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Society for History Education
Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American
HistoryAuthor(s): Tony WatersSource: The History Teacher, Vol. 39,
No. 1 (Nov., 2005), pp. 11-21Published by: Society for History
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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History
Tony Waters California State University, Chico
STUDENTS IN MY UNDERGRADUATE Sociology and Social Sci- ence
classes often tell me that the "history" they learned in high
schools was different than the "history" they learned in our
university classes. They often claim that what they learned in K-12
was "wrong" and that they did not learn the "real" history until
they got to college. They usually focus on the fact that K-12
history is typically taught from a triumphal "grand sweep"
perspective emphasizing places and dates, and the glories of the
past in general. They contrast this with a college curriculum that
they say emphasizes that there were great injustices in the past.
Students often feel as if they have to choose between one version,
or the other.
Often my students' history preferences are based on their
pre-existing political views about the role of the state in
ordering society. Those on the right choose to believe in the
"glorious past" version of K-12, and those from the left focus on
the "persistence of oppression" version often emphasized by college
courses in history and education departments. The "glorious past"
version of history has in its corner the millions of K-12 textbooks
distributed to schools around the country. The persistence of
oppression school uses a different "clandestine" history of which
the most popular right now seems to be James Loewen's Lies My
Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got
Wrong. This The History Teacher Volume 39 Number 1 November 2005 C
Society for History Education, Inc.
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12 Tony Waters
book is a systematic debunking of K-12 American history texts
and is often read enthusiastically by students claiming that they
now understand "real" American history.
I think though that the dichotomy between right and wrong
history, right or left political views, or real and fake history is
all false. In fact, there are two histories being taught, each of
which is reasonable and important in the reproduction of society.
The K-12 version is about affirming the logical basis for our being
a people with a past and, by implication, a present. This version
is inherently patriotic and positive. In the case of the United
States, this optimistic story explains why today's values of
democracy, capitalism, equal opportunity, and individual lib- erty
are an important basis for a just society. This story is important
because Americans need to agree that there is a plausible and
logical explanation for why today's institutions are the best
possible. But in these patriotic and optimistic views there is a
limitation. The problem is that the optimism of the story told in
K-12 is never consistent with what is observed in the present. This
is where the role of college history comes in. College history
emphasizes not only optimism and patriotism but also ambiguity and
conflict. Learning this history is important because it is part of
a broader contingent story, part of which will eventually be used
to explain to children of the future a logical basis for their
present. What a good college level history course does is draw the
student into the wider conversation about the problems of the past.
It does this in order that future citizens will have the
intellectual tools to explain a present that has yet to emerge.
The Problem of a Plausible Past
There is a problem, however, with maintaining a patriotic story
for our children. The story needs to be plausible with respect to
both what significant adults remember of the past, what is
happening in the present, and the dreams a society has for a
future. These three things of course never quite match, but they at
least need to be consistent enough to avoid too much dissonance.
When there is too much dissonance, the old story becomes "wrong,"
and a new "more accurate" story emerges, creating a new version
which is still optimistic and patriotic.
Let me use a recent story from the United States during the
1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement confronted a country
which claimed to value democracy, equal opportunity, and individual
liberty. But this claim highlighted an obvious dissonance which was
the disenfranchise- ment of African-Americans who had fought for
these values in World War II. History books of the 1950s reflected
an older version of Ameri-
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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History
13
can history which dealt poorly with questions of race, and
focused on previous concerns about the need to reconcile whites
split by the fratri- cide of the Civil War. These histories told a
triumphal story of how English colonists established the
Massachusetts Bay and Virginia colo- nies, conducted a successful
revolt and gained independence from an English king who denied them
basic political rights. They then fought a terrible Civil War
focused by a need to preserve the union, and inciden- tally abolish
slavery. In order to make plausible the story that the war "saved
the union," memories of the intense hatred created by that war
needed to be downplayed and the patriotism of whites from the south
and north celebrated. The story then continued by noting that the
united country successfully fought World Wars I and II in defense
of democracy and liberty. This history took little note of millions
of African-Ameri- cans, a situation which was difficult to
reconcile with the participation of black units in World War II.
Nor could it explain the increasingly large presence of segregated
African-American communities in northern and southern cities where
public facilities were separate and unequal.
In response, the story told of "we the Americans" changed in the
history textbooks. Our origins were traced to peoples and places
besides England, including African slaves. Beginning in the 1970s,
the role that slavery and race played in the origins of the Civil
War was re-empha- sized, and it was no longer primarily a war to
preserve the union. Frederick Douglass was added to the glorious
story of the Civil War, and Robert E. Lee's role declined in a
country no longer focused on reconcili- ation of northerners and
southerners, but in reconciling blacks and whites. By the 1980s,
the assassinated Martin Luther King was elevated to a glorious role
in the country's struggle for freedom. In short, the story remained
a glorious and plausible one, but over a period of 30 to 40 years
even the heroes changed.
And guess what? In fifty years, how we teach history at the K-
12 level will change again. The story of the Civil War told in the
history textbooks of 2055 will not be the same as that told in
2005, or 1955. The story told in the K-12 textbooks of 2055 will
reflect a new story, which will be presented to children as being
the truth about an honorable past. Almost inevitably, today's
textbooks will be criticized for having omitted issues which do not
seem important today. But again, this is where college classes
should come in. College classes are part of the contingent "run-
ning conversation" from which this future vision of the past will
emerge. In contrast, K-12 is about the consensus reached in that
conversation, at least at the point in time when state boards of
education approved textbooks for distribution. The approved
textbooks will always present an optimistic and patriotic
expression of the political context the boards
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14 Tony Waters
of education reflect. That which is still contested will not be
legitimated politically, and will be left out of the K-12 canon
known as "the content standards."
This brings me back to the issue of what historians in our
universities do, and why what they teach is so often different from
what is taught in K-12. Universities produce the contingent history
of tomorrow. The grab bag that their classes dip into will become
the stories and analyses that will explain events in an unknowable
future. But only a very few will actually be used in future K- 12
books. For example, the reason why Islam is a new emphasis of the
American social studies curriculum, and not Shintoism or Hinduism,
has to do with broader political and military issues which emerged
after September 11,2001. There will probably be a stronger emphasis
on Islam in future K-12 textbooks because the story of Islam is
important in 2005 for explaining to our children the present
actions of the United States, while the stories of Shintoism and
Hinduism are not. The emphasis on Islam has everything to do with
the story America is trying to tell itself, and little to do with
the relative importance of Islam, Hinduism, or Shintoism as world
religions.
Max Weber on Ethnic Groups: How Nations Think about Their
History
The sociologist Max Weber discussed how groups use history to
define themselves as having a common identity in ethnicity,
nationality, or citizenship. Weber wrote that such status groups
are made up of "communities" of people who share the common "honor"
of a particular identity. In the case of ethnic and national
groups, this honor comes through a plausible belief in common
ancestry. Note that this common form of "honor" needs to be one of
"belief"' not actual verifiable genetic fact. So long as there is a
belief in common origin, and it is credible and creditable, it is
enough for the group to verify who belongs and who does not. It has
to be credible in the sense that habits, looks, dress, food, likes,
etc., are consistent with common practice. It has to be creditable
in the sense that the group needs to have an explanation of why
their unique sense of dignity is important, irrespective of
objective conditions. This is K-12 history at its best: credible,
creditable, and expressing the dignity of nationalism and
patriotism. K-12 history ultimately is the definition of a nation
or ethnic group both to itself and to the world about why it is
unique.
All groups, whether of low or high status, believe themselves to
be creditable, and tell stories about why their own group is better
than others. However, there is a problem of how to go about doing
this
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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History
15
credibly. Status groups, when compared to others, are either
positively or negatively privileged. The story they tell about
themselves--their his- tory--must credibly explain why things are
the way they are. Positively privileged groups need to explain to
others why their privileges are natural and normal. Negatively
privileged groups need to explain how privileges are denied them,
despite their own basic goodness. In other words, ethnic groups
need to explain to themselves and others why their status is
creditable, in a credible fashion.
Weber writes that positively privileged status groups focus on
their own general "excellence." Their kingdom is "of this world."
Positively privileged groups control the government which in the
modem world also controls the school curriculum. They live for the
present and need to identify a great past that logically leads up
to that present. Weber explains that part of the privileged status
is a fear of "decay from inside" by a present generation. They
believe that they themselves, and especially the young, are
incapable of living up to the moral standards established by "the
greatest generation," or subversion by groups jealous of their
privi- leges. Quite often dominant groups describe how their
education or skills have made them inappropriate for lower status
tasks, that is the "dirty work" of society which is reserved for
the subordinate groups.
Nevertheless, subordinate groups also have a sense of excellence
and dignity. For them, there is a glorious future lying beyond the
present, whether it is of this life, or a later life. There is
often in such groups a belief that they have a providential mission
from God, and that a messiah figure will appear to shine a light on
their hidden excellence. It is generally believed that this light
will naturally lead to the overthrow of their undeserving
oppressors. When this happens, their true honor will become obvious
to a world which has previously defined them as pariahs.
Put bluntly, positively privileged groups have nostalgia for the
past, and are likely to "celebrate" it through telling and
retelling of their history. Subordinated groups dream of future
deliverance, and speak little of a discreditable past. During the
Civil War, the nostalgia for the past was expressed in songs like
"Dixie" which glorified the past that domi- nant Southern planters
sought to preserve. At the same time, subordi- nated slaves
expressed themselves through songs of deliverance, like "Swing Low
Sweet Chariot" and even the "Battle Hymn of the Repub- lic," which
expressed a belief in a future salvation.
Credibility, Creditability, and Thoroughbred Anthropological
Types
Whether a status group is positively or negatively privileged in
a particular society, they also generate what Weber calls a
"thoroughbred
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16 Tony Waters
anthropological type." These are the stereotypes that ethnic and
national groups use to define themselves, as well as the others
with whom they have contact. These definitions include beliefs
about characteristic food preferences, dress, music, and
professions. These likes and dislikes are asserted through song,
ritual, stories, and history texts. For modem dominant groups, such
self-definition may become encoded in law, and the story expressed
through K-12 texts.
The anthropological thoroughbreds developed by dominant and
subor- dinate groups are patterned. The dominant group sees itself
as being smart, benevolent, and unable to do unskilled labor, while
subordinate groups are lazy, and fit only for menial tasks. The
dominant group generally believes that the subordinate people are
satisfied in their posi- tion. This view is often expressed in the
United States today in dominant views about immigrants from poor
Third World countries. It is believed that immigrants will take
low-status jobs in farm-work/gardening/restau- rants, and that they
are still happy to be here because life in the home country was so
miserable. Complementing such folk anthropology is the belief that
the native born are incapable of working in farm-work/garden-
ing/restaurants because the pay is too low, and the youth too
decadent to work as hard as required.
But the anthropological thoroughbreds developed by subordinate
groups also fit a pattern. The stories they tell tend to describe
themselves as being clever and indispensable, while the dominant
group is rich, cruel, and easily fooled. The Br'er Rabbit stories
developed by African-Americans during the days of slavery are a
good example of such stories. Subordi- nate groups also often
believe that were it not for the skills and insights of themselves,
the system of the dominant group would collapse. Slaves in the
American South typically all shared this view, irrespective of the
fact that their status in the larger society was low. Today,
building custodians, and farm workers will assert that the larger
market system they serve would collapse without them. Note that
this view is both credible and creditable. It is through such
stereotypes, if you will, that the conversa- tion about how a group
defines its own characteristics and those of others is
sustained.
Most important for this essay, dominant groups have the further
ad- vantage that a formal history, such as that introduced in K-12,
establishes stereotypes as historical fact. But the running
conversations of the subor- dinate groups are also important. For
it is out of this unofficial "clandes- tine" conversation that the
rationalizations needed to explain future shifts in power, prestige
and honor will emerge.
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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History
17
History, Mass Modern Society, and Textbooks Textbooks are an
important means by which mass modem societies
affirm and recreate an explanation of where a nation is today.
Millions of glossy paged copies are produced to teach K-12 students
the dominant explanation of why society is the way it is.
Meanwhile, the stories of subordinate groups tend to be passed
along clandestinely through alle- gorical myths, music, gossip, and
art. New ideas emerging out of subordi- nated media are often
unnoticed by the dominant culture. Music is a powerful means for
passing along clandestine values in modem society. Powerful
clandestine forces emerging during the last 40 years or so were
first expressed in rap, soul, and folk music. Much of the
now-dominant conservative movement had its origins in allegorical
myths about wel- fare, capitalism, affirmative action, race,
abortion, taxation policy, and government bureaucracy. These
stories were told clandestinely in little- noticed publications,
business schools, and radio stations which gained currency in the
1960s and 1970s.
College classrooms, where individual professors have broad power
to assign books, are a place where clandestine ideas are expressed
and tested for their plausibility. For what it is worth, the
clandestine ideas of the right tend to be expressed in business and
economics departments. Clan- destine ideas of the left are often
found in history and education Depart- ments. The advantage of the
college classroom is that these ideas can be shaped and interpreted
in ways that make sense in the context of different plausible
futures.
The Problem of Historical Change: Why We Celebrate
Thanksgiving
No dominant group started out being in charge. What is more, no
dominant group will remain dominant forever. And if you look
carefully, you can see the fingerprints of subordination in the
histories that domi- nant groups tell about themselves. This is
because every dominant group must at some time outwit someone else,
permitting the group to achieve its rightful place in the sun. In
other words, there must be a foil in the story, a messiah figure,
and a theme of triumph against odds. This story is rooted in a past
which is plausible, creditable, and credible to a dominant group. A
good way to do this, is to legitimate an event which is beyond the
lived memories of people within the society. This is why dominant
groups tell stories of a distant, rather than recent past. Perhaps
it is even why so many K-12 history classes never seem to reach the
end of the book where the recent past is discussed. Glorious
stories of a hundred years ago are less likely to be challenged by
the memories of the living.
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18 Tony Waters
A good way to illustrate this is by looking at how the American
Thanksgiving went from being a one-off minor celebration by fewer
than fifty English religious heretics dependent on Indian largesse,
to a descrip- tion of a glorious past for a nation of two hundred
ninety-four million people. The Thanksgiving story, as is told in
our K-12 history textbooks, is the story of a small band of church
dissenters--Pilgrims -upset with the theological practices of the
Church of England. They first went to Holland, and later to
Massachusetts. They settled at Plymouth in the forests of
Massachusetts near Cape Cod in 1620. After democratically deciding
to govern themselves with written laws (The Mayflower Com- pact)
these rational modem human beings established themselves on the
shores of Massachusetts Bay. Their first winter in New England was
devastating, and many of the Pilgrims perished. A messiah figure
eventu- ally appeared in the person of Squanto, an Indian who spoke
English and introduced them to the Indians of the area. The
Puritans worked with these Indians to establish farms which the
following season provided an abundant harvest. After the harvest
was in, the Pilgrims invited their new Indian friends to a feast of
uniquely American food like turkey, venison, and maize. And the
story often concludes that today's uniquely positive American
values like the rule of law, freedom of religion, cultural diver-
sity, farming, and hard work are logically celebrated by
acknowledging the role Pilgrims and Indians played in developing
the new society.
The problem that the grouchy critical historians at the
universities are likely to point to is that it didn't quite happen
that way. To start with, Spaniards, French, and even English had
long preceded the Pilgrims in America. Indeed, if there was a
"first food" it was cod liver oil from the fisherman who boiled the
massive codfish caught along Cape Cod. And as for friendship and
tolerance, the Pilgrims were the antecedents for seventy years of
Puritan theological despotism which included the perse- cution of
Quakers, the military annihilation of Squanto's heirs in King
Philip's War, and culminated in the Salem Witch Trials in 1691.
Indeed, it was only an autocratic act by that great social liberal,
the King of England, that finally revoked the democratic Puritan
Charter, replacing it with a staid Royal Charter which finally
protected religious liberty from the excesses of the Pilgrims'
successors.
Nevertheless, despite these uncomfortable truths, we continue to
use the Pilgrims as exemplars of virtue in our textbooks. Virtually
all Ameri- cans celebrate Thanksgiving and honor both the Pilgrims
and the Indians. As I will conclude below, this is probably a good
idea. Given the nature of American society today, including the
importance of religion, cultural diversity and the rule of law, the
Pilgrim story continues to resonate well. But, I suspect that it is
no coincidence that the second Thanksgiving was
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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History
19
not held until about 1820, long after the excesses of the
Puritans had faded from immediate memory. There was also of course
a need, as Weber pointed out, for the new country to define itself
as unique from others in terms of food likes, dress, and social
customs. Thanksgiving has proved to be an excellent ritual to
assert this "American exceptionalism."
And so, hundreds of millions are exposed to Thanksgiving through
the shared experience of donning Indian or Puritan costumes as
second graders, eating American turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, and,
of course, reading about the story in millions of American history
textbooks. By performing these rituals, and insisting that our
second graders dress up as Pilgrims or Indians (even those living
in Polynesian Hawaii), we make an important statement about what
values are important to us as a nation today, not just in the
past.
Choosing a Plausible Past, Present, and Future
So what happened to the nasty side of the Massachusetts'
Puritans? Aren't we their heirs, too? In a positivistic sense we
are; and in the college history curriculum it is generally taught
that events like the Salem witch trials are a natural outgrowth of
religious extremism. Indeed the reason we talk about the Salem
witch trials today is that intellectuals of the 1950s effectively
resuscitated these events to make a clandestine point about witch
trials being important as literary metaphor, that is, trials
without heroes or honor. No one in the story of the Salem witch
trials is creditable given contemporary values. The powerful
prosecutors who condemned the witches to death are not people to be
emulated. The judges who relaxed rules of evidence to permit ready
convictions are not creditable. And none of the victims left
clandestine diaries, notes, or stories which would provide a
credible example of how good could overcome evil. I There are no
heroes, so there is no creditable history. The Salem witch trials
may be instructive for would-be prosecutors and judges to study in
law schools, but they are of dubious value for K-12 books seeking
to create an optimistic patriotism.
And this is why Loewen's book Lies my Teacher Told Me will never
become part of a state board of education's content standards for
K-12. Loewen's book points out that there is much to be discredited
about American history. Heroes were in fact clods, and racism, not
only pursuit of freedom and liberty, is a dominant theme in
American history. Which is of course the reason that it cannot be
used as a textbook in K- 12, where the dominant society needs to
convince its children that an American identity is honorable, and
that the dominance of the state is a natural consequence of a
glorious past.
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20 Tony Waters
Lies My Teacher Had Better Teach Me
This brings me full circle to answering the original question
that my students first asked about the two types of history, that
taught in K-12, and that learned in the university. The history we
tell in K-12 is always tied to a need to justify the present.
Implicitly, and most importantly, the story is about what "we" as a
group believe our future should be. Through what is chosen to
include in the history taught to our children, the government is
helping children to discuss more than the problems of the past.
Children are taught about how the problems of the present are
discussed, and what future should be hoped for. In a modern society
where the dominant group is inherently in charge of the state, this
means that textbooks will always tell a creditable story which
glorifies the past, and justifies the present. There will always be
an assumption that today's youth do not quite measure up to their
honored predecessors. This is what my students called the "wrong"
history when they got to my class. But rather than being right or
wrong, it is what modern states need to do to persist. History
taught to the masses is always glorious, and always justifies the
present.
But, while a glorious past may be important for the present, it
is inadequate for a future where the unforeseen will need to be
explained. Interpretations of future events will be contested, as
power shifts occur, and new problems are dealt with. In the 1960s
the United States was fortunate that a generation of historians
prepared a "clandestine history" about Fredrick Douglass and others
who have become recognized since as contributing creditably and
credibly to a present focused on a need to reconcile racial
differences. Other clandestine histories are being written today,
most of which will never be heard of beyond a limited group of
specialized scholars, or perhaps by undergraduates in a sociology,
an- thropology, or history class. But, necessarily a few will
address the unforeseen circumstances of the future, and be used by
someone to assert a claim of legitimacy for the people we will
become. This will become the future's K-12 history at its best:
credible, creditable, and expressing the dignity of nationalism and
patriotism.
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Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American History
21
Sources and Further Reading
Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections of the
Spread on Nationalism, 2"d edition. New York: Verso Press.
Barth, Fredrik,edior (1969). "Introduction" to Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries: The Ori- gins of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little
Brown.
Blumer, Herbert (1958). "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group
Position." Pacific Socio- logical Review. v. 1: 3-8.
Loewen, James (1996). Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your
American History Textbook Got Wrong
Waters, Tony and Kim LeBlanc (2005). "Refugees and Education:
Mass Public School- ing without a Nation-State. Comparative
Education Review 49(2): 129-147.
Weber, Max (1948) "Class, Status, Party," pp. 180-194 in From
Max Weber. New York: Free Press.
Notes
1. Which is not of course to say that there could not have been
any; after all without the voice provided by Anne Frank's diaries,
her capture, deportation and death would have had as little to say
to us as the victims of the Salem Witch Trials, as without the
diary she would have been as anonymous as the victims of Salem.
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Contentsp. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p.
21Issue Table of ContentsThe History Teacher, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Nov.,
2005), pp. 1-139Front MatterWelcome to Our New Editor: Jane Dabel
[pp. 9-10]Why Students Think There Are Two Kinds of American
History [pp. 11-21]The Craft of TeachingWhat Happened and Why?
Helping Students Read and Write Like Historians [pp. 23-32]The
State of the ProfessionJames Conant's Uncompleted Revolution:
Methods Faculty and the Historical Profession, 1978-2004 [pp.
33-41]HistoriographyThe Spanish Borderlands, Historiography Redux
[pp. 43-56]Special Feature: National History Day 2005 Prize
EssaysIntroduction [pp. 57-58]Divided by a Common Language: The
Babel Proclamation and its Influence in Iowa History [pp. 59-88]The
Great Communicator: How FDR's Radio Speeches Shaped American
History [pp. 89-106]Notes and Comments'To Feel Fiercely':
Tradition, Heritage, and Nostalgia in English History [pp.
107-115]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 117-118]Review: untitled [pp.
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138-139]Back Matter