered a new way of life to far
corners of the world.” Thus, the idea of
American exceptionalism—the United
States as the best country in the world—which
starts in our textbooks with the
Pilgrims, gets projected into the future.
In the 1950s a graphics firm redesigned the
symbol for Explorer Scouting to be
more “up to date.” The new symbol’s onward and
upward thrust perfectly

represents the archetype of progress.
Faith in progress has played various functions in
society and in American
history textbooks. The faith has promoted the status
quo in the most literal sense,
for it proclaims that to progress we must simply do
more of the same. This belief
has been particularly useful to the upper
class, because Americans could be
persuaded to ignore the injustice of social class if
they thought the economic pie
kept getting bigger for all. The idea of progress
also fits in with social
Darwinism, which implies that the lower class is
lower owing to its own fault.
Progress as an ideology has been intrinsically
antirevolutionary: because things
are getting better all the time,everyone should
believe in the system. Portraying
America so optimistically also helps textbooks
withstand attacks by
ultrapatriotic critics in Texas and othertextbook
adoption states.
Internationally, referring to have-not countries as
“developing nations” has
helped the “developed nations” avoid facing
the injustice of worldwide
stratification. In reality “development” has been
making Third World nations
poorer, compared to the First World. Per capita
income in the First World was

five times that in the Third World in 1850,
ten times in 1960, and fourteen times
by 1970. It’s tricky to measure theseratios,
partly because a dollar buys more in
the Third World than in the First, but per
capita income in the First World is now
twenty to sixty times that in the Third
World.10 The vocabulary of progress
remains relentlessly hopeful, however, with regard to
the “undeveloped.” As
economist E. J. Mishan put it, “Complacency is
suffused over the globe, by
referring to these destitute and sometimes
desperate countries by the fatuous
nomenclature of ‘developing nations.’”11 In the
nineteenth century, progress
provided an equally splendid rationale for
imperialism. Europeans and
Americans saw themselves as performing
governmental services for and
utilizing the natural resources of natives in distant
lands, who were too backward
to do it themselves.
Gradually the archetype of progress has been
losing its grip. In the last
quarter-century the intellectual community in the
United States has largely
abandoned the idea. Opinion polls show that
the general public, too, has been
losing its faith that the future is automatically
getting better. Reporting this new
climate of opinion, the editors of a 1982
symposium entitled “Progress and Its
Discontents” put it this way: “Future historians will
probably record that from

the mid-twentieth century on, it was difficult for
anyone to retain faith in the
idea of inevitable and continuing progress.”12
Probably not even textbook authors still believe
that bigger is necessarily
better. No one celebrates higher populations.13 Today,
rather than boast of our
consumption, we are more likely to lament
our waste, as in this passage by
Donella H. Meadows, coauthor of The Limits to
Growth: “In terms of spoiling
the environment and using world resources,
we are the world’s most
irresponsible and dangerous citizens.” Each
American born in the 1970s will
throw out ten thousand no-return bottles and almost
twenty thousand cans while
generating 126 tons of garbage and 9.8 tons of
particulate air pollution. And
that’s just the tip of the trashberg, because
every ton of waste at the consumer
end has also required five tons at the manufacturing
stageand even more at the
site of initial resource extraction.14
In someways, bigger still seems to equal
better. When we compare ourselves
to others around us, having more seems to
bring happiness, for earning a lot of
money or driving an expensive car implies that
one is a more valued member of
society. Sociologists routinely find positive correlations

between income and
happiness. Over time, however, and in an
absolute sense, more may not mean
happier. Americans believed themselves to be
less happy in 1970 than in 1957,
and still less happy by 1998, yet they used much
more energy and raw materials
per capita in 1998.15
The 1973 oil crisis precipitated the new
climate of opinion, for it showed
America’svulnerability to economic and even geological
factors over which we
have little control. The new pessimism was
exemplified by the enormous
popularityof that year’s ecocidal bestseller,The Limits
to Growth.16 Writing the
next year, Robert Heilbroner noted the new
pessimism: “There is a question in
the air . . . ‘Is therehope for man?’”17 Robert
Nisbet, who thinks that the idea of
progress “has done more good over a 2500-year period .
. . than any othersingle
idea in Western history,”18 nonetheless agrees
that the idea is in twilight. This
change did not take place all at once.
Intellectuals had been challenging the idea
of progress for some time, dating back to
The Decline of the West, published
during World War I, in which Oswald
Spengler suggested that Western
civilization was beginning a profound and inevitable
downturn.19 The war itself,
the Great Depression, Stalinism, the Holocaust,
and World War II shook
Western belief in progress at its foundations.

Developments in social theory further undermined
the idea of progress by
making social Darwinism intellectually obsolete.
Modern anthropologists no
longer believe that our society is “ahead of” or
“fitter than” so-called “primitive”
societies. They realize that our society is more
complex than its predecessors but
do not rank our religions higher than “primitive”
religions or consider our
kinship system superior. Even our technology, though
assuredly more advanced,
may not be better in that it may not meet human
needs over the long term.20
Another key justification for our belief in
progress had come from biological
theory. Biologists used to see natural evolution as
the survival of the fittest. By
1973 a much more complex view of the development
of organisms had swept
the field. “Life is not a tale of progress,”
according to Stephen Jay Gould. “It is,
rather, a storyof intricate branching and wandering,
with momentary survivors
adapting to changing local environments, not approaching
cosmic or engineering
perfection.”21
Since textbooks do not discuss ideas, it is no
surprise that they fail to address
the changes in American thinking resulting from World
War I, World War II, the

Holocaust, or Stalinism, let alone from
developments in anthropological or
biological theory. By 1973, however, another
problem with progress was
becoming apparent: the downside risks of our increasing
dominance over nature.
Environmental problems have grown more ominous every
year.
In the 1980s and 1990s, most books at
least mentioned the energy crises
caused by the oil embargo of 1973 and the Iran-
Iraq War in 1980. No worries,
however: textbook authors implied that both crises
found immediate solutions.
“As a result” of the 1973 embargo, Triumph of
the AmericanNation told us,
“Nixon announced a program to make the
United States independent of all
foreign countries for its energy requirements by
the early 1980s.” Ten pages
later, in response to gas rationing in 1979,
“Carter set forth another energy plan,
calling for a massive program to develop
synthetic fuels. The long-range goal of
the plan was to cut importation of oil in half.”
No mention in 1979 of Nixon’s
1973 plan, which had failed so abjectly that our
dependence on foreign oil had
spiraled upward, not downward.22 No mention that
Congress never even passed
most of Carter’s 1979 plan, inadequate as it
was. Virtually all the textbooks
adopted this trouble-free approach. “By the end of
the Carter administration, the
energy crisis had eased off,” Land of Promise

reassured its readers. “Americans
were building and buying smaller cars.” “People
gradually began to use less
gasoline and conserve energy,” echoes The American
Tradition.
If only it were that simple! Between 1950 and 1975
world fuel consumption
doubled, oil and gas consumption tripled, and the
use of electricity grew almost
sevenfold.23 Since then things have only grown
worse. Meanwhile, world oil
production has reached a plateau, as M. K.
Hubbert predicted it would decades
ago. In 1994 I wrote, “If our sources of
energy are not infinite, which seems
likely sincewe live on a finite planet, then at
somepointwe will run up against
shortages.” By 2007 theseshortages have begun to
manifest themselves, and the
dislocations will prove enormous.A century ago
farming in America was energy
self-sufficient: livestock provided the fertilizer and tillage
power, farm families
did the work of planting and weeding, wood heated
the house, wind pumped the
water, and photosynthesis grew the crops. Today
American farming relies on
enormous amounts of oil, not only for tractors and
trucks and air-conditioning,
but also for fertilizers and herbicides. Given
these circumstances,most social
and natural scientists concluded from the 1973

energy crisis that we cannot
blithely maintain our economic growth forever.
“Anyone having the slightest
familiarity with the physics of heat, energy, and
matter,” wrote Mishan in 1977,
“willrealize that, in terms of historical time,the
end of economic growth, as we
currently experience it, cannot be that far off.”24
This is largely because of the
awesome power of compound interest. Economic
growth at 3 percent, a
conventional standard, means that the economy doubles
every quarter-century,
typically doubling society’s use of raw materials,
expenditures of energy, and
generation of waste.
The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 pointed to
the difficulty that capitalism, a
marveloussystem of production, was never
designed to accommodate shortage.
For demand to exceed supply is supposed to be
good for capitalism, leading to
increased production and often to lower costs.
Oil, however, is not really
produced but extracted. In a way it is rationed by
the oil companies and OPEC
from an unknown but finite pool.Thus, the oil
companies, which we habitually
perceive as competing capitalist producers, might
more accuratelybe viewed as
keepers of the commons.
America has seen commons problems before. Imagine a
colonial New
England town in which each household

kept a cow. Every morning, a family
member would take the cow to the common town
pasture, where it would join
other cows and graze all day under the
supervision of a cowherd paid by the
town. An affluent family might benefit from
buying a second cow; any excess
milk and butter they could sell to cowless sailors
and merchants. Expansion of
this sort could go on only for a finite period,
however, before the common
pasture was hopelessly overgrazed. What was in
the short-term interest of the
individual family was not in the long-term
interest of the community. If we
compare contemporary oil companies with cow-
holding colonial families, we
see that new forms of governmental regulations,
analogous to the regulated use
of the commons, may be necessary to assure there
will be a commons—in this
case, an oil pool—for our children.25
The commons issueaffects our society in otherways.
Fishing and shellfishing
are in crisis. A catch of 20 million bushels
of crabs and oysters in Chesapeake
Bay in 1892 and 3.5 million in 1982 fell to
just 166,000 bushels in 1992.
Fisherfolkresponded the way people usually do when
their standard of living is
imperiled:work harder. This meant redoubling their
efforts to take more of the

few crabs and oysters still out there. Although
this tactic may benefit an
individual family, it cannot but wreak disaster
on the commons. By 2006,
scientists estimated that one-fifth of the fishing and
oystering fleet in the bay
would reap about the same harvest, with much
less ecological damage. The
problem of the bay is amplified in the oceans
by the use of increasingly
sophisticated fishing technology. A report in
Science in 2006 predicted that 90
percent of all species of fish and shellfish that
now feed people may be gone by
2048. Twenty-nine percent of those species
have already collapsed, meaning that
their harvests were already less than one-tenth what they
had been. The United
Nations is struggling to develop a global system
“to manage and repropagate the
fish that are still left.” Since international waters
are involved, however,
negotiations may not succeed until after many species
have been made extinct.26
Because the economy has become global, the
commons now encompasses the
entire planet. If we consider that around the
world humans owned ten times as
many cars in 1990 as in 1950, no sane
observer would predict that such a
proportional increase could or should continue
for another forty years.27
According to Jared Diamond, in 2005 the
average American consumed thirty-
two times as much of the world’s largesse

and produced thirty-two times as
much pollution as the average Third World
citizen.28 Our continued economic
development coexists in some tension with a
corollary of the archetype of
progress: the notion that America’scause is the
cause of all humankind. Thus,
our economic leadership is very different from
our political leadership.
Politically, we can hope othernations will put in
place our forms of democracy
and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can
only hope othernations will
never achieve our standard of living, for if
they did, the earthwould become a
desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the
hope of the world. Since the
planet is finite, as we expand our economy
we make it less likely that less
developed nations can expand theirs. Today,
increasing demand for fuel for
Chinese vehicles is already creating a worldwide
oil shortage.
Almost every day brings new reasons for
ecological concern, from
deforestation at the equator to ozone holes at
the poles. Cancer rates climb and
we don’t know why.29 We have no way
even to measure the full extent of
human impact on the earth. The average sperm
count in healthy human males
around the world has dropped by nearly 50

percent over the past fifty years. If
environmentally caused, this is no laughing matter,
for sperm have only to
decline in a straight line for another fifty years
and we will have wiped out
humankind without even knowing how we did it.30
We were similarly unaware
for years that killing mosquitoes with DDT was
wiping out birdsof prey around
the globe. Our increasingpower makes it
increasingly possible that humankind
will make the planet uninhabitable by accident.
Indeed, we almost have, on
several occasions. In the early 1990s, for
example, nations around the planet
agreed to stop production of many CFCs
(chlorofluorocarbons) that damaged the
ozone in the upper atmosphere. In 2006
Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach
noted, “Scientists are haunted by the realization
that if CFCs had been made with
a slightly different type of chemistry, they’d
have destroyed much of the ozone
layerover the entire planet.”31 We were simply
lucky.
All theseconsiderations imply that more of the same
economic development
and nation-state governance that brought us this
far may not guide us to a livable
planet in the long run. We do not simply face
an energy crisis that might be
solved if we only develop a low-cost form of
energy that does not pollute or
cause global warming. On the contrary, if we
had cheaper energy, imagine the

havoc we might cause! Scientists have already
envisioned how we could happily
use it to decrease the salinity of the seas,
increase our arable land, and in other
ways make our planet nicer for us—in the
short run. Instead, we must start
treating the earthas if we plan to stay here. At
somepointin the future, perhaps
before readers of today’s high school textbooks
pass their fiftieth birthdays,
industrialized nations, including the United States,
may have to move toward
steady-state economies in their consumption of
energy and raw materials. Thus,
our oil crisis can best be viewed as a wake-
up call to change our ways.
Getting to zero economic growth involves another
form of the problem of the
commons, however, for no country wants to be
first to achieve a no-growth
economy, just as no individual family findsit in its
interest to stop with one cow.
A new international mechanism may be required,
one hard even to envision
today. Heilbroner is pessimistic: “No substantial
voluntary diminution of
growth, much less a planned reorganization of
society, is today even remotely
imaginable.”32 If, tomorrow, citizens must
imagine diminished growth, we
cannot rest easily, knowing that most high school
history courses do nothing

whatever to prepare Americans of the future to
think imaginatively about the
problem. Continued unthinking allegiance to
the idea of progress in our
textbooks can only be a deterrent, blinding students to
the need for change, thus
making change that much more difficult. David
Donald characterizes the
“incurable optimism” of American history courses
as “not merely irrelevant but
dangerous.”33 In this sense, our environmental crisis
is an educational problem
to which American history courses contribute.
Edward O. Wilson divides those who writeon
environmental issues into two
camps: environmentalists and exceptionalists.34 Most
scholars and writers,
including Wilson, are of the former persuasion.
On the otherside stand a relative
handful of political scientists, economists, and
natural scientists, several
associatedwith right-wing think tanks, who have
mounted important counter-
arguments to the doomsaying environmentalists. In
1994 I pointed to Julian
Simon, Herman Kahn, and someothers who
compared their world to the world
of our ancestors and argued that although modern
societies have more power to
harmthe planet, they also have more power to set
the environment right. After
all, environmental damage has been undone on
occasion. Some American rivers
that were deemed hopelessly polluted forty years
ago are now fit for fish and

human swimmers. Human activity has reforested
South Korea.35 Hence, the
exceptionalists claimed, modern technology may exempt
us from environmental
pressures. They noted that recovery time after
natural disasters such as
earthquakes or man-made disasters such as
World War II has become much
shorter today than in the nineteenth century,
owing in part to the ability of our
large bureaucratic organizations to mobilize information
and coordinate
enormous undertakings. Human life expectancy, one
measure of the quality of
life, continues to lengthen. Herbert London, who titled
his book Why Are They
Lying to Our Children? because he believes
that teachers and textbooks
overemphasize the perils of economicgrowth, pointed
out that more food was
available in 1990 than twenty years earlier.36
Simon pointed out how most
short-term predictions of shortages in everything
from whale oil in the last
century to silver in the 1990s have been
confuted by new technological
developments.37 To be sure, higher prices will
eventually make it profitable to
use extraordinary measures—steam pressure and the
like—to extract more oil.
In 1994 I faulted textbooks for not supplying
students with either side of this

debate and then encouraging them to think
about it. Not only did the books
ignore the looming problems, they also did not present
the adaptive capacities of
modern society. Authors should have shown trends
in the past that suggest we
face catastrophe and other trends that suggest
solutions. Doing so would
encourage students to use evidence from history to
reach their own conclusions.
Instead, authors assured us that everything will
come out right in the end, so we
need not worry much about where we are
going.38 Their endorsement of
progress was as shallow as General Electric’s, a
company that claims, “Progress
is our most important product,” but whose
ecological irresponsibility has
repeatedly earned it a place on Fortune’s
list of the ten worst corporate
environmental offenders.39
No longer do I suggest this evenhanded
approach. Even though Simon is right
and capitalismis supple, in at least two ways our
current crisis is new and cannot
be solved by capitalismalone. First, we face a
permanent energy shortage, only
beginning with an oil shortage. Such a shortage
leads toward oligopoly—a
“natural” cartel, not a forced cartel such as
John D. Rockefeller achieved with
Standard Oil around 1900—and cartels are not
good capitalism. If a handful of
companies controlled the manufacture of skis,
so they could get together and

charge whatever they wanted, someone might start
another company not bound
by their agreement or develop new,
cheaper materials for skis or invent the
snowboard—or we the public could stop buying
skis. But if a handful of
companies or countries control the oil industry, no
new producer can break in.
Moreover,no alternative can easily be developed
for petroleum in transportation.
Second, our use of oil (and all other fossil
fuels) has a serious worldwide
impact: global warming. As everyone now knows,
except some high school
history textbook authors, this warming melts the
polar ice caps, causing sea
levels to rise.Oceans rose one foot in the last
century. The most conservative
estimate, embraced by the George W. Bush
administration, predicts they will
rise another threefeet in this century. Around the
world—from Miami to Venice
to much of Bangladesh—hundreds of millions of
people live closeenough to sea
level that this rise will endanger their lives and
occupations. The resulting
dislocation will constitute the biggest crisis
mankind has faced since the
beginning of recorded history. And this is the most
pleasant estimate. If the
Greenlandice sheetmelts, the oceans may rise twenty-
threefeet. Scientist James

Lovelock in 1970 famously invented the “Gaia
hypothesis,” the idea that the
earthacts as a homeostatic system. Recently
Lovelock has pointed out that as the
earth’s equilibrium gets disturbed, some
disequilibrium processes may cause
even faster warming. As the polar ice capsmelt,
for example, they no longer
reflect the sun’s rays, so the earthabsorbs still
more heat. Lovelock predicts the
death of billions of people before equilibrium
is established once more. Global
warming also increases other weather problems:
the average windspeeds of
hurricanes have doubled in the past thirty
years, and they are also more
frequent.40
That’s not all. Evidence shows that carbon
dioxide, a normal result of burning
oil or coal, also makes the oceans more acidic.
Scientists warn that, by the end of
this century, this acidity could decimate coral
reefs and kill off creatures that
undergird the sea’s food chain. “It’s the
single most profound environmental
change I’ve learned about in my entire career,”
said Thomas Lovejoy, author of
Climate Change and Biodiversity. “What we’re
doing in the next decade will
affect our oceans for millions of years,” said
Ken Caldeira, oceanographer at
Stanford University.41
In addition to our energy and global-warming
crises, we face other severe

problems. Thousands of species face imminent
extinction. One list of likely
candidates includes a third of all amphibians, a
fourth of the world’s mammals,
and an eighth of its birds. Wilson thinks
the foregoing is optimistic and believes
two thirds of all species will perish before
the end of the century. Nuclear
proliferation poses another threat. In 1945 only
one country—the United States
—had the know-how and economic means to
buildnuclear weapons. Since then,
Great Britain, the USSR, France, China, India,
Pakistan, Israel, South Africa,
and apparently North Korea have joined the
nuclear club. If Pakistan and North
Korea can do it, clearly almost every nation
on earth—and some private
organizations, including terrorist groups—has the
capability. The United States
came uncomfortably close to using nuclear
weapons in Vietnam in 1969, and
Indiaand Pakistan cameuncomfortably closeto using
them against each otherin
2002.42
In the long run, just keeping to the old paths
regarding all thesenew problems
is unlikely to work. “From the mere fact
that humanity has survived to the
present, no hope for the future can be salvaged,”
Mishan noted. “The human race
can perish only once.”43 If the arguments in

this new edition of this chapter
seemskewed to favor the environmentalists, perhaps
the potential downside risk
if they are right, as well as the ominous
developments since the first edition,
make this bias appropriate. After all, history
reveals many previously vital
societies, from the Mayans and Easter Island to
Haiti and the Canaries, that
irreparably damaged their ecosystems.44
“Considering the beauty of the land,”
Christopher Columbus wrote on first seeing
Haiti, “there must be gain to be
got.” Columbus and the Spanish transformed the
island biologically by
introducing diseases, plants, and livestock. The
pigs, hunting dogs, cows, and
horses propagated quickly, causing tremendous
environmental damage. By 1550
the “thousands upon thousands of pigs” in the
Americas had all descendedfrom
the eightpigs that Columbus brought over in 1493.
“Although theseislands had
been, sinceGod made the earth, prosperous
and full of people lacking nothing
they needed,” a Spanish settler wrote in 1518,
after the Europeans’ arrival “they
were laid waste, inhabited only by wild animals and
birds.”45 Later, sugarcane
monoculture replaced gardening in the name of
quick profit, thereby
impoverishing the soil. More recently, population
pressure has caused Haitians
and Dominicans to farm the island’s steep
hillsides, resulting in erosion of the
topsoil. Today this island ecosystemthat formerly

supported a largepopulation
in relative equilibrium is in far worse
condition than when Columbus first saw it.
This sad story may be a prophecy for the future,
now that modern technology
has the power to make of the entire eartha
Haiti.
Not one textbook brings up the whale oil lesson,
the Haitilesson, or any other
inference from the past that might bear on the
question of progress and the
environment. In sum, although this issuemay be the
most important of our time,
no hint of its seriousness seeps into our history
textbooks. To my surprise,
today’s textbooks have actually gotten worse
than their predecessors about the
environment. Except for two passages in Pageant
and one in Journey, they say
nothing about environmental issues since the
Carter presidency. The 1970
invention of Earth Day, 1973 Arab oil embargo, and
1979 Iran hostage crisis are
the environmental events that get into our textbooks,
along with the
establishment of the Environmental Protection
Agency during the Nixon
administration. Fifteen more years have passed
since these events took place.
Since authors take no note of underlying trends
but only of flashy events, they
see no history to report in the interval. Putting

the energy crisis that much further
back in time,however, implies that it’s old news.
Moreover,the textbooks imply
that it has pretty much been fixed. “With
the help of the [National Energy] act,”
The Americans assures us in a typical
passage, “U.S. dependence on foreign oil
had eased slightly by 1979.” If so, 1979 was
unusual, because in 1975, before
Carter became president, the United States
imported 35 percent of its petroleum,
while in 2005 we imported 58 percent.
To expect textbooks published around 1990 to treat
global warming might not
be fair. In Atlantic Monthly in 2006, Gregg
Easterbrook noted that it had not
been proven:
Fifteen years ago, a thoughtful person looking
at global-warming studies
might have focused on the uncertainty; at
that time the National
Academy of Sciences itselfemphasized uncertainty.
Today a thoughtful
person who looks at recent science, including
recent National Academy
of Sciences statements, must deduce thereis a
danger.
Easterbrook described himself as “skeptical,” then
“gradually persuaded by the
evidence. Inuits living in the Arctic strongly
agree; they warn that the entire
ecosystem there is in collapse. Every year
between 1997 and 2005 was one of

the ten hottest ever recorded; 2005 set a record.”46
So how do today’s textbooks treat what
may be the most important single
issueof our time? Here is every word on the
subject in all six textbooks, except
for a passage at the very end of Pageant that
we will analyze at the end of this
chapter:
At the outset of the 21st century, developments
like global warming
served dramatic notice that planet earth was
the biggest ecological
system of them all—one that did not recognize
national boundaries. Yet
while Americans took pridein the efforts they
had made to clean up their
own turf, who were they, having long sinceconsumed much
of their own
timberlands, to tell the Brazilians that they should
not cut down the
Amazon rain forest?
—The American Pageant
Although no one is sure what causes global
warming, a United Nations
report warned that air pollution could be a
factor.
—The American Journey

Here Pageant implies that Third World countries
form the bulk of the problem,
although the United States contributes almost 25
percent of all CO2 emissions,
far more than any othernation. Journey hedges: air
pollution “could be a factor.”
And four books never mention the subject.47
Why are textbook treatments of environmental issues
so feeble? If authors
revised their closing pages to jettison the
unthinking devotion to progress, their
final chapters would sit in uneasy dissonance
with earlier chapters. Their tone
throughout might have to change. From
their titles on, American history
textbooks are celebratory, and the idea of progress
legitimates the 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 usurpation and Negro
debauchery fits with the upward curve
of progress, for if relations were bad in
Reconstruction, perhaps not as bad as in
slavery but surely worse than what came later,
then we can imagine that race
relations have gradually been getting better.
However, the facts about
Reconstruction compel us to acknowledge that in
many ways race relations in
this country have yet to return to the pointreached
in, say, 1870. In that year, to
take a small but symbolic example, A. T.

Morgan, a white state senator from
Hinds County, Mississippi, married Carrie
Highgate, a black woman from New
York, and was reelected.48 Today this probably
could not happen, not in Hinds
County, Mississippi, or in many counties
throughout the United States.
Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts
many white Americans to
conclude that black Americans have no legitimate
claim on our attention today
because the problem of race relations has surely
been ameliorated.49
A. T. Morgan’s marriage is hard for us to make
sense of, because Americans
have so internalized the cultural archetype of
progress that by now we have a
built-in tendency to assume that we are more
tolerant, more sophisticated, more,
well, progressive than we were in the past. Even a
trivial illustration—Abraham
Lincoln’s beard—can teach us otherwise. In
1860 a clean-shaven Lincoln won
the presidency; in 1864, with a beard, he
was reelected. Could that happen
nowadays? Today many institutions, from
investment banking firms to Brigham
Young University, are closed to white males
with facial hair. No white
presidential candidate or successfulSupreme Court
nominee has ventured even a
mustache sinceTom Dewey in 1948. Beards may

not in themselves be signsof
progress, although mine has subtly improved my
thinking, but we have reached
an arresting state of intolerance when the huge
Disney corporation, founded by a
man with a mustache, will not allow any
employee to wear one. On a more
profound note, consider that Lincoln was also the last
American president who
was not a member of a Christian denomination
when taking office. Americans
may not be becoming more tolerant; we may only
think we are. Thus, the
ideology of progress amounts to a chronological
form of ethnocentrism.
Not only does the siren song of progress lull us into
thinking that everything
now is more “advanced,” it also tempts us to
conclude that societies long ago
were more primitive than they may have been.
Progress underlies the various
unilinear evolutionary schemes into which our society
used to classify peoples
and cultures: savagery-barbarism-civilization, for
example, or gathering-hunting-
horticultural-agricultural-industrial. Under the influence of
these schemes,
scholars completely misconceived “primitive”
humans as living lives that, as
Hobbes put it, were “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Only “higher” cultures were
conceived of as having sufficient leisure to develop
art, literature, or religion.

The United States was founded in a spirit of
dominion over nature. “My family, I
believe, have cut down more trees in
America than any other name!” boasted
John Adams. Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War
general, spoke for most
Americans of his day when he observed in
1792, “Civilization directs us to
remove as fast as possible that natural growth
from the lands.” The Adams-
Lincoln mode of thought did make possible
America’s rapid expansion to the
Pacific, the Chicago school of architecture, and
Henry Ford’s assembly line. Our
growing environmental awareness casts a colder light on
theseaccomplishments,
however. Since 1950 more than 25 percent of the
remaining forests on the planet
have been cut down. Recognizing that trees
are the lungs of the planet, few
people still thinkthat this represents progress.
Anthropologists have long known better.
“Despite the theories traditionally
taught in high school social studies,” pointed
out anthropologist PeterFarb, “the
truth is, the more primitive the society, the more
leisured its way of life.” 50
Thus “primitive” cultures were hardly “nasty.” As to
“brutish,” we might recall
the comparison of the peaceful Arawaks on Haiti
and the Spanish conquistadors
who subdued them. “Short” is also problematic.
Before encountering the
diseases brought by Europeans and Africans, many

people in Australia, the
Pacific islands, and the Americas probably enjoyed
remarkable longevity,
particularly when compared with European and African
city dwellers. “They live
a long life and rarely fall sick,” observed
Giovanni da Verrazano, after whom the
VerrazanoNarrows and bridge in New York City are
named.51 “The Indians be
of lusty and healthful bodies not experimentally
knowing the Catalogue of those
health-wasting diseases which are incident to other
Countries,” according to a
very early New England colonist, who apparently
ignored the recently
introduced European diseases that were then laying
waste the Native Americans.
He reported that the Indians lived to “three-
score, four-score, some a hundred
years, before the world’s universal summoner
cites them to the craving
Grave.”52 In Maryland, another early settler
marveled that many Indians were
great-grandfathers, while in England few people
survived to become
grandparents. 53 The first Europeans to meet
Australian aborigines noted a range
of ages that implied a goodly number livedto be
seventy. For that matter, Psalm
90 in the Bible implies that thousands of
years ago most people in the Middle
East livedto be seventy: “The years of our lives
are threescore and ten, and if by
reason of strength they be four score, yet is
their laborsorrow . . .”54

Besides fostering ignorance of past societies, belief
in progress makes
students oblivious to merit in present-day
societies other than our own. To
conclude that othercultures have achieved little about
which we need to know is
a natural side effect of believing our society
the most progressive. Anthropology
professorsdespair of the severe ethnocentrism shown
by many first-year college
students. William A. Haviland, author of a popular
anthropology textbook, says
that in his experience the possibility that “some
of the things that we aspire to
today—equal treatment of men and women, to cite
but one example—have in
fact been achieved by some other peoples
simply has never occurred to the
average beginning undergraduate.”55 Few high
schools offer anthropology
courses, and fewer than one American in ten ever
takesa college anthropology
course, so we can hardly count on
anthropology to reduce ethnocentrism. High
school history and social studies courses could
help open students to ideasfrom
other cultures. That does not happen, however,
because the idea of progress
saturates thesecourses from Columbus to their final words.
Therefore, they can
only promote, not diminish, ethnocentrism. Yet ethnocentric
faith in progress in
Western culture has had disastrous consequences. People
who believed in their

society as the vanguard of the future, the most
progressive on earth, have been
all too likely to indulge in such excessive
cruelties as the Pequot massacre,
Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust, or the Great
Leap Forward.
Rather than assuming that our ways must be best,
textbook authors would do
well to challenge students to think about
practices from the American way of
birth to the American way of death. Some
elements of modern medicine, for
instance, are inarguably more effective and based
on far better theory than
previous medicines. On the otherhand, our
“scientific” antigravity way of birth,
which dominated delivery rooms in the United
States from about 1930 to at least
1970, shows the influence of the idea of
progress at its most laughable. The
analogy for childbirth was an operation: the doctor
anesthetized the mother and
removed the anesthetized infant like a gall
bladder.56 Even as late as 1992, only
half of all women who gave birth in U.S. hospitals
breast-fed their babies, even
though we now know, as “primitive” societies
never forgot, that human milk, not
bovine milk or “formula,” is designed for human
babies.57 If history textbooks
relinquished their blinddevotion to the archetype of
progress, they could invite
readers to assess technologies as to which
have truly been progressive. Defining
progress would itself become problematic.

Alternative forms of social
organization, made possible or perhaps even
necessary by technological and
economic developments, could also be considered.
Today’s children may see the
decline of the nation-state, for instance, because
the problem of the planetary
commons may force planetary decision-making or
because growing tribalism
may fragment many nations from within.58 The
closing chapters of history
textbooks might become inquiry exercises,
directing students toward facts and
readings on both sides of such issues. Surely
such an approach would prepare
students for their six decades of life after
high school better than today’s
mindlessly upbeat textbook endings.
Thoughtfulnessabout such matters as the quality
of life is often touted as a
goal of education in the humanities, but history
textbooks sweep such topics
under the brightly colored rug of progress.
Textbooks manifest no real worries
even about the environmental downside of our
economic and scientific
institutions. Instead, they stress the fortunate
adequacy of our government’s
reaction. Textbook authors seem much happier
telling of the governmental
response—mainly the creation of the Environmental
ProtectionAgency—than

discussing any continuing environmental problems.
By far the most serious
treatment of our future in any of the new
textbooks is this passage on the next to
last page of The American Pageant:
Environmental worries clouded the country’s future.
Coal-firedelectrical
generating plants helped form acid rain and
probably contributed to the
greenhouse effect, an ominous warming of the
planet’s temperature. The
unsolved problem of radioactive waste disposal
hampered the
development of nuclear power plants. The planet
was being drained of
oil. . . .
By the earlytwenty-first century, the once-lonely
cries for alternative
fuel sources had given way to mainstream public
fascination with solar
power and windmills, methane fuel, electric
“hybrid” cars, and the
pursuit of an affordable hydrogen fuel cell. Energy
conservation
remained another crucial but elusive strategy—much-
heralded at the
politician’s rostrum, but too rarely embodied in
public policy. . . .
Although hardly a wake-up call, at least those
words raise the issues and do not
imply that they are nothing to worry about.
Unfortunately, on the next page—its last page—Pageant

blandly reassures:
“In facing those challenges, the world’s oldest
republic had an extraordinary
tradition of resilience and resourcefulness to draw
on.” Many students are not so
easily reassured. According to a 1993 survey,
children are much more concerned
about the environment than are their parents.59 In
the late 1980s about one high
school senior in three thought that nuclear or
biological annihilation will
probably be the fate of all mankind within their
lifetimes.60 “I have talked with
my friends about this,” a student of mine
wrote in her class journal. “We all
agree that we feel as if we are not going to
finish our adultlives.” A survey of
high school seniors in 1999 found that almost
half believed the “bestyears of the
United States were behind us.”61 These
students had all taken American history
courses, but the textbooks’ regimen of positive
thinking does not seemto have
rubbed off on them. Students know when
they are being conned. They sense that
underneath the mindless optimism is a
defensiveness that rings hollow. Or
maybe they simply never reached the cheerful
endings of their textbooks.
Probably the principal effect of the textbook
whitewash of environmental
issues in favor of the idea of progress is to

persuade high school students that
American history courses are not appropriate places
to bring up the future course
of American history.62 What is perhaps the key
issueof the day will have to be
discussed in otherclasses—maybe science or
health—even though it is foremost
a social rather than biological or health issue.
Meanwhile, back in history class,
thereare more bland, data-free assurances that things
are getting better.
E. J. Mishan has suggested that feeding
students rosy tales of automatic
progress helps keep them passive, for it
presents the future as a process over
which they have no control.63I don’t believe
this is why textbooks end as they
do, however. Their upbeat endings may best be
understood as ploys by
publishers who hope that nationalist optimism will
get their books adopted.
Moreover,they know that Republicans have descended
from the partyof Nixon
—when they passed the Environmental ProtectionAct—to
the partyof George
W. Bush, where big business, especially oil,
directs our environmental and
energy policies. In today’s political climate
publishersmay worry that to suggest
that global warming or energy shortages are real
threats may be taken as partisan
Democratic history. Hence, they may lose adoptions.
Such happy endings in our history books really

amount to concessions of defeat,
however. By implying that no real questions about
our future need be asked and
no real thinking about trends in our history
need be done, textbook authors
concede implicitly that our history has no serious
bearing on our future. We can
hardly fault students for concluding that the study
of history is irrelevant to their
futures.
12.
WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS?
I do not know if there is any other field
of knowledge
which suffers so badly as history from
the sheer blind
repetitions that occur year after year, and from book to
book.
—HERBERT BUTTERFIELD 1
There is no other country in the world
where there is
such a large gap between the sophisticated
understanding of some professional historians and
the
basiceducation given by teachers.

—MARC FERRO2
When you’re publishing a book, if there’s
something
that is controversial, it’s better to take it out.
—HOLT, RINEHART ANDWINSTON
REPRESENTATIVE3
They hired somebody. I don’t remember
the man’s
name.
—BROOKS MATHER KELLEY, COAUTHOR, A
HISTORY OF THE UNITED
STATES, EXPLAINING WHO REALLY WROTE ITS
LAST CHAPTER4
Here’s $3,000 for a freelance writer, and our
editorial
staff will take it from there. . . . They
pick things up
pretty quickly, and in a couple of days,
they’re up on
the CivilWar.
—VETERAN EDITOR OF HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY
TEXTBOOKS5

ELEVEN CHAPTERS HAVE SHOWN that textbooks
supply irrelevant and
even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal
questions and facts in their
treatments of issues ranging from Columbus’s
second voyage to the possibility
of impending ecocide. We have also seen that history
textbooks offer students no
practice in applying their understanding of the past to
present concerns, hence no
basis for thinking rationally about anything in
the future. Reality gets lost as
authors stray further and further from the
primary sources and even the
secondary literature. Textbooks rarely present
the various sides of historical
controversies and almost never reveal to
students the evidence on which each
side bases its position. The textbooks are
unscholarly in other ways. Of the
eighteen I studied, only the two oldest, published
back in the 1970s, contain any
footnotes.6 Ten textbooks even deny students a
bibliography.
Despite heavy criticisms by scholars,7 new editions of
the old texts come out
year after year, largely unchanged. Year after year, clones
appear, allegedly by
new authors but with nearly identical covers, titles,
and contents. What explains
such appalling uniformity?
The textbooks must be satisfying somebody.
Publishers produce textbooks with several

audiences in mind. One is their
intended readers: students. Their characteristics, as
publishers perceive them,
particularly affect reading level and page layout,
and we will return to this point.
Historians and professors of education are
another audience, perhaps two
audiences. Teachers comprise another, and their
characteristics and wants we
will also review. Conceptions of the general public
also enter publishers’
thinking, sincepublic opinion influencesadoption
committees and sinceparents
represent a potential interest group that publishers
seek not to arouse.
Some members of the public have not been
shy about what they want
textbooks to do. In 1925 the American Legion
declaimed that the ideal textbook:
must inspire the children with patriotism . . .
must be careful to tell the truth optimistically . .
.
must dwell on failure only for its value as a
moral lesson, must speak
chiefly of success . . .
must give each State and Section full space
and value for the
achievements of each.8

By contrast, in 1986 Shirley Engle and Anna
Ochoa, longtime luminaries of
social studies education, voiced very different
recommendations for textbooks.
From their vantage point, the ideal textbook should:
confront students with important questions and
problems for which
answers are not readily available;
be highly selective;
be organized around an important problem in society
that is to be studied
in depth;
utilize . . . data from a variety of
sources such as history, the social
sciences, literature, journalism, and from
students’ first-hand
experiences.9
Today’s textbooks hew closely to the American Legion
line and disregard the
recommendations of Engle and Ochoa. Why?
Is the secondary literature in history to blame?
We can hardly expect textbook
authors to return to primary sources and dig
out facts that are truly obscure. A
few decades back, the secondary literature in
history was quite biased. Until
World War II, history, much more than the other
social sciences, was overtly
anti-Semitic and antiblack. According to PeterNovick,
whose book That Noble

Dream is the best recent account of the history
profession, looking at every
white college and university in America, exactly
one black was ever employed
to teach history before 1945.10 Most
historians were males from privileged
white families. They wrote with blinders on.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. found
himself able to write an entire book on
the presidency of Andrew Jackson
without ever mentioning perhaps the foremost issue
Jackson dealt with as
president: the removal of American Indians from
the Southeast. What’s more,
Schlesinger’s book won the Pulitzer Prize!11
These days, however, the secondary literature in
American history is much
more comprehensive. Indeed, every chapter of
this book has been based on
commonly available research. Competent historians
will find nothing new here.
The information is all there, in the secondary
literature, but has not made its way
into our textbooks, educational media, or
teacher-training programs, and
therefore hasn’t reached our schools.12 As a
consequence, according to
comparative historian Marc Ferro, the United
States has wound up with the
largest gap of any country in the world
between what historians know and what
the rest of us are taught.13

Could these omissions be a question of
professional judgment? Textbook
authors cannot include every event. The past is
immense. No book claims to be
complete. Decisions must be made. What is
important? What is appropriate for a
given age level? Perhaps teachers should devote
no time at all to Helen Keller,
no matter how heroic she was.
But when we lookat what textbooks do
include—when we contemplate the
minute details, someof them false, that they foist
upon us about Columbus, for
example—we have to think again. Constraints
of time and space cannot be
causing textbooks to leave out any discussion
of what Columbus did with the
Americas or how Europe came to dominate the
world, since these issues are
among the most vital in all the broad sweep of
the past.
Perhaps an upper-class conspiracy is to blame.
Perhaps we are all dupes,
manipulated by elite white male capitalists
who orchestrate how history is
written as part of their scheme to perpetuate
their own power and privilege at the
expense of the rest of us. Certainly high school
history textbooks are so similar
that they look as if they might all have been
produced by the same executive
committee of the bourgeoisie. In 1984, George
Orwell was clear about who

determines the way history is written: “Who
controls the present controls the
past.”14
The symbolic representation of a society’s past is
particularly important in
stratified societies. The United States is stratified, of
course, by social class, by
race, and by gender. Some sociologists think
that social inequality motivates
people, prompting harder work and more innovative
performance. It does, but
stratification is also intrinsically unfair, because
those with more money, status,
and influence use their advantage to get still
more, for themselves and their
children. In a society marked by inequality,
people who have endured less-than-
equal opportunities may become restive. Members of
favored groups may
become ashamed of the unfairness, unable to
defend it to the oppressed or even
to themselves. To maintain a stratified system, it
is terribly important to control
how people think about that system. Marx
advanced this analysis under the
rubric false consciousness. How people thinkabout
the past is an important part
of their consciousness. If members of the elite come
to thinkthat their privilege
was historically justified and earned, it will be
hard to persuade them to yield
opportunity to others. If members of deprived

groups come to think that their
deprivation is their own fault, then therewill be no
need to use forceor violence
to keep them in their places.
“Textbooks offer an obvious means of
realizing hegemony in education,”
according to William L. Griffen and John
Marciano, who analyzed textbook
treatment of the Vietnam War.
By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence
that dominant classes
or groups exercise by virtue of their control
of ideological institutions,
such as schools, that shape perception on such
vital issues as the Vietnam
War. . . . Within history texts, for
example, the omission of crucial facts
and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in
which students come to
view history events. Further, through their one-
dimensionality textbooks
shield students from intellectual encounters
with their world that would
sharpen their critical abilities.15
Here, in polite academic language, Griffen and
Marciano tell us that controlling
elements of our society keep crucial facts from us to
keep us ignorant and stupid.
Mostscholars of education share this perspective,
oftenreferred to as “critical
theory.”16 Jonathan Kozol is of this school
when he writes, “School is in

business to produce reliable people.”17 Paulo
Freire of Brazil puts it this way: “It
would be extremely naïve to expect the
dominant classes to develop a type of
education that would enable subordinate classes to
perceive social injustices
critically.”18 Henry Giroux, Freire’s leading
disciple in the United States,
maintains, “The dominant culture actively functions to
suppress the development
of a critical historical consciousness among the
populace.”19 David Tyack and
Elisabeth Hansot tell us when this all started:
between 1890 and 1920
businessmen cameto have by far a greater impact
on public education than any
otheroccupational group or stratum.20 Some
writers on education even conclude
that upper-class control makes real improvement
impossible. In a critique of
educational reform initiatives, Henry M. Levin
stated, “The educational system
will always be applied toward serving the role of
cultural transmission and
preserving the status quo.”21 “The public
schools we have today are what the
powerful and the considerable have made of them,”
wrote Walter Karp. “They
will not be redeemed by trifling reforms.”22
These education writers take their cue from
an even weightier school of
thought in social science, the power elite

theorists. This school has shown that an
upper class does exist in America, and
its members can be found at elegant
private clubs, gatherings of the Trilateral
Commission, and board meetings of
the directors of the multinational corporations. Rich
capitalistscontrol the major
TV networks, most newspapers, and all textbook-
publishing companies, and thus
possess immense power to frame the way we
talk and thinkabout current events.
And on occasion they use it. ExxonMobil, for
example, by somemeasures the
world’s largest corporation, gave $6 million over
the last decade to the National
Science Teachers Association, chump change to
Exxon but a bonanza to the
teachers. As a result, NSTA initially refused
fifty thousand free copies of Al
Gore’s video about global warming, An
Inconvenient Truth—which was the
Motion Picture Academy winner for “Best
Documentary”—citing “unnecessary
risk upon the capital campaign” if they accepted.
NSTA does distribute a video
by the American Petroleum Institute that a
Washington Post reporter calls “a
shameless pitchfor oil dependence.” So money
corrupts.23
Nevertheless, it is inappropriate to lay this
particular bundle on the doorstep of
the upper class. To blame the power elite
for what is taught in a rural Vermont
school or an inner-city classroom is too
easy. If the elite is so dominant, why

hasn’t it also censored the books and articles
that expose its influence in
education? Paradoxically, critical theory cannot
explain its own popularity. Any
upper class worth its salt—so dominant and so
monolithic that it determines how
American history is taught in almost every
American classroom—must also have
the power to marginalize those social
scientists who expose it. But the upper
class has hardly kept critical theory out of
education. On the contrary, critical
theorists dominate scholarship in the field. Their
books get prominently
published and well reviewed; education professorsassign
them to thousands of
students every year.
The upper class controls publishing, to be sure,
but its control does not extend
to content, at least not if the books in
question make money. Robert Heilbroner
has pointed out that no matter what is done in
America, members of the upper
class usually have a hand in it, but their
participation does not mean that they
directed the action, nor that it was in their class’s
interest.24 Many of the books
that criticize American education are published by
companies that also put out
the textbooks they criticize. One of the glories of
capitalismis that somewhere
thereare publisherswho will publish almost any book,
so long as they stand to

make a profit from it. If the upper class
forces the omission of “crucial facts and
viewpoints,” then why has it failed to censor
the entire marvelous secondary
literature in American history—which occasionally even
breaks into prime-time
public television in series like Eyes on the
Prize, an account of the civil rights
movement. The upper class seems to be falling
down on the job.
The elite has also apparently lost control of the
landscape. Across America,
new, more accurate historical markers and monuments
are going up. In Alabama
and Illinois, for example, new markers give tourists a
good sense of the “Trail of
Tears” of the Cherokees and Choctaws.A new
monument in Duluth, Minnesota,
tells of the tragic day in the nadirof race
relations when whites lynched three
black circus workers. American Indians have created
new museums, such as the
Pequot Museum in Connecticut that tells the full
story of the tribe, including
their partial annihilation by the Pilgrims, their
survival through the nadir, and
their successful new casino. The Museum of the
Confederacy in Richmond,
Virginia, mounted its first-ever exhibit on slavery,
which included chains, torture
devices, and a resulting book that did not
minimize the inhumanity of the
institution.25 Perhaps we must conclude, mixing a
metaphor, that the power elite
did not have its thumb in every pie.

Interestingly, the upper class may not even control
what is taught in its “own”
history classrooms. Graduates of elite “prep” schools
are more likely than public
school graduates to have encountered high school
history teachers who
challenged them and diverged from rote use of
textbooks. Such teachers’ success
in teaching “subversively” in the bellyof the upper
class should hearten us to
believe that it can be done anywhere.26 On
the other hand, if textbooks are
devised by the upper class to manipulate
youngsters to support the status quo,
they hardly seemto be succeeding. Instead of
revering Columbus et al., students
wind up detesting history. Evidence suggests that history
textbooks and courses
make little impact in increasing trust in
the United States or inducing good
citizenship, however theseare measured.27
In sum, power elite theories seem to
explain everything but may explain
nothing. They may credit the upper class with more
power, unity, and conscious
self-interest than it has. Indeed, regarding its alleged
influence on American
history textbooks, the upper class may be a
scapegoat. Blaming the power elite is
comforting. Power elite theory offers tidy
explanations: educational institutions

cannot reform because to do so is not in
that class’s interest, so the upper class
prevents change. Accordingly, power elite theory
may create a world more
satisfying and more coherent in evil than the real world
with which we are all
complicit. Power elite theories thus absolve the rest of
us from seeing that all of
us participate in the process of cultural
distortion. This line of thought not only
excuses us from responsibility for the sorry
state of American history as
currently taught, it also frees us from the
responsibility for changing it. What’s
the use? Any action we might take would be
inconsequential by definition.
Upper-class control may not be necessary to
explain textbook
misrepresentation, however. Special pressures in the
world of textbook
publishing may account to some extent for
the uniformity and dullness of
American history textbooks. Almost half the states
have textbook adoption
boards. Some of these boards function
explicitly as censors, making sure that
books not only meet criteria for length, coverage,
and reading level, but also that
they avoid topics and treatments that might
offend someparents. States without
such boards are not necessarily freer of
censorship, for their screeningusually
takesplace on the local level, where concern
about giving offense can be even
more immediate. Moreover, states without

textbook boards constitute smaller
markets, sincepublishersmust win approval at the
individual district or school
level. Therefore, states without boards have
less influence on publishers, who
orient their best efforts toward the largestates
with adoption boards. California
and Texas, in particular, directly affect
publishers and textbooks because they
are large markets with statewide adoption and active
lobbying groups. Schools
and districts in nonadoption states must choose
among books designed for the
larger markets.28
Textbook adoption processes are complex.29 Some
states, such as Tennessee,
accept almost every book that meets certain
basic criteria for binding, reading
level, and subject matter. Tennesseeschools then
select from among perhaps a
dozen books, usually making district-wide
decisions.30 At the other extreme,
Alabama used to adopt just one book per
subject for the entire state. State
textbook boards are usually small committees
whose members have been
appointed by the governor or the state
commissioner of education. They are
volunteers who may be teachers, lawyers, parents, or
otherconcerned citizens.
The dailywork of the textbook board is typically
performedby a small staff that

begins by circulating specifications that tell
publishersthe grade levels, physical
requirements (size, binding, and the like), and
guidelines as to content for all
subjects in which they next plan to adopt
textbooks. Publishers respond by
sending books and ancillary materials. Meanwhile
the board, with inputfrom the
person(s) who appointed them and sometimes with
staff input as well, sets up
rating committees in each subject area—for
instance, high school American
history. The staff holds orientation meetings
for these rating committees,
explains the forms used for rating the textbooks,
and then sends the books to the
raters.
Usually one formal meeting is set up for
publishers’ representatives to address
the rating committees. Large states may hold
several meetings in different parts
of the state. At thesemeetings the representatives
emphasize the ways in which
their books excel. For the most part representatives
push form, not content: they
tout special features of layout, art work, “skills
building,” and ancillary material
such as videos and exams.
Rating committees face a Herculean task.
Remember that the recent books I
examined average 1,150 pages. In a single
summer, raters cannot even read all
the books, let alone compare them
meaningfully. Raters also wrestle with an

average of seventy-three different rating criteria
that they are supposed to apply
to each book—an Augean stable. Since they have
time only to flip through most
books, they look for easy readability, newness, a
stunning colorcover, appealing
design, color illustrations, and ancillaries such
as audiovisual materials, ready-
made teaching aids, and test questions.
Ancillaries can be critical. Many
teachers, especially those with little background,
depend on them. Publishers
supply complete lecture outlines, little stories to
add colorto the basicnarrative,
and websites with “animated maps” and “infographics,” to
quote a McDougal-
Littell brochure. Test questions are especially
important. Many teachers have
neither time nor knowledge to make up their
own unit tests, having 120 students
in four sections of the course. Thus, a
discussion group of teachers of advanced-
placement U.S. history courses was notified in fall
2006 that some teacher
somewhere had posted questions and answers from
the test bank that
accompanies The American Pageant. “To say the least
this is quitedistressing,”
wrote a teacher in alarm. “I have e-mailed
the teacher in question and asked him
to remove the links ASAP.”31
Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing

lures: the pointis
to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus, many
adopted textbooks are flashy to catch
the eye of adoption committees but dull when
read by students. The American
Journey, the new seventh-grade textbook by Joyce
Appleby, Alan Brinkley, and
James McPherson, exemplifies the problem. It is
disjointed to the point of
incoherence. Perhaps in response to the alleged
shortattention spans of today’s
students, the layout department at McGraw-Hill
has run amok. Consider what
should be a compact, interesting chapter: “World
War II.” This chapter begins
with a star in a box containing a paragraph
titled “Why It’s Important.” Another
star in a box introduces five “Chapter Themes.” A
theme, we learn in the
beginning of the book under the heading “How
Can I Remember Everything?” is
“a concept, or main idea, that happens again
and again throughout history.”
Whether a concept or idea “happens” is dubious, as
is whether such themes as
“continuity and change” can help anyone remember
anything. As we read the
first section, “Road to War,” for example, how
does it help us to know that it fits
under the theme “continuity and change”? What
doesn’t?
Then, highlighted by a star in a rectangle
titled “History and Art,”comes the
title “Embarkation, San Francisco, California,” for a
painting by Barse Miller. It

is captioned, “World War II American soldiers
believed they were fighting for
what President Roosevelt called the Four
Freedoms: freedom of speech and
expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want,
and freedom from fear.” As
a historical statement, that caption is
questionable, showing none of the
sophistication one of the authors, James McPherson,
brought to his book For
Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the
CivilWar. The next page brings a
time line of the 1930s with only four events on
it: Japan invades Manchuria,
Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany, Italy
invades Ethiopia, and Germany
seizes Czechoslovakia. At the risk of suggesting
more cluttering, plenty of room
remains for more entries, such as
Kristallnacht, the 1938 event that launched
Germany’s pogrom against the Jews.
Even the graphics get ruined by the busyness of
modern textbooks. On the next
page after World War II in The American Journey,
we see Norman Rockwell’s
famous painting The Problem We All Live With,
showing a black girl dressed in
her Sunday best for her first day of school, with
federal marshals walking before
and after her. Only we don’t see it well. The
illustration is overlaid by an ad for a
1957 Chevrolet, a button for the United Farm
Workers grape boycott, and a hat.

Its power is further vitiated by the unfortunate
layout: the designer has moved it
into the crease between pages to make room
for the caption “Vietnam veteran’s
hat.” (Showing their own attention deficit disorder, the
authors give us another
“Vietnam veteran’s hat” with the same caption,
superimposed over another
image, a hundred pages later.) This placement
cuts out much of the forward
marshal and makes the girl appear to be
marching into the page crease.
Then comes a heading, “Section 1,” in a little
golden egg, and “Road to War.”
Still the chapter does not start; first we have
a summary headed “Read to
Discover . . .” followed by threetopics. (I
would call them themes, except that
term has already been usurped.) Then we have five “Terms
to Learn.” They are
followed by a heading, “The Storyteller,” which
introduces a paragraph by
William Shirer about a Nazi rally. At last,
after a photograph of the book jacket
of MeinKampf, we finally begin the narrative
text about World War II. In all,
about 55 percent of the World War II
chapter is not the narrative text, but
interruptions to it. Some of thesesidebars and
boxes offer excerpts from original
sources or useful vignettes. Others are less than
useful “Activities” and “Terms
to Learn.” Overall, they distract. Since the
narrative text comprises less than half

of the whole, often it looks lost on the
page, becoming just one more
interruption.
Could this jumble be necessary? Millions of
middle-schoolers have read Harry
Potter books voluntarily. Yet each book contains
hundreds of pairs of facing text
pages with no illustrations, no sidebars—nothing
but the main story. Cluttering
every page with “Multimedia Activities,” “The
Storyteller,” and “Terms to
Learn” seems aimed at textbook adoption
committees rather than actual readers.
The narrative looks more readable than Harry
Potter but is actually far less
readable.
Moving beyond style, what content do adopters
want to see? First off, they
look for nice treatments of events and people
important to their own state. In
New Hampshire, woe to the textbook that speaks
honestly about Franklin W.
Pierce, famed fourteenth president of these
United States. He was perhaps our
second-worst president ever, as he presided over near
civil war in Kansas, had
his diplomats gather to produce the
embarrassing Ostend Manifesto (which
threatened to take Cuba; eventually the U.S.
StateDepartment had to disavow
the document), and was drunk much of the
time.But he was the only president

New Hampshire ever produced. Likewise, the Alamo
lies deep in the heart of
(Anglo) Texans; woe to any textbook that might
pointout that love of slavery
motivated Anglos to fight there for “freedom.”
Some local demands make for
more inclusive history: California’s legislature
recently debated a bill to require
textbooks to include the internment of Japanese
Americans during World War
II.32
Usually adopters find the details they seek.Most
textbook editors start their
careers in publishing as sales representatives.
They are not historians, but they
know their market. They make sure their books
include whatever is likely to be
of concern. Everything gets mentioned. Lynne
Cheney, former director of the
National Endowment for the Humanities, decried
the result: “Textbooks come to
seemlike glossaries of historical events—compendiums of
topics.” 33 In recent
years, even more has to get mentioned, owing
to the multiple-choice tests that
many states have concocted to comply
with the No Child Left Behind Act.
Teachers will always teach to a test, especially a
high-stakes test that results in
students not getting diplomas or schools being
placed on probation. Multiple-
choice exams almost have to test “twig
history”—tiny factoids like “When did
the War of 1812 begin?”34 No Child Left
Behind does not require multiple-

choice tests in history. Indeed, it does not require
any tests in history. Teachers
have learned to their sorrow, however, that the only
thingworse than a multiple-
choice test in history is no test in history,
for then a school district de-
emphasizes history entirely, focusing instead on
those subjects that are tested.
There is an answer to this conundrum,
however, and somestates have found it:
develop a test—or portfolio or other
instrument—worth teaching to. In the
meantime,however, NCLB and the statewide exams it
has spawned provide one
more reason for textbooks to growlonger and
teachers to use them haplessly.
In some states the next step is hearings, at
which the public is invited to
comment on books under consideration by the
rating committees. In Texas and
California, at least, these hearings are
occasions at which organized groups
attack or promote one or more of the selections,
often contending that a book
fails to meet a requirement found within
the regulations or specifications.
Although publishers lament the procedure, critics,
particularly in Texas, have
unearthed and forced publishersto correct hundreds of
errors, from misspellings
to major blunders. Since adoption committees do
try to please constituents, those

who complain at hearings oftenmake a difference,
for better and sometimes for
worse.
Adoption states used to pressure publishersovertly to
espouse certain points
of view. For years any textbook sold in Dixie
had to call the CivilWar “the War
between the States.” Earlier editions of The
American Pageant used the even
more pro-Confederate term “the War for Southern
Independence.” This is
simply bad history. Between 1861 and 1865 while it
was going on, the CivilWar
was called “the CivilWar,” “the Rebellion,” or
“the Great Rebellion”—hence
“rebels.” But Pageant did “exceptionally well” in
Southern states, so who cares?
Only after the civil rights movementdid Pageant
revert to “the CivilWar.”35
Alabama law used to require that schools avoid
“textbooks containing anything
partisan, prejudicial, or inimical to the interests of
the [white] people of the
State” or that would “cast a reflection
on their past history.”36 Texas still
requires that “textbooks shall not contain
material which serves to undermine
authority.” 37 Such standards are astounding in
their breadth and might force
drastic cuts in almost every chapter of every
textbook, except that authors have
already omitted most unpleasantries and controversies.
Many states have rewritten their textbook
specifications to strike such blatant

content requirements. Since at least 1970
Mississippi’s regulations, for example,
have consisted of a series of clichés with which
no reasonable textbook author or
critic could disagree. Publishers might be
forgiven if they believe that the spirit
of the old regulations still survives, however, for
the initial rejection of
Mississippi: Conflict and Change proves that it
does. I was senior author of the
book, a revisionist state history text finally
published by Pantheon Books in
1974. I say “finally” because Pantheon brought it
out only after eleven other
publishers refused. The problem wasn’t with the quality
of the manuscript,
which won the Lillian Smith Award for best
Southern nonfictionthat year. The
problem was that tradepublisherssaid they could not
publish a textbook, while
textbook publisherssaid they could not publish a
book so unlikely to be adopted.
Some publishers even feared that Mississippi
might retaliate against their
textbooks in other subjects. Textbook publishers
proved partly right—the
textbook board refused to allow our book. It
contained too much “black history,”
included a photograph of a lynching, and gave
too much attention to the recent
past, according to the white majority on the rating
committee. My coauthors and
I, joined by threeschool systems that wanted to

adopt the book, sued the state in
a First Amendment challenge,Loewen et al. v.
Turnipseed et al., and in 1980 got
the book on the state’s approved list.
Despite the value of Turnipseed as a
precedent, publishersstill fear right-wing
criticism. And with reason. In 2006 Florida passed a
law that states, “The history
of the United States shall be taught as genuine
history and shall not follow the
revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of
relative truth. . . . American history
shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.”
This law is meant as a shot across
the bow of “liberal” professors who “interpret”
the past rather than “telling it
like it was.” Its authors have no understanding
that any telling of history requires
choices as to what is included and what is left
out and is therefore by definition
an interpretation.
Another force for uniform, conservative textbooks
comes from publishing
houses themselves. “There’s a greatdeal of
copying,” Carolyn Jackson, who has
probably edited more American history textbooks
than any other single
individual, told me. In the 1980s every house
coveted the success of Triumph of
the AmericanNation, which held a quarter to a
third of the market. So most
textbooks resembled Triumph. Indeed, they still do.
Although adequate
scholarship exists in the secondary literature to

support such ventures
intellectually, not a single left-wing or right-wing
American history textbook has
ever appeared from a mainstream publisher. Neither
has a textbook emphasizing
African American,Latino, labor, or feminist history
as the entrypointto general
American history.38 Such books might sell dozens of
thousands of copies a year
and make thousands of dollars in profit.
At the least, they would command
niches in the marketplace all their own.
Publishers might do fine without
Texas.39 Nonetheless, no publishing house can
see such possibilities. All are
blinded by the golden prospect of putting out
the next Triumph and making
millions of dollars. One editor characterized a
prospective book, perhaps
unfairly, as too focused on “the mistreatment of
blacks” in American history.
“We couldn’t have that as our onlyAmerican
history,” he continued. “So we
broke the contract.” The manuscript was never
published. “We didn’t want a
book with an ax to grind,” the editor concluded.
Of course, one person’s pointof
view is another’s ax to grind, so textbooks
end up without axes or points of
view.
Thus, textbook uniformity cannot be attributed
exclusively to overt state

censors. Even in the formerly communist
countries of Eastern Europe,
censorship was largely effected by authors, editors,
and publishers, not by state
censors, and was “ultimately a matter of . .
. sensitivity to the ideological
atmosphere.”40 It is not too different here:
textbook publishers rarely do
anything that they imagine might risk state
disapproval. Therefore, they never
stray far from the traditional textbooks in form,
tone, and content. Indeed, when
Scott, Foresman merely replaced Macbeth with Hamlet
in their literature reader,
educators and editors considered the change so
radical that Hillel Black devoted
three pages to the event in his book on
textbook publishing, The American
Schoolbook.41 In American history, even more
than in literature, publishers
strive for a “balanced” approach to offend no
one.
Publishers would undoubtedly think twice
before including a hard-hitting
account of Columbus, for example. In Chapter 2,
I used genocide to refer to the
destruction of the Arawaks in the Caribbean.
When scholars used the same term
in applying for a grant for a television
series on Columbus from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the endowment
rejected them.42 Lynne Cheney
said that the word was a problem. The entire project,
1492: Clash of Visions ,
was too pro-Indian for the endowment. “It’s okay to

talk about the barbarism of
the Indians, but not about the barbarism of
the Europeans,” complained the
series producer.43
For publishers to avoid giving offense is
getting increasingly difficult,
however. A dizzying array of critics—creationists,
the radical right, civil
liberties groups, racial minorities, feminists,
and even professional historians—
have entered the fray. No longer do textbooks
get denounced only as
integrationist or liberal.44 Now they are also attacked as
colonialist, Eurocentric,
or East Coast-centric. Publishers must feel a bit
flustered as they delete a passage
modestly critical of American policy to please
right-wing critics in one state,
only to find they have offended left-wing critics in
another. Including a
photograph of Henry Cisneros may please
Hispanics but risk denunciation by
New Englanders demanding an image of John
Adams.
Although publishers want to think of themselves
as moral beings, they also
want to make money. “We want to do well while
doing good,” the president of
Random House, the parent company of Pantheon,
said to me as he inquired into
the commercial prospects of our Mississippi

textbook.45 Thoughts of the bottom
line narrow the range of thought publisherstolerate
in textbooks. Publishers risk
over half a million dollars in production costs
with every new textbook.
Understandably, this scares them.
What about the authors? Since every bad
paragraph had to have an author,
surely authors lie at the heartof the process.
It’s not always clear who the real
authors are, however. The names on the cover of
a textbook are rarely those of
the people who really wrote it.46 Lewis Todd
and Merle Curtimay have written
the first draft of Rise of the American Nation back in
1949, but by the timeits
tenth edition came out in 1991, now titled
Triumph of the American Nation,
Curtiwas ninety-five and in a nursing home
and Toddwas dead. The people
listed as authors on someothertextbooks have even
less to do with them. Some
teachers and historians merely rent their names
to publishers, supplying
occasional advice in return for a fraction of
the usual royalties, while minions in
the bowels of the publishing houses do the
work of organizing and writing the
textbooks. Often theseanonymous clerks have
only a BA in English, according
to an editor at McGraw-Hill.47
An executive at Prentice Hall told me that Daniel
Boorstin “controls every
word that goes into his book,” which does not claim

that he wrote it but does
imply substantial author involvement. We will
see later that even this claim
cannot be substantiated. Prentice Hall relies on
Davidson and Lytle to keep A
History of the Republic current in historical
content, according to the publisher.
Even thesemodest claims are suspect, however. Mark
Lytle admitted that he and
his coauthor play only “a kind of authentication role”
regarding new editions.
The publisher initiates the new material, and it is
“too late to make any major
changes once it reaches us.”
In 2006, as I was studying the six new
textbooks for this revised edition of
Lies My Teacher Told Me, one topic I
focused on was their treatments of the
recent past, especially of our two Iraq wars and the
attacks of 9/11/2001 on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To
my astonishment, I found that for
paragraph after paragraph, two books—America:
Pathways to the Present, by
Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth Perry, Linda Reed,
and Allan Winkler, and A History
of the United States, by Daniel Boorstin and
Brooks Mather Kelley—were
identical, or nearly identical. Here, for example,
are the first paragraphs of their
discussion of the disputed Florida election
between Bush and Gore in 2000.

On election night, the votes in several states
were too close to call;
neither candidate had captured the 270 electoral votes
needed to win
the presidency. One undecided state, Florida,
could give either
candidate enough electoral votes to win the
presidency. Because the
vote there was so close, state law required a
recount of the ballots.
Florida became a battleground for the presidency
as lawyers,
politicians, and the media swarmed thereto monitor
the recount.
—America: Pathways to the Present
On election nightthe votes in several states
were too closeto call and
neither candidate captured the 270 electoral votes
needed to win. One
undecided state, Florida, would give either
candidate the electoral
votes needed to win. A recount of the votes
therewas ordered by law,
due to the closeresults which slightly favored
Bush. Florida became a
battleground for the presidency as lawyers and
the media swarmed
thereto monitor the recount.
—A History of the United States
Both books choose the same image to represent
the destruction of the World

Trade Center on 9/11/2001: three men in
firemen’s hats raising the American
flag, reminiscent of the famous photo of the
marines on Iwo Jima. Both give the
photo the same caption: “Rescue workers raise
the American flag amidst the
rubble of the fallen World Trade Center
towers,” although Boorstin and Kelley
append the date. The rest of their treatments
of the 9/11 attacks are equally
similar. In Pathways, “the impact of the fully fueled
jets caused both towers to
burstinto flames,” while in A History, “the impact
of the fully fueled jets caused
the twin towers to burstinto flames.”
So it goes, page after page. The books
describe our war in Afghanistan in
identical sentences, too. Both contain a section titled
Department of Homeland
Security, although Pathways drops Department of. In
both books, thesesections
begin, “The President also moved quickly to combat
terrorism at home.” They
continue:
Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, Bush created
the Office of
Homeland Security, to be headed by Pennsylvania
Governor Tom
Ridge. Ridge took office amidst a new wave of
mysterious attacks.
Anthrax spores, which can be deadly if

inhaled, began turning up in
letters. . . .
—Pathways to the Present
Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, Bush created
the Office of
Homeland Security, with Pennsylvania Governor Tom
Ridge in
charge.
Ridge took office amidst a new wave of
mysterious attacks.
Anthrax spores, which can be deadly if
inhaled, began turning up in
letters. . . .
—A History of the United States
What is happeninghere?
Do we imagine that Boorstin and Kelley cribbed
from Cayton, Perry, Reed,
and Winkler? Daniel J. Boorstin was a famous
historian, former Librarian of
Congress, and the author of more than twenty books.
According to his obituary
in the Manchester Guardian, his “learning and
diligence were legendary.” But
he was in his eighty-ninth and final year when
this textbook was being written.
Maybe the fault lies with his coauthor. Brooks Mather
Kelley formerly served as

Yale University archivist and curator of historical
manuscripts, so he must know
about proper scholarship and attribution.
Or maybe Cayton, Perry, Reed, and Winkler
cribbed from Boorstin and
Kelley? They are less famous than Boorstin, but all
are tenured professorsand
hold doctoratesin history, so all have been exposed to
proper scholarly etiquette.
One of them, Allan Winkler, “Distinguished
Professor of History” at Miami
University in Ohio, specializes in recent
history, especially the history of the
home front during World War II. So maybe he
wrote the passages in question
and Boorstin and Mather pilfered them.
If these were real books, historians would
hold their collective breaths,
waiting to see whether Kelley (and Boorstin’s
estate) sues Cayton et al., or vice
versa. These identical passages are far longer
and more flagrant, after all, than
the copying that got Stephen Ambrose and Doris
Kearns Goodwin into so much
hot water a few years ago. One of Ambrose’s
sins, for example, was quoting
primary sources as if he had found them,
rather than double-quoting them
because he had read them in a secondary source.
Nothing so subtle is going on
here. For page after page, topicafter topic, these
textbooks sportparagraphs that
are interchangeable.

I asked Kelley what he thought had taken
place. He said he had nothing to do
with the 2005 revision: “DanBoorstin did that one.”
(Kelley claimed to have had
more to do with the “classic edition,” which also
carries a 2005 copyright,has
the same cover, lists for the same price,
and appears to be the same book.) I
asked who wrote the material on the recent
past. “They hired somebody,” he
replied. “I don’t remember the man’s name.
Dan then looked over it and, I’m
sure, rewrote it in his inimitable fashion.” When he
learned that the passages are
the same as those in another history
textbook, he was taken aback. “That’s
terrible!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if they hired
one of the same people who
wrote that book.” Asked for his reaction to
the duplication, Kelley replied, “I’m
extremely distressed.”48
At first Allan Winkler claimed authorship of
the last chapter of Pathways to
the Present: “I wrote most of that. Then the editors
played with it.” After I told
him that paragraph after paragraph are the same or nearly
the same as those in
Boorstin and Kelley, he hastened to deny that he
had copied from them: “I have
never even opened the Boorstin and Kelley book.”
He then backed awayfrom
the claim of authorship. “It’s possible that

somebody in-house wrote that for
both books, which would appall me.” Asked
for his reaction to the duplication,
Winkler replied, “I find that profoundly disturbing.
Lord!”49
Thus, neither set of authors copied from
the other. That’s because neither
wrote anything. Prentice Hall published both textbooks,
and both new chapters
were written by a nameless person known only to
its editorial staff. The tiny
differences between the two probably came about
in the copyediting process.
Prentice Hall’s bargain-basement thinking does
draw back the curtain on the
sordid process of textbook construction, however.
I asked Winkler what he thought of the
treatment of the recent past that had
been published under his name. “Well, let me
get it off the shelf,” he replied. He
then admitted that he had not read it. Nor had Kelley
read the last chapter of A
History, and he had already given up on his
claim that Boorstin had done so.
Superficially, theseacts by Boorstin, Kelly, Winkler, et
al., recall those busy
undergraduates who buy term papers off the Web,
slap their names on them, and
hand them in as their own. Both sets of
“authors” take credit for the work of
others, who remain nameless but do get paid. A
key difference, however, is that
the cheating students usually at least read the

material, even though they didn’t
writeit. These textbook authors have never even
bothered to read the words that
go out over their names. Boorstin, Kelley, and
Winkler may be crediting Saddam
Hussein with having nuclear weapons. They may have
misidentified Osama bin
Laden as a Jewish rabbi. If so, they’ll be
the last to know.
These passages are not mere revisions of earlier
material that the putative
authors actually wrote. This is brand-new
history. Moreover, final chapters
surely rank among the most important in the books.
They cover important, hotly
contested, ongoing issues. Unlike the War of 1812,
or even World War II, there
can be no doubt about their relevance to
the present. If the people listed as
authors of thesetextbooks never wrote these
passages, what did they write? And
if they did not even read these passages, what
did they read? Surely not the
small and not-so-small changes in interpretations
that have swept through the
treatment of American Indians, for example, as a
result of the new scholarship of
the past threedecades.
It’s not just thesetwo books that suffer from
anonymous writing. Editors tell
me that recent chapters of American history
textbooks are “typically” written by
freelance writers. Nor is it just the final
chapters. Judith Conaway, who has

ghostwritten elementary-level textbooks in several
fields, wrote, “It is absolutely
the standard practice in the textbook publishing
industry to assign ALL the
writing to freelancers. Then you rent a name to
go on the cover.” Since Rise/
Triumph of the American Nation by Toddand Curti
sold so well in the 1970s
and 1980s, the publisher wanted to keep it in
print. In 1994, having finally
become embarrassed by the fact that Toddwas dead
and Curtiwas in a nursing
home, Holt,Rinehart and Winston moved their names
into the title and engaged
Paul Boyer to “write” what was now called
Todd and Curti’s The American
Nation. Ironically, Boyer had become “Merle
Curti Professor of History” at
Wisconsin. Asked if he substantially rewrote
the book at that point, Boyer would
not say. Instead, he replied, “I really would
like to know more of your motive
before discussing details of my career.” I
identified myself as a member of the
Organization of American Historiansand the American
Historical Association,
explained that I was the author of Lies My Teacher
Told Me, and noted that Lies
would be coming out in a new edition.
Although he had heard of Lies, he still
would not reveal who had written Todd and
Curti’s The American Nation,
referring me to an editor at Holt.In 1998 “his”

book cameout again, now titled
The American Nation . In 2003 it was again
renamed, to Holt American Nation,
which does carry a certain honesty, since
the publisher, not the author, surely
does writemost of it. To the New York Times, Boyer
excused the practice with
the quip,“Textbooks are hardly the same as the
Iliad or Beowulf.” Interviewed
by the Times, Brooks Mather Kelley said,
“Frankly, many of these textbooks,
unlike ours, were not written by the authors who
were once involved with them.”
His use of “unlike ours” was staggering, since
I had just caught Boorstin and
him red-handed. Moreover, two days later his
claim that he and Boorstin had
written earlier editions of their book was contradicted
by James Goodwin, who
revealed that about fifteen years earlier, he
had revised and written several
chapters of it. “I did it for the money,” he
said, “ten thousand dollars for a few
months of part-time work.”50
The editor quoted at the head of the chapter
implies no one is the loser from
this practice, because the freelancers “pick things
up pretty quickly, and in a
couple of days, they’re up on the CivilWar.”
Historianswho have spent decades
researching that war may not agree that it can be
mastered in two days, however.
Hiring neophyte stand-ins to do authors’ work may
help explain the sometimes
astonishing mistakes that textbooks commit. A

notorious example was the claim
in a 1990-era textbook, “President Truman easily
settled the Korean War by
dropping the atomic bomb.”51 Truman’s action
certainly cameas a surprise to
Dwight Eisenhower, who campaigned for the
presidency in 1952 with the
slogan, “I will go to Korea.” Similar errors
dot history textbooks from start to
finish. Boorstin and Kelley tell us, for instance,
that one reason Columbus sailed
to the Americas from the Canary Islands, rather
than from Spain, was that “the
Canaries were on the same latitude as Japan, so if
he went due west he thought
he would arrive where he wanted to be.”
Actually Seville, Spain’s leading port at
the time, lies precisely at the midpoint of
Honshu, Japan’s largest island. The
Canaries lie far to the south, as a glance at
a globe reveals. To take another
example, The American Journey claims that “Maggie
Lena” “was the first
American woman to serve as a bank
president,” leaving out Maggie Walker’s
last name. One of Journey’s three putative
authors is James McPherson,
specialist in CivilWar African American history. He
would never have written
—or even read—that passage and allowed such a
mistake to stand.
The anonymous author of the last chapter of

The American Pageant didn’t
have to be a specialist to avoid the following
egregious error about the 2004
election:
On election day, Bush nailed down a decisive
victory. His three-pronged
strategy of emphasizing taxes, terror, and moral
values paid off
handsomely. He posted the first popular vote
majority in more than a
decade, 60,639,281 to Kerry’s 57,355,978, with a
commanding
advantage in the Electoral College, 286 to 252.
Commanding advantage indeed! The mere switch of
Ohio’s 20 electoral votes,
which Kerry almost won, would have given
Kerry 272 and the victory, to Bush’s
266. Does not the author recall the suspense on
election night, along with the
claims of voting irregularities in Ohio during
the next week? Moreover, in
percentage terms, Bush got 51.4 percent of the
Bush-Kerry total, while in 1996
Clinton got 54.7 percent of the Clinton-Dole total.
To spin the election to
produce a “handsome” mandate where none
occurred may be good politics, but
it’s bad history.
Updating does not just require adding a new chapter
at the end, to handle the
new happenings since the book last came out.
New facts are discovered about
older events, from new information about the

events of the 1990s all the way
back to new discoveries in archaeology that
influence our understanding of the
first people in our hemisphere. Throughout the
book, the process of updating
also suffers from the absence of oversight—by
the alleged authors or anyone
else. Consider the sabotage of Pan American Airlines
flight 103, which exploded
over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. In 1989,
1992, and 1995, Boorstin and Kelley
had sound company when they wrote “there
were many indications that the
Iranians had ordered the bombing.” For their book to
make this claim in its 2005
edition implies that the authors were not
convinced by the conviction of a
Libyan in 2001, missed Libya’s payment of
more than two billion dollars to
victims of the disaster in 2002, and did not
credit Libya’s admission of guilt in
2003.52 Of course, the anonymous authors and
updaters, being anonymous, do
not risk their reputations by such errors.
Even authors who do writetheir books writeonly the
core narrative, which is
gradually becoming an ever smaller proportion of
the whole. Authors have
nothing to do with the countless boxes, teaching
aids, questions, photo captions,
and “activities” that now often take up more
space than the narrative itself.

Perhaps that is why this material is frequently
so mindless. Consider this
suggestion after the chapter about the coming of
the CivilWar in Holt American
Nation: “Homework: Haveeach student obtain and
read John Brown’s Body by
Stephen Vincent Benét and writea two-paragraph
response to the poem.” This
assignment is so absurd as to prompt the
conclusion that no one is home
intellectually at Holt,Rinehart and Winston. The task
does follow an account of
John Brown’s 1859 takeover of the armory at Harpers
Ferry. But John Brown’s
Body is not even about that takeover.
Rather, it is the poet’s evocation of
selected aspects of the Civil War and of the
society that resulted from it.
Moreover, the poem is nearly four hundred pages
long. “Have each student
obtain and read” it, indeed—most adults have
never read a four-hundred-page
poem in their lives, and if one did, how
does one respond to it in two
paragraphs?53
Other questions are mindlessly huge. The
Americans, for example, asks:
“How has location influenced the history of
your city or town?” Now, that’s
quite a question. A PhD dissertation might make
a good stab at answering it.
Quite an assignment for someone just starting a
course in American history.
Next it asks, “How have the characteristics and
concerns of your region changed

over the last generation?” Again, quitea question. If
we thinkabout answering it
for the South, we realize how formidable the
question is. Yet the South is
America’smost defined region. To define the
“characteristics and concerns of
the Midwest” would be still harder, let alone
assess how they have changed.
What could these authors have in mind?
Nothing, I submit. Someone decided
that the page would look better with questions
on it; someone else supplied
them; but they aren’t meant to be answered.
Unfortunately, questions like these
encourage students to conclude that idle speculation
amounts to a form of
learning.
When questions aren’t mindless, oftenthey are mind-
numbing. Several books
have the annoying habitof ending every photo
caption with a question. Consider
this question in The American Journey under a
photo showing Hitler at a Nazi
rally: “What group especially suffered from the
Nazis?” Three inches above the
photo, the text tells of Hitler’s “extreme anti-
Semitism.” If “groups” had been
asked in the plural, the question becomes more
interesting, with additional
possible answers such as the Rom people,
socialists, homosexuals, and others.
All Journey wants, however, is for students to

mutter “Jews.” The Americans
dots its margins with questions headed “Main Idea.”
Next to a paragraph telling
why women organized the National Organization
for Women, for example, is
the question “What prompted women to establish
NOW?” All students need to
do is rewrite the paragraph in their own hand,
and lo! they are studying history!
Even when the question is interesting, too often
the desired answer is self-
evident, hence boring. Holt American Nation
provides the quotation reprinted in
Chapter 6 from the Chicago Tribune responding to
Mississippi’s “Black Codes”:
“The men of the North will convert the State of
Mississippi into a frog pond
before they will allow such laws to disgrace one
foot of soil in which the bones
of our soldiers sleepand over which the flag of
freedom waves.” That quotation
is arresting and important. Holt then asks:
“Identifying Bias: How does the
writer reveal his opinion of the Black
Codes?” Although not perfect, that
question might lead students to draw interesting
observations. The quote shows
the extent to which the war had become
identified with the cause of black
freedom, for example—at least among
Republicans, the Tribune being an
important organ of the Republican Party. It
then links the intense emotional
attachment to “our” war dead to the cause
of antiracism. “Into a frog pond”

deserves analysis, too, as a piece of rhetoric
that at once disrespects the state of
Mississippi and proclaims Northern power over it.
The answer in the teacher’s
edition, however, makes clear that no actual thought
is envisioned: “By writing
that northern men will turn Mississippi into a frog
pond before allowing the state
to impose the Black Codes.” This merely repeats
the quotation, turning the
assignment into another exercise of rote repetition.
Although we can hope the authors had nothing to do
with such silly teaching
suggestions, their names are on the books
and they should be held responsible
for what is inside their covers.
Ironically, once in a while the material added
by publishers’ clerks conflicts
with and enhances the base narrative. In American
Journey, someone added “My
Lai Massacre” and its date to the map “The
Vietnam War,” even though the text
never mentions the event. Exactly what students
are to make of this map notation
is unclear.
In interviews with me, publishing executives
blamed adoption boards, school
administrators, or parents, whom they feel they have to
please, for the distortions
and lies of omission that mar U.S. history textbooks.
Parents, whether black

militants or Texas conservatives, blame publishers.
Teachers blame
administrators who make them use distasteful
books or the publishers who
produced them. But authors blame no one. They
claim credit for their books.
Several authors told me that they suffered no
editorial interference. Indeed,
authors of three different textbooks told me
that their editors never offered a
single content suggestion. “That book
doesn’t have fiftywords in it that were
changed by the editor!” exclaimed one author. “They
were so respectful of my
judgment, they were obsequious,” said another. “I kept
waiting for them to say
no, but they never did.”54
If authors claim to have written the textbooks as
they wanted, then maybe they
are to blame for their books. Sometimes
they don’t know any better. I asked
John Garraty, author of American History, why he
omitted the plague in New
England that devastated Indian societies before
the Pilgrims came. “I didn’t
know about it” was his straightforward reply.
To his credit, soon afterword
Garraty learned about the Columbian Exchange
and made it the first entryin his
1001 Things Everyone Should Know About
American History.55
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, demonstrating that they
understand their geopolitical significance, their
devastating impact on Indian
culture and religion, and their effect on
estimates of the precontact Indian
population. In After the Fact, looking down
from the Olympian heights of
academe, Davidson and Lytle even write, “Textbooks
have finally begun to take
note of theselarge-scale epidemics.” Meanwhile,
their own high school history
textbooks leave them out.56
How are we to understand this kind of behavior?
Authors know that even if
their textbook is good, it won’t really count
toward tenure and promotionat most
universities. “Real scholars don’t writetextbooks”
is a saying in academia.57 If
the textbook is bad, the authors won’t get
chastised by the profession because
professional historians do not read high school
textbooks.58 The American
Historical Review, Journal of American History, and
Reviews in American
History do not review high school textbooks.
Thus, the authors’ academic
reputations are not really on the line.59
Adoption boards loomin the textbook authors’ minds
to a degree, especially

when publishersbring them up. Authors rarely
have personal knowledge of the
adoption process—I am an unfortunate exception.
Editors may invoke students’
parents as well as adoption boards in cautioning
authors not to give offense. “I
wanted a text that could be used in every
state,” one author told me. She relied
on her publisher for guidance about what would
and would not accomplish this
aim. Mark Lytle characterized his own textbook as
“a McDonald’s version of
history—if it has any flavor, people won’t
buy it.” He based this conclusion on
his publisher’s “survey of what the market
wanted.”60
On the otherhand, publishersknow that “students,
parents, teachers want to
see themselves represented in the texts,” as
one editor said to me, and
occasionally influence authors to make their
books less traditional. Michael
Kammen tells of a publisher who tried to
persuade the two authors of an
American history textbook to give more space to
Native Americans. Thomas
Bailey’s publisher pressed him to include more women
and African Americans
in The American Pageant.61
Regardless of the direction of the input,
publishersare in charge. “They didn’t
want famous people, because we’d be more
tractable,” Mark Lytle told me,
explaining why a major publisher had sought

out him and James Davidson,
relative unknowns. Two widely published authors
told me that publisherstore up
textbook contracts with them because they didn’t like
the political slant of their
manuscripts. “We have arguments,” one editor
told me bluntly. “We usually
win.”
Very different conditions apply to secondary
works in history, where the
intended readership typically includes professional
historians. Authors of book-
length secondary works know that publishers
and journal editors hire
professional historians to evaluate manuscripts, so
they writefor otherhistorians
from the beginning. Writers also know that other
historians will review their
monographs after publication, and their
reputation will be made or broken by
those reviews in the historical journals.
With such different readerships, it is natural
for secondary works and
textbooks to be very different from each other.
Textbook authors need not
concern themselves unduly with what actually
happened in history, since
publishers use patriotism, rather than scholarship, to
sell their books. This
emphasis should hardly be surprising: the
requirement to take American history

originated as part of a nationalist flag-waving
campaign earlyin this century.62
Publishers start the pitchon their outside covers,
where nationalist titlessuch as
The Challenge of Freedom and Land of
Promise are paired with traditional
patriotic icons: eagles, Independence Hall, the Stars
and Stripes, and the Statue
of Liberty. Four of the six new books in my
sample display the American flag on
their covers; the othertwo use red, white, and blue
for their titlesand authors.63
Publishers market the books as tools for
helping students to “discover” our
“common beliefs” and “appreciate our heritage.”
No publisher tries to sell a
textbook with the claim that it is more accurate
than its competitors.
Textbook authors also bear their student readers in
mind, to a degree. From
my own experience I know that imagining
what one’s readers need is an
important part of the process of writing a history
textbook. Some textbook
authors are high school teachers, but most are college
professorswho know only
a few high school or junior high school
students personally. Interviews with
textbook authors revealed that their imagining of what
students need is a strange
process. Something about the enterprise of
writing a high school American
history textbook converts historians into patriots.
One author told me that she
was the single parent of an eleven-year-old

girl when she started work on her
textbook. She “wanted to write a book that
Samantha would be proud of.” I
empathized with this desire and told of my own
single parenting of a daughter
about the same age. Further conversation made
clear, however, that this author
did not simply mean a book her daughter would
respect and enjoy. Rather, she
wanted a book that would make her daughter
feel good about America, a very
different thing.64
Other textbook authors have shared similar
comments with me. They want to
produce good citizens, by which they mean
people who take pride in their
country. Somehow authors feel they must strap on the
burden of transmitting and
defending Western civilization. Sometimes there
was almost a touch of
desperation in their comments—sort of an après
moi le déluge. Authors can feel
that they get only one shot at these children; if
they do not reach them now,
America’s future might be jeopardized. In turn,
this leads to a feeling of self-
importance—that one is on the front line of
our society, helping the United
States continue to grow strong. Not only
textbook authors feel this way:
historians and history teachers commonly cite their
role in building good citizens

to justify what they do. In “A Proud Word
for History,” Allan Nevins waxes
euphoric over “school texts that told of Plymouth
Rock, Valley Forge, and the
Alamo.” He lauds history’s role in making a
nation strong. “Developing in the
young such traitsas character, morals, ethics, and
good citizenship,” according
to Richard Gross, former president of the
National Council for the Social
Studies, “are the reasons for studying history and
the social sciences.”65 When
we were writing our Mississippi history my
coauthors and I felt the same way—
that we might improve our state and its
citizens by imparting knowledge and
changing attitudes in its next generation.
When the authors of American history textbooks
have their chance to address
the next generation at large, however, even those
who in their monographs and
private conversations are critical of some aspects
of our society seem to want
only to maintain America rather than change it.
One textbook author, Carol
Berkin, began her interview with me by saying,
“As a historian, I am a feminist
socialist.”66 My jaw dropped, because her textbook
displays no hint of feminism
or socialism. Surely, a feminist author would
writea textbook that would help
readers understand why no woman has ever been
president or even vice
president of the United States. Surely, a
socialist author would writea textbook

that would enable readers to understand why
children of working-class families
rarely become president or vice president, the
mythical Abraham Lincoln to the
contrary.67
If textbooks are overstuffed, overlong, oftenwrong,
mindless, boring, and all
alike, why do teachers use them? In one sense,
teachers are responsible for the
miseducation in our history classrooms. After
all, the distortions and omissions
exposed in the first ten chapters of this book
are lies our teachers tell us. If
enough teachers complained about American history
textbooks, wouldn’t
publishers change them? Teachers also play a
substantial role in adopting the
textbooks: in most states, textbook rating
committees are made up mainly of
teachers, from whom publishers have faced
no groundswell of opposition. On
the contrary, many teachers like the textbooks as
they are. According to
researchers K. K. Wong and T. Loveless, most
teachers believe that history
textbooks are good and getting better.68
Could it be that they just don’t know the
truth? Many history teachers don’t
know much history: a national survey of
257 teachers in 1990 revealed that 13
percent had never taken a single college

history course, and only 40 percent held
a BA or MA in history or a field with
“some history” in it, like sociology or
political science.69 Furthermore, a study of
Indiana teachers revealed that fewer
than one in five stay current by reading books or
articles in American history.
An audience of high school history teachers at a
1992 conference on Christopher
Columbus and the Age of Exploitation gasped aloud
to learnthat people before
Columbus knew the world to be round. These
teachers were mortified to realize
that for years they had been disseminating false
information. Of course, teachers
cannot teach what they do not know.
Mostteachers do not like controversy. A study
someyears ago found that 92
percent of teachers did not initiate discussion of
controversial issues, 89 percent
didn’t discuss controversial issues when
students brought them up, and 79
percent didn’t believe they should. Among the
topics that teachers felt children
were interested in discussing but that most
teachers believed should not be
discussed in the classroom were the Vietnam
War, politics, race relations,
nuclear war, religion, and family problems such as
divorce.70
Many teachers are frightened of controversy
because they have not
experienced it themselves in an academic setting
and do not know how to handle

it. “Most social studies teachers in U.S.
schools are ill prepared by their own
schooling to deal with uncertainty,” according to
Shirley Engle. “They are in
over their heads the minute that pat answers no
longer suffice.” Inertia is also
built into the system: many teachers teach as
they were taught. Even many
college history professorswho well know that history
is full of controversy and
dispute become old-fashioned transmitters of
knowledge in their own
classrooms. 71
Since textbooks employ a rhetoric of
certainty, it is hard for teachers to
introduce either controversy or uncertainty into
the classroom without deviating
from the usual standards of discourse. Teachers
rarely say “I don’t know” in
class and rarely discuss how one might then find
the answer. “I don’t know”
violates a norm. The teacher, like the textbook, is
supposed to know. Students,
for their part, are supposed to learnwhat teachers and
textbook authors already
know.72
It is hard for teachers to teach open-endedly.
They are afraid not to be in
control of the answer, afraid of losing their
authority over the class. To avoid
exposing gaps in their knowledge, teachers allow

their students to make “very
little use of the school’s extensive resources,”
according to researcher Linda
McNeil, who completed three studies of high
school social studies classes
between 1975 and 1981.73 Who knows where
inquiry might lead or how to
manage it? John Goodlad found that less than 1
percent of instructional time
involved class discussions requiring “reasoning or
perhaps an opinion from
students.”74 Instead of discussion and research,
teachers emphasize “simplistic
teacher-controlled information.” Teachers’ “patterns of
knowledge control were,
according to their own statements in taped
interviews, rooted in their desire for
classroom control,” according to McNeil.75 They
end up adopting the same
omniscient tone as their textbooks. As a result,
teachers present a boring, overly
ordered way of thinking, much less interesting
than the way people really think.
Summarizing McNeil’s research, Albert Shanker,
himself an advocate for
teachers, noted that the same teachers who are
“vital, broad-minded, and
immensely knowledgeable in private conversations”
nonetheless come across as
“narrow, dull, and rigid in the classroom.”76
David Jenness has pointed out that professional
historical organizations for at
least a century have repeatedly exhorted
teachers not to teach history as fact
memorization. “Stir up the minds of the pupils,”

cried the American Historical
Association in 1893; avoid stressing “dates,
names, and specific events,”
historians urged in 1934; leaders of the
profession have made similar appeals in
almost every decade in between and since.77
Nevertheless, teachers continue to
present factoids for students to memorize. Like
textbook authors, teachers can be
lazy. Teaching is stressful. Bad textbooks make
life easier. They make lesson
plans easy to organize. Moreover,we have seenhow
publishers furnish lavish
packages that include videos for classroom
viewing, teachers’ manuals with
suggestions on how to introduce each topic, and
examinations ready to duplicate
and gradable by machine. Textbooks also offer
teachers the security of knowing
they are covering the waterfront, so their
students won’t be disadvantaged on
statewide or nationwide standardized tests.
For all these reasons, national surveys have
confirmed that teachers use
textbooks more than 70 percent of the time.78
Moreover,most teachers prefer
textbooks that are similar to the books they are
already using, a big reason that
the “inquiry textbook” movementnever caught on in
the late 1970s. “Teachers
oftenprefer the errors they are familiar with,”
Tyson-Bernstein even claims, “to

unfamiliar but correct information”—another reason
that errors get preserved
and passed on to new generations.79
Laziness is not exactly a fair charge, however.
When are teachers supposed to
find time to do research so they can develop their
own course outlines and
readings? They already work a fifty-five-hour week.
Most teachers are far too
busy teaching, grading, policing, handing out
announcements, advising,
comforting, hall monitoring, cafeteria quieting, and
then running their own
households to go off and research topics they
do not even know to question.
After hours, they are oftenrequired to supervise
extracurricular activities, to say
nothing of grading papers and planning lessons.80
During the academic year
most school districts allow teachers just two to
four days of “in-service training.”
Summers offer time to retool but no money, and
we can hardly expect teachers
to subsidize the rest of us by going two months
with no income to learn
American history on their own.
Some of the foregoing pressures affect
teachers of any subject. But certain
additional constraints affect teachers in American
history. Like the authors of
history textbooks, history teachers can get
themselves into a mind-set wherein
they feel defensive about the United States,
especially in front of minority

students. Like authors, teachers can feel that they
are supposed to defend and
endorse America. Even African American teachers may
feel vaguely threatened
by criticism of America, threatened lest they be
attacked, too. Teachers naturally
identify with the material they teach. Since the
textbooks are defensively
boosterish about America, teachers who use them
run the risk of becoming
defensively boosterish, too. Compare the happier
state of the English teacher,
who can hardly teach, say, Langston Hughes’s mildly
subversive poem
“Freedom Train” without becomingmildly subversive.
Similarly, it is hard to
teach Holt American Nation without becoming mildly
boring.
Social studies and history teachers oftenget less
respect from colleagues than
faculty in other disciplines. When asked
what subject might be dropped,
elementary school teachers mentioned social
studies more often than any other
academic area.81 Especially in the Midwest and
South, high school principals
often assign history to coaches, who have to
teach something, after all, since
there aren’t enough physical education classes to
go around. Assigning
American history classes to teachers for whom
history lies outside their field of

competence—which is the case for 60 percent of
U.S. history teachers,
according to a nationwide study—obviously implies
the subject is not important
or that “anyone can teach it.” History teachers
also have higher class loads than
teachers of any otheracademic subject.82
Students, too, consider history singularly
unimportant. According to recent
research on student attitudes toward social studies,
“Most students in the United
States, at all grade levels, found social
studies to be one of the least interesting,
most irrelevant subjects in the school curriculum.”83
Many teachers sense what
students thinkof their subject matter. All too many
respond by giving up inside
—not trying to be creative, making only
minimal demands, simply staying ahead
of their students in the book. Students, in turn,
respond “with minimal classroom
effort,” and the cycle continues.84
Relying on textbooks makes it easier for
students as well as teachers to put
forth minimal effort. Textbooks’ innumerable lists—
of main ideas, key terms,
people to remember, dates, skill activities,
matching, fill in the blanks, and
review identifications—which appear to be the
bane of students’ existence,
actually have positive functions. These lists
make the course content look
rigorous and factual, so teachers and students can
imagine they are learning

something. They make the teacher appear
knowledgeable, whereas freer
discussion might expose gaps in his/her
information or intelligence. And they
give students a sense of fairness about
grading: performance on “objective”
exams seeking recall of specific factoids is
easy to measure. Thus, lists reduce
uncertainty by conveying to students exactly
what they need to know.85
Fragmenting history into unconnected “facts” also
guarantees, however, that
students will not be able to relate many of
theseterms to their own lives and will
retain almost none of them after the six-weeks’
grading period.86
In some ways the two inquiry textbooks in
my sample are better than the
sixteen narrative textbooks. Both inquiry books,
The American Adventure and
Discovering American History, suggest ways students
can use primary materials
while examining them for distortions. The
American Adventure directly
challenges ethnocentrism in its teachers’ guide, a
topicnever mentioned in any
of the othertextbooks or their supplementary teaching
guides. Research suggests
that the inquiry approach leads to higher student
interest in contemporary
political issues. 87 However, inquiry textbooks
require much more active

teaching. Classes can’tjust plow through them.
Teachers must supplement them
with additional information, leave out parts of the
book, choose which exercises
to assign, and work in concert with their school
librarians.Perhaps it is because
inquiry textbooks do not rely on rote learning
that teachers and school
administrations soon abandoned them. The inquiry
approach was too much
work.88
If teachers seem locked into the traditional
narrative textbooks, why don’t
teachers teach against them, at least
occasionally? Again, teaching against the
book is hard. We have already noted the
logistical problems of time and
workload. Resources are also a problem. Where
do teachers find a point of
leverage? If a state historical museum or university is
nearby, that can help. But
how do teachers know when they do not know
something? How do they know
when their book is wrong or misleading?
Moreover,students have been trained
to believe what they read in print. How can
teachers compete with the expertise
of established authors backed by powerful
publishers?
Teaching against a textbook can also be scary.
Textbooks offer security.
Teachers can hide behind them when principals,
parents, or students challenge
them to defend their work. Teaching against the

textbook might be construed as
critical of the school system, supervisor,
principal, or department head who
selected it. Teachers could get in trouble for
doing that. Or so they imagine.89
A student of mine who was practice-teaching in an
elementary school decided
to introduce her students to what she had
learned from my course about the
Pilgrims, the plagues, and Thanksgiving. The professor of
education who
supervised her field placement vetoed her
plan. “Telling the kids this
information, going against their traditions, is
like telling them there’s no Santa
Claus.” He was also concerned that the information
might “cause a big
controversy with the families.” With the approval of
the classroom teacher, my
student persevered, however. While she received
no parental complaints, it is
true that she risked being perceived as hostile
or negative by some parents,
administrators, and even fellow teachers.
Teachers do get fired, after all. I have interviewed
several high school teachers
and librarians who have been fired or threatened with
dismissal for minor acts of
independence such as making material available
that some parents consider
controversial. Teachers have been fired for

teaching Brave New World in
Baltimore, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in Idaho,
and almost everything
else in between.90 Knowing this, many teachers
anticipate that powerful forces
will pounce upon them and doubt that anyone will
come to their defense, so they
relaxinto what Kenneth Carlson called the “security of
self-censorship.”91 I am
convinced, though, that most teachers enjoy
substantial freedom in practice.
“Most teachers have little control over school policy
or curriculum,” wrote Tracy
Kidder in Among Schoolchildren, “but most
have a great deal of autonomy
inside their classrooms.” In Who Controls
Our Schools? Michael W. Kirst
agreed: “Teachers have in effect a pocket
veto on what is taught. An old
tradition in American public schools is that once
the door of the classroom shuts
nobody checks on what a teacher actually
does.”92 Nonetheless, even teachers
who have little real cause to fear for their jobs
typically avoid unnecessary risks.
Perhaps I have been too pessimistic here about
teachers. Everywhere I have
traveled to speak about the problems with
textbooks, I have encountered teachers
hungry for accurate historical information. I have
met many imaginative teachers
who make American history come alive—who
bring in controversies and
primary-source material and challenge students to think.
Despite these heroic

exceptions in schools all over America, however,
the majority of social studies
and history teachers are part of the problem, not
part of the solution.
Let us cast our net even wider. Are all of
us involved? The myths in our
history are not limited to our schooling, after
all. These cultural lies have been
woven into the fabric of our entire society.
From the flat-earth advertisements on
Columbus Day weekend to the racist distortion of
Reconstruction in Gone With
the Wind, our society lies to itselfabout its
past. Questioning theselies can seem
anti-American. Textbooks may reflect theselies only
because we want them to.
Textbooks may also avoid controversy because
we want them to: at least half of
the respondents in national public opinion polls
routinely agree that “books that
contain dangerous ideasshould be banned from public
school libraries.”93 And
when the National Assessment for Educational
Progress sent its social studies
assessment instruments to lay reviewers “to
help insure that [they] would be
acceptable to the general public,” the public
replied, “references to specific
minority groups should be eliminated whenever
possible”; “extreme care”
should be used in wording any referencesto the
FBI, the president, laborunions,

and someotherorganizations; and “exerciseswhich show
national heroes in an
uncomplimentary fashion though factually accurate
are offensive.”94
John Williamson, the president of a major
textbook publishing company,
employed this line to defend publishers: “In the
thirties, the treatment of females
and of black people clearly mirrored the
attitudes of society. All females were
portrayed in homemaker roles. . . . Blacks
were not portrayed at all.” Williamson
went on to admit that recent improvements in
the treatment of women and blacks
have not been owed to publishers, “much as
we would like the credit.” As in the
past, “textbooks mirror our society and contain
what that society considers
acceptable.” Williamson concluded that all this
was as it should be—parents,
teachers, and members of the community should
have the right to pressure
publishersto present history as they want it
presented.95
Williamson has a point. However, when
publishers hide behind “society,”
their argument invokes a chicken-and-egg
problematic, for if textbooks varied
more, pressure groups in society would have
more alternatives for which to
lobby. Moreover, Williamson has conceded the
major point: that history
textbooks stand in a very different relationship to
the discipline of history than

most textbooks do to their respective fields. “Society”
determines what goes into
history textbooks. By contrast, the mathematics
profession determines what goes
into math textbooks and, creationist pressure
notwithstanding, the biology
profession determines what goes into
biology textbooks. To be sure,
mathematics and biology textbooks are products of
the same complex
organizations and delicate adoption procedures as
American history textbooks.
To be sure, math and biology books also err. But
only about history and social
studies do writers actually ask, “Can textbooks have
scholarly integrity?”96 Only
in history is accuracy so political.
Consider the example of black soldiers in the
CivilWar. Even in the 1930s the
facts about their contribution were plainfor all to
see in the primary sources and
even the textbooks of the Civil War and
Reconstruction eras. Depression-era
textbooks omitted those facts, not because they
were unknown but because
including important acts by African Americans
did not “mirror the attitudes of
[white] society” during the nadir of race
relations. Thus, to understand how
textbooks in the 1930s presented the CivilWar, we do
not look at the history of
the 1860s, but at the society of the 1930s.
Likewise, to understand how
textbooks today present the CivilWar, the Pilgrims, or
Columbus, we do not

look at the 1860s, 1620s, or 1490s, but at
our time.What distortions of history
does our society cause? We must not fool ourselves
that the process of distorting
history has magically stopped. We must not
congratulate ourselves that our
society now treats everyone fairly and manifests
attitudes that allow accurate
interpretations of the past. We must not
pretend that, unlike all previous
generations, we write true history. Authors of
high school history textbooks
oftendon’t even try, as we have seen.When parents
and teachers do not demand
from publishersand schools the same effort to present
accurate history that we
expect in otherdisciplines, we become part of
the problem.
For that matter, many history textbooks published in
the present are not really
products of our time at all. Chapter 5 told of
the nadir of American race
relations, between 1890 and 1940. In that period,
not only did we slide backward
in race relations, we also developed a deeply biased
understanding of what was
then our recent past—Reconstruction (1866-77),
the confused period that
followed (1877-90), and the nadir itself.
Chapter 6 showed how John Brown
went insane after 1890, but Brown’s sanity
was not the only casualty of the

nadir. Interpretationsconcocted during the nadirstill
affect what textbooks say
today about the Grant administration,
Woodrow Wilson, and even Christopher
Columbus. In the nadir, African Americans
seemed so “obviously” inferior that
most whites could not imagine that President Grant,
the “Stalwarts,” and most
Republican officeholders in the South had really
cared about racial equality.
Logically, it followed that they must have had
some other motivation—most
likely, greed or power. Therefore, a
textbook like The American Pageant in 2006
emphasizes corruption and minimizesidealism to
discredit Republican behavior
in the 1870s and 1880s. How can the nadirstill
distort a textbook published in
2006? For one thing, Pageant’s interpretation of
Grant was not written in 2006.
It dates to 1956, long before the civil
rights movement had any influence on
American history textbooks. Interpretations in 1956
were still based on ideasset
in the nadir, and Pageant’s author, Thomas Bailey,
earned his PhD in 1927, in
the heartof that period. Interpretations of Columbus in
the 1980s derived from
the celebrations of 1892; Chapter 2 showed
how new textbooks were influenced
by the more complex remembrances of 1992. Thus
when a book is written—or,
rather, when its interpretation of an event
was set in our culture—determines
what is written.

Some people feel that we should sanitize history
to protect students from
unpleasantries, at least until they are eighteen or
so. Children have to growup
soon enough as it is, thesepeople say; let them
enjoy childhood. Why confront
our young people with issues even adults
cannot resolve? Mustwe tell all the
grisly details about what Columbus did on Haiti,
for example, to fifth graders?
97 Sissela Bok wrote a whole book about,
and mostly against, lying; but she
seems to agree that lyingto children is okay
and compares it to sheltering them
from harsh weather.98
Certainly age-graded censorship is the one form
of censorship that almost
everyone believes is appropriate: fifth graders should
not see violent
pornography, for instance. Some fifth or even
twelfth graders who encounter
illustrations of Spaniards cutting off Indians’
hands or Indians committing
suicide might have nightmares about Columbus.
Withholding pornography is not
a precise analogy to whitewashing history,
however. When we fail to present
students with the truth about, say, Columbus, we
end up presenting a lie instead
—at least a lie of serious omission. I doubt
that shielding children from horror
and violence is really the cause of textbook

omissions and distortions. Books do
include violence, after all, so long as it isn’t
by “us.” For instance, American
History describes John Brown’s actions at
Pottawatomie, Kansas, in 1856:
When Brown learned of the [Lawrence] attack,
he led a partyof seven
men. . . . In the dead of night they
entered the cabins of three
unsuspecting families. For no apparent reason they
murdered five people.
They split open their skulls with heavy, razor-sharp
swords. They even
cut off the hand of one of their victims.
Telling of skulls split open and providing minutiae
like the heft and sharpness of
the swords prompt us to feel revulsion toward
Brown. Certainly the author does
not provide thesedetails to shield students from
unpleasantries.
If textbooks are going to include severed hands,
those of the Arawaks cut off
by Columbus are much more historically significant.
Columbus’s severings were
systematic and helped depopulate Haiti.
American History, having omitted these
atrocities, cannot claim to present Pottawatomie
evenhandedly.
Violence aside, what about shielding children from
otheruntoward realities of
our society? How should social studies classes
teach young people about the

police, for instance? Should the approach be Officer
Friendly? Or should
children receive a Marxist interpretation of how
the power structure uses the
police as its first line of control in urban
ghettoes? Does the approach we choose
depend on whether we teach in the suburbs or
the innercity? If a more complex
analysis of the police is more useful than Officer
Friendly for inner-city children,
does that mean we should teach about slavery
in a different way in the suburbs
than we would in the innercity?
In 1992, Los Angeles exploded in a violent
race riot, triggered by a white
suburban jury’s acquittal of four police officers
who had been videotaped
beating a black traffic offender, Rodney King.
Almost every child in America
saw this most famous of all home videotapes.
Therefore, almost every child in
America learned that Officer Friendly is not the
whole story. We do not protect
children from controversy by offering only an
Officer Friendly analysis in
school. All we do is make school irrelevant to
the major issues of the day. Rock
songs bought by thirteen-year-olds deal with AIDS,
nuclear war, and global
warming. Rap songs discuss racism, sexism, drug
use—and American history.
We can be sure that our children already know

about and thinkabout theseand
other issues, whether we like it or not. Indeed,
attempts by parents to preserve
somenonexistent childhood innocence through avoidance
are likely to heighten
rather than reduce anxiety.99 Lying and
omission are not the right ways. There is
a way to teach truth to a childat any age
level.
Because history is more personal than geology or
even American literature,
more about “us,”thereis an additional reason not to
present it honestly: don’t we
want our children to be optimists? Maybe
textbooks that emphasize how
wonderful, fair, and progressive our society has
been give somestudents a basis
for idealism. It may be empowering for children to
believe that simply by living
we all contribute to a constantlyimprovingsociety.
Maybe later, when students
growup and learnmore, they will be motivated to
change the system to make it
resemble the ideal. Maybe stressing fairness as a
basicAmerican value provides
a fulcrum from which students can criticize society
when they discover, perhaps
in college history courses, how it has often
been unfair. This all may be an
instance of Emily Dickinson’s couplet “The
Truth must dazzle gradually/Or
every man be blind.” 100
Since fewer than one American in six ever takesan
American history course

after leaving high school, it is not clear just
when the next generation will get
dazzled by the truth in American history.
Another problem with this line of
thinking is that the truth may then dazzle
students with the sudden realization
that their teachers have been lyingto them. A
student of mine wrote of having
been “taught the storyof George Washington
receiving a hatchet for his birthday
and proceeding to chop down his father’s favorite
cherry tree.” To her horror this
student later discovered that “a storyI had held
sacred in my memory for so long
had been a lie.” She ended up “feeling bitter
and betrayed by my earlier teachers
who had to lie to buildup George Washington’s
image, causing me to question
all that I had previously learned.” This student’s
alienation palesbesides that of
African Americans when they confront another
truth about the Founding
Fathers: “When I first learned that Washington
and Jefferson had slaves, I was
devastated,” historian Mark Lloyd told me. “I
didn’t want to have anything more
to do with them.”101 Selling Washington as a
hero to Native Americans will
eventually founder on a similar rock when
they learnwhat he did to the Iroquois.
It is hard to believe that adults keep children
ignorant in order to preserve their

idealism. More likely, adults keep children
ignorant so they won’t be idealistic.
Many adults fear children and worry that respect
for authority is all that keeps
them from running amok. So they teach them to
respect authorities whom adults
themselves do not respect. In the late 1970s,
survey researchers gave parents a
series of statements and asked whether they
believed them and wanted their
children to believe them. One statement stood
out: “People in authority know
best.” Parents replied in theseproportions:
13 percent—“believe and want children to believe”
56 percent—“havedoubts but still want to teach to
children”
30 percent—“don’t believe and don’t want to
pass on to children”
Thus, 56 percent of parents wanted their
children not to doubt authority figures,
even though the parents themselves doubted.102
Some adults simply do not trust children to
think. For several decades
sociologists have documented Americans’
distrust of the next generation.
Parents may feel undermined when children get
tools of information and inquiry
not available to adults and use them in ways
that seem to threaten adult-held
values. Many parents want children to
concentrate on the three R’s, not on

multicultural history.103 Shirley Engle has
described “a strident minority [of
teachers and parents] who do not really believe in
democracy and do not really
believe that kids should be taught to think.”
104 Perhaps adults’ biggest reason
for lyingis that they fear our history—fear that it
isn’t so wonderful and that if
children were to learn what has really gone on,
they would lose all respect for
our society. Thus, when Edward Ruzzo tried
in 1964 to cover up Warren G.
Harding’s embarrassing love letters to a married
woman, he used the rationale
“that anything damaging to the image of an
American President should be
suppressed to protect the younger generation.” As
Judge Ruzzo put it, thereare
too many juvenile delinquents as it is.105
Ironically, only people who themselves have been
raised on shallow feel-good
history could harbor such doubts. Harding
may not have been much of a role
model, but other Americans—Tom Paine,
Thoreau, Lincoln, Helen Hunt
Jackson, Martin Luther King, and, yes, John
Brown, Helen Keller, and
Woodrow Wilson, too—are still celebrated by lovers
of freedom everywhere.
Yet publishers, authors, teachers, and parents seem
afraid to expose children to
the blazing idealism of these leaders at their

best. Today many aspects of
American life, from the premises of our legal system to
elements of our popular
culture, inspire other societies. If Russia can
abandon boosterish history, as it
seems to have done, surely America can, too.106
“We do not need a bodyguard
of lies,” points out Paul Gagnon. “We can afford
to present ourselves in the
totality of our acts.” 107
Textbook authors seemnot to share Gagnon’s
confidence, however. There is a
certain contradiction in the logicof those who
writenationalist textbooks. On the
one hand, they describe a country without
repression, without real conflict. On
the otherhand, they obviously believe that we need to
lie to students to instill in
them love of country. But if the country is so
wonderful, why must we lie?
Ironically, our lying only diminishes us.
Bernice Reagon, founder of the
singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock,
has pointed out that othercountries are
impressed when we send spokespeople abroad who,
like herself, are willing to
criticize the United States. Surely, this is part of
what democracy is about.
Surely, in a democracy a historian’s duty is
to tell the truth. Surely, in a
democracy students need to develop informed reasons
to criticize as well as take
pride in their country. Maybe somewhere along
the line we gave up on

democracy?
Lying to children is a slippery slope. Once
we have started sliding down it,
how and when do we stop? Who decides when
to lie? Which lies to tell? To
what age group? As soon as we loosen the anchor
of fact, of historical evidence,
our history textboat is free to blow here and there,
pointing first in one direction,
then in another. If we obscure or omit facts because
they make Columbus look
bad, why not omit those that make the United
States look bad? Or the Mormon
Church? Or the state of Mississippi? This is the
politicization of history. How do
we decide what to teach in an American
history course once authors have
decided not to value the truth? If our history
courses aren’t based on fact
anyway, why not tell one story to whites,
another to blacks? Isn’t Scott,
Foresman already doing something like that when
it puts out a “Lone Star”
edition of Land of Promise, tailoring the facts of
history to suit (white) Texans?
Philosopher Martin Heideggeronce defined truth as
“that which makes a people
certain, clear, and strong,” and publishers of
American history textbooks
apparently intend to do just that, avoiding topics

that superficially might seemto
divide Americans. Before we abandon the old
“correspondence to fact” sense of
truth in favor of Heidegger’s more useful
definition, however, we may want to
recall that he gave it in the service of
Adolf Hitler. Moreover, we need to
consider the meaning of a people. Does a
people mean only European
Americans? Perhaps openly facing topics that
seemdivisive might actually unify
Americans across racial, ethnic, and other
lines.108 After all, if the textbooks
aren’t true, they leave us with no grounds
for defending the courses based on
them when students charge that American history is
a waste of time.Why should
children believe what they learnin American history if
their textbooks are full of
distortions and lies? Why should they bother to
learnit?
Luckily, as the next chapter tells, they don’t.
13.
WHAT IS THE RESULT OF TEACHING HISTORY
LIKE
THIS?
William Jennings Bryan: “I do not think about
things
that I don’t thinkabout.”
Clarence Darrow: “Do you ever thinkabout things

you
do thinkabout?”
—SCOPES TRIAL TRANSCRIPT1
Learning social studies is, to no small extent,
whether
in elementary school or the university,
learning to be
stupid.
—JULES HENRY2
Yeah, I cut class, I got a D ’Cause
history meant
nothin’ to me.
—JUNGLE BROTHERS3
The truth shall make us free.
The truth shall make us free.
The truth shall make us free someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
The truth shall make us free someday.
—VERSE OF “WE SHALL OVERCOME”
ALL OVER AMERICA, high school students sit in
social studies and American

history classes, look at their textbooks, write
answers to the questions at the end
of each chapter, and take quizzes and examinations
that test factual recall. When
I was subjected to this regimen, I never defined
any of the terms at the end of the
chapter until the sixth weekof each six-week grading
period. Then the teacher
and I would negotiate what proportion of the
terms I had to define correctly to
get an A- (usually something like 85 percent)
and I would madly write out
definitions through the last two days of class.
Three years later, when my sister
took American history, she developed a more effective
technique. She handed in
the work on time,writing real definitions to the
first two and last two terms, but
for the thirty or forty in the middle she
free-associated whatever nonsense she
wanted. “Hawley-Smoot Tariff: I have no idea,
Mr. DeMoulin,” was one entry.
“Blue Eagle: FDR’s pet bird who got very sad
when he died” was another.
Today students use the Internet: “At my school
we divided up the list and then
posted our part on the Internet. Then you could
download the terms, change the
style, print them out, and hand them
in.” Educational theorists call such acts
“day-to-day resistance”—a phrase that comes from
theorizing about slavery—
but I did not know that then. I am still
envious that I never thought of such
marvelouslabor-saving ploys.4

Of course, fooling the teacher is of little
consequence. Quite possibly my
sister’s teacher even knew of the ruse and joked
about it with his colleagues, the
way masters chuckled that their slaves were so stupid
they had to be told every
evening to bring in the hoes or they would
leave them out in the night dew.
Some social studies and history teachers try to
win student cooperation by telling
them, when introducing a topic, not to
worry, they won’t have to learn much
about it. Students happily acquiesce.5 Students
also invest a great deal of
creative energy in getting teachers to waste
time and relax requirements.6
Teachers acquiesce partly because, as with much
day-to-day resistance during
slavery, yielding does not really threaten the
system. Day-to-day school
resistance also provides students a form of
psychic distance, a sense that
although the system may have commanded their
pens, it has not won real
cooperation from their minds.
How could it? Who wants to learn useless
minutiae? Every chapter of The
American Journey, for example, ends with two to six
pages of “Assessment and
Activities,” mostly stressing twigs. For example,
the final chapter has a “Time
Line Activity” that asks students to “place the

following events in chronological
order.”
• Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims sign peace
agreementto end civil war
• Soviet Union dissolves
• Bill Clinton is elected to first term as
president
• Geraldine Ferraro is first woman from a
major party to run for vice
president
• Iraq invades Kuwait
• Sandra Day O’Connor named to Supreme Court
• Ronald Reagan is reelected president
I defy readers to put theseseven events in
the correct order without looking them
up. Certainly I can’tdo it, and I bet Joyce
Appleby, Alan Brinkley, and James
McPherson, whose names are on the cover of
the book, can’teither. Even if they
can, what have they accomplished? There is
no important causal or logical
connection among most of the events, so thereis
no reason to remember which
camefirst. This activity merely asks students to
memorize the order of unrelated
occurrences. Even though someitems seemconnected—
O’Connor and Reagan,
for example—on closer examination it is not
enough to know that he appointed
her; one must also remember whether he did so in
his first or second term.
Study after study shows that students successfully

resist learning “facts” like
these.7 Indeed, they resist all too well. When
two-thirdsof American seventeen-
year-olds cannot place the CivilWar in the right
half-century, or 22 percent of
my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought
between North and South
Korea, we must salute young people for
more than mere ignorance.8 This is
resistance raised to a high level. Students are
simply not learning even those
details of American history that educated citizens
should know. Still less do they
learnwhat caused the major developments in our
past. Therefore, they cannot
apply lessons from the past to current issues.
Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to
understand, accept, or
rebuthistorical referents used in argumentsby candidates
for office, sociology
professors, or newspaper journalists. If
knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be
bliss.
Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick.
We remember where we were
when we heard of the attack on the World
Trade Center because it affected us
emotionally. American history is a heartrending
subject. When students read real
voices from our past, the emotions do not fail to
move them. Recall Las Casas’s

passionate denunciations of the Spanish treatment of
Indians: “What we
committed in the Indies stands out among
the most unpardonable offenses ever
committed against God and mankind.” Consider
the famous final words of
William Jennings Bryan to the 1896 Democratic
national convention: “You shall
not press down upon the brow of labor
this crown of thorns. You shall not
crucify mankind upon a crossof gold.” Or Helen
Keller’s attack on the Brooklyn
Eagle: “Socially blindand deaf, it defends an
intolerable system.” Or Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s words in the depression,
assuring us we had “nothing to fear but
fear itself.” Events and images also call forth
strong feelings. The saga of
Elizabeth Blackwell in medical school, the
liberation of Nazi death camp
inmates by American (and Russian and British)
soldiers, the ultimate success of
Jonas Salk in finding a vaccine that would
kill polio—these are stirring stories.
As textbook critic Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes,
“There is no way the glowing,
throbbing events of history can be presented fairly,
accurately, and factually
without involving emotion.” 9
Earlier chapters have shown, however, that
American history textbooks and
courses are neither dispassionate nor passionate.
All textbook authors and many
teachers seemnot to have thought deeply about
just what in our past might be

worthy of passion or even serious
contemplation. No real emotion seeps into
these books, not even real pride.10 Instead, heroic
exceptions to the contrary,
most American history courses and textbooks
operate in a gray emotional
landscape of pious duty in which the United
States has a good history, so
studying it is good for students. “They don’t
think of history as drama,” one
teacher told me. “They all tell me they hate history,
because it’s dead facts, and
boring.”
Another way to cause history to stick is to
present it so that it touches
students’ lives. To show students how racism
affects African Americans, a
teacher in Iowa discriminated by eye color
among members of her all-white
class of third graders for two days. The film A
Class Divided shows how vividly
thesestudents remembered the lesson fifteen years
later.11 In contrast, material
from U.S. history textbooks is rarely retained for
fifteen weeks after the end of
the school year. By stressing the distant past,
textbooks discourage students from
seeking to learn history from their
families or community, which again
disconnects school from the otherparts of students’
lives.

“Children, like most adults, do not readily
retain isolated, incoherent, and
meaningless data,” claim two Canadian educators.12
Surely they are right, and
sincetextbooks provide almost no causal skeleton,
surely that lack of coherence
helps to explain why students forget most of
the mass of detail they “learn” in
their history courses. Not all students forget it
equally, however. Caste minority
children—Native Americans, African Americans,
and Hispanics—do worse in
all subjects, compared to white or Asian
American children, but the gap is
largest in social studies. That is because
the way American history is taught
particularly alienates students of colorand children
from impoverished families.
Feel-good history for affluent white males
inevitably amounts to feel-bad history
for everyone else. A student of mine, who
was practice-teaching in Swanton,
Vermont, a town with a considerable American
Indian population, noticed an
Abenaki fifth grader obviously tuning out when
he brought up the subject of
Thanksgiving. Talking with the childbrought forth the
following reaction: “My
father told me the real truth about that day
and not to listen to any white man
scum like you!” Yet Thanksgiving seems reasonably
benign compared to, say,
Columbus Day. Throughout the school year, in a
thousand little ways, American
history offends many students. Unlike the
Abenaki youngster, most have-not

students do not consciously take offense and do
not rebel but are nonetheless
subtly put off. It hurtschildren’s self-image to
swallow what their history books
teach about the exceptional fairness of
America. Black students consider
American history, as usually taught, “white” and
assimilative, so they resist
learning it. This explains why research shows a
larger performance differential
between poor and rich students, or black and white
students, in history than in
otherschool subjects.13 Girlsalso dislike social
studies and history even more
than boys, probably because women and women’s
concerns and perceptions still
go underrepresented in history classes.14
Afrocentric history arose partly in response to
this problem. Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr., denounced Afrocentrism as
“psychotherapy” for blacks—a one-
sided misguided attempt to make African
Americans feel good about
themselves. 15 Unfortunately, the Eurocentric history
in our textbooks amounts
to psychotherapy for whites. Since historians
like Schlesinger have not
addressed Eurocentrism, they do not come into the
discussion with clean hands.
To be sure, the answer to Eurocentric
textbooks is not one-sided Afrocentric
history, the kind that has Africans inventing everything
good and whites

inventing slavery and oppression. Surely, we do
not really want a generation of
African Americans raised on antiwhite Afrocentric
history, but just as surely, we
cannot afford another generation of white
Americans raised on complacent
celebratory Eurocentric history. Even if they don’t
learnmuch history from their
textbooks, students are affected by the book’s
slant. Educator Martha Toppin
found unanimous agreement with this proposition
among ninety high school
students: “If Africa had had a history worth
learning about, we would have had it
last year in Western Civilization.”16 The message
that Eurocentric history sends
to non-European Americans is: your ancestors
have not done much of
importance. It is easy for European Americans
and non-European Americans to
take a step further and conclude that non-European
Americans are not important
today.
From the beginning, when textbooks call
Columbus’s 1492 voyage “a
miracle” and proclaim, “Soon the grateful captain
wades ashore and gives thanks
to God,” they make the Christian deityGod and
put Him [sic] on the white side.
Omitting the Arawaks’ perspective on Haiti
continues the process of
“otherizing” nonwhites in this first diorama from
our history. If the “we” in a
textbook included American Indians, African Americans,

Latinos, women, and
all social classes, the book would read differently,
just as whites talk differently
(and more humanely) in the presence of people of
color. Surely it is possible to
write accurate multicultural history that spreads the
discomfort around, rather
than distorting history to help only affluent white
children feel comfortable
about their past. Maybe we can even writeand
teach an American history that
children of the nonelite would want to study.
Equally as worrisome is the impact of
American history courses on white
affluent children. This grave result can best be
shown by what I call the
“Vietnam exercise.” Throughout the Vietnam War,
pollsters were constantly
asking the American people whether they wanted to
bring our troops home. At
first, only a small fraction of Americans favored
withdrawal. Toward the end of
the war, a largemajority wanted us to pull out.
Not only did Gallup, Roper, the National Opinion
Research Center, and other
organizations ask Americans about the war, they
also usually inquired about
background variables—sex,education, region, and
the like—so they could find
out which kinds of people were most
hawkish (pro-war), which most dovish.
Over ten years I have asked more than a
thousand college undergraduates and
several hundred others their beliefs about

what kind of adults, by educational
level, supported the war in Vietnam. I ask
audiences to fill out Table 1, trying to
replicate the results of the January 1971 national
Gallup survey on the war. By
January 1971, as I tell audiences, the
national mood was overwhelmingly dove:
73 percent favored withdrawal. (I excluded “don’t
knows.”)
TABLE 1
In January 1971 the Gallup Poll asked: “A
proposal has been made in Congress
to require the U.S. government to bring home
all U.S. troops before the end of
this year. Would you like to have your
congressman vote for or against this
proposal?”
Estimate the results, by education, by filling
out this table:
Most recent high school graduates are not able even
to construct a simple
table or interpret a graph. Accordingly, I teach
audiences how the table must
balance—how, if grade school-educated adults,
for instance, were more dovish
than others, hence supported withdrawal by
more than 73 percent, some other
group must be less dovish than 73 percent for
the entire population to balance

out at 73 percent doves. If you wish to be an
active reader, you might fill out the
table yourself before reading further.
By an overwhelming margin—almost 10 to 1—
audiences believe that college-
educated persons were more dovish. Table 2 shows
a typical response.
TABLE 2
I then ask audiences to assume that their tables
are correct—that the results of
the survey correspond to what they guessed—and to
state at least two reasonable
hypotheses to explain theseresults. Their most
common responses:
Educated people are more informed and critical, hence
more able to sift
through misinformation and conclude that the Vietnam
War was not in
our best interests, politicallyor morally.
Educated people are more tolerant. There were
elements of racism and
ethnocentrism in our conduct of the war; educated
people are less likely
to accept such prejudice.
Less-educated people, being of lower
occupational status, were more
likely to be employed in a war-related
industry or in the armed forces

themselves, hence had self-interest in being
pro-war.
There is nothing surprising here. Most people
feel that schooling is a good
thing and enables us to sift facts, weigh
evidence, and think rationally. An
educated people has been said to be a bulwark of
democracy.
However, the truth is quite different. Educated
people disproportionately
supported the Vietnam War. Table 3 shows the
actual outcome of the January
1971 poll:
TABLE 3
These results surprise even someprofessional social
scientists. Twice as high
a proportion of college-educated adults, 40
percent, were hawks, compared to
only 20 percent of adults with grade school
educations. And this poll was no
isolated phenomenon. Similar results were registered
again and again, in surveys
by Harris, NORC, and others. Back in 1965,
when only 24 percent of the nation
agreed that the United States “made a
mistake” in sending troops to Vietnam, 28
percent of the grade school-educated felt so.
Later, when less than half of the
college-educated adults favored pullout, among
the grade school-educated 61

percent did. Throughout our long involvement in
Southeast Asia, on issues
related to Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, or Laos,
the grade school-educated
were always the most dovish, the college-educated
the most hawkish.
Today most Americans agree that the Vietnam
War was a mistake, politically
and morally; so do most political analysts,
including such men as Robert
McNamara and Clark Clifford, who waged the
war.17 If we concur with this
now conventional wisdom, then we must concede
that the more educated a
person was, the more likely s/he was to be wrong
about the war.
Why did educated Americans support the war? When
my audiences learnthat
educated people were more hawkish, they scurry
about concocting new
explanations. Since they are still locked into their
presumption that educated
people are more intelligentand have more goodwill than
the less educated, their
theories have to strain to explain why less-
educated Americans were right. The
most popular revamped theory asserts that since
working-class young men bore
the real cost of the war, “naturally” they and their
families opposed it. This
explanation seems reasonable, for it does credit
the working class with opposing
the war and with a certain brute rationality.
But it reduces the thinking of the

working class to a crude personal cost-benefit
analysis, implicitly denying that
the less educated might take society as a whole
into consideration. Thus, this
hypothesis diminishes the position of the
working class—which was more
correct than that of the educated, after all—to a
mere reflex based on self-
interest. It is also wrong. Human nature
doesn’t work that way. Research has
shown that people of whatever educational level
who expect to go to war tend to
support that war, because people rarely don’t
believe in somethingthey plan to
do. Working-class young men who enlisted or looked
forward to being drafted
could not easily influence their destinies to
avoid Vietnam, but they could
change their attitudes about the war to be
more positive. Thus, cognitive
dissonance helps explain why young men of
draft age supported the war more
than oldermen, and why men supported the war more than
women. While less-
educated families with sons in the Vietnam conflict
often formed pockets of
support for the war, such pockets were
exceptions to the dovishness that
pervaded the less-educated segments of our populace.18
By now my audiences are keen to learnwhy educated
Americans were more
hawkish. Two social processes,each tied to schooling,

can account for educated
Americans’ support of the Vietnam War. The first
can be summarized by the
term allegiance. Educated adults tend to be
successfuland earn high incomes—
partly because schooling leads to better
jobs and higher incomes, but mainly
because high parental incomes lead to more education
for their offspring. Also,
parents transmit affluence and education directly to
their children. Successful
Americans do not usually lay their success at
their parents’ doorstep, however.
They usually explain their accomplishments as
owing to their own individual
characteristics, so they see American society as
meritocratic. They achieved their
own success; other people must be getting
their just desserts. Believing that
American society is open to individual input,
the educated well-to-do tend to
agree with society’s decisions and feel they had a
hand in forming them. They
identify more with our society and its policies.
We can use the term vested
interest here, so long as we realize we are
referring to an ideological interest or
need, a need to come to terms with
the privilege with which one has been
blessed, not simple economic self-interest. In this
sense, educated successful
people have a vested interest in believing that
the society that helped them be
educated and successful is fair. As a result,
those in the upper third of our
educational and income structure are more likely to

showallegiance to society,
while those in the lower third are more likely
to be critical of it.
The other process causing educated adults to
be more likely to support the
Vietnam War can be summarized under the rubric
socialization. Sociologists
have long agreed that schools are important
socializing agents in our society.
Socializing in this context does not mean
hobnobbing around a punch bowl but
refers to the process of learning and
internalizing the basic social rules—
language, norms, etiquette—necessary for an
individual to function in society.
Socialization is not primarily cognitive. We are not
persuaded rationally not to
pee in the living room; we are required not to.
We then internalize and obey this
rule even when no authority figure lurks to
enforce it. Teachers may try to
convince themselves that education’s main function is
to promote inquiry, not
iconography, but in fact the socialization function of
schooling remains
dominant at least through high school and hardly
disappears in college.
Education as socialization tells people what to think
and how to act and requires
them to conform. Education as socialization influences
students simply to accept
the rightness of our society. American history
textbooks overtly tell us to be

proud of America. The more schooling, the more
socialization, and the more
likely the individual will conclude that America is
good.
Both the allegiance and socialization processes cause
the educated to believe
that what America does is right. Public
opinion polls show the nonthinking
results. In late spring 1966, just before the
United States began bombing Hanoi
and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split
50-50 as to whether we should
bomb these targets. After the bombing began,
85 percent favored the bombing
while only 15 percent opposed. The sudden shift
was the result, not the cause, of
the government’s decision to bomb. The same
allegiance and socialization
processes operated again when policy changed in
the opposite direction. In 1968,
war sentiment was waning; but 51 percent of
Americans opposed a bombing
halt, partly because the United States was still
bombing North Vietnam. A month
later, after President Johnson announced a
bombing halt, 71 percent favored the
halt. Thus, 23 percent of our citizens changed
their minds within a month,
mirroring the shift in government policy. This
swaying of thought by policy
affects attitudes on issues ranging from our
space program to environmental
policy and shows the so-called “silent majority” to
be an unthinking majority as
well. Educated people are overrepresented among

thesestraws in the wind.19
We like to think of education as a mix of
thoughtful learning processes.
Allegiance and socialization, however, are intrinsic to
the role of schooling in
our society or any hierarchical society. Socialist
leaders such as FidelCastro and
Mao Tse-tung vastly extended schooling in Cubaand
China in part because they
knew that an educated people is a socialized
populace and a bulwark of
allegiance. Education works the same way
here: it encourages students not to
think about society but merely to trust that it
is good. To the degree that
American history in particular is celebratory, it
offers no way to understand any
problem—such as the Vietnam War, poverty, inequality,
international haves and
have-nots, environmental degradation, or changing
sex roles—that has historical
roots. Therefore, we might expect that the
more traditional schooling in history
that Americans have, the less they will understand
Vietnam or any other
historically based problem. This is why educated
people were more hawkish on
the Vietnam War.
Some people have suggested that the Vietnam War
was idiosyncratic. For six
long years, they point out, it was a Republican

war, and Republicans are on
average more educated than Democrats; that is why
more educated Americans
were hawks. Such thinking founders on several
grounds. First, more than any
other war in our history, Vietnam was a bipartisan
war. John Kennedy,
Democrat,sent in the first soldiers; Lyndon Johnson,
Democrat,sent in the most.
Second, more-educated Americans were pro-war
when those Democratic
administrationswaged it, compared to less-educated
Americans. Finally, not just
the Vietnam War shows more support by the
educated. About the Iraq War,
surveys by the Pew Trust found the samepattern.
In August 2004, for example,
two-thirdsof all Americans who graduated from college
favored keeping troops
in Iraq “long enough to bring stability,” while
61 percent with less than a high
school degree favored “a quick pullout.”20
Table 2 supplies an additional example of
nonthinking by the educated and
affluent: they are wrong about who supported the
war. By a 9 to 1 margin, the
hundreds of educated people who have filled out
Table 1 believed that educated
Americans were more dovish. Thus, the Vietnam
exercise suggests two errors by
the elite. The first error that educated people
made was being excessively
hawkish back in 1966, 1968, or 1971. The
second error they made was in filling
out Table 1.

Why have my audiences been so wrong in
remembering or deducing who
opposed the Vietnam War? One reason is that
Americans like to believe that
schooling is a good thing. Most Americans
tend automatically to equate
educated with informed or tolerant.21 Traditional
purveyors of social studies and
American history seizeupon precisely this belief to
rationalize their enterprise,
claiming that history courses lead to a more
enlightened citizenry. Respondents
to my Vietnam exercise who thrash about
claiming that it worked only for that
war or only because less-educated respondents feared
having to fight are still
trying to preserve their belief in the mantra
that education makes us wise. The
Vietnam exercise suggests the opposite is morelikely
true.
Audiences would not be so easily fooled if
they would only recall that
educated people were and are more likely to be
Republicans, while high school
dropouts are more likely to be Democrats.
Hawkish right-wing Republicans,
including the core supporters of Barry Goldwater
in 1964, of Ronald Reagan in
1980, and of groups like the John Birch
Society, come disproportionately from
the most educated and affluent segments of our society,

particularly dentists and
physicians. So we should not be surprised that
education correlates with
hawkishness. At the other end of the social-
status spectrum, although most
African Americans, like most whites, initially
supported U.S. intervention in
Vietnam, blacks were always more questioning and
more dovish than whites,
and African American leaders—Muhammad Ali, Martin
Luther King Jr., and
Malcolm X—were prominent among the earlyopponents of
the war.22
American history textbooks help perpetrate the
archetype of the blindly
patriotic hard hat by omitting or understating
progressive elements in the
working class. Textbooks do not reveal that
CIO unions and someworking-class
fraternal associations were open to all when many
chambers of commerce and
country clubs were still white-only. Few textbooks
tell of organized labor’s role
in the civil rights movement, including the
1963 March on Washington.
Nevertheless, many members of my audiences
are aware that educated
Americans are likely to be Republicans, hard-
liners on defense, and right-wing
extremists. Some members of my audiences
know about Goldwater voters,
Muhammad Ali’sinduction refusal, Birchers and
education, or laborunions and
the war—information that would have helped them
fill in the blanks in Table 1

correctly. Somehow, though, they never think to
apply such knowledge. Most
people fill out the table in a daze
without ever using what they know. Their
education and their position in society cause them
not to think.23
Such nonthinking occurs most commonly when
society is the subject. “Oneof
the major duties of an American citizen is to
analyze issues and interpret events
intelligently,” Discovering American History exhorts
students. Our textbooks
fail miserably at this task. The Vietnam exercise
shows how bad the situation
really is. Sociology professorsare amazed and
depressed at the level of thinking
about society displayed each fall, especially
by white upper-middle-class
students in their first-year classes. These
students cannot use the past to
illuminate the present and have no inkling of
causation in history, so they cannot
thinkcoherently about social life. Extending the
terminology of JulesHenry, we
might use “social stupidity” to describe the
illogical intellectual process and
conclusions that result.
Social stupidity continues in the twenty-first
century. In 2005, for example,
the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of
Republicans agreed with the

statement, “Poor people today have it easy
because they can get government
benefits without doing anything in return.”
Twenty-seven percent of Democrats
also agreed. Such responses can only come from people
who have neither had a
conversation with a poor person nor imagined their
economic and social reality
—yet somehow imagine they know enough to
hold an opinion. Educated people
are more likely to venture such ill-informed
opinions.24
Education does not have this impact in otherareasof
study. People who have
taken more mathematics courses are more
proficient at math than those who
have not. The same holds true for English, foreign
languages, and almost every
othersubject. Only in history is stupidity the result
of more, not less, schooling.
Why do educated people oftendisplay particularly
nonsensical reasoning about
the social world? For some, it is in their
ideological interest. Members of the
upper- and upper-middle classes are comforted
by a view of society that
emphasizes schooling as the solution to intolerance,
poverty, even war. Such a
rosy view of education and its effects lets them
avoid considering the need to
make major changes in otherinstitutions. To
the degree that this view permeates
our society, students automatically think well of
education and expect the
educated to have seen through the Vietnam War.

Moreover, thinking well of education reinforces
the ideology we might call
American individualism. It leaves intact the
archetypal image of a society
marked by or at least striving toward equality of
opportunity. Yet precisely to the
extent that students believe that equality of
opportunity exists, they are
encouraged to blame the uneducated for being
poor, just as my audiences blame
them for being hawks on the war in Vietnam.
Americans who are not poor find
American individualism a satisfying ideology, for it
explains their success in life
by laying it at their own doorstep. This
enables them to feel proud of their
success, even if it is modest, rather than
somehow ashamed of it. Crediting
success to their position in social structure
threatens those good feelings. It is
much more gratifying to believe that their
educational attainments and
occupational successes result from ambition and hard
work—that their privilege
has been earned. To a considerable degree,
working-class and lower-class
Americans also adopt this prevailing ethic
about society and schooling. Often
working-class adults in dead-end jobs blame
themselves, focusing on their own
earlier failure to excel in school, and feel
they are inferior in somebasicway.25

Students also have short-term reasons for
accepting what teachers and
textbooks tell them about the social world in
their history and social studies
classes, of course. They are going to be tested
on it. It is in the students’ interest
just to learnthe material. Arguing takesmore energy,
doesn’t help one’s grade,
and even violates classroom norms. Moreover,
there is a feeling of
accomplishment derived from learning something,
even something as useless
and mindless as the answers to the identification
questions that occupy the last
two pages of each chapter in most history
textbooks. Students can feel frustrated
by the ambiguity of real history, the debates among
historians, or the challenge
of applying ideasfrom the past to their own lives.
They may resist changes in the
curriculum, especially if theseinvolve more work or
work less clearly structured
than simply “doing the terms.” After years of
rote education, students can
become habituated to it and inexperienced and
ineffectual at any otherkind of
learning.26
In the long run, however, “learning” history this
way is not really satisfying.
Mosthistory textbooks and many high school history
teachers give students no
reason to love or appreciatethe subject. The
abysmal ratings that students give to

their history courses provide a warning flag,27
and we cannot respond merely by
exhorting students to like history more. But all
this does not mean the sorrystate
of learning in most history classrooms cannot
be changed. Students will start
learning history when they see the pointof doing
so, when it seems interesting
and important to them, and when they believe
history might relate to their lives
and futures. Students will start finding history
interesting when their teachers
and textbooks stop lyingto them.
AFTERWORD
THE FUTURE LIESAHEAD—AND WHAT TO DO
ABOUT
THEM
One does not collect facts he does not need, hang on
to them, and
then stumble across the propitious moment to
use them. One is
first perplexed by a problem and then makes
use of facts to
achieve a solution.
—CHARLES SELLERS1
Once you have learned how to ask questions—
relevant and
appropriate and substantial questions—youhave learned

how to
learnand no one can keep you from learning whatever
you want
or need to know.
—NEIL POSTMAN ANDCHARLES
WEINGARTNER2
Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a
greatmany things.
Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open
minds; do not
overload them.
—ANATOLE FRANCE3
The future of mankind lies waiting for those
who will come to
understand their lives and take up their
responsibilities to all
living things.
—VINE DELORIA JR.4
IF THE AUTHORS OF American history textbooks
took notice of the points
made in the first eleven chapters of this book,
then textbooks would be far less
likely to present, and teachers to teach,

distorted and indefensibly incomplete
accounts of our past. Lies My Teacher Told Me is
itselfincomplete, however. It
says little about Hispanic history, for example.
Yet our textbooks are so
Anglocentric that they might be considered
Protestant history.5 What about
women’s history and the history of gender in
America, two different but related
topics? Lies mentions both subjects from time to
time but makes no thorough
critique of how textbooks present women’s history
and gender issues.6 And what
about the next lie? The next historical marker,
commemorative statue, museum
exhibit, feature film set in the American past,
television miniseries, or historical
novel will probably pass on more misinformation. At
the least, it will present its
topicincompletely and partially. What is to be
done about thesefuture lies?
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
make me the arbitrator—I who
surely still unknowingly accept all manner of
hoary legends as historical fact.7
Instead, the answer is for all of us to
become, in Postman and Weingartner’s
vulgar term, “crap detectors”8—independent
learners who can sift through
arguments and evidence and make reasoned judgments.
Then we will have

learned how to learn, as Postman and Weingartner
put it, and neither a one-sided
textbook nor a one-sided critique of textbooks will be
able to confuse us.
To succeed, schools must help us learnhow to ask
questions about our society
and its history and how to figure out answers
for ourselves. At this crucial task
most American history textbooks and courses fail
miserably.
Part of the problem is with form. Because they
try to cover so many things,
textbooks, at least as currently incarnated,
cannot effectively acquaint students
with issues and controversies and thereby with
historical argument, with its
attendant skills of using logicand marshaling
evidence to persuade. Mentioning
is part of the problem. Even when textbooks
discredit the myths that clog our
historical arteries, students don’t retain the tiny
rebuttals in their history
textbooks. 9 They forget the untoward fact
that contradicts the myth, for it
doesn’t fit with the powerful archetype. History
textbooks and teachers must
make special efforts and take enough time to
teach effectively against these
archetypes. Mircea Eliade has referred to “the
inability of collective memory to
retain historical events except insofar as it

transforms them into archetypes.”10
Truth, to be retained, must be given the same
mythic significance that we have
given our lies.
For this reason, I find myself tongue-tied when
teachers ask what textbook I
recommend. Perhaps no traditional textbook can
be written that will empower
rather than bore us with history.
What, then, is to be done?
The portrait of lyingpainted in the last two
chapters as a vertically integrated
industry, including textbook boards, publishers,
authors, teachers, students, and
the public, may appear bleak. It follows,
however, that intervention can occur at
any pointin the cycle. The next few paragraphs
are directed particularly toward
teachers, who can intervene even in the absence of
transformed textbooks. Those
of us not in the classroom can play a role in
changing how history is taught by
supporting teachers who put innovative approaches
into practice.
Throughout the United States, roadside markers,
monuments, forts, ships, and
museums distort history. My book Lies Across
America critiqued one hundred
such sites. This marker, which I critiqued in
the first edition of Lies My Teacher
Told Me, inspired that book. Like many Civil
War monuments and roadside
markers across the South, it misrepresented

Southerners as united in support of
the Confederacy. In reality, in 1863, support
from black residents in southwest
Mississippi—and from some whites as well—
enabled Grant to abandon his
supply lines and attack Vicksburgfrom the south
and east. Despite this roadside
marker’s words, “the people” Grant’s forces
encountered were mostly African
Americans who responded to “the blueclad
invaders” by supplying them with
food, showing them the best roads to Jackson,
and telling them exactly where the
Confederates were.
By 2000, perhaps because of this book, the
marker had been removed. The
Mississippi Department of Archives and History
does not admit to knowing
what happened to it, but it no longer stands in
southwest Mississippi. A
marvelousteaching device would be for a class to
examine roadside markers and
monuments in their own community, deciding
which is least accurate. Then
students could propose a corrective marker to
stand next to the biased
commemoration; they might even help raise
money to erect it. In the process,
they might stumble upon some of the forces
that influence historical memory,
especially when it is on the landscape.
The first critical change must be in the form:

we must introduce fewer topics
and examine them more thoroughly. There is no
way to get students to explore
and bring primary and secondary sources to bear on
the thousands of topics that
now clutter history textbooks. Rather than having
students memorize the names
Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni Verrazano, Ponce de
Leon, Hernando de Soto, etc.,
and a phrase telling what each allegedly did,
teachers can help students focus on
the larger picture—the effects of Columbus’s
1493 expedition upon Haiti and
Spain, and then on all the Americas, Europe, the
Islamic world, and Africa. So
many details connect with major issues such as
this that I suspect students will
come awayremembering more particulars than if
they had merely regurgitated
factoids. Certainly, students will recall the
projects they worked on and the
issues they worked through themselves. Many
educators have already put into
effect teaching methods that deviate from the
deadening “learn the textbook”
routine and provide models for otherteachers.11
Covering fewer topics will enable classes to
delve into historical
controversies. Doing so is an absolute requirement
if students are to learn that
history is not just answers. The answers one gets
depend partly upon the
questions one asks, and the questions one asks depend
partly upon one’s purpose

and one’s place in the social structure.Perhaps
not everyone in the classroom
will come to the same conclusion. Teachers
need to put themselves in the
position that for students to disagree with their
interpretation is okay, so long as
students back up their disagreement with serious
historical work: argumentation
based on evidence. People have a right to
their own opinions, but not to their
own facts. Evidence must be located, not created,
and opinions not backed by
evidence cannot be given much weight.
Students who research both sides will
discover which issues and questions facts will
resolve, and which differences
involve basic values and assumptions. The
students’ positions must then be
respected. This does not imply that teachers should
concede the floor or accede
to the now fashionable opinion that all points of
view are equally appropriate
and none is to be “privileged” with the label
“true.”12
Teachers do not have to know everything to
facilitate independent student
learning. They can act as informed reference
librarians, directing children to
books, maps, and people who can answer their
questions about history.
Resources already exist that can help teachers teach
history creatively, using

primary materials.13
Perhaps the best resources are right at hand.
Students can interview their own
family members, diverse people in the community,
leaders of local institutions,
and oldercitizens.14 Some history classes have
compiled oral histories of how
the depression affected their town or how
desegregation affected their school.
Students in a Mississippi high school published
a book, Minds Stayed on
Freedom, about the civil rights movement in their
community.15 Students in a
Massachusetts school “became” historical figures and
published their work.16
For students to create knowledge is exciting
and empowering, even if the
product merely gets placed in the school
library. Students might also suggest a
new historical marker for their school or community.
Often the most important
events go unrecorded on the landscape, while
markers commemorate the
nineteenth-century site of the First Presbyterian Church.
What events at a high
school were important enough to be noted
on a marker? Which graduates
“should” be commemorated? Which made history,
and is a broader definition of
“making history” needed? Do the names of local
streets or buildings honor
people whose acts we are now trying to
rectify? Mississippi’s Ross Barnett
Reservoir, for example, pays tribute to the
racist governor who tried to keep

African Americans out of the University of
Mississippi. Who should be
honored? Why? How? Raising these questions
leads students to important
issues; if their answers are controversial, so much
the better.
Teaching history backward from the present also grips
students’ attention. The
teacher presents current statistics on high school
seniors’ life chances, analyzed
by race, sex, social class, and region—their
prospects for various levels of
educational achievement, divorce, incarceration, death
by violence; their life
expectancy, frequency of voting, etc. Then
students are challenged to discuss
events and processes in the past that cause these
differences.
Teachers can also encourage their students to
critique their textbook. Each
student can pick on a topics/he thinks is badly
handled, or the entire class can
work together on a common problem. Chapter 5
told of an Illinois teacher who
upset her sixth graders by telling them that most
presidents before Lincoln were
slaveowners. After her students convinced themselves
that she was right, they
were outraged with their textbook, which devoted
many pages to Washington,
Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and the rest without a

word about their owning
slaves. They wound up sending a letter to
the putative author and the publisher.
The author never replied, but someone at the
publisher sent a bland reply that
thanked them for providing “useful feedback on our
product,” assured them “we
are always striving to improve our product,” and
concluded by pointing out that
the textbook included several pages on the civil
rights movement. “What does
this have to do with our critique?” exclaimed
the students. Presumably the
answer to their question was “It’s ‘black,’ isn’t it?!”
Such an encounter amounts
to a win-win situation. If the students receive an
intelligentreplythat takestheir
pointseriously, then they have helped to improve the
book in its next edition. If
they get a boilerplate replylike theseIllinois sixth
graders, then they realize no
one is at home intellectually in this publishing
enterprise, so they had better read
critically from here on.
Even if teachers do not challenge textbook doctrine,
students and the rest of us
are potential sources of change. African American
students have actively
pressured several urban school systems for new
history curricula. Two white
sixth-grade girls in Springfield, Illinois, who did a
National History Day project
on the 1908 riot that tried to make that
town an all-white “sundown town,”
followed their project up by spurring the city to

create a “race riot walking tour”
as apology and remembrance. Two Native American
high school students
spurred the state of Minnesota to eliminate the
word squaw, a derogatory term
for female American Indians, as a formal name
on the landscape. And all across
America, confronted with teachers who still simply
teach from the textbook,
students have challenged them with ideas
from Lies My Teacher Told Me. As
one student put it: “I’ve been using your
book to heckle my teacher from the
back of the room.”
Whether dealing with bad textbooks, watching
historical movies, or visiting
museum exhibits, students—and the rest of us—must
learn how to deal with
sources. This process entails putting five questions to
each work.17
First, when and why was it written (or
painted, etc.)? Locate the intended
audience in the social structure. Consider what
the speaker was trying to
accomplish with them. This is part of what
sociologists call the sociology of
knowledge approach. English professorscall it
contextualization: learning about
the social context of the text. As we have seen,
historians call it historiography:
studying the writing of history. Historiography—the
concept and the term—can

be taught to students as young as fourth
grade, and it helps make them critical
readers and critical thinkers.18
A second question, also part of historiography, is to
ask whose viewpoint is
presented. Where is the speaker, writer, etc., located
in the social structure?
What interests, material or ideological, does
the statement serve? Whose
viewpoints are omitted? Students might then attempt
to rewrite the storyfrom a
different viewpoint, thus learning that history is
inevitably partial.
Third, is the account believable? Does each acting
group behave reasonably—
as we might, given the same situation and
socialization? This approach also
requires examining the work for internal
contradictions. Does it cohere? Do
some of its assertions contradict others? If
textbooks emphasize the United
States as a generally helpful presence in Latin
America, for example, how do
they explain anti-Yankee sentiment in the region?
Fourth, is the account backed up by other
sources? Or do other authors
contradict it? This question sends us to the
secondary historical and social
science literature. Even a cursory encounter with
research on social class in other
countries, for instance, is enough to refute the
glowing textbook accounts of
America as a land of unparalleled opportunity.

Finally, after reading the words or seeing the
image, how is one supposed to
feel about the America that has been presented?
This analysis also includes
examining the authors’ choice of words and
images. “Most of the words we use
in history and everyday speech are like mental
depth charges,” James Axtell has
written. “As they descend [through our consciousness]
and detonate, their
resonant power is unleashed, showering our
understanding with fragments of
accumulated meaning and association.”19
Readers who keep thesefive questions in mind will have
learned how to learn
history.
Teachers and students are not the only fulcrums for
change. New factors make
transformed textbooks possible. In California, Texas,
and otherstates, right-wing
conservatives still influence textbook adoptions, but
so now do many others.
Beginningin 1985, for instance, Texas forced
somepublishersto treat evolution
more honestly, avoid such stereotypical terms as
go on the warpath, when
referring to Native Americans, and add white
before Southerners where
appropriate. 20 The ensuing standoffs between black
nationalists, feminists,

right-wingers, First Amendment groups, etc., allow
authors and publishersnew
roomto maneuver.
Consumers of education—students, teachers,
parents, and interested citizens
—are beginning to demand textbooks with
real flavor, history that can even
upset the stomach. According to Michael
Wallace, Americans are ready for it.
People generally “are angry at having been
conned and are curious to know
more,” he claims. “Witness the triumph of Roots
in a culture once seemingly
mired in the pieties of Gone With the
Wind.”21 For that matter, the success of the
first edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me provides
additional evidence.
It is about time. For history is central to
our ongoing understanding of
ourselves and our society. We need to produce
Americans of all social-class and
racial backgrounds and of both genders who
command the power of history—the
ability to use one’s understanding of the past to
inspire and legitimize one’s
actions in the present. Then the past will
seriously inform Americans as
individuals and as a nation, instead of
serving as a source of weary clichés.
Products of successful American history courses
know basic social facts about
the United States and understand the historical
processes that have shaped these
facts. They can locate themselves in the social

structure, and they know someof
the societal and ideological forces that have
influenced their lives. Such
Americans are ready to become citizens, because
they understand how to effect
change in our society. They know how to check
out historical assertions and are
suspicious of archetypal “truths.” They can
rebut the charge that history is
irrelevant, because they realize ways that the
past influences the present,
including their own present.
Thomas Jefferson surely had it right when
he urged the teaching of political
history so that Americans might learn “how
to judge for themselves what will
secure or endanger their freedom.”22 Citizens
who are their own historians,
willing to identify lies and distortions and able to
use sources to determine what
really went on in the past, become a
formidable force for democracy. Hugh
Trevor-Roper, the dean of British historians, has
written, “A nation that has lost
sight of its history, or is discouraged from
the study of it by the desiccating
professionalism [or unprofessionalism!] of its
historians, is intellectually and
perhaps politicallyamputated. But that history must be
true history in the fullest
sense.” After the eleven years of research
and writing that went into the first

edition of this book,23 and thirteen more years of
study since, my own quest to
know what truly happened in our American past has
only begun. After reading
all this way, so has yours. Bon voyage to us
both!
NOTES
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
1 Student, email via AOL.com, 1996.
2 Tomi Evans, email, 10/2005.
3 Via Erik Bailey, e-mail, 11/2005.
4 Dudley Lewis, “Teachingthe Truth,” San
Francisco Examiner & Chronicle,
11/26/1995. Lewis was the first commentator to
pair Howard Zinn’s People’s
History and Lies. He was far from the last. Our books
are very different, partly
because our politics differ, but we are equally
critical of the smug boring
textbooks that still dominate American history on the
high school level.
5 Mary Mackey, “Don’t Know Much About
History . . . ,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 2/12/1995.

6 “Joan” at independentreader.com (1995); website
has sincechanged hands.
7 Others have done better, but they’re dead!
8 Several readers have taken me to task for
including almost nothing about
women’s history. To be sure, in the AfterwordI
took myself to task for this
omission and explained it by noting that the job
had already been done. A note to
that chapter directs readers to six different
critiques of history textbooks’
treatment of women; I could not bring myself
to do again what others had done
so well. I must admit, however, that I have yet to
meet a single person who read
one of thesecritiques because of my suggestion, so
perhaps I should have
addressed the topicmyself.
9 When I did this on a panel with Herbert
Kohl and Howard Zinn in Boston,
Zinn suggested, “Maybe you should have called
your book Lies 70 Percent of
My Teachers Told Me.”
10 Please, before you quit, buy at least one book
from the club!
11 Polite would be nice, though.
http://AOL.com
http://independentreader.com

INTRODUCTION: SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY
WRONG
1 Billings, whose real name was Henry
Wheeler Shaw, coined this phrase
probably between 1850 and 1885.
2 James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,”
Saturday Review, 12/21/1963, reprinted
in Rick Simonson and ScottWalker, eds., Multi-cultural
Literacy (St. Paul,MN:
Graywolf Press, 1988), 11.
3 Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko, quoted in Robert
Slusser, “History and the
Democratic Opposition,” in Rudolf L. Tökés,
ed., Dissent in the USSR
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1975), 329-53.
4 I use the term history as encompassing social
studies, as do most researchers
and students. When the distinction is important,
I will make it. Robert Reinhold,
Harris poll, reported in New York Times, 7/3/1971,
and quoted in Herbert
Aptheker, The Unfolding Drama (New York:
International, 1978), 146; Terry
Borton, The Weekly Reader National Survey on
Education (Middletown, CT:
FieldPublications, 1985), 14, 16; Mark Schug,
Robert Todd, and R. Beery,
“Why Kids Don’t Like Social Studies,” Social
Education 48 (May 1984): 382-
87; Albert Shanker, “The ‘Efficient’ Diploma Mill,”
paid column in New York

Times, 2/14/1988; Joan M. Shaughnessy and Thomas
M. Haladyna, “Research
on Student Attitudes Toward Social Studies,” Social
Education 49 (November
1985): 692-95. National grade averages in 1992
ACT Assessment Results,
Summary Report, Mississippi (Iowa City:ACT,
1993), 7.
5 Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr., What
Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?
(New York: Harper and Row, 1987);
National Geographic Society, Geography:
An International Gallup Survey (Washington, D.C.:
National Geographic
Society, 1988). Since the first edition of Lies
My Teacher Told Me, thesestudies
continue to come out. Recent examples include
Elizabeth McPike, Education for
Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Albert Shanker
Institute, 2000); a study of 556
students at fifty-five elite colleges and universities
commissioned by the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, summarized
by the Associated Press
—“Students Ignorant of History,” USA Today,
6/29/2000; the 2001 National
Assessment of Educational Progress in History,
summarized by Diane Ravitch,
“Should We Be Alarmed by the Results of the
Latest U.S. History Test? (Yes),”
History News Network, hnn.us/articles/1526.html,
10/19/2003; Sheldon M.

Stern, Effective StateStandards for U.S. History
(Washington, D.C.: Thomas B.
Fordham Institute, 2003); and Joe Williams, “Duh!
81% of kids fail test,” New
York Daily News,
nydailynews.com/front/story/308139p263646c.html,
5/10/2005. In addition to pointing out that
graduates know little history, McPike
also claims they are not nationalist enough, having
been taught too many bad
things about our past. I disagree.
6 James Green, “Everyone His/Her Own
Historian?” Radical Historians
Newsletter 80 (5/99): 3, reviewing and quoting
Roy Rosenzweig and David
Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
7 Richard L. Sawyer, “College Student Profiles:
Norms for the ACT
Assessment, 1980-81” (Iowa City:ACT, 1980).
Sawyer findslarger differences
by race and income in social studies than in
English, mathematics, and the
natural sciences.
8 Years ago Mills discerned that Americans
feel a need to locate themselves in
the social structure in order to understand
the forces that shape their society and
themselves. See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological
Imagination (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959), 3-20.
9 Paul Goldstein, Changing the American Schoolbook

(Lexington, MA: D. C.
Heath, 1978). Goldstein says textbooks are the
organizing principle for more
than 75 percent of classroom time.In history, the
proportion is even higher.
10 One of the “newnew”books, We Americans,
also has ancient antecedents but
changed authors and was radically revised around
1990.
11 ———, “Ask an Alum,” Vermont Quarterly (Fall
2005): 53.
12 Ravitch and Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-
Olds Know? 49.
13 Mel Gabler’s right-wing textbook critics and I
concur that textbooks are
boring. Mrs. W. Kelley Haralson writes, “The
censoring of emotionalism from
history texts during the last half century has
resulted in history textbooks which
are boring to students.” “Objections [to The
American Adventure]” (Longview,
TX: Educational Research Analysts, n.d.), 4. We
part company in our proposed
solutions, however, for the only emotion that Gabler
and his allies seemto want
to add is pride.
14 “It’s a Great Country,” sung with prideby a
high school choirfrom Webster
http://hnn.us/articles/1526.html
http://nydailynews.com/front/story/308139p263646c.html

Groves, Missouri, in a CBS News video, Sixteen
in Webster Groves (NY:
Carousel Films, 1966).
15 In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Harcourt
Brace renamed this last one
Triumph of the American Nation. This is the Rambo
approach to history: we may
have lost the war in Southeast Asia, but we’llwin it
on the book jackets!
16 James Axtell, “Europeans, Indians, and the
Age of Discovery in American
History Textbooks,” American Historical Review 92
(1987): 627. Essays such as
Axtell’s, which review college-level textbooks,
rarely appear in history journals.
Almost never are high school textbooks reviewed.
17 Twelve were in my first sample for the first
edition of this book, six in my
second, for this revision. Two books, Discovering
American History and The
American Adventure, are “inquiry textbooks,”
composed of maps, illustrations,
and extracts from primary sources such as diaries
and laws, all woven together
by an overarching narrative. Briefly popular in
the mid-1970s, thesebooks were
meant to invite students to “do” history
themselves. The American Way, Land of
Promise, The United States—A History of the
Republic, American History, and
The American Tradition are traditional high school

narrative history textbooks in
my earlier sample. American Adventures, Life and
Liberty, and The Challenge of
Freedom, also in my original sample, were intended
for junior high students but
were oftenused by “slow” senior high classes.
Triumph of the American Nation
and The American Pageant were oftenused in “advanced
placement” high
school history courses. The newer six books
included a descendant of Triumph
of the American Nation retitled Holt American Nation,
the newest Pageant, A
History of the United States by Daniel
Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, The
Americans, now listing Gerald Danzer and four
otherauthors, Pathways to the
Present, listing four authors, and a seventh-grade
book, The American Journey,
which I included because a McGraw-Hill
representative urged me to, impressed
with the threeoutstanding historians listed as its
authors. Sales figures are trade
secrets, but the five current high school textbooks I
examined are probably the
biggest sellers and probably account for more than
three-fourths of all American
history textbook sales.
CHAPTER 1: HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY:
THE PROCESS
OF HERO-MAKING
1 James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,”

Saturday Review, 12/21/1963, reprinted
in Rick Simonson and ScottWalker, eds., Multi-cultural
Literacy (St. Paul,MN:
Graywolf Press, 1988), 9.
2 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction
(Cleveland: World Meridian, 1964
[1935]), 722.
3 Charles V. Willie, quoted in David J.
Garrow, Bearing the Cross (New York:
William Morrow, 1986), 625.
4 The phrase, of course, refers to his father’s
wealth and Senate seat.
5 Helen Keller (New York: McGraw-Hill
Films, 1969).
6 Helen Keller, “Onward, Comrades,” address at
the RandSchool of Social
Science, New York, 12/31/1920, reprinted in Philip
S. Foner, ed., Helen Keller:
Her Socialist Years (New York: International
Publishers, 1967), 107.
7 Quoted in Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is
Dark and I Am Far from Home (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1990 [1975]), 101.
8 Foner, ed., Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years,
26.
9 Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher (New
York: Delacorte, 1980), 454; Dennis
Wepman, Helen Keller (New York: Chelsea

House, 1987), 69; Foner, ed., Helen
Keller: Her Socialist Years, 17-18. The United
States did not allow Flynn to
receive the letter.
10 Jonathan Kozol brought this suppression to
my attention in an address at the
University of Wyoming in 1975.
Nazi leaders also knew about her radicalism: in
1933 they burned Keller’s
books because of their socialist content and banned
her from their libraries. We
overlook her socialist content, thus learning no more
than the German public
about her ideas. See Irving Wallace, David
Wallechinsky, and Amy Wallace,
Significa (New York: Dutton, 1983), 1-2.
11 N. Gordon Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and
World Politics: America’s
Response to War and Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1968),
67. Everett M. Dirksen, “Use of U.S. Armed Forces
in Foreign Countries,”
Congressional Record, June 23, 1969, 16840-43.
12 Robert J. Maddox, The Unknown War with Russia
(San Rafael, CA: Presidio
Press, 1977), 137.
13 Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of
Haiti, 1915-1934 (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971),
86.
14 Ibid., 66, 74.
15 Walter Karp, The Politics of War (New
York: Harper and Row, 1979), 158-
67.
16 Piero Gleijesus, “The Other Americas,”
Washington Post Book World,
12/27/1992, 5.
17 “Reports Unlawful Killing of Haitians by Our
Marines,” New York Times,
10/14/1920, 1ff. Also see Schmidt, The United States
Occupation of Haiti.
18 Addresses of President Wilson. 66th Congress, Senate
Document 120
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1919), 133.
19 Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh (New York:
Random House, 1968), 24, 265.
20 Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro
(New York: Collier, 1965
[1954]), 360-70; Nancy J. Weiss, “Wilson Draws
the Color Line,” in Arthur
Mann, ed., The Progressive Era (Hinsdale, IL:
Dryden, 1975), 144; Harvey
Wasserman, America Born and Reborn (New York:
Macmillan, 1983), 131;
Kathleen Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal
Segregation,” Journal of

Negro History 44 (1959): 158-73; and Morton
Sosna, “The South in the Saddle,”
Wisconsin Magazine of History 54 (Fall 1970):
30-49.
21 Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican
National Committee,
“Address to the Colored Voters,” October 6, 1916,
reprinted in Herbert
Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro
People in the United States,
1910-1932 (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1973), 140;
Nancy Weiss, “The Negro and
the New Freedom,” Political Science Quarterly 84, 1
(March 1969): 66;
Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal
Campaigns Against Black
Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998).
22 Wyn C. Wade, The Fiery Cross (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 115-
51.
23 Ibid., 135-37.
24 Ibid., 138.
25 Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1966
[1962]), 292-94. Bennett counts twenty-six major
race riots in 1919 alone,
including riots in Omaha; Knoxville; Longview,
Texas; Chicago; Phillips

County, Arkansas; and Washington, D.C. Also see Herbert
Shapiro, White
Violence and Black Response (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press,
1988), 123-54.
26 Addresses of President Wilson, 108-99.
27 William Bruce Wheeler and Susan D. Becker,
Discovering the American
Past, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 127.
28 Ronald Schaffer, Americans in the Great
War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), quoted in Garry Wills, “The
Presbyterian Nietzsche,” New York
Review of Books, 1/16/1992, 6.
29 Karp, The Politics of War, 326-28; Charles D.
Ameringer, U.S. Foreign
Intelligence (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1990),
109. Ironically, after the war
Wilson agreed with Debs on the power of
economic interests: “Is thereany man
here . . . who does not know that the seed of
war in the modern world is
industrial and commercial rivalry?” (speech in Saint
Louis, 9/5/1919; Addresses
of President Wilson, 41).
30 Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence, 109.
31 Ibid. Ameringer points out that Wilson’s attacks
on civil liberties had become
a political liability and Attorney General Palmer a
pathetic joke by the fall of

1920.
32 The seventh-grade textbook American Journey does
tell of her in two places,
each time saying “according to popular legend.”
33 Michael H. Frisch, A Shared Authority
(Albany: StateUniversity of New
York Press, 1990), 39-47.
34 In Arthur M. Schlesinger’s 1962 poll of
seventy-five “leading historians,”
Wilson camein fourth, ahead of Thomas
Jefferson (Kenneth S. Davis, “Not So
Common Man,” New YorkReview of Books,
December 4, 1986, 29). Eight
hundred and forty-six professorsof American history
ratedWilson sixth, after
FDR and the four gentlemenalready on Mount
Rushmore (Robert K. Murray
and Tim Blessing, “The Presidential Performance Study,”
Journal of American
History 70 [December 1983]: 535-55). See also
George Hornby, ed., Great
Americana Scrap Book (New York: Crown,
1985), 121.
35 Thomas A. Bailey, Probing America’sPast, vol. 2
(Lexington, MA: D. C.
Heath, 1973), 575.
36 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1991), 701.
37 Quoted in Marjory Kline, “Social Influences
in Textbook Publishing,” in
Educational Forum 48, no. 2 (1984): 230.
38 Bessie Pierce, Public Opinion and the
Teaching of History in the United
States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926),
332.
39 Charles Dickens, American Notes, Chapter 3, in
The Complete Works of
Charles Dickens, dickens-
literature.com/American_Notes/3.html, 11/2006;
Elisabeth Gitler, The Imprisoned Guest (New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux,
2001); “Laura Dewey Bridgman” at Wikipedia,
11/2006; Helen Keller,
Midstream: My Later Life (New York:
Greenwood, 1968 [1929]), 156.
40 Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, 1.
Since Wilson’s was the only
Democratic administration in the first third of the
twentieth century, it was
natural that many of Franklin Roosevelt’s
statesmen, including FDR himself,
had received their foreign policy experience under
Wilson.
41 Quoted in Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I
Am Far from Home, 101.
42 Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 639.

43 See also Arthur Levine, When Dreams and
Heroes Died (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1980), and Frisch, A Shared
Authority.
44 Quoted in Claudia Bushman, “America Discovers
Columbus” (Costa Mesa,
CA: American Studies Association Annual Meeting,
1992), 9.
http://dickens-literature.com/American_Notes/3.html,
CHAPTER 2: 1493: THE TRUE IMPORTANCE
OF
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
1 Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1990), 5.
2 Samuel D. Marble, Before Columbus (Cranbury,
NJ: Barnes, 1989), 25.
3 Bartolomé de Las Casas, History of the
Indies, translated by Andrée M.
Collard (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
289.
4 David Quinn, England and the Discovery of
America, 1481-1620 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 5-105; Robert Blow,
Abroad in America (New York:
Continuum, 1990), 17; Jack Forbes, Black
Africans and Native Americans
(Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1988), 20.

5 Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire (New
York: Dutton, 1981), 5.
6 A. H. Lybyer, “The Ottoman Turks and the
Routes of Oriental Trade,” English
Historical Review 30, no. 120 (10/1915): 577-88.
Turkey may have shut out
Portuguese and Spanish merchants from the tradefor a
time,however, owing to
warfare between Turkey and Spain/Portugal.
7 Ibid.
8 William H. McNeill, The Age of Gunpowder
Empires (Washington, D.C.:
American Historical Association, 1989).
9 Some textbooks use the term Native Americans,
someuse American Indians,
and someuse both.Since about 1975 someNative
Americans have rejected the
term American Indian. Others, including the American
Indian Movement, have
chosen to stick with it. Because Native people
use both terms, so will I.
10 Letter to the king and queen of Spain,
7/1503, in Select Letters of Christopher
Columbus, translated and edited by R. H. Major
(New York: Corinth, 1961
[1847]), 196.
11 Columbus renamed the island now occupied by
Haitiand the Dominican
Republic Hispaniola, “Little Spain.” I call the

island Haitibecause, as a term,
Hispaniola is less well known by the public
than Haiti, and because Haitiwas
the aboriginal term, although confusion remains as to
whether Haitireferred to
the entire island or the highlands. See Las
Casas, History of the Indies, 44.
12 Michele de Cuneo, 1495 letter referring to
1/20/1494, quoted in Sale,
Conquest of Paradise, 143.
13 The Requirement has been widely reprinted. This
translation is from “500
Years of Indigenous and Popular Resistance
Campaign” (np: Guatemala
Committee for Peasant Unity, 1990).
14 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism:
The Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), 71-93.
15 bell hooks makes this pointin “Columbus:
Gone but Not Forgotten,” Z,
December 1992, 26.
16 Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 71-72.
17 ConstanceIrwin, Fair Godsand Stone Faces
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1963),
193-211, 217, 241; Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus
(New York: Crown, 1971),

119-25; Geoffrey Ashe et al., The Quest for
America (London: Pall Mall, 1971),
78-79.
18 Richard Eaton, Islamic History as Global
History (Washington, D.C.:
American Historical Association, 1990), 17; on caravel,
Smithsonian Institution
“Seeds of Change” exhibit (Washington, D.C.:
National Museum of Natural
History, 1991).
19 The American Adventure points out “the
magnetic compass had come from
China,” and “from the Arabs camean instrument
called the astrolabe.” Holt
American Nation credits the Chinese for the
compass and the Persians or Indians
for the lateen sail. Otherwise, all eighteen
textbooks present the Portuguese
achievements as unprecedented.
20 Stephen C. Jett, “Diffusion vs. Independent
Development,” in Carroll Riley et
al., eds., Man Across the Sea (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1971), 7.
21 An entry-level list of sources for thesealleged
predecessors of Columbus
begins with the enormous bibliography by John L.
Sorenson and Martin H.
Raish, Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas Across
the Oceans (Provo,
UT: Research Press, 1990), hereafter “Sorensonand
Raish.” See also:
For Indonesia: Stephen C. Jett. “The

Development and Distribution of the
Blowgun,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers (Davis:
University of California, December 1970).
Similar manufacture of paper: Paul
Tolstoy, “Paper Route,” Natural History, 6/1991, 6-
14; and Feats and Wisdom
of the Ancients (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1990),
122. Also see Carroll Riley
et al., eds., Man Across the Sea, especially the article
by Jett, and Sorenson and
Raish, entries H255, M109, and S57.
For Japanese: Betty J. Meggers, “Did Japanese
Fishermen Really Reach
Ecuador 5000 Years Ago?” Early Man 2
(1980): 15-19, and Ashe et al., The
Quest for America , 239-59. Also see Feats
and Wisdom of the Ancients, 124.
For Crees, Navajos, and Inuits: William Fitzhugh,
“Crossroads of Continents:
Review and Prospect,” in William Fitzhugh and
V. Chaussonet, eds.,
Proceedings of the Crossroads Symposium
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1988). See also Ian Stevenson,
Twenty Cases Suggestive of
Reincarnation (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1974), 218-19.
For Chinese: Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen,
Trans-Pacific Echoes and

Resonances (Singapore:World Scientific, 1985).
Also see Feats and Wisdom of
the Ancients, 121; Stevenson, Twenty Cases
Suggestive of Reincarnation , 218-
19; Irwin, Fair Gods and Stone Faces, 249-
51; Paul Shao, The Origins of
Ancient American Culture (Ames: Iowa State
University Press, 1983); and
Sorenson and Raish, entries L228, 231, 238-41 et
al.
For Afro-Phoenicians: Alexander von Wuthenau,
The Art of Terracotta
Pottery in Pre-Columbian Central and South
America (New York: Crown,
1970), and Unexpected Faces in Ancient
America (New York: Crown, 1975).
Also see Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before
Columbus (New York: Random
House, 1976); Thor Heyerdahl, “The Bearded Gods
Speak,” in Ashe et al., The
Quest for America, 199-238; Feats and Wisdom of
the Ancients, 123; Irwin, Fair
Gods and Stone Faces, 67-71, 89-96, 122-45,
176-86; J. A. Rogers, 100
Amazing Facts About the Negro (St. Petersburg,
FL: Helga Rogers, 1970), 21-
22; and Sorenson and Raish, entries J13-17, G71 et
al. Kenneth Feder attacks
Van Sertima’s evidence in Frauds, Myths, and
Mysteries (Mountain View, CA:
Mayfield, 1990), 75-77.
For Celts: Barry Fell, America B.C. (New York:
Quadrangle, 1976), and Barry

Fell, Saga America (New York: Times Books,
1980).
For Irish: Ashe et al., The Quest for America,
24-48. Ashe concludes that the
evidence for Irish voyages is weak.
For Norse: Erik Wahlgren,The Vikings and America
(New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1986).
For West Africans: Marble, Before Columbus, 22-25.
See also Van Sertima,
They Came Before Columbus; Arthur E.
Morgan, Nowhere Was Somewhere
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1946), 198; Michael Anderson
Bradley, Dawn Voyage (Toronto: Summer Hill Press,
1987); Pathe Diagne, “Du
Centenaire de la Decouverte du Nouveau Monde
par Bakari II, en 1312, et
Christopher Colomb, en 1492” (Dakar: privately
printed, 1990); and Sorenson
and Raish, entryH344.
For Polynesians: Heather Whipps, “Chicken Bones
Suggest Polynesians
Found Americas Before Columbus,” Live
Science website, 6/4/2007,
livescience.com/history/070604_polynesian_ chicken.html.
For Portuguese: Marble, Before Columbus, 25.
See also Van Sertima, They

Came Before Columbus: Morgan, Nowhere Was
Somewhere , 197; Ashe et al.,
The Quest for America, 265-66; Quinn, England
and the Discovery of America,
41-43, 85-86; and H. Y. Oldham, “A Pre-
Columbian Discovery of America,”
Geographical Journal 3 (1895): 221-33.
For Basques: Forbes, Black Africans and Native
Americans, 20.
For Bristol fishers: Quinn, England and the
Discovery of America, 5-105.
Also see A. A. Ruddock, “John Day of Bristol,”
Geographical Journal 132
(1966): 225-33; Blow, Abroad in America, 17; G.
R. Crone, The Discovery of
America (New York: Weybright and Talley,
1960), 157-58; and Carl Sauer,
Sixteenth-Century North America (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1971), 6.
22 Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient
Sea Kings (New York: Chilton,
1966). Hapgood argues for the Turkish map, which
he believes contains details
unknown to European explorers in 1513, hence
could not be fraudulent. Current
Anthropology 21, no. 1 (February 1980) contains
argumentsfor and against
coins as evidence of Roman visits.
23 Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans,
7-14; William Fitzhugh,
personal communication, November16, 1993; Van
Sertima, They Came Before

Columbus , Chapter 12. See also Alice B. Kehoe,
“Small Boats Upon the North
Atlantic,” in Riley et al., Man Across the Sea,
276.
24 James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle,
After the Fact (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1992).
25 Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans,
19. Morgan Llywelyn, “The
Norse Discovery of the New World,” Early Man 2,
no. 4 (1980): 3-6; Marshall
McKusick and Erik Wahlgren,“Viking in America—Fact
and Fiction,” Early
Man 2, no. 4 (1980): 7-9. Unlike most authorities,
Sale, The Conquest of
http://livescience.com/history/070604_polynesian_chicken.html
Paradise, 374, is unsure that Columbus reached
Iceland. The Norse findings
were known in Europe, according to James Duff,
The Truth about Columbus
(London: Jarrolds, 1937), 9-13.
26 Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus ,
30. See also Irwin, Fair Gods
and Stone Faces, 126.
27 Von Wuthenau, The Art of TerracottaPottery in
Pre-Columbian Central and
South America, 50.
28 Jose Maria Melgar quoted in Jacques

Soustelle, The Olmecs (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1984), 9. Gabriel Haslip-Viera,
Bernard Ortizde Montellano, and
Warren Barbour summarize the case against African
contact in “Robbing Native
American Cultures,”Current Anthropology 38 #3
(6/1997), 419-31.
29 Note 21 includes pro and con sources for Afro-
Phoenician contact.
30 Quoted by Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
1988), 13.
31 For example, “Acknowledge YourOwn History” by
Jungle Brothers.
32 Phoenicians and Egyptians did not keep trackof
“races” in today’s terms and
ranged (as they do today) from light to dark.
33 A controversy rages over what impact these
alleged newcomers had. Older
Eurocentric theories credited white visitors to
the Americas with the ideasthat
led to Olmec and Mayan civilizations. Pierre
Honore, In Quest of the White God
(New York: Putnam, 1964), is a late
example. A few authors believe the black
visitors to be the source of many Olmec
skills and ideas. See Irving Wallace,
David Wallechinsky, and Amy Wallace, Significa (New
York: Dutton, 1983),
58. MostMesoamericanists believe the Olmecs
developed entirely on their own.

For an earlystatement of this criticism, see Gregory
Mason, Columbus Came
Late (New York: Century, 1931). A fourth
view holds that the Afro-Phoenician
contact might have triggered a flowering of Olmec
society. This view retains the
potential for genius in both hemispheres.
34 Adventure is an “inquiry textbook,”
composed of maps, illustrations, and
extracts from primary sources such as diaries and
laws, linked by narrative
passages. Questions of this sort are the bane of inquiry
books. Wrestling with
them would require abundant library materials,
curricular time,and teaching
savvy.
35 Marble, Before Columbus, 25.
36 De Soto’s only geopolitical significance was
smallpox, which he left among
the Indians, and which left their populations much
reduced even by the time La
Sallefloated down the Mississippi 140 years
later. Among the books I reviewed
only Life and Liberty mentions this plague, giving it
just five words.
37 After I published this imagined classroom
exchange in The Truth About
Columbus (New York: New Press, 1992), I
read an account of the African
American novelist Ishmael Reed’s bringing up similar

material, learned from the
historian J. A. Rogers, in his fourth-grade history
class. His teacher dismissed his
ideasin “a lengthy outburst,” Reed reports. See “The
Forbidden Books of
Youth,” New York Times Book Review, June 6,
1993, 26-28.
38 Diagne, “Du Centenaire de la Decouverte du
Nouveau Monde par Bakari II,
en 1312, et Christopher Colomb, en 1492,” 2-
3; Van Sertima, They Came Before
Columbus, 6. Forbes, Black Africans and Native
Americans, 13-14, cites Las
Casas as evidence that Columbus knew of
American tradefrom West Africa.
39 Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus ,
21, 26. RegardingAfrican
diseases in the Americas, see Sorenson and Raish,
entryH344, and Richard
Hoeppli, “Parasitic Diseases in Africa and the
Western Hemisphere,” in Acta
Tropica, Supplementum 10 (Basel: Verlag für Recht
und Gesellschaft, n.d.), 54-
59. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans,
cautions that black and Negro
might be misleading terms, for Europeans
oftenapplied them to any dark person
of low status. Forbes believes that Balboa saw
blacks, but thinks theseblacks
might have come somehow from Haiti. Since
African slaves were brought to
Haitionly in 1505, they would have had to escape
from Haitito Panama with
Indians in order to have preceded Balboa, who

arrived in Panama in 1510.
Regardingblack oral tradition in Mexico, see
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, La
población negra de México (Mexico City:Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1989);
and John G. Jackson, Man,God, and Civilization (New
Hyde Park, NY:
University Books, 1972), 283.
40 Riley et al., Man Across the Sea, especially
Alice B. Kehoe, “Small Boats
upon the North Atlantic,” 275-92. Even MarcStengel
leaves out Brendan from
his lively and sympathetic summary, “The Diffusionists
HaveLanded,” Atlantic
Monthly, 1/2000, 35-48.
41 The threesmall fragments of knowledge about
Columbus’s background are
described in Lorenzo Camusso, The Voyages of
Columbus (New York: Dorset,
1991), 9-10. See also Sale, The Conquest of
Paradise, 51-52.
42 Las Casas, History of the Indies, 21.
44 Ibid., 344; J. B. Russell, Inventing the Flat
Earth (New York: Praeger, 1991).
45 By 2003 the descendant textbook Holt American
Nation dropped the mutiny

altogether.
46 Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 171, 185, 204-14,
362; John Hebert, ed.,
1492: An Ongoing Voyage (Washington, D.C.:
Library of Congress, 1992), 100.
47 Hans Koning, Columbus, His Enterprise(New
York: Monthly Review Press,
1976), 39-40; Sale, The Conquest of Paradise ,
238.
48 Pietro Barozzi, “Navigation and Ships in
the Age of Columbus,” Italian
Journal 5, no. 4 (1990): 38-41.
49 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Great Explorers (New
York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), 397-98. ElsewhereMorison gives
talk of revolt a bit more
credence, but Koning, Columbus, His Enterprise,
50, pooh-poohs the mutiny.
The best source for the trip, Columbus’s journal,
now lost but summarized by
Bartolomé de Las Casas, offers this account:
“Here [10/10] the men could bear
no more and complained of the length of the
voyage. But the Admiral
encouraged them in the best way he could, giving
them hope of the advantage
they might gain from it [riches]. He added that
however much they might
complain, having come so far, he had nothing to
do but go to the Indies, and he
would go on until he found them.” Sale, The
Conquest of Paradise, 60, believes

the storyhas little historical credibility. Indeed, by
October 9, they were
following largeflocks of birds, which they
believed (correctly) would take them
toward land, making an October 10 mutiny threat
quiteunlikely.
50 Bill Bigelow, “Once Upon a Genocide . .
. ,” in Rethinking Schools 5, no. 1
(October-November 1990): 7-8.
51 Salvador de Madariaga, Christopher Columbus
(New York: Frederick Ungar,
1967 [1940]), 203-4.
52 The Journal of Christopher Columbus,
translated by Cecil Jane (New York:
Bonanza, 1989), 171.
53 Ibid., 23.
54 The Log of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage
to America in the Year
1492, as copied out in brief by Las Casas
(Hamden, CT: Linnet, 1989),
unpaginated.
55 Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 122.
56 Philip Klass, “Wells, Welles, and the
Martians,” New York Times Book
Review, October 30, 1988. Ironically, in Wells’s
story, the aliens are finally done
in by microbes, while, in reality, disease wiped

out the Natives. “Amazon tribe
faces‘annihilation’,” BBC, 5/17/2005,
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/2/hi/americas/4554221 .stm ,
11/2006.
57 Quoted in Michael Paiewonsky, The Conquest of
Eden, 1493-1515 (Chicago:
Academy, 1991), 109. I have slightly modified the
translation based on a
translation in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen,
Bartolomé de Las Casas in
History (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1971),
312.
59 Cuneo, quoted in Sale, The Conquest of
Paradise, 138. See also Howard
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
(New York: Harper and Row,
1980), 4.
60 1496 letter, quoted in Eric Williams, Documents
of West Indian History,
(Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: PNM, 1963), 1:57.
61 Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of the Admiral
Christopher Columbus (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959),
149-50.
62 Maria Norlander-Martinez, “Christopher Columbus:
The Man,the Myth, and
the Slave Trade,” Adventures of the Incredible
Librarian, 4/1990, 17; Troy
Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean

(Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1973), 29.
63 One book, The Americans, does much better.
It includes the quotation about
subjugating the island with fifty men, quotes Las
Casas, and tells the storyof the
1493 voyage and the subjugation of the Natives
that followed.
(1987): 621-32; Sale, The
Conquest of Paradise, 156.
65 De Cordoba letter in Williams, Documents of
West Indian History, 1:94.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/2/hi/americas/4554221.stm
66 Smallpox, usually the big killer, probably did
not appear on the island until
after 1516.
67 Benjamin Keen, “Black Legend,” in The
Christopher Columbus
Encyclopedia (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1991). Las Casas cited by Sale,
The Conquest of Paradise, 160-61. See also Alfred
W. Crosby Jr., The
Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 45.

68 RegardingIsabella, see J. Leitch Wright Jr.,
The Only Land They Knew (New
York: Free Press, 1981), 128; Forbes, Black
Africans and Native Americans, 28;
Morison, The Great Explorers, 78. Warren Lowes,
Indian Giver (Penticton,
British Columbia: Theytus, 1986), 32, says
Labrador means “place to get cheap
labor.” Regardingthe Natchez, see James W. Loewen
and Charles Sallis,
Mississippi: Conflict and Change (New York:
Pantheon, 1980), 40.
69 Letter by Michele de Cuneo quoted in
Paiewonsky, The Conquest of Eden,
50.
70 Letter by Columbus quoted in Williams,
Documents of West Indian History,
1:36-37.
71 Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands:
The Origins of American
Racism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 131, also
quoting and paraphrasing Peter
Martyr, De Orbe Novo (1516).
72 Las Casas, History of the Indies, quoted in
Williams, Documents of West
Indian History, 1:67.See also Sanders, Lost Tribes
and Promised Lands, 131,
also quoting and paraphrasing Las Casas.
73 Norlander-Martinez, “Christopher Columbus: The
Man,the Myth, and the
Slave Trade,” 17; Sale, The Conquest of Paradise,

156; Sanders, Lost Tribes and
Promised Lands, 169; Eduardo Galeano, Memory of
Fire (New York: Pantheon,
1988), 72; Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the
Caribbean, 75, 222. Diego
Columbus was almost killed in this revolt,
according to J. A. Rogers, Your
History (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1983
[1940]), 71. Nicholas de Ovando
may have imported Africans as slaves even before
1505.
74 This turn of phrase is Bill Bigelow’s.
75 Official statement,June 8, 1989, quoted in
Five Hundred (magazineof the
Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission), 10/1989, 9.
76 Jeffrey Hart,“Discovering Columbus,” National
Review, 10/15/1990, 56-57.
78 Quoted in Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised
Lands, 290.
79 Koning, Columbus, His Enterprise, 86.
80 Marcel Dunan, ed., Larousse Encyclopedia of
Modern History (New York:
Crescent, 1987), 40.
81 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange,11-12. See
also Calder, Revolutionary

Empire, 13-14; Dunan, ed., Larousse Encyclopedia of
Modern History, 40, 67;
Crone, Discovery of America, 184.
82 Morgan, Nowhere Was Somewhere; Marble, Before
Columbus, 73-75;
Calder, Revolutionary Empire, 13. Lowes, Indian
Giver, 82, regarding
Montaigne. Also Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised
Lands, 208-9. The direct
influence of the anthropologist L. H. Morgan on
Marx and Engels is described
by Bruce Johansen, Forgotten Founders: How the
American Indian Helped
Shape Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Common Press, 1982), 122-23.
Sale, The Conquest of Paradise. See also Crone,
Discovery of America, 184.
83 Quoted by PeterFarb, Man’s Rise to
Civilization (New York: Avon, 1969),
296. The Tempest shows Shakespeare’s own fascination:
he modeled its Native
character, Caliban, after the Carib Indians, who were
cannibals, according to
what the Arawaks had told Columbus.
84 For that matter, Europe isn’t a continent, unless
the word is defined
Eurocentrically! Europe is a peninsula;the
division between Europe and Asia is
arbitrary, unlike the divisions between othercontinents.
85 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
(Evanston, IL: Row,
Peterson, 1957).

86 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange,124-25 and
Chapter 5; William Langer,
“American Foods and Europe’s Population
Growth, 1750-1850,” Journal of
Social History 8 (winter 1975): 51-66; Jack
Weatherford, Indian Givers (New
York: Fawcett, 1988), 65-71; “Seeds of
Change” exhibit (Washington, D.C.:
National Museum of Natural History, 1991).
87 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange,124-25; Lowes,
Indian Giver, 59-60;
Weatherford, Indian Givers, 65-71; Boyce
Rensberger, “Did Syphilis Sail to
Europe with Columbus and His Crew?” Burlington
Free Press, 7/31/1992, 3D.
88 See also Williams, Documents of West Indian
History, 1:xxxi. Karl Marx and
Fredrich Engels, “Communist Manifesto,” in Robert
C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-
Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978),
474. Weatherford, Indian Givers, 43,
58, argues that long-staple American cotton, more
useful for making cloththan
Old World varieties, prompted the industrial revolution;
he also considers the
earlyproduction of coins in Bolivia and sugar
in the Caribbean to amount to
proto-factories that spurred the industrial revolutionin
Europe.

89 Weatherford, Indian Givers, 12, 15-17. Dunan,
ed., Larousse Encyclopedia of
Modern History, 69, and Sale, The Conquest of
Paradise, 236, regarding
inflation. Marx and Engels, “Communist Manifesto.”
90 Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds.,
Seeds of Change (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991),
186-207.
91 Michael Wallace, “The Politics of Public
History,” in Jo Blatti, ed., Past
Meets Present (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1987), 41-42.
See also Garry Wills, “Goodbye, Columbus,”
New York Review of Books,
November22, 1990, 6-10. Interestingly, in
response to the Columbus
quincentenary the United Nations voted to declare
the 1990s “the Decade to
Eradicate Colonialism.” Only the United States
dissented. Even Spain and other
Western European former colonial powers abstained
out of respect for the new
global reality. See John Yewell, “To Growing
Numbers, Columbus No Hero,”
St. Paul Pioneer Press, 10/11/1990.
92 Johnson v. M’Intosh; see Robert K. Faulkner,
The Jurisprudence of John
Marshall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1968), 53; and Bruce A.
Wagman, “Advancing Tribal Sovereign Immunity as a
Pathway to Power,”
University of San Francisco Law Review 27, no. 2

(Winter 1993): 419-20.
93 Roy Preiswerk and Dominique Perrot,
Ethnocentrism and History (New
York: NOK, 1988), 245-46.
94 Columbus quoted in Sale, The Conquest of
Paradise, 116; see also 201.
95 John Burns, “Canada Triesto Make Restitution
to Its Own,” New York Times,
9/1/1988.
96 Virgil Vogel, This Country Was Ours (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972),
38, re Cartier. Weatherford, Indian Givers, 30, re
Drake. RegardingLewis and
Clark, one textbook, American History, gives full
credit to their Indian guides.
Romeo B. Garrett, Famous First Facts About
the Negro (New York: Arno,
1972), 68-69, re Henson as first at Pole.Some
claim Peary’s expedition never
reached the Pole;if it did, we cannot now
determine which person did so first.
Interestingly, Peary and Henson both fathered sons
during the expedition. In
1987 thesemen, now eighty years old, participated in
a reunion with Peary’s and
Henson’s “legitimate” descendants. For the first time,
the men’s mothers’ role in
the expedition was recognized. See “Discoverers’
Sons Arrive for Reunion,”

Burlington Free Press, 5/1/1987; also Susan A.
Kaplan’s introduction to
Matthew Henson, A Black Explorer at the North
Pole (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989). A good shortaccount of
Henson appears in Wallace,
Wallechinsky, and Wallace, Significa, 17-18. For a
view of how Peary took
advantage of the Inuits, including a charge of
“scientific criminality,” see
Michael T. Kaufman, “A Museum’sEskimo Skeletons
and Its Own,” New York
Times, 8/21/1993, 1, 24.
98 Las Casas, oral history collected from Tainos, in
Williams, Documents of
West Indian History, 1:17,92-93.
99 Las Casas quoted in J. H. Elliot, The
Old World and the New (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), 48; Las
Casas, History of the Indies, 289;
John Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus
(New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1991), 40. Las Casas is justly
criticized for suggesting that African slaves
be brought in to replace Indian slaves.
However, he recanted this proposal and
concluded “that black slavery was as unjust as
Indian slavery” (History of the
Indies, 257).

CHAPTER 3: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST
THANKSGIVING
1 Michael Dorris, “Why I’m Not Thankful for
Thanksgiving” (New York:
Council on Interracial Books for Children
Bulletin 9, no. 7, 1978): 7.
2 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America:
Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant
of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975), 15.
3 Howard Simpson, Invisible Armies: The Impact of
Disease on American
History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 2.
4 Col. Thomas Aspinwall, quoted in Jennings,
The Invasion of America, 175.
5 Kathleen Teltsch, “Scholars and Descendants
Uncover Hidden Legacy of Jews
in Southwest,” New York Times, 11/11/1990, A30;
“Hidden Jews of the
Southwest,” Groundrock (Spring 1992).
6 Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian
Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1972), 83. Our cowboy
culture’s Spanish origin explains why it is so
similar to the gaucho tradition of
Argentina.
7 The new Pageant has also increased its treatment of
Spanish rule.

(1987): 630.
9 The passage is basically accurate, although the
winter of 1620-21 was not
particularly harsh and probably did not surprise
the British, and Indians did not
assist them until spring.
10 William Langer, “The Black Death,” Scientific
American,February 1964.
11 Ibid.; see also William H. McNeill, Plagues
and Peoples (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1976), 166-85.
12 William H. McNeill, “Disease in History,” lecture
at the University of
Vermont, 10/18/1988. I use microbe and later germin
their larger meaning,
including viral as well as bacterial pathogens.
13 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange,34. Although
people do get pneumonia or
otherillnesses after exposure to the elements, they do
not get sick from the cold
but in the cold, because their bodily defenses are
weakened. Pneumonia and
otherpathogens do not lurk in icy lakesand snowy
hillsides but dwell on and

within us, where it is warm.
14 PeterFarb, Man’s Rise to Civilization (New
York: Avon, 1969), 42-43;
Hubbert McCulloch Schnurrenberger, Diseases
Transmitted from Animals to
Man (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1975);
see also Alfred W. Crosby Jr.,
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion
of Europe, 900-1900 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1976),
31. Andeans did have llamas; the
Andes may be too high and cold to promote disease
among llamas or people,
however, as is implied by the fact that European
and African epidemics after
1492 were less devastating therethan elsewhere.
15 McNeill, “Disease in History”; Crosby, The
Columbian Exchange,37; Henry
Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee
Press, 1983).
16 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 38-39, argues
that smallpox epidemics can
repeatedly wipe out most of the population among
such groups each time they
recur, perhaps every generation.
17 McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 201.
18 Gregory Mason, Columbus Came Late (New
York: Century, 1931), 269-70.
19 Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization, 268. See

also Jennings, The Invasion of
America, 86; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 210.
20 Feenie Ziner, Squanto (Hamden, CT: Linnet
Books, 1988), 141. See also
Jennings, The Invasion of America, 48-52; Robert
Loeb Jr., Meet the Real
Pilgrims (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 23,
87; and Warren Lowes,
Indian Giver (Penticton, British Columbia:
Theytus, 1986), 51. It wasn’t only
the Pilgrims: Queen Isabella boasted that she took
only two baths in her life, at
birth and before her marriage, according to Jay Stuller,
“Cleanliness,”
Smithsonian 21 (February 1991): 126-35.
21 Simpson, Invisible Armies, 2; Crosby, The
Columbian Exchange,37.
22 Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of
Massachusetts Bay
and John Eliot,” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Alan M.
Smith, eds., Race Relations in
British North America, 1607-1783 (Chicago: Nelson-
Hall, 1982), 44; and Neal
Salisbury, “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,”in David
Sweet and Gary Nash, eds.,
Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley
and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1981), 231-37.
Dobyns agrees that the 1617
plague was bubonic but believes it swept up

the Atlantic sea-board all the way
from Florida; see Their Number Become Thinned.
William Bradford, Of Plimoth
Plantation, rendered by Valerian Paget (New
York: McBride, 1909), 258,
implies that the Indians knew that smallpox was
not the epidemic that laid waste
to them in 1617, for in describing a 1634
outbreak of smallpox, Bradford stated,
“They fear it worse than the plague.” William
Cronon, Changes in the Land
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 87, votes
for chicken pox.
23 Excluding otherplagues in the Americas, of course.
Cushman is quoted in
Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback,
Puritans, Indians, and Manifest
Destiny (New York: Putnam’s, 1977), 54-55.
24 Simpson, Invisible Armies, 6.
25 Quoted in Ibid., 7.
26 Cushman, quoted in Segal and Stineback,
Destiny, 54-55; William S. Willis, “Division and
Rule: Red, White, and Black in
the Southeast,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and
Kenneth Jackson, eds., American
Vistas, 1607-1877 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 66.
27 Particularly the remnants of the once-hostile
Massachusetts, reduced in
number from 4,500 to 750, converted, according to

James Axtell, The European
and the Indian (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1981), 252, 370; see also
James W. Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, After
the Fact (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1992), iii.
28 Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 93; cf. Peter
Hulme, Colonial Encounters
(London: Methuen, 1986), 147-48.
29 John Winthrop to Simonds D’Ewes, 7/21/1634,
Publications of the Colonial
Society of Massachusetts 1900-02, 7 (12/1905) 71, at
books.google.com/ books.
30 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the
Indians (London: J. M. Dent,
1980), 186; cf. Simpson, Invisible Armies, 8.
31 Tee Loftin Snell, America’sBeginnings
(Washington, D.C.: National
Geographic, 1974), 73, 77.
32 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 50-51.
http://books.google.com/
33 Ibid., 202-15.
35 Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned.
36 David Quummen, “Columbus and Submuloc,”

Outside, June 1990, 31-34. Cf.
Crosby, The Columbian Exchange,49; McNeill, Plagues
and Peoples, 205-7.
37 James Brooke, “For an Amazon Indian Tribe,
Civilization Brings Mostly
Disease and Death,” New York Times, 12/24/1989.
Violent uprooting of Native
cultures continues as well;see Amnesty International,
Human Rights Violations
Against the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas
(New York: Amnesty
International, 1992). Charles Darwin, Voyage of
the Beagle, quoted in Crosby,
Ecological Imperialism, vii. As Darwin knew,
the same sad processes have
recurred wherever Europeans, Asians, or Africans
encountered isolated peoples,
from Australia to Easter Island, Hawaii to Siberia.
Thus, for example, the
population of the Marquesan Islands in the
South Pacific sank from one hundred
thousand at first contact to twenty-five hundred in
1955. See Thor Heyerdahl,
Aku-Aku (Chicago: RandMcNally, 1958), 352.
38 Langer, “The Black Death,” 5; see also
McNeill, Plagues and Peoples.
39 Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization, 294-95.
40 Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of North
American History (New York:
Viking, 1988), 3. McEvedy is a clinical
psychiatrist.

41 Jennings, The Invasion of America, 16.
42 Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 258.
43 Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California
Frontier (New Haven: Yale
44 Sources estimating precontact populations in
this range include P. M.
Ashburn, The Ranks of Death (Philadelphia:
Porcupine, 1980 [1947]); Woodrow
Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal
and Colonial America,”in
William Denevan, ed., The Native Population of
the Americas in 1492 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 13-34;
Sherburne Cook and Woodrow
Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico
and the Caribbean , vol. 1
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1971); Crosby, The
Columbian Exchange; Jared Diamond, “The Arrow
of Disease,” Discover,
October 1992, 64-73; Dobyns, Their Number
Become Thinned, 42; Jennings,
Invasion of America, 16-30; Simpson, Invisible
Armies; David Stannard,
American Holocaust (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 11-24; and
Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and
Survival: A Population
History Since 1492 (Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1987) and “The
Native American Holocaust,” Winds of Change 4,
no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 23-28.
For a review of the population literature, see
Melissa Meyer and Russell
Thornton, “Indians and the Numbers Game,” in Colin
Calloway, ed., New
Directions in American Indian History (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press,
1988), Ch. 1.
45 A paragraph in The American Pageant does tell of
the 90 percent toll
throughout the hemisphere but leaves out any
mention of the plague at
Plymouth.
46 Quoted in Ziner, Squanto, 147.
47 J. W. Barber, Interesting Events in the
History of the United States (New
Haven: Barber, 1829), 30. Barber does not cite
the authority he quotes.
48 Even though “Virginia” then included most of
New Jersey, the Mayflower
nonetheless landed hundreds of miles northeast.
Historianswho support the “on
purpose” theory include George F. Willison, Saints
and Strangers (New York:
Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945); Lincoln Kinnicutt,
“The Settlement at Plymouth
Contemplated Before 1620,” Publications of the
American Historical
Association (1920): 211-21; and Neal Salisbury,
Manitou and Providence (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109,
270. Leon Clark Hills, History and
Genealogy of the Mayflower Planters (Baltimore:
Genealogical Publ. Co.,
1975), and Francis R. Stoddard, The Truth about
the Pilgrims (New York:
Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1952), 19-20,
support the “Dutch bribe”
theory, based on primary source material by
Nathanial Morton. Historiansat
Plimoth Plantation support the theories of pilot error or
storm.
49 Ziner, Squanto, 147; Kinnicutt, “The Settlement at
Plymouth Contemplated
Before 1620”; Almon W. Lauber, Indian Slavery
in Colonial Times Within the
Present Limits of the United States
(Williamstown,MA: Corner House, 1970
[1913]), 156-59; Stoddard, The Truth about the
Pilgrims, 16.
50 The Mayflower sailed south for half a
day, until encountering “dangerous
shoals,” according to several of our textbooks.
Then the captain and the Pilgrim
leadershipinsisted on returning to Provincetown and
eventually New Plymouth.
Conspiracy theorists take this to be a charade to
dissuade the majority from
insisting on Virginia. See Willison, Saints and
Strangers, 145, 466; Kinnicutt,
“The Settlement at Plymouth Contemplated Before

1620”; and Salisbury,
Manitou and Providence, 109, 270.
51 Willison, Saints and Strangers, 421-22.
52 Speech in Sioux Falls, 9/8/1919, in
Addresses of President Wilson,
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1919), 86.
53 T. H. Breen, “Right Man,Wrong Place,”
New York Review of Books, 11/20/
1986, 50.
54 Written by Robert Beverley in 1705 and quoted
in Wesley Frank Craven, The
Legend of the Founding Fathers (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1983 [1956]), 5-8.
55 Axtell, The European and the Indian, 292-95.
56 J. Leitch Wright Jr., The Only Land They Knew
(New York: Free Press,
1981), 78.
57 Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 173; James
Truslow Adams, The
March of Democracy (New York: Scribner’s,
1933), 1:12.
58 I encountered most of thesestudents in New
England, but many of them
camefrom suburbs of Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.,
and New Jersey. I
suspect that replies from the rest of the United
States would be similar, except

perhaps the Far West.
59 Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1974), 139, describes the same process in
Pennsylvania.
60 Emmanuel Altham letter quoted in Sydney
V. James, ed., Three Visitors to
Early Plymouth (Plymouth: Plimoth Plantation,
1963), 29.
61 Could therebe a fairy tale parallel to this
Pilgrim incident? Like Goldilocks,
the Pilgrims broke-and-entered, trespassed, vandalized,
and stole, and like
Goldilocks, educators forgive them because they are
Aryan. The Goldilocks tale
makes her victims less than human, and the
shadowy way our histories represent
Indians makes the Pilgrims’ victims also less than
human. My thanks to Toni
Cade Bambara for this analysis of Goldilocks.
62 Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 125.
63 All five had names otherthan Squanto or
Tisquantum, but Indians sometimes
went by different names in different tribes.
Squanto’s biographer, Feenie Ziner,
believes he was one of the five. Ferdinando Gorges
stated in 1658 that Squanto
was among those abducted in 1605 and livedwith

him in England for three
years, which convinced Kinnicutt (“The Settlement
at Plymouth Contemplated
Before 1620,” 212-13) but not historians at Plimoth
Plantation or Neal Salisbury
(Manitou and Providence, 265-66), although Salisbury
seems more positive in
“Squanto: Last of the Patuxets.”See also Lauber, Indian
Slavery in Colonial
Times, 156-59.
65 One textbook, the latest edition of Boorstin
and Kelley, does summarize the
enslavement and the destruction of Squanto’s village.
66 William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 99.
See also, inter alia, Salisbury,
“Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,”228-46.
67 Robert Moore, Stereotypes, Distortions, and
Omissions in U.S. History
Textbooks (New York: CIBC, 1977), 19.
68 Robert M. Bartlett, The Pilgrim Way
(Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1971),
265; and Loeb, Meet the Real Pilgrims, 65.
69 Charles Hudson et al., “The Tristan de Luna
Expeditions, 1559-61,” in Jerald
T. Milanich and Susan Milbrath, eds., First Encounters
(Gainesville: University
of Florida Press, 1989), 119-34, supplies a
vividillustration of European
dependence on Indians for food. They tell of

the little-known second Spanish
expedition (after de Soto) into what is now
the southeastern United States.
Because the Indians retreated from them and burned
their own crops, the
Europeans almost starved.
70 Bessie L. Pierce, Public Opinion and the
113-14. See also Alice B. Kehoe,
“‘In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed
. . . ’: The Primacy of the
National Myth in U.S. Schools,” in PeterStone
and Robert MacKenzie, eds., The
Excluded Past (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 207.
71 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New
York: Harper and Row, 1963), 18-19.
72 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in
America,”Daedalus (Winter 1967): 1-
21. See Hugh Brogan, The Pelican History of
the U.S.A. (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin, 1986), 37, regarding Plymouth Rock.
See also Michael
Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 207-
10.
73 Valerian Paget, introduction to Bradford’s
History of the Plymouth
Settlement, 1608-1650 (New York: McBride,

1909), xvii.
74 Dorris, “Why I’m Not Thankful for
Thanksgiving,” 9. The addition is mine,
in the interest of accuracy.
75 Plimoth Plantation, “The American Thanksgiving
Tradition, or How
Thanksgiving Stolethe Pilgrims” (Plymouth, MA: n.d.,
photocopy); Stoddard,
The Truth about the Pilgrims, 13. Jeremy D.
Bangs, “Thanksgiving on the Net:
Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 1,” Society of
Mayflower Descendants in
the Commonwealthof Pennsylvania Web page,
sail1620.org/discover_feature_thanksgiving_on_the_net_roast_b
ull_with_cranberry_sauce_part_l.shtml
1/2007.
76 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny
(Cambridge: Harvard
77 Arlene Hirshfelder and Jane Califf, “Celebration
or Mourning? It’s All in the
Point of View” (New York: Council on
Interracial Books for Children Bulletin
10, no. 6, 1979), 9.
78 Frank James, “Frank James’ Speech” (New
York: Council on Interracial
Books for Children Bulletin 10, no. 6, 1979),
13.
79 Willison, Saints and Strangers; Salisbury, Manitou
and Providence, 114-17;

Wright, The Only Land They Knew, 220. Salisbury,
Manitou and Providence,
120-25, tells of the militaristic and coercive nature
of Plymouth’s dealings with
the Indians, however, right from the first.
http://sail1620.org/discover_feature_thanksgiving_on_the_net_r
oast_bull_with_cranberry_sauce_part_l.shtml
CHAPTER 4: RED EYES
(1987): 629-30.
2 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America (Chapel
Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975), vii.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
(New York: MacMillan, 1907),
86.
4 Rupert Costo, “There Is Not One Indian
Child Who Has Not Come Home in
Shame and Tears,” in Miriam Wasserman,
Demystifying School (New York:
Praeger, 1974), 192-93.
5 Thomas Bailey, “The Mythmakers of American
History,” Journal of American
History (1968): 18.
6 Quoted in Calvin Martin, ed., The American

Indian and the Problem of History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),
102.
7 Axtell, “Europeans, Indians, and the Age of
Discovery,” 621-32.
8 Sol Tax, foreword to Virgil Vogel, ed., This
Country Was Ours (New York:
Harper and Row, 1972), xxii.
9 The exceptions are Pathways to the Present,
just one and a half pages of 1,088
or 0.1 percent; Discovering American History, 2 of
831 or 0.2 percent; The
American Pageant (1991), 4 of 1,077 or 0.4
percent; Pageant (2006), 4 of 1,162
or 0.3 percent; and Boorstin and Kelley, 4 of
1,056 or 0.2 percent. My edition to
Pathways to the Present , while covering
American history from the beginning,
emphasizes the modern era; another edition might
treat American Indian cultures
at greater length.
10 I will use the terms tribe and nation
interchangeably, because someNative
American leaders argue that nation is a
European construct, implying more
emphasis on the state than they feel applies to most
Indian societies. As
explained in the previous chapter, I also use Native
American and American
Indian synonymously. The textbooks I surveyed also
walk this linguistic
minefield.Interestingly, those that use Native

American are not necessarily more
up-to-datein their interpretations. I call Native
individuals by their Native
names, after introducing them by their Native names
and the names more
familiar to non-Native readers.
11 Robin McKie, “Diamonds Tell Tale of Comet
That Killed Off the Cave-
men,” The Observer, 5/20/2007;
observer.guardian.co.uk/, 5/20/2007.
12 Although refusing to give up the usual “knows
all” textbook tone, one other
book, The United States—A History of the
Republic by James Davidson and
Mark Lytle, does tell of controversy and
uncertainty in archaeology.
13 John N. Wilford, “New Mexico Cave Yields
Clues to Early Man,” New York
Times, May 5, 1991, describes research by Richard
MacNeish suggesting 35,000
BP there. David Stannard, American Holocaust (New
York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 10, suggests 32,000 to 70,000
BP. Sharon Begley offers a useful
popular summary in “The First Americans,” in
Newsweek’s special issueWhen
Worlds Collide (Fall/Winter 1991), 15-20. Cf.
Andrew Murr, “Who Got Here
First?” Newsweek, 11/15/99; MarcStengel, “The
Diffusionists HaveLanded,”

Atlantic Monthly 1/1/2000, 35-48,
theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001stengel.htm; Steve
Olson, “The Genetic
Archaeology of Race,” Atlantic Monthly, 4/2001,
70-71; and Steve Olson, “First
Americans More Diverse than OnceThought, Study
Finds,” Washington Post,
7/31/2001.
14 According to Robert F. Spencer, JesseD.
Jennings et al., The Native
Americans (New York: Harper and Row,
1977), 8, most archaeologists believe
in the small-gene-pool theory.
15 Since people arrived in Australia long before
12,000 BP and could not have
walked there, we cannot be sure that Indians
did not get here by boat.
Archaeology reveals no boats from this era, but
then they would not have been
built from stone or have lasted in wood.
16 American Journey even suggests “that the Inuit were
the last migrants to
crossthe land bridge into North America.”Presumably,
thesefamed kayakers
carried their boats on their shoulders!
17 To be sure, when lower sea level provided an
isthmus across the Bering
Strait, North and South America were not totally
surrounded by water, so there
is no reason that the first settlers—or Boorstin,
Kelley, or Garraty—should have
concluded that they were. In an age that accords

continent status to Europe,
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
http://theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001stengel.htm
however, which is far from surrounded by water,
this is a nitpick and not the
pointour authors were making.
18 Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence. Not nearly enough
archaeology has been done in Alaska or Canada,
and almost none in the now-
flooded coastal routes that might have been most
auspicious for earlyhuman
migration.
19 Llamas were the only draft animal in the
Americas, and Diamond explains
why they were not really suitable.
20 Díaz quoted in Sources in American History
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1986). Population from Robert F.
Spencer and JesseD. Jennings,
The Native Americans, 480.
21 Quoted in Costo and Henry, Textbooks
and the American Indian.
22 In The Cunning of History (New York:
Harper, 1987), 91, a rumination on
the Nazi holocaust,Richard L. Rubenstein emphasizes
that “the Holocaust bears
witness to the advance of civilization.”

23 Christmas is an example of syncretism in
European culture, combining
elements from the Jewish religion, like the idea of a
Messiah, and Northern
European “pagan” observances, like the winter solstice
and the emphasis on
plants that are green in winter (holly, ivy,
evergreen tree, mistletoe). Corn
culture among the Iroquois and otherEastern nations
is an example of
syncretism in American culture, combining corn
from Mexico and Peru with
ideasalready present in the Northeast.
24 Pertti Pelto, The Snowmobile Revolution
(Menlo Park, CA: Cummings,
1973).
25 Fred Anderson,review of The Skulking Way of
War, Journal of American
History 79, no. 3 (December 1992): 1134.
26 Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier of the
American West (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 12.
27 This admixture of peoples in Native societies
makes it hard to identify
physical types on reservations today. “Creek” or
“Lumbee” is cultural, not
physical. J. Leitch Wright Jr., The Only Land They
Knew (New York: Free Press,
1981), 230. More powerful centralized governments
were also forced upon
indigenous people by European powers so they

would have conflict partners
with whom to deal.
28 Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black (Englewood
1974), 257; James Axtell, The European and the
Indian (New York: Oxford
29 On Ireland, see Allen Barton, Communities in
Disaster (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1970), 11-12. The large-scale nations
in Mexico and Peru, like
nations in Europe, waged large-scale war. In
someareaswithin the present
United States, notably the Northwest, tribal
warfare was sometimes brutal before
European influence.
30 Wright, The Only Land They Knew, 138; Patricia
Galloway,“Choctaw
Factionalism and CivilWar, 1746-1750,” Journal of
Mississippi History 44, no.
4 (11/1982): 289-327; Joseph L. Peyser, “The
Chickasaw Warsof 1736 and
1740,” Journal of Mississippi History 44, no. 1
(1/1982): 1-25.
31 Six of eighteen books mention that survivors of
the Pequot War or King
Philip’s War were sold into slavery, but they treat this as
an isolated incident and
do not otherwise mention the Indian slavetrade.

32 Wright, The Only Land They Knew, 33, 130.
33 PeterN. Carroll and David Noble, The Free
and the Unfree (New York:
Penguin, 1988), 57.
34 Almon W. Lauber, Indian Slavery in
Colonial Times Within the Present
Limits of the United States (Williamstown,MA:
Corner House, 1970 [1913]),
110.
35 Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times,
106. Nash, Red, White, and Black,
113, 119, offers somewhat different figures: 5,300
whites, presumably including
indentures; 2,900 blacks; and 1,400 Indians.
36 J. A. Rogers, YourHistory (Baltimore: Black
Classic Press, 1983 [1940]), 78.
See also Frederick W. Hodge, ed., Handbook of the
Indians (Bureau of
American EthnologyBulletin, vol. 30, part 2)
(Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1906), 216.
37 On California, see Albert Hurtado, Indian
Survival on the California Frontier
(New Haven:Yale University Press, 1988),
75. On the Southwest, see Jack
Forbes, The Indian in America’sPast (Englewood
1964), 94-95. Cf. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave
Trade (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2002).
38 Wright, The Only Land TheyKnew, 81-83.
39 Henry Dobyns, Their Number Become
Thinned (Knoxville: University of
TennesseePress, 1983), 332. He also points out
that the plagues, by killing
experts and reducing numbers generally, thus decreasing
the division of labor,
played a role in de-skilling Natives. See also
Nash, Red, White, and Black, 97;
Jennings, The Invasion of America, 41, 87; Anthony F.
C. Wallace, The Death
and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1970), 24-25; Neal
Salisbury, Manitou and Providence (New York:
Oxford, 1982), 56-57.
40 Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American
West, 21. Wasichu in Lakota is
also translated as “fat grabber,” one who is greedy
(Wendy Rose, “For Some,
It’s a Timeof Mourning,” The New World
[Smithsonian Quincentenary
Publication], no. 1 [Spring 1990]: 4). The
Cherokee word for white man
similarly translates as “people greedily grasping for
land,” according to Ray
Fadden in a private communication, November
25, 1993.
41 The Americans does mention that Europeans
“need to borrow from the

peoples they sought to dominate,” but gives
nary an example.
42 D. W. Meinig, “A Geographical Transect of
the Atlantic World, ca. 1750,” in
Eugene Genovese and Leonard Hochberg,eds., Geographic
Perspectives in
History (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1989), 197; Patricia
Nelson Limerick, “The
Case of the Premature Departure: The Trans-Mississippi
West and American
History Textbooks,” Journal of American History
78, no. 4 (3/1992): 1381. The
textbook view can be contrastedwith that shown in
the feature movie
Koyaanisqatsii,which is filmed from a Hopi
viewpoint and portrays western
canyons serenely but is disquietedby the canyons of
New York City.
43 Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands:
The Origins of American
Racism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 373-74.
44 Helen H. Tanner, “The Glaize in 1792: A
Composite Indian Community,”
Ethnohistory 25, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 15-39.
Frontier, 47-49.
46 Nash, Red, White, and Black, 60.
47 Quoted in PeterFarb, Man’s Rise to
Civilization (New York: Dutton, 1978),
313.

48 Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Bruce Johansen,
Forgotten Founders: How the
American Indian Helped Shape Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Common
Press, 1982), 92-93. Farb, Man’s Rise to
Civilization, 313; Frederick Turner,
Beyond Geography (New York: Viking, 1980),
244; Nash, Red, White, and
Black, 317-18; and James Axtell, “The White
Indians” in The Invasion Within
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
302-27, agree that many more
whites became Indian than vice versa.
49 Turner, Beyond Geography, 241; Karen Ordahl
Kupperman, Settling with the
Indians (London: J. M. Dent, 1980), 156. See
also Axtell, “The White Indians,”
and The European and the Indian, 160-76.
50 Franklin quoted in Jose Barreiro, ed., Indian
Roots of American Democracy
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University American Indian
Program, 1988), 43; Vogel,
ed., This Country Was Ours, 257-59. Not all Indian
societies were equalitarian:
the Natchez in Mississippi and the Aztecs in
Mexico showed a rigid hierarchy.
51 Cadwallader Colden quoted in Vogel, ed.,
This Country Was Ours, 259.
52 Alvin Josephy, Jr., The Indian Heritage of

America (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1973), 35; William Brandon, New Worlds
for Old (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1986), 3-26; Michel de
Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” in Thomas
Christensen and Carol Christensen, eds., The
Discovery of America and Other
Myths (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992),
110-15.
53 Quoted in Bruce Johansen and Roberto
Maestas, Wasichu: The Continuing
Indian Wars(New York: Monthly Review Press,
1979), 35.
54 Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers (New York:
Fawcett, 1988), Ch. 8;
Johansen, Forgotten Founders; Barreiro, ed., Indian Roots
of American
Democracy, 29-31. See also Bruce A. Burton,
“Squanto’s Legacy: The Origin of
the Town Meeting,” Northeast Indian Quarterly 6,
no. 4 (Winter 1989): 4-9;
Donald A. Grinde Jr., “Iroquoian Political
Concept and the Genesis of American
Government,” Northeast Indian Quarterly 6, no. 4
(Winter 1989): 10-21; and
Robert W. Venables, “The Founding Fathers,” Northeast
Indian Quarterly 6, no.
4 (Winter 1989): 30-55. While this was partly
flattery, in this and other
documents of that time,Congress repeatedly used
symbols and ideasfrom the
Iroquois League. Not only Franklin but also Thomas
Jefferson and Thomas
Paine knew and respected Indian political

philosophy and organization.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth Tooker denies this influence in
“The U.S. Constitution
and the Iroquois League,” Ethnohistory 35, no. 4
(Fall 1988): 305-36. But see
“Commentary” on Tooker in Ethnohistory 37, no. 3
(Summer 1990). In The
Disuniting of America (New York: Norton,
1992), 127, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
makes the Eurocentric claim that Europe was
“alsothe source—the unique
source—of those liberating ideasof individual liberty
. . . ,” but he offers no
evidence, only assertion, for this claim. Apparently he
does not know of
Europe’s astonishment not only at Native American
liberty but also at religious
freedom in China and Turkey. Marco Polo
reported that of all the fabulous
things he saw during his twenty-seven-year trip to
“Cathay,” none amazed him
more than its religious freedom: Jews, Christians,
Muslims, and Buddhists
worshipped freely and participated in civil society
without handicap. When
Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, Turkey took
them in and allowed them to
worship.
55 John Mohawk, “The Indian Way Is a Thinking
Tradition,” in Barreiro, ed.,
Indian Roots of American Democracy, 16.

56 James Axtell, “The Indian in American
History, the Colonial Period,” in The
Impact of Indian History on the Teaching of
United States History (Chicago:
Newberry Library, 1984), 20-23; Barreiro, ed., Indian
Roots of American
Democracy, 40-41; Bernard Sheehan, “The Ideology of
the Revolution and the
American Indian,” in Francis Jennings, ed., The
American Indian and the
American Revolution (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1983),
12-23; and Stewart
Holbrook, Dreamers of the American Dream (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday,
1957), 137-45, regarding New York State.
57 Weatherford, Indian Givers, Ch. 6.
58 Wright, The Only Land They Knew, 264.
59 Alfred Crosby Jr., “Demographicsand Ecology”
(paper presented at
Smithsonian Institution Seminar, Washington, D.C.:
September 1990), 4.
Andean Indians practiced the only agriculture known
to produce more topsoil
than it depleted. We have yet to unlock all the
secrets of Mexican and
Guatemalan agriculture, which seemto have
combined floating gardens, canals,
and fisheries.
60 Vogel, ed., This Country Was Ours, 268.
61 Ibid., 266-67.

62 FaithDavis Ruffins, colloquium at the
National Museum of American
History (Washington, D.C.: April 25, 1991),
regarding patent medicine images.
See also the treatment of American Indian Medicine by
Virgil J. Vogel (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). Bruce
Johansen, Forgotten Founders,
117; Warren Lowes, Indian Giver (Penticton,
British Columbia: Theytus Books,
1986), 51; William B. Newell, “Contributions of
the American Indian to Modern
Civilization,” Akwesasne Notes (Late Spring
1987): 14-15; Lewis Hanke, The
Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of
America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 90,
regarding political and ideological
influences.
63 Costo and Henry, Textbooks and the
American Indian, 22.
64 Vine Deloria, an American Indian writer, does
this in God Is Red (Golden,
CO: North American Press, 1992 [1973]).
65 In Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian
and the Problem of History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 21.
66 Quoted in Lee Clark Mitchell, Witnesses to a
Vanishing America (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 260. See
also Richard Drinnon, Facing
West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1980), 539.
67 James Merrell, The Indians’ New World (Chapel
Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989), 193-95.
68 Drinnon, Facing West, xvii-xix. In his well-
known novel Rabbit Boss (New
York: Vintage, 1989 [1973]), which tells of the
Washo Indians of California in
the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, Thomas
Sanchez supplies a vivid
portrayal of what happens to a people denied
equal rights before the law.
69 David Horowitz, The First Frontier (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1978),
14; Stephen Aron, “Lessons in Conquest (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University,
1993, typescript), 15; Wiley Sword, President
Washington’s Indian War
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985),
191-97. An exception is Land of
Promise, which offers a subheading, “150 Years
of Warfare,” preceding a
competenttreatment of Indian wars in general and
King Philip’s War in
particular.
71 From the inside jacket of Missouri! (New
York: Bantam, 1984). Ross was the

pen name of Noel B. Gerson, who wrote 325 in
all.
72 Joe Feagin, Racial and Ethnic Relations
(Englewood Cliffs: NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1984), 181. John D. Unruh, The Plains Indians
(Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1979).
73 Quoted in Kupperman, Settling with the
Indians, 185. See also Jennings, The
Invasion of America, 220.
74 Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, rendered by
Valerian Paget (New York:
McBride, 1909), 284-87. Underhill quoted in
Jennings, The Invasion of America,
223, and Segal and Stineback, Puritans, Indians,
and Manifest Destiny, 106.
Indians quickly adjusted to European warfare and
raised their level of violence
accordingly. The Pequots were not quitedestroyed; a
few still live on and near a
tiny reservation of a few acresin Connecticut,
where they own a huge casino.
75 PeterA. Thomas, “Cultural Change on the
Southern New England Frontier,
1630-1655,” in Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures in Contact,
155.
76 Nash, Red, White, and Black, 126. But see
Jennings’s lower figures, The

Invasion of America, 324.
77 To make this claim, I include lives lost on
both sides, sinceWampanoags and
Narragansetts are now U.S. citizens. Including only
colonial deaths, King
Philip’s War was nevertheless more deadly than the
French and Indian War, the
War of 1812, or the Spanish-American War. See
also Stephen Saunders Webb,
as paraphrased by Pauline Maier, “Second
Thoughts on Our First Century,” New
York Times Book Review, 8/7/1985.
78 Weatherford, Indian Givers, 225.
79 Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change (Trenton, NJ:
Africa World Press, 1988), 55.
Carolyn Stefanco-Schill, “Guale Indian Revolt,”
Southern Exposure 12, no. 6
(11/1984): 4-9.
80 Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 125.
81 The novel Okla Hannali by R. A. Lafferty
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1972), 136-42, 186-89, treats the CivilWar within
Indian Territory.
82 Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and Amy
Wallace, Significa (New
York: Dutton, 1983), 326. Cf. James W.
Loewen, Lies Across America (New
York: New Press, 1999), 385-89.

83 Even today, this remains true: people have the
right to hunt,fish, and walk
across private rural land, unless it is posted,
and posting developed relatively
recently.
84 Carleton Beals, American Earth (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1939), 327-30;
Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging,”
Radical History Review 26
(1982): 37-64; PeterA. Thomas, “Cultural Change on
the Southern New
England Frontier, 1630-1655,” in Fitzhugh, ed.,
Cultures in Contact, 151.
85 See, for example, Pierre Berton, The Invasion of
Canada, 1812-1813
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980), 27. The
seven battles do not include
Tippecanoe, which predated a formal declaration
of war against England.
86 The transformed character of our Indian wars
after 1815 was revealed by the
next war in the Northwest, the Black Hawk
War of 1832. Although it nearly
destroyed the Sac and Fox nations, it was insignificant
compared to the battles in
that theater during the War of 1812. See also
Brian Dippie, The Vanishing
American (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1982), 7-8.

87 Johansen, Forgotten Founders, 118. See also Frances
FitzGerald, America
Revised (New York: Vintage, 1980), 90-93.
88 Before 1815, according to William Clark
(of Lewis and Clark fame), “the
tribes nearest our settlements were a formidable
and terrible enemy; sincethen
their power has been broken . . . and
themselves sunk into objects of pity.”
Quoted in Dippie, The Vanishing American,7-9.
89 Fergus M. Bordewich, review of David
Roberts’s OnceThey Moved Like the
Wind, in Smithsonian, 3/1994, 128.
90 Carleton Beals, American Earth, 63-64. See
also Reginald Horsman, Race
and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 1, 3, 190-
95.
91 Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 188; and
Dippie, The Vanishing
American,7-9.
92 Nash, Red, White, and Black, 63; Jennings,
Empire of Fortune, 63; Horsman,
Race and Manifest Destiny, 32-36. Cf. Leon Festinger, A
Theory of Cognitive
Dissonance (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957).
93 William Gilmore Simms quoted in Mitchell,
Witnesses to a Vanishing
America, 255. See also Vogel, ed., This Country Was

Ours, 286. Francis A.
Walker, message to his department, 1871.
94 John Toland, Adolf Hitler (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1976), 702.
95 Edward H. Carr,What Is History? (New
York: Random House, 1961), 167.
96 Gordon Craig, “History as a Humanistic
Discipline,” in Paul Gagnon, ed.,
Historical Literacy (New York: Macmillan, 1989),
134.
98 Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the
Jacksonian Era (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 143.
99 Francis Drake seems to have had something
like this in mind for British
North America in 1573, but he never brought
his plans to fruition. See Sanders,
Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, 218-19.
100 Over time,Lumbees and Seminolesbecame more racist.
Lumbees kept a
nearby “blacker” triracial group out of their
schools; Seminolesomitted “black
Seminoles” from their presentation of tribal history
at the National Museum of
the American Indian.

101 J. F. Fausz, “Patterns of Anglo-Indian
Aggression and Accommodation
Along the Mid-Atlantic Coast, 1584-1634,” in
William Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures
in Contact (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution, 1985), 234-35; Adolph
Dial and David Eliades, The Only Land I Know
(San Francisco: Indian Historian
Press, 1975), 2-13. See also Turner, Beyond
Geography, 241-42. Challenge of
Freedom does tell about the likelihood that descendants
of the lost colony can be
found today among the Lumbee. PeterHulme,
Colonial Encounters (London:
Methuen, 1986), 143, agrees that the lost colony
probably became Croatoan
Indians. Holt American Nation does suggest that the
Lost Colony might have
been absorbed into a nearby American Indian tribe
but does not otherwise treat
possible bi- or triracial societies.
102 Robert Beverly, The History and Present Stateof
Virginia (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1947
[1705]), 38.
103 Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times;
LonnTaylor, “American
Encounters,” (address at the Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.,
4/29/1993).
104 Thomas, “Cultural Change on the Southern New
England Frontier, 1630-
1655,” in Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures in Contact, 141. In

their very first years in
Virginia, the British encouraged intermarriage to
promote alliances with nearby
Indians, even offering a bribeto any white
Virginian who would marry an
Indian, but this offer lasted briefly, and few
colonists took advantage of it.
105 Wright, The Only Land They Knew, 235; Nash,
Red, White, and Black;
Axtell, “The White Indians.”
106 Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune (New
York: Norton, 1988), 479. See
also Charles J. Kappler, Indian Treaties 1778-1883
(New York: Interland, 1972
[1904]), 5.
107 Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian
Era, 216-18.
108 Pearce, The Savages of America.
109 S. Blancke and C.J.P. SlowTurtle, “The
Teaching of the Past of the Native
Peoples of North America in U.S. Schools,” in
PeterStone and Robert
MacKenzie, eds., The Excluded Past (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1990), 123.
110 Reginald Horsman, “American Indian Policy
and the Origins of Manifest
Destiny,” in Francis Prucha, ed., The Indian in

Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 22.
111 Drinnon, Facing West, 85.
112 Nash, Red, White, and Black, 285. Cf. Evon
Vogt, “Acculturation of
American Indians,” in Prucha, ed., The Indian in
American History, 99-107; and
Axtell, The European and the Indian, 168.
Frontier, 122.
114 Chief Seattle, “Our People Are Ebbing Away,”
in Wayne Moquin with
Charles Van Doren, Great Documents in
American Indian History (New York:
Praeger, 1973), 80-83. Today’s Manhattanite who
summers in Vermont would
surely understand Indian patterns of movement.
115 Ruellen Ottery, “Treatment of Native
Americans Under the Jurisdiction of
the Plymouth Colony” (Johnson, VT, 1984, typescript),
8-9; Jennings, The
Invasion of America, 144-45. Alden Vaughan, New
England Frontier (New
York: Norton, 1979), claims Indians did fine in
New England courts, although
his book has been attacked by the new scholarship.
116 David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians
(Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1978), 189-90.

117 Inmuttooyahlatlat quoted in Robert C. Baron,
ed., Soul of America (Golden,
CO: Fulcrum, 1989), 289.
118 Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization, 317.
119 Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback,
Destiny (New York: Putnam, 1977), 48. Turner,
Beyond Geography, 215-16,
also says Indian-white relations and whites’ “unjustified
and blasphemous” land
claims, in Williams’s view, were the key cause
of his banishment.
120 Prucha, ed., The Indian in American History, 7.
121 Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian
Era, 25.
122 Blancke and SlowTurtle, “The Teaching of the
Past of the Native Peoples
of North America in U.S. Schools,” 121.
123 This pointis implied by DeanA. Crawford, David
L. Peterson, and Virgil
Wurr, “Why They Remain Indians,” in Vogel,
ed., This Country Was Ours, 282-
84. See also Robert Berkhover, The White Man’s
Indian (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1978), 192-93.
124 Christopher Vecsey, “Envision Ourselves Darkly,

Imagine Ourselves
Richly,” in Martin, ed., The American Indian and
the Problem of History, 126.
Jennings makes a similar argument in The
Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (New
York: Norton, 1984), 482.
CHAPTER 5: “GONE WITH THE WIND”: THE
INVISIBILITY OF RACISM IN AMERICAN HISTORY
TEXTBOOKS
1 Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning,”
poem written for the Clinton
inauguration, January 20, 1993.
2 Ken Burns, “Mystic Chords of Memory” (speech
delivered at the University of
Vermont, Burlington, September 12, 1991).
3 W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (Cleveland:
World Meridian, 1964
[1935]), 722.
4 Warren Beck and Myles Clowers, Understanding
American History Through
Fiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 1:ix.
5 Herbert Aptheker, Essays in the History of
the American Negro (New York:
International, 1964 [1945]), 17; Irving J. Sloan,
Blacks in America, 1492-1970
(Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1971), 1. Blacks
were also probably among the

Spanish slavemasters, according to J. A. Rogers,
YourHistory (Baltimore:
Black Classic Press, 1983 [1940]), 73. I follow
my usage in Chapter 2, but the
Spanish called Haiti“Santo Domingo.”
6 Two new textbooks—The Americans and
Pathways to the Present—structure
their accounts of earlyAmerica as a three-way
encounter among theseculture
areas, which makes for effective pedagogy and
accurate history. However, they
never develop the idea of three-way race relations.
7 Filibuster information in John and Claire
Whitecomb, Oh Say Can You See?
(New York: Morrow, 1987), 116. On Republicans,
see Richard H. Sewell,
Ballots for Freedom (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 292. On
parties, see Thomas Byrne Edsall, Chain
Reaction (New York: Norton, 1991),
and “Willie Horton’s Message,”New York Review of
Books, 2/13/1992, 7-11.
8 Minstrelsy was an important mass entertainment
from 1850 to 1930 and the
dominant form from about 1875 to World War I.
Gone With the Wind was the
largest grossing film ever in constant dollars. When
first shown on television, it
also won the highest ratings accorded an
entertainment program up to that time.
Admittedly, it is first a romance, but its larger
social setting is primarily about

race. Time, 2/14/1977, tells of the popularityof
Roots. For general discussions of
black stereotyping in mass media see Michael
Rogin, “Making America Home,”
Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (12/1992):
1071-73; Donald J. Bogle,
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies,and Bucks
(New York: Bantam, 1974); and
James W. Loewen, “Black Image in White
Vermont: The Origin, Meaning, and
Abolition of KakeWalk,” in Robert V. Daniels,
ed., Bicentennial History of the
University of Vermont (Boston: University Press
of New England, 1991).
An early draft of this paragraph cited
racial content I remembered from the
first full-length animated movie, Fantasia. When I
rented the video to check my
memory, I found no race relations. Then I
learned from Ariel Dorfman (The
Empire’s Old Clothes [New York: Pantheon,
1983], 120) that the Disney
company had eliminated all the segments containing
racial stereotypes from the
video rerelease.
9 1993 exhibition: “The Cotton Gin and Its
Bittersweet Harvest” at the Old State
Capitol Museum in Jackson, MS.
10 The Alamo and the Seminoleswill be discussed
later in the chapter. The
foremost reason why white Missourians drove

the Mormons out of Missouri into
Illinois in the 1830s was the suspicion that they
were not “sound” on slavery.
Indeed, they were not: Mormons admitted black males
to the priesthood and
invited free Negroes to join them in Missouri. In
response to this pressure,
Mormons not only fled Missouri but changed their
attitudes and policies to
resemble those of most white Americans in
the 1840s, concluding that blacks
were inferior and should not become full members.
They did not reverse this
policy until 1978. See Ray West Jr., Kingdom of
the Saints (New York: Viking,
1957), 45-49, 88; Forrest G. Wood, The
Arrogance of Faith(New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1990), 96-97; and Newell Bringhurst,
Saints, Slaves, and Blacks
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981).
11 Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites
Think and Feel About the
American Obsession (New York: New Press, 1992).
12 Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele
Commager, The Growth of the
American Republic (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1950), 521. In Andrew
Rooney and Perry Wolf’s film Black History:
Lost,Stolen or Strayed? (Santa
Monica, CA: BFA, 1968), Bill Cosby points
out that this textbook was written
by two northern Pulitzer Prize-winning historians.
13 Nancy Bauer’s The American Way says little about

slavery as experienced by
slaves, but she does mention slaverevolts and the
underground railroad.
Discovering American History tells about slavery,
using primary sources, but
theseare all by whites and contain little about
slavery from the slaves’ pointof
view. Considering the many slavenarratives, it
is surprising that Discovering
excludes black sources.
There is nothing “cutting edge” in any of
the books’ coverage of slavery.
Twenty years ago historians developed the “slave
community” interpretation to
emphasize how African Americans experienced
the institution; no textbook
shows any familiarity with that school. Nor do
any authors describe the
controversies among competing slavery “schools.”
For a compact discussion of
theseinterpretations, see James W. Loewen, “Slave
Narratives and Sociology,”
Contemporary Sociology 11, no. 4 (7/1982): 380-
84, reviewing works by
Blassingame, Escott, Genovese,Gutman, and Rawick.
14 Whether slavery was profitable in the nineteenth
century spurred a minor
historical tempest a few years back. Although it
eroded Southern soil, and
although the Southern economy grew increasingly
dependent on the North,

evidence indicates planters did find slavery profitable.
See, inter alia, Herbert
Aptheker, And Why Not Every Man? (New York:
International, 1961), 191-92.
15 James Currie, review of The South and
Politics of Slavery, Journal of
Mississippi History 41 (1979): 389; see also
William Cooper, Jr., The South and
the Politics of Slavery , 1828-56 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana StateUniversity
Press, 1978).
16 Roger Thompson, “Slavery, Sectionalism, and
Secession,” Australian
Journal of American Studies 1, no. 2 (7/1981): 3,
5; William R. Brock, Parties
and Political Conscience (Millwood, NY: KTO Press,
1979).
17 Joseph R. Conlin, ed., Morrow Book of
Quotations in American History (New
York: Morrow, 1984), 38.
18 Frank Owsley, a historian with Confederate
sympathies, championed reasons
for war otherthan slavery. When it was fought,
however, virtually everyone,
including Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
and Ulysses S. Grant on
the Union side and Jefferson Davis and AlexanderH.
Stephens, president and
vice president of the Confederacy, thought the war
was caused by slavery. See
Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War (New York:

28, 180.
19 Pageant does supply a shortquote from this
document,but it is so vague that
few readers will understand it.
66-70. Nor was the North a great
incubator of progressive textbooks in those
decades.
21 Frances FitzGerald, America Revised (New
York: Vintage, 1980), tells how
history textbooks changed their treatment of slavery
and Reconstruction in the
1970s. Hillel Black describes the former
influence of white segregationist
Southerners and the new black influence in
Northern urban school districts,
resulting from the civil rights and Black Power
movements, in The American
Schoolbook (New York: Morrow, 1967), Chapter
8. “Liberating Our Past,”
Southern Exposure, 11/1984, 2-3, tells of the influence of
the civil rights
movement. The new treatments of slavery are
closer to most of those written at
the time and to the primary sources.
22 Interviews at Williamsburg; Sloan, Blacks in
America, 1492-1970, 2; Howard

Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston: Beacon,
1970), 67.
23 Horton is quoted by Robert Moore in
Stereotypes, Distortions, and Omissions
in U.S. History Textbooks (New York: Council
on Interracial Books for
Children, 1977), 17.
24 Before Freedom Came, which was also a
book, edited by E.D.C. Campbell Jr.
(Richmond, VA: Museum of the Confederacy, 1991).
25 Quoted in FelixOkoye, The American Image of
Africa: Myth and Reality
(Buffalo: Black Academy Press, 1971), 37. Here
Montesquieu presages
Festinger’s idea of cognitive dissonance. See Leon
Festinger, A Theory of
Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, IL: Row,
Peterson, 1957).
26 Okoye, The American Image of Africa.
27 Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New
York: Avon, 1964 [1936]),
645.
28 In reporting the survey, a journalist added
dryly, “The Bible also ranked
high.”
29 I also searched under white racism, white
supremacy, and various other
headings, to no avail.

30 On Ecuador, see Ivan Van Sertima, They Came
Before Columbus (New York:
Random House, 1976), 30. On blacks’ influence
among the Seminoles, see
Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Africans and Creeks
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979).
On Elliot’s Iowa eye-color experiment, see the PBS
Frontline documentary, A
Class Divided (video, Yale University Films.
Alexandria, Virginia: PBS, 1986).
On the Arctic, see “Discoverers’ Sons Arrive for
Reunion,” Burlington Free
Press, May 1, 1987; Susan A. Kaplan,
introduction to Matthew Henson, A Black
Explorer at the North Pole (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989); and
Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and Amy
Wallace, Significa (New York:
Dutton, 1983), 17-18. Note that The American
Adventure blithely assumes
assimilation to white society as the goal.
31 That racism has varied is a problem for
black rhetors who seek to make it
always the overwhelming forceof history, which, of
course, reduces our ability
to recognize otherfactors.
32 James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis,
Mississippi: Conflict and Change (New
York: Pantheon, 1980), 141.
33 FitzGerald, America Revised, 158. Matthew

Downey makes the same pointin
“Speakingof Textbooks: Putting Pressure on the
Publishers,” History Teacher
14 (1980): 68.
34 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign
Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
35 Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 182;
Henry quoted in J. Franklin Jameson, The
American Revolution Considered as a
Social Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965),
23.
36 The American Adventure, an inquiry textbook
partly assembledfrom primary
sources, includes more of the letter from which
the quoted sentence was drawn.
Henry went on to write, “Let us transmit to
our descendants, together with our
slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot, and an
abhorrence of slavery.” His
biographer, Richard R. Beeman, treats Henry’s
view of slavery drily: “If it was
not hypocrisy, then it was at least self-deception on
a grand scale.” See Patrick
Henry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 97.
37 Paul Finkelman, “Jeffersonand Slavery,” in PeterS.
Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian
Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1993), 181-221, is an
extensive analysis of Jefferson’s slaveholding and
the difference it made on his

thought.
38 Paul Finkelman, “Treason Against the Hopes of
the World: Thomas Jefferson
and the Problem of Slavery” (Washington, D.C.:
National Museum of American
History colloquium, March 23, 1993); Roger
Kennedy, Mr. Lincoln’s Ancient
Egypt (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of
American History, 1991,
typescript), 93; Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror
(Boston: Little, Brown,
1993), 69. William W. Freehling also treats
Jefferson’s ambivalence about
slavery in The Roadto Disunion (New York:
123-31, 136.
39 Patronizing compliments like this are surely
intended to woo African
American and liberal white members of textbook
adoption committees. Or
perhaps publishersimagine that such praise helps
white students thinkless badly
of African Americans today. Showing how the
Revolution decreased white
racism would be more legitimate historically,
however, and probably more
relevant to reducing bigotry today.
40 Bruce Glasrud and Alan Smith, Race Relations in
British North America,
1607-1783 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 330.

41 George Imlay, quoted in Okoye, The
American Image of Africa, 55. See also
Glasrud and Smith, Race Relations in British North
America, 278-330.
42 Aptheker, Essays in the History of the
American Negro, 76.
43 Quoted in Jameson, The American Revolution
Considered as a Social
Movement, 23.
44 Regardingthe impact of the Revolution on
slavery, see Glasrud and Smith,
Race Relations in British North America, 278; Richard
H. Sewell, Ballots for
Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976), 3; Dwight Dumond,
Antislavery (New York: Norton, 1966 [1961]),
27-34; Arthur Zilversmit, The
First Emancipation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967); and Paul
Finkelman, An Imperfect Union (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina
Press, 1981). Virginia data from Finkelman,
“Jeffersonand Slavery,” 187.
45 Finkelman, “Treason Against the Hopes of
the World.”
46 David Walker, quoted in Okoye, The
American Image of Africa, 45-46. Even
as he attacked Jefferson, Walker also quoted with
approval from the Declaration
of Independence.

47 Oncehe realized Napoleon was serious about
occupying“Louisiana,”
Jefferson did revise his tilt toward France to a
neutral position. See John Chester
Miller, The Wolf by the Ears (New York: Free
Press, 1977), 134-37.
48 Piero Gleijesus “The Limits of Sympathy,”
Journal of Latin American
Studies 24, no. 3 (October 1992): 486, 500; Roger
Kennedy, Orders from France
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 140-45,
152-57.
49 Gleijesus, “The Limits of Sympathy,” 504; the
Ostend Manifesto quoted in
Dumond, Antislavery, 361. See also Robert May,The
Southern Dream of a
Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana StateUniversity Press,
1973).
50 Henry Sterks, The Free Negro in Antebellum
Louisiana (Rutherford, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1972),
301-4.
51 William S. Willis, “Division and Rule: Red,
White, and Black in the
Southeast,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and Kenneth
Jackson, eds., American Vistas,
1607-1877 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 61-64; see also

Littlefield, Africans and Creeks, 10-100, and Theda
Perdue, “Red and Black in
the Southern Appalachians,” Southern Exposure 12, no. 6
(November 1984): 19.
52 Sloan, Blacks in America, 9; Littlefield,
Africans and Creeks, 72-80.
53 William C. Sturtevant, “Creek Into Seminole,”
in Eleanor Burke Leacock and
Nancy O. Lurie, eds., North American Indians in
Historical Perspective
(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988 [1971]), 92-128.
54 J. Leitch Wright Jr., The Only Land They Knew
(New York: Free Press,
1981), 277; William Loren Katz, Teachers’ Guide
to American Negro History
(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 34, 63. See also Scott
Thybony, “Against All
Odds, Black Seminole Won Their Freedom,”
Smithsonian Magazine 22, no. 5
(8/1991): 90-100; and Littlefield, Africans and Creeks,
85-90.
55 Reginald Horsman, “American Indian Policy
and the Origins of Manifest
Destiny,” in Francis Prucha, ed., The Indian in
Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 28. Almost every
textbook mentions slavery
as an issuein Texas, but most bury it within
other“rights” Mexicans denied
Anglos. On free blacks see Moore, Stereotypes,
Distortions, and Omissions in
U.S. History Textbooks, 24. Readers may also enjoy

a brilliant historical novel
by R. A. Lafferty, Okla Hannali (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1972), 100,
which declares: “however it be falsified (and the
falsification remains one of the
classic things), therewas only one issuethere:
slavery.”
56 Thomas David Schoonover, Dollars Over
Dominion (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 1978), 41, 78.
57 Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest
(New York: Norton, 1987), 92-
93.
58 The debates were also the first events in
American public life to be
transcribed verbatim, allowing much fuller and
more accurate news coverage.
59 Amazingly, the two inquiry texts glossover the
debates. The American
Adventure includes only a paragraph of questions,
Discovering American
History only a paragraph of descriptive prose
(though it does quote from
Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech). When treating
actions, inquiry texts can
have a difficult time incorporating primary sources,
which by nature are usually
words rather than deeds. Here the action
consists of words—yet the textbooks
ignore them!

60 Paul M. Angle, Created Equal? The Complete
Lincoln-Douglas Debates of
1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
See also Gustave Koerner,
Memoirs, 2:58-60, quoted in Angle, The American
Reader (New York: Rand
McNally, 1958), 297.
61 Angle, Created Equal? 22-23.
62 Quoted in Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered
(Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1979), 153.
63 The exceptions are The American Pageant, The
American Way, and
Discovering American History. American Pageant is a
patch job by David
Kennedy on Thomas Bailey’s original, which datesto
1956! Where Bailey
embraced Margaret Mitchell—“The moonlight-and-
magnolia Old South of
antebellum days had gone with the wind”—after “days”
Kennedy adds “largely
imaginary in any case.” Despite such new material,
the result is still a dated and
racist interpretation of “Reconstruction by the
Sword,” emphasizing its “drastic
legislation” and completely downplaying the
considerable acceptance
Republican policies won among many Southern
whites. The American Way
paints “Radical” Republicans as opportunists who
“sentnortherners to the South
to make sure the Blacks remembered to vote

for the partythat freedthem.”
(Blacks needed no such aid, of course; many
voted Republican through the
1950s!) The American Way also claims that “The
Radicals felt that it was not
enough to give Blacks the same rights as
Whites,” so they “managed to pass the
Fourteenth Amendment”—but that amendment gave
blacks exactly the same
rights as whites! In all, American Way’s
treatment is amateurish. Even sparser is
the coverage in Discovering American History, an
inquiry text: it devotes just
two pages to all of Congressional Reconstruction,
and most of that space is used
to reprint the texts of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments. Discovering
American History is the only text to avoid the
terms carpetbagger and scalawag,
but then again it avoids Reconstruction almost
entirely.
64 Perhaps Bauer was influenced by Margaret
Mitchell’sportrait of African
Americans who lazed about as soon as slavery
ended and white supervision
relaxed. Writings and recollections by newly freed
people offer no support for
this portrait, however. See Escott, Slavery
Remembered, which offers valuable
information about Reconstruction remembered. See
also studies of individual
locales and statewide analyses, such as Roberta Sue

Alexander, North Carolina
Faces the Freedmen (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1985).
65 George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace
(Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1984), 1.
66 Morgan Kousser, “The Voting Rights Act and
the Two Reconstructions”
(Washington, D.C.: BrookingsInstitution, October
19, 1990); DuBois, Black
Reconstruction, 681.
67 Eric Foner, Reconstruction (New York: Harper
& Row, 1988), as reviewed
by C. Vann Woodward in “Unfinished
Business,” New York Review of Books,
5/12/1988, referring to statistics gathered by Albion
W. Tourgée. See also
Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen.
68 Gen. O. O. Howard quoted in Robert Moore,
Reconstruction: The Promise
and Betrayal of Democracy (New York: CIBC,
1983), 17.
69 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964
[1944]), lxxv-lxxvi.
70 Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro
(New York: Macmillan, 1970
[1954]). See also Foner, Reconstruction, 604.
71 FitzGerald, America Revised, 157.

72 In Minority Education and Caste (New York:
Academic Press, 1978),
anthropologist John Ogbu uses stigma to explain
why members of oppressed
minorities typically fare better outside their home
societies.
73 Michael L. Cooper, Playing America’sGame
(New York: Lodestar, 1993),
10; Gordon Morgan, “Emancipation Bowl”
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Department of Sociology, n.d., typescript).
74 Robert Azug and Stephen Maizlish, eds., New
Perspectives on Race and
Slavery in America (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky,1986), 118-21,
125; Loewen and Sallis, Mississippi: Conflict and
Change, 241.
75 Wallace, Wallechinsky, and Wallace, Significa, 26-27,
“Man in the Zoo.”
76 On the cultural meaning of minstrelsy, see
Robert Toll, Blacking Up (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 57,
and the introduction to Ike Simond,
Old Slack’s Reminiscence and Pocket History of
the Colored Profession
(Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1974), xxv;
Joseph Boskin, Sambo (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 129;
Myrdal, An American Dilemma,

989; and Loewen, “Black Image in White
Vermont.”
77 For Cleveland, see Stanley Hirshson, Farewell to
the Bloody Shirt (Chicago:
Quadrangle, 1968), 239-45. For Democrats, see
Kousser, “The Voting Rights
Act and the Two Reconstructions,” 12. For Harding
see Wyn Craig Wade, The
Fiery Cross (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1987), 165. Harding’s induction
merely showed the legitimacy of the KKK;
his administration was not as racist
as Wilson’s, although it did not undo Wilson’s
segregative policies. For Rice v.
Gong Lum, see James W. Loewen, The
Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and
White (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988),
66-68. For Tulsa, see
Wallace, Wallechinsky, and Wallace, Significa, 60-61. As
I was writing this
chapter in 1992, Los Angeles erupted in what
many reporters called “the worst
race riot of the century.” Perhaps, having been weaned
on our history textbooks,
they didn’t know of the savage riots of the
nadir.
78 See James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A
Hidden Dimension of American
Racism (New York: New Press, 2005),
especially Ch. 3.
79 Americans who did not experience segregation,
which ended in the South in
about 1970, may consider thesewords

melodramatic. American history
textbooks do not help today’s students feel the reality
of the period. Please see
the last field study of segregation, Loewen, The
Mississippi Chinese, 45-48, 51,
and 131-34.
80 In The Mississippi Chinese, 48, I showthat
black economic success in itself
affronted white Southerners and was hard to
maintain without legal rights.
81 See Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the
Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants
Since 1880 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980). Herbert Gutman in
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New
York: Vintage, 1977) notes that
black family instabilitycannot be traced back to
slavery or Reconstruction.
Edmund S. Morgan in “Negrophobia,” New York
Review of Books, 6/16/1988,
27-29, summarizing research by Roger Lane,
reports that in Philadelphia by the
1890s, blacks turned to criminal occupations at
much higher rates than whites
owing to their exclusion from virtually all industrial
occupations. See also
Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many
Mansions (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
On “tangle of pathology,” see Lee
Rainwater, ed., The Moynihan Report and the Politics
of Controversy

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).
82 “Racial Division Taking Root in Young
America, People for Finds,” People
for the American Way Forum 2, no. 1 (3/1992): 1.
83 Richard Cohen, “Generation of Bigots,”
Washington Post, 7/23/1993;
Marttila & Kiley, Inc., Highlights from an Anti-
Defamation League Survey on
Racial Attitudes in America (New York: Anti-
Defamation League, 1993), 21.
CHAPTER 6: JOHN BROWN ANDABRAHAM
LINCOLN:
THE INVISIBILITY OF ANTIRACISM IN AMERICAN
HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
1 Frances FitzGerald, America Revised (New
York: Vintage, 1980), 151.
2 John Brown quoted by Henry David
Thoreau in “A Plea for Captain John
Brown,” in Richard Scheidenhelm, ed., The Response to
John Brown (Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth, 1972), 58.
3 Ibid., 57.
4 Said to Rev. M. D. Conway and Rev. William
Henry Channing and quoted in
Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World,

1954), 315.
5 FitzGerald, America Revised, 151. Paul Gagnon
points out that textbooks
similarly underplay the worldwide impact of the
American Revolution in
Democracy’s Half-Told Story (New York:
American Federation of Teachers,
1989), 46-47.
6 Many textbook authors do describe the acts of
William Lloyd Garrison,
Theodore Weld, and sometimes otherabolitionists,
but without their words and
ideasand without much sympathy.Black
abolitionists—Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, and Frederick Douglass—emerge with more life.
American Adventures
is exceptional in its warm and extended
treatment of Thaddeus Stevens, and
Discovering American History, an inquiry text, quotes
enough Garrison that
students can get a sense of the man’s
position.
7 Sara Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior
Life, Ch. 16, “The Attack
upon Lawrence,” kancoll.org/books/robinson/r_chap16.htm;
Marvin Stottelmire,
“John Brown: Madman or Martyr?” Brown
Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Winter 2000),
brownvboard.org/brwnqurt/03-3/03-3a.htm#cap1, 9/2006;
Louis A. DeCaro, Jr.,
John Brown—The Cost of Freedom (New York:
International, 2007), 41-42.

8 Slaves who refused to take part were left alone.
9 Hannah Geffert and Jean Libby, “Regional
Involvement in John Brown’s Raid
on Harpers Ferry,” in T. M. McCarthy and J.
Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest
http://kancoll.org/books/robinson/r_chap16.htm
http://brownvboard.org/brwnqurt/03-3/03-3a.htm#cap1
(New York: New Press, 2006), 173-75; Jean
Libby, ed., John Brown Mysteries
(Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing, 1999),
16-21, 25, 29-35.
10 Of course, Wise wanted to find Brown sane so
he could hang him, just as
Brown’s defenders wanted to argue him insane so
he could be spared. The best
evidence as to Brown’s state of mind is provided by
his own letters, statements,
and interviews, which showno trace of insanity.
See also the discussion by
Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood
(New York: Harper and Row,
1970), 329-34. Wise’s “Message to the Virginia
Legislature, December 5,
1859,” is reprinted in Scheidenhelm, ed., The
Response to John Brown, 132-53;
his evaluation of Brown is on page 143. Wise is
additionally quoted by Henry
David Thoreau in “A Plea for Captain John
Brown,” on page 51 of same.
11 As Brown pointed out in his last speech in

court, each “joined me of his own
accord.” This was true even of his sons.
12 Letter to Judge Daniel R. Tilden,
11/28/1959, quoted in Barrie Stavis, John
Brown: The Sword and the Word (New York:
A. S. Barnes, 1970), 164.
13 John Brown, “Last Words in Court,” in
Scheidenhelm, ed., The Response to
John Brown, 36-37.
14 Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in
Scheidenhelm, ed., The
Response to John Brown, 53.
15 George Templeton Strong quoted in Daniel
Aaron, The Unwritten War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 24.
16 Letter quoted in William J. Schafer, ed.,
The Truman Nelson Reader
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989),
250.
17 Stavis, John Brown: The Sword and the Word,
14, 167; Richard Warch and
Jonathan Fanton, eds., John Brown (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973),
142.
18 The melody thus made a full circle, because
it began as the Methodist hymn,
“Say Brothers, Will You Meet on Canaan’s Happy Shore.”
Leon Litwack
describes the Boston scene in Been in the Storm

So Long(New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1979), 77-78. Hollywood finally
portrayed the 54th Massachusetts in
Glory in 1990.
19 John Spencer Bassett, A Short History of
the United States (New York:
Macmillan, 1923), 502.
20 The treatment of Harpers Ferry in the current
Holt American Nation finally
gets beyond this language and does not question
Brown’s sanity.
21 See Benjamin Quarles, The Black Abolitionists
(New York: Oxford
22 Pathways simply never mentions that Brown
was religious.
23 See Oates, To Purge This LandWith Blood,
for a full account of Brown’s
acts.
24 The American Pageant comes the closest, with
substantial treatment of
religions as social institutions and somediscussion
of their ideas. Otherwise, I
agree with Robert Bryan’s assessment, History,
Pseudo-History, Anti-History:
How Public School Textbooks Treat Religion
(Washington, D.C.: Learn, Inc.,
1984), 3, that after the Pilgrims, Christianity has no

historical presence in
American history textbooks. See also Paul Gagnon,
Democracy’s Untold Story:
What World History Textbooks Neglect
(Washington, D.C.: American
Federation of Teachers, 1987); Charles C.
Haynes, Religion in American History
(Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development,
1990); and William F. Jasper, “America’s
Textbooks Are Censored in Favor of
the Left,” in Lisa Orr, ed., Censorship: Opposing
Viewpoints (San Diego:
Greenhaven, 1990), 154-59.
25 Right-wing textbook critics are rightly
incensed by this; as one of Mel
Gabler’s reviewers put it, criticizingLife and Liberty,
“Obviously, the Publishers
are not threatened by admitting the Arapaho were
religious—so why not the
notable [non-Indian] Americans past and present?”
(untitled critique by Deborah
L. Brezina [n.p., typescript distributed by Mel
Gabler’s Educational Research
Analysts, 1993], 7). Unfortunately, Gabler’s reviewers
want only positive things
said about religion, and mainly about their
religion, Christianity; thus they attack
another textbook for mentioning that Benjamin
Franklin was a Deist.
26 Paul M. Angle, Created Equal? The Complete
Lincoln-Douglas Debates of
1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
41.

27 The new edition of The American Pageant
includes a well-chosen paragraph
in which Lincoln agrees with Douglas that whites
should be superior socially,
but argues that blacks should have equal rights.
28 Richard Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows
(Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1980 [1958]), 216.
29 Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), 74-75.
30 American Adventures and American History quote
from Lincoln’s letter to
Albert Hodges, April 4, 1864. See Herbert
Aptheker, And Why Not Every Man?
(New York: International, 1961), 249, for the
entire text.
31 See, for example, Jehuti El-Mali Amen-Ra,
Shatteringthe Myth of the Man
Who Freed the Slaves (Silver Spring, MD: Fourth
Dynasty Publishing, 1990),
21. Amen-Ra, an “Afrikan” nationalist from Baltimore,
edits Lincoln’s letter just
as textbook authors do, to discredit him.
32 Proposed by the border states, this compromise
would have reversed Dred
Scottand restored the Missouri Compromise line while
guaranteeing slavery

forever south of it. Lincoln could not abide
the latter idea and instructed
Republican congressmen not to support it.
Without Republican support, it
narrowly failed in both houses. Several new
textbooks do provide Lincoln’s
opposition to the Crittenden Compromise.
33 V. J. Voegeli, Free but Not Equal (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
1967), 62-63, 128-50.
34 Pageant provides a blowup of the last half of
the last sentence, which
therefore can be made out, with difficulty.
35 Later that year he would establish
Thanksgiving Day, to identify another set
of Founding Fathers with the United States.
36 Lest this analysis makes Lincoln appear too
ethnocentric, note that some
Europeans, including Tocqueville, and many
Americans in the nineteenth
century believed that the United States indeed
exemplified the future. See Abbott
Gleason, “Republic of Humbug,”American Quarterly 44,
no. 1 (3/1992): 1-20;
and G. D. Lillibridge, Beacon of Freedom
(Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1955).
37 Quoted in M. Hirsh Goldberg, The Book of
Lies (New York: Morrow, 1990),
79-80.

38 Intellectuals still debate its implications for
our present age. See, inter alia,
Clarence Thomas, “The Modern CivilRights Movement”
(Winston-Salem, NC:
The Tocqueville Forum, 4/18/1988); Garry Wills,
Lincoln at Gettysburg (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Robert Lowell
as described in Allan Nevins,
ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press,
1964), 88-89; Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in
America,”Daedalus (Winter
1967): 1-21; Willmoore Kendall, “Equality:
Commitment or Ideal?”
Intercollegiate Review (Fall 1989): 25-33; and Harry
V. Jaffa, “Inventing the
Gettysburg Address,” Intercollegiate Review (Fall 1992):
51-56.
39 Triumph of the American Nation does ask two
questions but buries them
inside two pages of “Reviewing Important
Terms,” “Practicing Critical Thinking
Skills,” and so on at the end of the unit.
40 With the same reasoning, Paul Gagnon agrees
that “all texts should reprint
the [Second Inaugural] in its entirety” in
Democracy’s Half-Told Story, 70-71.
41 Cf. Voegeli, Free but Not Equal, 138.
42 Pathways to the Present does include a

different sentence that mentions
slavery.
43 Lyrics quoted in James M. McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), vi.
44 See Carleton Beals, War Within a War
(Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965), 145-50.
45 Quoted in James M. McPherson, “Wartime,”
New York Review of Books,
March 12, 1990, 33. Black soldiers caused “a
revolutionin thinking” in the
Union army, according to Litwack, Been in the
Storm So Long, 100.
46 The American Adventure, Challenge of Freedom,
Discovering American
History, and Life and Liberty treat the topicof black
soldiers particularly well.
47 A particularly astute reader might be
able to infer that result from the
treatment in The American Journey.
48 Bill Evans points out (personal communication,
12/1993) that another factor
encouraging border-state abolitionism was the absence
from the polls of some
slavery sympathizers fighting in the Confederate
Army.
49 As quoted by McPherson, Battle Cry of
Freedom, 688 (his ellipses).

50 Hugh L. Keenleyside, Canada and the United
States (New York: Knopf,
1952), 115; Aptheker, Essays in the History of
the American Negro, 159;
Charles Sumner, speech, 6/1/1865.
51 Only The American Adventure, an inquiry text,
includes this quote. The
American Pageant includes an equally telling passage
by abolitionist James
Russell Lowell on the South’s reasons for
seceding. Otherwise, although
misinformation on the South’s raison d’etre is
rampant throughout the United
States and could be countered by this quote, no
text includes it. See McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, 649; Reid Mitchell, “The
Creation of Confederate
Loyalties,” in Robert Azug and Stephen
Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on
Race and Slavery in America (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky,1986),
101-2.
52 Paul Escott, After Secession (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana StateUniversity Press,
1978), 254.
53 James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, eds.,
Mississippi: Conflict and Change
(New York: Pantheon, 1980), 129-31; Beals,
War Within a War; Mitchell, “The
Creation of Confederate Loyalties,” 93-108.

54 Beals, War Within a War, 12, 142; see also
Stavis, John Brown: The Sword
and the Word, 100-101.
55 John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., “The
Fort Pillow Massacre: A
Statistical Note,” Journal of American History, 76 #2
(12/89), 832-37; Brian S.
Wills, A Battle from the Start (NY: Harper, 1993),
77-78, 178, 186-93, 215;
David Ndilei, Extinguish the Flames of Racial
Prejudice (Gainesville, FL: I.E.F.
Publications, 1996), 40, 91, 131, 157-58; John L.
Jordan, “Was There a
Massacre at Fort Pillow?” TennesseeHistorical Quarterly,6
(1947); Nathan
Bedford Forrest, 4/ 15/64 dispatch, from War of
the Rebellion: Official Records,
v.32 pt. 1 (DC: GPO, 1891), 609-10; Richard
Nelson Current, Lincoln’s
Loyalists (NY: Oxford University Press, 1992),
139-43; Richard L. Fuchs, An
Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow (Rutherford,
NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1994), 23, 116-17,
144-46; James McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom (NY: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 565-66, 793-95;
McPherson, The Negro’s CivilWar (NY: Pantheon, 1965),
186-7; Joseph T.
Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The CivilWar Alliance of
Black Soldiers and White
Officers (NY: Free Press, 1990), 133-34.
56 Escott, After Secession, 198; McPherson,

Battle Cry of Freedom, 833-35;
Beals, War Within a War, 147.
57 Stavis, John Brown: The Sword and the Word,
101-2; see also McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, 832-38; Joseph T.
Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and
Beyond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversity
Press, 1995). Untilthe last
year of the war, Union desertion rates were almost as
high as Confederate, but
Union deserters almost never joined the
Confederate army.
58 Beals, War Within a War, 73. See also Gabor
Boritt, ed., Why the
Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
59 One old book from my original sample, The
American Adventure, quoted
original sources on the evolution of Union war
aims and asked, “How would
such attitudes affect the conduct and outcome of
the war?”
60 American History, its author apparently
unfamiliar with the literature about
division within the South, even claims as an
advantage for the Confederates that
“their whole way of life [was] at stake.
This added to their determination and
helped make up for the shortage of men and

supplies.” Of course, ideaswere not
the sole cause of Union victory. Many
textbooks mention the North’s
considerable advantages in population, industry,
and railroads. Some textbooks
note the naval blockade of the South, coupled
with the region’s inadequate
internal transportation. Several recognize that the
Union’s government and
financing were already in place. On the otherhand,
sometextbooks pointout
that the Confederates had the advantage of fighting on
their home turf with
shorter supply lines; a few note that they also
had initial sympathy from the
governments of Britain and France. Beyond these
factors, idiosyncratic
considerations—what historians like to call historical
contingency—were at
work. The South had better generals at first.
Lincoln was a far better president
than Davis. McClellan was indecisive. Two of
the South’s most capable
generals, Albert Sidney Johnston and Stonewall
Jackson, were killed earlyin the
war. Certain officers did or did not bring their
troops to bear in time in certain
battles. Lee’s plans at Antietam fell into Union
hands. And so on. Thus, there
was no inevitability to the outcome, and I do
not claim that textbooks err by not
saying that the Union won for ideological
reasons. I do suggest that since
American history textbooks rarely discuss causation at
all, they are unlikely to
treat causes of the Union victory very well, and,

indeed, five textbooks give no
reasons! Since textbooks discuss ideaseven less often,
they are unlikely to treat
ideasas causes in the CivilWar. The American
Adventure does so with
intelligence.
61 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign
Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 345; see also PeterNovick,
That Noble Dream
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
74-80.
146-70; see also Lowenthal, The
Past Is a Foreign Country, 345; John S. Mosby,
letter to Sam Chapman,
7/4/1907, at Gilder Lehrman Institute of American
History,
gilderlehrman.org/collection/docs_current.html.
63 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1991), 118.
64 Mark Halton offers an interesting
discussion of the resurgence of the
Confederate flag in the 1950s and its symbolic
opposition to the civil rights
movementin “Time to Furl the Confederate Flag,”

Christian Century 105, no.
17 (5/18/1988): 494-96. “Embattled Emblem,” an
exhibit at the Museum of the
Confederacy on the history of the Army of
Northern Virginia flag from
Reconstruction to the 1990s, similarly credits its
resurgence to white opposition
to civil rights. The white South is slowly
giving up its identification with the
Confederacy. In 1983 even the University of
Mississippi, once a citadel of
resistance to racial change, dropped the Confederate
flag as its official emblem.
In 2001, Georgia removed the Confederate flag
from its state flag, and in 2004
voters supported the new design.
65 Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
(New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1939), 4:347-49.
66 Loewen and Sallis, eds., Mississippi: Conflict
and Change, 145-47. John
Hope Franklin suggested renaming “Presidential
Reconstruction” “Confederate
Reconstruction.”
67 American Social History Project, Who Built
America? (New York: Pantheon,
1989), 482.
68 Eric Foner, Reconstruction (New York: Harper
and Row, 1988), 267.
69 Edmonia Highgate quoted in Robert Moore,
Reconstruction: The Promise

and Betrayal of Democracy (New York: CIBC,
1983), 17.
70 The exception, Discovering American History,
doesn’t mention Southern
Republicans at all and hardly covers
Reconstruction.
71 William C. Harris, “A Reconsideration of
the Mississippi Scalawag,” Journal
of Mississippi History 37, no. 1 (2/1970): 11-13.
72 Ibid., 3-42; C. Vann Woodward,
“Unfinished Business,” New York Review of
Books, May 12, 1988.
http://gilderlehrman.org/collection/docs_current.html
73 Again, Discovering American History is the
exception because it doesn’t
mention Southern Republicans at all and hardly
covers Reconstruction.
Ironically, most Northern whites who went south
for economic gain were
Democrats.
74 The editors, “Liberating Our Past,” Southern
Exposure 12, no. 6 (11/ 1984):
2.
75 See LaWanda Cox and John Cox, “Negro Suffrage
and Republican Politics:
The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction
Historiography,” Journal of
Southern History 33 (August 1967): 317-26; Richard

Curry, ed., Radicalism,
Racism, and Party Realignment (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press,
1969).
76 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 853. The
population of the Union was
twenty-two million. In “The Reconstruction of
Abraham Lincoln,” Ch. 5 of
David Middletonand Derek Edwards, eds., Collective
Remembering (London:
Sage, 1991), Barry Schwartz analyzes the funeral
as a crucial step in Lincoln’s
iconolatry.
77 Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4:296,
373-80; John T. Morse
Jr., ed., The Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 2:288-
90.
78 Among white respondents Lincoln usually
comes in first in opinion polls as
the “greatest president”or “greatest American,” partly
because whites like such
personal traitsas his humanitarianism, populist touch,
and empathy, according to
Barry Schwartz in “Abraham Lincoln in the Black
Community of Memory”
(Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American
History colloquium,
8/24/1993).
79 “The Lesson of the Hour,” in Warch and
Fanton, John Brown, 108.

80 I must note an important exception: American
Adventures, which is aimed at
younger or “slower” readers, devotes two of its
two- to three-page chapters to
abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Thaddeus
Stevens and presents them
with unusual flair.
81 On Brown and Ho Chi Minh, see Truman
Nelson, The Truman Nelson
Reader (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1989), 285; on South
Africa and Northern Ireland, see PeterMaas,
“Generations of Torment,”New
York Times Magazine,6/10/1988, 32; 1988 PBS
documentary, We Shall
Overcome.
CHAPTER 7: THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
1 Abraham Lincoln quoted in Carl Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 271.
2 Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life
(New York: Greenwood, 1968
[1929]), 156.
3 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1964),
63.

4 Similarly, Cynthia S. Sunal and Perry D.
Phillips tell how their students aged
six to eighteen “seemed unable to explain
inequalities.” See “Rural Students’
Development of the Conception of Economic
Inequality” (New Orleans:
American Educational Research Association, 1988,
abstract, ERIC ED299069).
5 Two recent books do mention the air traffic
controllers’ strike broken by
President Reagan, but as part of the Reagan
presidency rather than laborhistory.
6 Jean Anyon, “Ideology and United States History
Textbooks,” Harvard
Educational Review 49, no. 3 (8/1979): 373. Anyon
claims that high school
history textbooks always concentrate on “the same
threestrikes”: the 1877
railroad strike, 1892 Homestead steel strike, and
1894 Pullman strike. Each was
“especially violent,” she writes, and laborlost all
three; hence to emphasize them
is “to cast doubt on striking as a validcourse
of action.” However, if textbooks
emphasized successfulstrikes, Anyon could then
charge them with minimizing
the seriousness of the struggle laborfaced.
Conversely, someappallingly violent
instances of class conflict go unmentioned by most
textbooks.
7 Gregory Mantsios, “Class in America: Myths
and Realities,” in Paula S.

Rothernberg, ed., Racism and Sexism: An Integrated
Study (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1988), 56. The 2003 Holt American Nation
does treat “The New
Working Class” around 1900 and in othereras
contains somediscussion of
poverty.
8 Ibid., 60; Kevin Phillips, The Politics of
Rich and Poor (New York: Random
House, 1990); Robert Heilbroner, “Lifting the
Silent Depression,” New York
Review of Books, 10/24/1991, 6; and Sylvia
Nasar, “The Rich Get Richer,” New
York Times, 8/16/1992. Stephen J. Rose, Social
Stratification in the United
States (New York: New Press, 2007), is a
posterbook that shows graphically the
shrinkage of the middle class between 1979 and 2004.
9 “Income Disparity Since World War II—The
Gini Index,” in “Gini
coefficient,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient ,
9/2006.
10 Jere Brophy and Thomas Good summarize
someof the vast literature on
social class, teacher expectation, and tracking in
Teacher-Student Relationships
(New York: Holt,1974), esp. 7-171. Ray Rist
observed similar tracking and
differential teacher expectation by social class
within first-grade classes in black

schools, as summarized in Edsel Erickson et
al., “The Educability of Dominant
Groups,” Phi Delta Kappan (December 1972):
320. Dale Harvey and Gerald
Slatin showed that teachers willingly categorize
children by social class on the
basisof photographs and hold higher expectations
for middle- and upper-class
children; see “The Relationship Between Child’s SES
and Teacher
Expectations,” Social Forces 54, no. 1 (1975):
140-59. See also Richard H.
DeLone, Small Futures (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1979).
11 Sizerquoted in Walter Karp, “Why Johnny
Can’t Think,” Harper’s, 6/1985,
73.
12 Reba Page, “The Lower-Track Students’ View of
Curriculum,” (Washington,
D.C.: American Education Research Association, 1987).
13 Woodrow Wilson quoted in Lewis H.
Lapham, “Notebook,” Harper’s,
7/1991, 10.
14 The difference is dramatically documented in
the film Health Care: Your
Money or Your Life (New York: Downtown
Community TV Center, c. 1977),
which compares two publicly funded neighboring
hospitals in New York City,
one caring mostly for poor people, the otherfor a
more affluent clientele.

15 Survey data from about 1979 reported in Sidney
Verba and Gary Orren,
Equality in America (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 72-75. Other
surveys, before and after, report similar results.
16 Linda McNeil, “Defensive Teaching and
Classroom Control,” in Michael W.
Apple and Lois Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in
Schooling (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1983), 116.
17 Edward Pessen, The Log Cabin Myth (New
Haven: Yale University Press,
1984).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
18 August Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich,
Social Class and Mental
Illness (New York: Wiley, 1958), 6.
Traditional sex roles, here favoring women,
caused the death rate among men to be much
higher in all classes.
19 Lawrence M. Baskir and William Strauss, Chance
and Circumstance (New
York: Random House, 1986).
20 Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden
Injuries of Class (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).
21 Citing only literature from the 1970s, see, inter
alia, Joel Spring, Education

and the Rise of the Corporate State(Boston: Beacon,
1972); Ray Rist, The
Urban School: A Factory for Failure (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1973); Samuel
Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist
America (New York: Basic
Books, 1976); Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine
(New York: David McKay,
1976); James Rosenbaum, Making Inequality (New
York: Wiley, 1976); Paul
Willis, Learning to Labor (Farnborough, Eng.:
Saxon House, Teakfield Ltd.,
1977); and Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey,
eds., Power and Ideology in
Education (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977).
22 Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New
York: Crown, 1991).
23 The inquiry textbook The American Adventure
comes closest to analyzing
education and social class among the eighteen books
I surveyed.
24 Cowan’s work is described and quoted in Herbert
Gutman, Power and
Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 396-97.
25 Gutman, Power and Culture, 386-90.
26 William Miller, “American Historiansand the
Business Elite,” in Miller, ed.,
Men in Business (New York: Harper and Row,
1962), 326-28, summarizing his
own research and work by Reinhard Bendix and F.

W. Howton. See also David
Montgomery, Beyond Equality (New York:
Vintage, 1967), 15. Some other
studies showed marginally higher proportions,
not materially different, except
for scattered pockets of opportunity, including
Paterson, NJ.
27 Verba and Orren, Equality in America ,
10. See also Paul Gagnon,
Democracy’s Half-Told Story (New York:
American Federation of Teachers,
1989), 84-85; “Income Disparity Since World
War II,” op cit.
28 Mantsios, “Class in America,”59; IsaacShapiro
and Robert Greenstein, The
Widening Gulf (Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities,
1999).
29 “Index,” Harper’s, May 1990, 19, citing data
from the United Automobile
Workers; Jeanne Sahadi, “CEO Pay: Sky High Gets
Even Higher,”
CNNMoney.com, 8/30/2005;
money/cnn.com/2005/08/26/news/economy/ceo_pay/.
30 “Index,” Harper’s, January 1993, 19, citing
the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
31 David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, “Conflict

and Consensus in American
Public Education,” Daedalus 110, no. 2 (Summer
1981): 11-12.
32 Jeffrey Williamson and Lindert, American
Inequality: A Macroeconomic
History (New York: Academic Press, 1980),
Chapter 3. Seymour Martin Lipset,
The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books,
1963), 324-26, holds that
wealth was less equal in Great Britain,
although income was not.
33 The American Pageant (2006) stands out by
noting that “many nations
boasted more equitable distributions of wealth.” This
book also reveals that “the
gap between rich and poor even widened somewhat in
the 1980s.”
Unfortunately, The American Pageant also says that 80
percent of the workforce
in the 1990s worked in white-collar jobs, double
the actual proportion.
34 Walter DeanBurnham, “The Changing Shape of
the American Political
University,” American P

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