v Contents Series Foreword by James A. Banks ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: History as Weapon 1 A Lesson from Mississippi 2 A Lesson from Vermont 7 Why History Is Important to Students 10 Why History Is Important to Society 15 1. The Tyranny of Coverage 19 Forests, Trees, and Twigs 19 Winnowing Trees 21 Deep Thinking 23 Relevance to the Present 25 Skills 28 Getting the Principal on Board 30 Coping with Reasons to Teach “As Usual” 32 You Are Not Alone 36 Bringing Students Along 38 This sample chapter appears in "Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History" by James Loewen. © 2009 James Loewen.
History as Weapon
Mar 30, 2023
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Transcript
Loewen rev proofs.inddAcknowledgments xv
Why History Is Important to Students 10
Why History Is Important to Society 15
1. The Tyranny of Coverage 19
Forests, Trees, and Twigs 19
Winnowing Trees 21
Deep Thinking 23
Skills 28
Coping with Reasons to Teach “As Usual” 32
You Are Not Alone 36
Bringing Students Along 38
Loewen rev proofs.indd v 5/8/2009 2:38:52 PM
This sample chapter appears in "Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History" by James Loewen. © 2009 James Loewen.
vi Contents
Research on Teacher Expectations 47
“Standardized” Tests Affect Teacher Expectations 49
Statistical Processes Cause Cultural Bias in “Standardized” Tests 51
Social Class Affects “Standardized” Test Scores 54
Internalizing Expectations 56
Teachers Can Create Their Own Expectations 60
3. Historiography 68
The Civil Rights Movement, Cognitive Dissonance, and Historiography 71
Studying Bad History 76
4. Doing History 83
Writing a Paper 87
A Crash Course on Archeological Issues 105
Presentism 109
Conclusions About Presentism 112
Loewen rev proofs.indd vi 5/8/2009 2:38:52 PM
Contents vii
The Important Questions 123
Explaining Civilization 127
The Columbian Exchange 133
Cultural Diffusion and Syncretism Continue 137
7. The $24 Myth 141
Deconstructing the $24 Myth 141
A More Accurate Story 145
Functions of the Fable 147
Overt Racism? 150
Additional Considerations 153
Hold a Meta-Conversation 159
Slavery and Racism 162
Additional Problems in Teaching the History of Slavery 170
9. Why Did the South Secede? 175
Teachers Vote 175
Examining Textbooks 183
Loewen rev proofs.indd vii 5/8/2009 2:38:52 PM
viii Contents
Historical Background 194
Students Can Reveal the Nadir Themselves 197
During the Nadir, Whites Became White 200
End of the Nadir 204
Implications for Today 206
Notes 213
Index 239
1
INTRODUCTION
History as Weapon
HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES,1 as usually taught before col- lege, can hinder rather than help build students’ understanding of how the world works. Indeed, my bestseller, Lies My Teacher
Told Me, opens with the claim that American history as taught in grades 4 through 12 is in crisis and typically makes us stupider.
Of course, it’s easy to make such a bold statement. At some point since 1980 just about every fi eld in education has been declared “in crisis.”2 The reception of Lies My Teacher Told Me, however, implies that many read- ers, including many teachers of American history in grades 4 through 12, agree with my assessment. In 2007, Lies passed a million copies sold and was selling at a higher rate than ever, even though it had been on the market, unchanged, for twelve years.3 Teachers have been special fans, leading to overfl ow workshops at venues like the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Association for Multicultural Education. So maybe I’m right. Maybe history/social studies is in crisis.
Certainly we can do better. Since Lies My Teacher Told Me came out in 1995, I have traveled the
country, giving workshops for school districts and teacher groups on how to teach history and social studies better. Some of the ideas I present in these workshops came from other K–12 teachers I have met over the years. Others derive from my own teaching experience and from my years of thinking about what Americans get wrong about the past. This book col- lects the best shticks from those workshops for the benefi t of teachers and future teachers I will never meet.
Teachers who already teach beyond and occasionally against their U.S. history textbooks will fi nd that this book will help them explain their ap- proach to other teachers who still teach traditionally. For those who have not yet dared to break away from the security of just teaching the textbook, this book will provide specifi c ways to do so—ways that have worked for other teachers. It may also help them explain their new approach to prin- cipals and more traditional parents.
Loewen rev proofs.indd text1 5/8/2009 2:38:53 PM
2 Teaching What Really Happened
Before plunging into how to teach history better, however, we need to spend a few pages considering why. This introduction begins with a cau- tionary tale from Mississippi, showing how history was used there as a weapon to mislead students and keep them ignorant about the American past. Moving north to Vermont, I show that ignorance about the past is hardly limited to Mississippi. Mississippi merely exemplifi ed the problem in exaggerated form, as Mississippi embodied many national problems in exaggerated form in the late 1960s and ’70s. The introduction goes on to dissect the usual reasons that teachers and textbooks give to persuade students that history is worth knowing. I suggest other more important reasons why history is important, both to the individual and society. The introduction then closes with a brief overview of the book.
A LESSON FROM MISSISSIPPI
I fi rst realized how history distorts our understanding of society in the middle of my fi rst year of full-time teaching, at Tougaloo College in Mis- sissippi. I had started teaching at Tougaloo, a predominantly black in- stitution, in the fall of 1968, after fi nishing my doctorate in sociology at Harvard University. That fi rst year, in addition to my sociology courses, I was assigned to teach a section of the Freshman Social Science Semi- nar. The history department had designed this seminar to replace the old “Western Civ” course—History of Western Civilization—then required by most colleges in America, including most black colleges. The FSSS in- troduced students to sociology, anthropology, political science, econom- ics, and so on, in the context of African American history—appropriate enough, 99% of our students being African Americans.
African American history uses the same chronology as American his- tory, of course, so the second semester began right after the Civil War, with Reconstruction. I had a new group of students that fi rst day of the spring semester in January 1969, and I didn’t want to do all the talking on the fi rst day of class. So I asked my seminar, “What was Reconstruction? What im- ages come to your mind about that era?”
The result was one of those life-changing “Aha!” experiences—or, more accurately, an “Oh, no!” experience. Sixteen of my seventeen stu- dents told me, “Reconstruction was that time, right after the Civil War, 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.”
Loewen rev proofs.indd text2 5/8/2009 2:38:53 PM
Introduction: History as Weapon 3
I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions of facts glared from that statement that it was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. Afri- can Americans never took over the Southern states. All Southern states had white governors and all but one had white legislative majorities throughout Reconstruction. Moreover, the Reconstruction governments did not “mess up.” Mississippi in particular enjoyed less corrupt gov- ernment during Reconstruction than at any point later in the century. Across the South, governments during Reconstruction passed the best state constitutions the Southern states have ever had, including their current ones. They started public school systems for both races. Missis- sippi had never had a statewide system for whites before the Civil War, only scattered schools in the larger towns, and of course it had been a felony to teach blacks, even free blacks, to read and write during slavery times. The Reconstruction governments tried out various other ideas, some of which proved quite popular. Therefore, “whites” did not take back control of the state governments. Rather, some whites—Democrats, the party of overt white supremacy throughout the nineteenth century— ended this springtime of freedom before full democracy could blossom. Spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan, they used terrorism and fraud to wrest control from the biracial Republican coalitions that had governed during Reconstruction.
How could my students believe such false history? I determined to fi nd out. I visited high schools, sat in on history classes, and read the text- books students were assigned. Tougaloo was a good college—perhaps the best in the state. My students had learned what they had been taught. Bear in mind that they had been attending all-black high schools with all-black teaching staffs—massive school desegregation would not take place in Mississippi until January 1970, a year later. In school after school, I saw black teachers teaching black students white-biased pseudo-history because they were just following the book—and the textbooks were writ- ten from a white supremacist viewpoint.
The yearlong Mississippi History course was the worst offender. It was required of all 5th- and 9th-graders, in public and private schools, owing to a state law passed after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, intended to desegregate the public schools. This Mississippi statute was part of a package of obstructionist measures designed to thwart the Court and maintain “our Southern way of life,” which every Mississippian knew meant segregation and white suprema- cy. The one textbook approved for the 9th-grade course, Mississippi: Yes- terday and Today by John K. Bettersworth, said exactly what my students had learned. Other than “messing up” during Reconstruction, this book
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4 Teaching What Really Happened
omitted African Americans whenever they did anything notable. Among its 60 images of people, for instance, just 2 included African Americans.4
I knew John Bettersworth. In my junior year in college, I attended Mis- sissippi State University, where he taught history. He knew better. Indeed, when he reviewed several books on Reconstruction in the New York Times Book Review, he made clear that he knew that the interracial Republican coalition that governed Mississippi during Reconstruction had done a good job under diffi cult circumstances. But in his 9th-grade textbook, Bet- tersworth wrote what he imagined the Mississippi State Textbook Board wanted to read. He knew full well that historians did not (and still do not) review high school textbooks, so his professional reputation would not be sullied by his unprofessional conduct.5
Dr. Bettersworth could not have believed that his textbook was an innocent way to make a few thousand dollars without hurting anyone. At Mississippi State, he encountered the graduates of Mississippi high schools by the hundreds, and he knew how racist some of them could be—partly because they believed the BS (Bad Sociology) about African Americans in his textbook.
Perhaps as a passive form of resistance against their racist textbooks, many Mississippi teachers—white as well as black—spent hours of class time making students memorize the names of the state’s 82 counties, their county seats, and the date each was organized as a county. Or, perhaps more likely, they did this because it had been done to them. Regardless, these 250 twigs of information were useless and soon forgotten.6 Mean- while, students learned nothing about the past from this book that would help them deal with the wrenching changes Mississippi was going through in the 1960s and ’70s.
Black students were particularly disadvantaged. What must it do to them, I wondered that January afternoon, to believe that the one time their group stood center-stage in the American past, they “messed up”? It couldn’t be good for them. If it had happened, of course, that would be another matter. In that case, it would have to be faced: why did “we” screw up? What must we learn from it? But nothing of the sort had taken place. It was, again, Bad Sociology.
For more than a year, I tried to interest historians in Mississippi in writing a more accurate textbook of state history. Finally, despairing of getting anyone else to do so, I put together a group of students and faculty from Tougaloo and also from Millsaps College, the nearby white school, got a grant, and we wrote it. The result, Mississippi: Confl ict and Change, won the Lillian Smith Award for best Southern nonfi ction the year it came out. Nevertheless, the Mississippi State Textbook Board rejected it as un- suitable. In most subjects, the board selected three to fi ve textbooks. In
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Introduction: History as Weapon 5
Mississippi history, they chose just one. Only two were available, which might be characterized “ours” and “theirs.” By a two-to-fi ve vote, the board rejected ours, accepting only theirs. Two blacks and fi ve whites sat on the board.
Our book was not biased toward African Americans. Six of its eight authors were white, as were 80% of the historical characters who made it into our index. An index 20% nonwhite looks pretty black, however, to people who are used to textbooks wherein just 2% of the people referred to are nonwhite. Moreover, in contrast to the white supremacist fabrications offered in “their book,” our book showed how Mississippi’s social struc- ture shaped the lives of its citizens. So, after exhausting our administrative remedies, we—coeditor Charles Sallis and I, accompanied by three school systems that wanted to use our book—eventually sued the textbook board in federal court. The case, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al., came to trial in 1980, Judge Orma Smith presiding. Smith was an 83-year-old white Mis- sissippian who believed in the 1st amendment—students’ right to con- troversial information—and was bringing himself to believe in the 14th amendment—blacks’ right to equal treatment.7
For a week we presented experts from around the state and around the nation who testifi ed that by any reasonable criteria, including those put forth by the state itself, our book was better than their book. Among other topics, they found Confl ict and Change more accurate in its treatment of prehistory and archaeology, Native Americans, slavery, Reconstruction, Mississippi literature, the Civil Rights era, and the recent past.
Then came the state’s turn. The trial’s dramatic moment came when the Deputy Attorney General of Mississippi asked John Turnipseed, one of the board members who had rejected our book, why he had done so. Tur- nipseed asked the court to turn to page 178, on which was a photograph of a lynching. “Now you know, some 9th-graders are pretty big,” he noted, “especially black male 9th-graders. And we worried, or at least I worried, that teachers—especially white lady teachers—would be unable to control their classes with material like this in the book.”
As lynching photos go, ours was actually mild, if such an adjective can be applied to these horrifi c scenes. About two dozen white people posed for the camera behind the body of an African American man, silhouetted in a fi re that was burning him. The victim’s features could not be dis- cerned, and no grisly details—such as whites hacking off body parts as souvenirs—were shown or described. Nevertheless, our book was going to cause a race riot in the classroom.
We had pretested our book—along with Bettersworth’s—in an over- whelmingly white classroom and an overwhelmingly black classroom. Both had preferred ours by huge margins. So we had material to counter
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6 Teaching What Really Happened
this argument when our turn came for rebuttal. We never had to use it, however, because at that point Judge Smith took over the questioning.
“But that happened, didn’t it?” he asked. “Didn’t Mississippi have more lynchings than any other state?”
“Well, yes,” Turnipseed admitted. “But that all happened so long ago. Why dwell on it now?”
“Well, it is a history book!” the judge retorted. And we nudged each other, realizing we were going to win this case. Eventually, in a decision the American Library Association ranks as one of its “notable First Amend- ment court cases,” the judge ordered Mississippi to adopt our book for the standard six-year period and supply it to any school system, public or private, that requested it, like any other adopted book.8
Although we won the lawsuit, that experience proved to me that his- tory can be a weapon, and it had been used against my students. This book helps teachers arm students with critical reading and thinking skills— historiography, for example—so they will not be defenseless. Indeed, they can even learn to do history themselves.
This is the lynching photo to which Turnipseed objected. A lynching is a public murder, done with considerable support from the community. Often, as here, the mob posed for the camera. They showed no fear of being identifi ed because they knew no white jury would convict them.
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Introduction: History as Weapon 7
A LESSON FROM VERMONT
After eight years, I moved to the University of Vermont. Again, I found myself teaching 1st-year undergraduates, this time in huge classes in Introductory Sociology. I enjoyed these freshman classes, not least be- cause they opened a wonderful window on the world of high school. The view was mighty discouraging at times. My UVM students—as the University of Vermont is known—showed me that teaching and learn- ing “BS history” in high school was and is a national problem. These students were also ignorant of even the basic facts of our past, as were my Mississippi students, despite the hours spent in most high schools memorizing them.
In 1989, their ignorance astounded me in a course I taught intended for advanced undergraduates in education, history, and sociology. On the fi rst day of class I gave my students a quiz. It contained some comical items (some posted at my website, uvm.edu/~jloewen/), but also per- fectly straightforward questions like this one: “The War in Vietnam was fought between _____ and ____.” To my astonishment, 22% of my stu- dents replied “North and South Korea!”
Now, please don’t infer that something special—and specially wrong— has eroded history education in Vermont. The University of Vermont is a national institution; only 40% of its students come from within the state. Moreover, repeated national studies show that high school students learn history exceptionally badly. In 2003, for instance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress granted “advanced” status in U.S. history to only 1% of high school seniors. College graduates did little better. In 2000, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni commissioned the Center for Survey Research at the University of Connecticut to administer a 34-item “high school level American history test” to 556 seniors at 55 top colleges and universities. “Nearly 80% . . . received a D or F,” according to a sum- mary. More than a third didn’t know that the Constitution established the three-way division of power in the U.S. government; 99%, on the other hand, could identify “Beavis and Butt-Head” as adolescent television car- toon characters.9 College courses failed to fi ll in the gaps in their knowl- edge, partly because many college students never take a history course, it having been so boring in high school.10
University of Vermont students were particularly bad, however, in learning and applying the basic concepts of sociology. Indeed, they were so bad at it that I coined a new term for the syndrome that they exhibited: soclexia. This learning disorder makes it very diffi cult for its victims to grasp the basic idea of sociology. It may be genetic; certainly it strikes cer- tain racial and economic groups more than others. Children from white
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8 Teaching What Really Happened
(and Asian American) upper-class and upper-middle-class families are especially vulnerable.11
What is the basic idea of sociology? It is this: Social structure pushes peo- ple around, infl uences their careers, and even affects how they think. I was un- prepared for the level of soclexia I experienced in Vermont. My…
Why History Is Important to Students 10
Why History Is Important to Society 15
1. The Tyranny of Coverage 19
Forests, Trees, and Twigs 19
Winnowing Trees 21
Deep Thinking 23
Skills 28
Coping with Reasons to Teach “As Usual” 32
You Are Not Alone 36
Bringing Students Along 38
Loewen rev proofs.indd v 5/8/2009 2:38:52 PM
This sample chapter appears in "Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History" by James Loewen. © 2009 James Loewen.
vi Contents
Research on Teacher Expectations 47
“Standardized” Tests Affect Teacher Expectations 49
Statistical Processes Cause Cultural Bias in “Standardized” Tests 51
Social Class Affects “Standardized” Test Scores 54
Internalizing Expectations 56
Teachers Can Create Their Own Expectations 60
3. Historiography 68
The Civil Rights Movement, Cognitive Dissonance, and Historiography 71
Studying Bad History 76
4. Doing History 83
Writing a Paper 87
A Crash Course on Archeological Issues 105
Presentism 109
Conclusions About Presentism 112
Loewen rev proofs.indd vi 5/8/2009 2:38:52 PM
Contents vii
The Important Questions 123
Explaining Civilization 127
The Columbian Exchange 133
Cultural Diffusion and Syncretism Continue 137
7. The $24 Myth 141
Deconstructing the $24 Myth 141
A More Accurate Story 145
Functions of the Fable 147
Overt Racism? 150
Additional Considerations 153
Hold a Meta-Conversation 159
Slavery and Racism 162
Additional Problems in Teaching the History of Slavery 170
9. Why Did the South Secede? 175
Teachers Vote 175
Examining Textbooks 183
Loewen rev proofs.indd vii 5/8/2009 2:38:52 PM
viii Contents
Historical Background 194
Students Can Reveal the Nadir Themselves 197
During the Nadir, Whites Became White 200
End of the Nadir 204
Implications for Today 206
Notes 213
Index 239
1
INTRODUCTION
History as Weapon
HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES,1 as usually taught before col- lege, can hinder rather than help build students’ understanding of how the world works. Indeed, my bestseller, Lies My Teacher
Told Me, opens with the claim that American history as taught in grades 4 through 12 is in crisis and typically makes us stupider.
Of course, it’s easy to make such a bold statement. At some point since 1980 just about every fi eld in education has been declared “in crisis.”2 The reception of Lies My Teacher Told Me, however, implies that many read- ers, including many teachers of American history in grades 4 through 12, agree with my assessment. In 2007, Lies passed a million copies sold and was selling at a higher rate than ever, even though it had been on the market, unchanged, for twelve years.3 Teachers have been special fans, leading to overfl ow workshops at venues like the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Association for Multicultural Education. So maybe I’m right. Maybe history/social studies is in crisis.
Certainly we can do better. Since Lies My Teacher Told Me came out in 1995, I have traveled the
country, giving workshops for school districts and teacher groups on how to teach history and social studies better. Some of the ideas I present in these workshops came from other K–12 teachers I have met over the years. Others derive from my own teaching experience and from my years of thinking about what Americans get wrong about the past. This book col- lects the best shticks from those workshops for the benefi t of teachers and future teachers I will never meet.
Teachers who already teach beyond and occasionally against their U.S. history textbooks will fi nd that this book will help them explain their ap- proach to other teachers who still teach traditionally. For those who have not yet dared to break away from the security of just teaching the textbook, this book will provide specifi c ways to do so—ways that have worked for other teachers. It may also help them explain their new approach to prin- cipals and more traditional parents.
Loewen rev proofs.indd text1 5/8/2009 2:38:53 PM
2 Teaching What Really Happened
Before plunging into how to teach history better, however, we need to spend a few pages considering why. This introduction begins with a cau- tionary tale from Mississippi, showing how history was used there as a weapon to mislead students and keep them ignorant about the American past. Moving north to Vermont, I show that ignorance about the past is hardly limited to Mississippi. Mississippi merely exemplifi ed the problem in exaggerated form, as Mississippi embodied many national problems in exaggerated form in the late 1960s and ’70s. The introduction goes on to dissect the usual reasons that teachers and textbooks give to persuade students that history is worth knowing. I suggest other more important reasons why history is important, both to the individual and society. The introduction then closes with a brief overview of the book.
A LESSON FROM MISSISSIPPI
I fi rst realized how history distorts our understanding of society in the middle of my fi rst year of full-time teaching, at Tougaloo College in Mis- sissippi. I had started teaching at Tougaloo, a predominantly black in- stitution, in the fall of 1968, after fi nishing my doctorate in sociology at Harvard University. That fi rst year, in addition to my sociology courses, I was assigned to teach a section of the Freshman Social Science Semi- nar. The history department had designed this seminar to replace the old “Western Civ” course—History of Western Civilization—then required by most colleges in America, including most black colleges. The FSSS in- troduced students to sociology, anthropology, political science, econom- ics, and so on, in the context of African American history—appropriate enough, 99% of our students being African Americans.
African American history uses the same chronology as American his- tory, of course, so the second semester began right after the Civil War, with Reconstruction. I had a new group of students that fi rst day of the spring semester in January 1969, and I didn’t want to do all the talking on the fi rst day of class. So I asked my seminar, “What was Reconstruction? What im- ages come to your mind about that era?”
The result was one of those life-changing “Aha!” experiences—or, more accurately, an “Oh, no!” experience. Sixteen of my seventeen stu- dents told me, “Reconstruction was that time, right after the Civil War, 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.”
Loewen rev proofs.indd text2 5/8/2009 2:38:53 PM
Introduction: History as Weapon 3
I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions of facts glared from that statement that it was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. Afri- can Americans never took over the Southern states. All Southern states had white governors and all but one had white legislative majorities throughout Reconstruction. Moreover, the Reconstruction governments did not “mess up.” Mississippi in particular enjoyed less corrupt gov- ernment during Reconstruction than at any point later in the century. Across the South, governments during Reconstruction passed the best state constitutions the Southern states have ever had, including their current ones. They started public school systems for both races. Missis- sippi had never had a statewide system for whites before the Civil War, only scattered schools in the larger towns, and of course it had been a felony to teach blacks, even free blacks, to read and write during slavery times. The Reconstruction governments tried out various other ideas, some of which proved quite popular. Therefore, “whites” did not take back control of the state governments. Rather, some whites—Democrats, the party of overt white supremacy throughout the nineteenth century— ended this springtime of freedom before full democracy could blossom. Spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan, they used terrorism and fraud to wrest control from the biracial Republican coalitions that had governed during Reconstruction.
How could my students believe such false history? I determined to fi nd out. I visited high schools, sat in on history classes, and read the text- books students were assigned. Tougaloo was a good college—perhaps the best in the state. My students had learned what they had been taught. Bear in mind that they had been attending all-black high schools with all-black teaching staffs—massive school desegregation would not take place in Mississippi until January 1970, a year later. In school after school, I saw black teachers teaching black students white-biased pseudo-history because they were just following the book—and the textbooks were writ- ten from a white supremacist viewpoint.
The yearlong Mississippi History course was the worst offender. It was required of all 5th- and 9th-graders, in public and private schools, owing to a state law passed after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, intended to desegregate the public schools. This Mississippi statute was part of a package of obstructionist measures designed to thwart the Court and maintain “our Southern way of life,” which every Mississippian knew meant segregation and white suprema- cy. The one textbook approved for the 9th-grade course, Mississippi: Yes- terday and Today by John K. Bettersworth, said exactly what my students had learned. Other than “messing up” during Reconstruction, this book
Loewen rev proofs.indd text3 5/8/2009 2:38:53 PM
4 Teaching What Really Happened
omitted African Americans whenever they did anything notable. Among its 60 images of people, for instance, just 2 included African Americans.4
I knew John Bettersworth. In my junior year in college, I attended Mis- sissippi State University, where he taught history. He knew better. Indeed, when he reviewed several books on Reconstruction in the New York Times Book Review, he made clear that he knew that the interracial Republican coalition that governed Mississippi during Reconstruction had done a good job under diffi cult circumstances. But in his 9th-grade textbook, Bet- tersworth wrote what he imagined the Mississippi State Textbook Board wanted to read. He knew full well that historians did not (and still do not) review high school textbooks, so his professional reputation would not be sullied by his unprofessional conduct.5
Dr. Bettersworth could not have believed that his textbook was an innocent way to make a few thousand dollars without hurting anyone. At Mississippi State, he encountered the graduates of Mississippi high schools by the hundreds, and he knew how racist some of them could be—partly because they believed the BS (Bad Sociology) about African Americans in his textbook.
Perhaps as a passive form of resistance against their racist textbooks, many Mississippi teachers—white as well as black—spent hours of class time making students memorize the names of the state’s 82 counties, their county seats, and the date each was organized as a county. Or, perhaps more likely, they did this because it had been done to them. Regardless, these 250 twigs of information were useless and soon forgotten.6 Mean- while, students learned nothing about the past from this book that would help them deal with the wrenching changes Mississippi was going through in the 1960s and ’70s.
Black students were particularly disadvantaged. What must it do to them, I wondered that January afternoon, to believe that the one time their group stood center-stage in the American past, they “messed up”? It couldn’t be good for them. If it had happened, of course, that would be another matter. In that case, it would have to be faced: why did “we” screw up? What must we learn from it? But nothing of the sort had taken place. It was, again, Bad Sociology.
For more than a year, I tried to interest historians in Mississippi in writing a more accurate textbook of state history. Finally, despairing of getting anyone else to do so, I put together a group of students and faculty from Tougaloo and also from Millsaps College, the nearby white school, got a grant, and we wrote it. The result, Mississippi: Confl ict and Change, won the Lillian Smith Award for best Southern nonfi ction the year it came out. Nevertheless, the Mississippi State Textbook Board rejected it as un- suitable. In most subjects, the board selected three to fi ve textbooks. In
Loewen rev proofs.indd text4 5/8/2009 2:38:53 PM
Introduction: History as Weapon 5
Mississippi history, they chose just one. Only two were available, which might be characterized “ours” and “theirs.” By a two-to-fi ve vote, the board rejected ours, accepting only theirs. Two blacks and fi ve whites sat on the board.
Our book was not biased toward African Americans. Six of its eight authors were white, as were 80% of the historical characters who made it into our index. An index 20% nonwhite looks pretty black, however, to people who are used to textbooks wherein just 2% of the people referred to are nonwhite. Moreover, in contrast to the white supremacist fabrications offered in “their book,” our book showed how Mississippi’s social struc- ture shaped the lives of its citizens. So, after exhausting our administrative remedies, we—coeditor Charles Sallis and I, accompanied by three school systems that wanted to use our book—eventually sued the textbook board in federal court. The case, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al., came to trial in 1980, Judge Orma Smith presiding. Smith was an 83-year-old white Mis- sissippian who believed in the 1st amendment—students’ right to con- troversial information—and was bringing himself to believe in the 14th amendment—blacks’ right to equal treatment.7
For a week we presented experts from around the state and around the nation who testifi ed that by any reasonable criteria, including those put forth by the state itself, our book was better than their book. Among other topics, they found Confl ict and Change more accurate in its treatment of prehistory and archaeology, Native Americans, slavery, Reconstruction, Mississippi literature, the Civil Rights era, and the recent past.
Then came the state’s turn. The trial’s dramatic moment came when the Deputy Attorney General of Mississippi asked John Turnipseed, one of the board members who had rejected our book, why he had done so. Tur- nipseed asked the court to turn to page 178, on which was a photograph of a lynching. “Now you know, some 9th-graders are pretty big,” he noted, “especially black male 9th-graders. And we worried, or at least I worried, that teachers—especially white lady teachers—would be unable to control their classes with material like this in the book.”
As lynching photos go, ours was actually mild, if such an adjective can be applied to these horrifi c scenes. About two dozen white people posed for the camera behind the body of an African American man, silhouetted in a fi re that was burning him. The victim’s features could not be dis- cerned, and no grisly details—such as whites hacking off body parts as souvenirs—were shown or described. Nevertheless, our book was going to cause a race riot in the classroom.
We had pretested our book—along with Bettersworth’s—in an over- whelmingly white classroom and an overwhelmingly black classroom. Both had preferred ours by huge margins. So we had material to counter
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6 Teaching What Really Happened
this argument when our turn came for rebuttal. We never had to use it, however, because at that point Judge Smith took over the questioning.
“But that happened, didn’t it?” he asked. “Didn’t Mississippi have more lynchings than any other state?”
“Well, yes,” Turnipseed admitted. “But that all happened so long ago. Why dwell on it now?”
“Well, it is a history book!” the judge retorted. And we nudged each other, realizing we were going to win this case. Eventually, in a decision the American Library Association ranks as one of its “notable First Amend- ment court cases,” the judge ordered Mississippi to adopt our book for the standard six-year period and supply it to any school system, public or private, that requested it, like any other adopted book.8
Although we won the lawsuit, that experience proved to me that his- tory can be a weapon, and it had been used against my students. This book helps teachers arm students with critical reading and thinking skills— historiography, for example—so they will not be defenseless. Indeed, they can even learn to do history themselves.
This is the lynching photo to which Turnipseed objected. A lynching is a public murder, done with considerable support from the community. Often, as here, the mob posed for the camera. They showed no fear of being identifi ed because they knew no white jury would convict them.
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Introduction: History as Weapon 7
A LESSON FROM VERMONT
After eight years, I moved to the University of Vermont. Again, I found myself teaching 1st-year undergraduates, this time in huge classes in Introductory Sociology. I enjoyed these freshman classes, not least be- cause they opened a wonderful window on the world of high school. The view was mighty discouraging at times. My UVM students—as the University of Vermont is known—showed me that teaching and learn- ing “BS history” in high school was and is a national problem. These students were also ignorant of even the basic facts of our past, as were my Mississippi students, despite the hours spent in most high schools memorizing them.
In 1989, their ignorance astounded me in a course I taught intended for advanced undergraduates in education, history, and sociology. On the fi rst day of class I gave my students a quiz. It contained some comical items (some posted at my website, uvm.edu/~jloewen/), but also per- fectly straightforward questions like this one: “The War in Vietnam was fought between _____ and ____.” To my astonishment, 22% of my stu- dents replied “North and South Korea!”
Now, please don’t infer that something special—and specially wrong— has eroded history education in Vermont. The University of Vermont is a national institution; only 40% of its students come from within the state. Moreover, repeated national studies show that high school students learn history exceptionally badly. In 2003, for instance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress granted “advanced” status in U.S. history to only 1% of high school seniors. College graduates did little better. In 2000, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni commissioned the Center for Survey Research at the University of Connecticut to administer a 34-item “high school level American history test” to 556 seniors at 55 top colleges and universities. “Nearly 80% . . . received a D or F,” according to a sum- mary. More than a third didn’t know that the Constitution established the three-way division of power in the U.S. government; 99%, on the other hand, could identify “Beavis and Butt-Head” as adolescent television car- toon characters.9 College courses failed to fi ll in the gaps in their knowl- edge, partly because many college students never take a history course, it having been so boring in high school.10
University of Vermont students were particularly bad, however, in learning and applying the basic concepts of sociology. Indeed, they were so bad at it that I coined a new term for the syndrome that they exhibited: soclexia. This learning disorder makes it very diffi cult for its victims to grasp the basic idea of sociology. It may be genetic; certainly it strikes cer- tain racial and economic groups more than others. Children from white
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8 Teaching What Really Happened
(and Asian American) upper-class and upper-middle-class families are especially vulnerable.11
What is the basic idea of sociology? It is this: Social structure pushes peo- ple around, infl uences their careers, and even affects how they think. I was un- prepared for the level of soclexia I experienced in Vermont. My…
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