US history or US histories, that is the question. Is my story your story? Is there a single story? Can there be multiple stories woven into a broader telling of a national history? What role do blinders play in our history? What should we teach our children? Who says?
What do we know about US history?
The course title reads United States History. I taught this course and supervised its instruction. Our classic US History textbooks told our national story beginning with European exploration and colonization, revolution and establishment of a constitutional republic, westward expansion, civil war, industrialization, world wars, civil rights, and, depending on publication date, some contemporary stories. All supplemental materials used to teach our history to children supported this chronicle of our American pride and spirit. US history was Eurocentric and comfortably fit the concepts of our 20th century nationalism.
We taught and students learned what Winston Churchill meant when he said, “History is written by the victors”. Our history curriculum in school has been the story of how English-speaking people spread across the middle of North America and established a government, economic system, and society to sustain the victor’s heritage. The victors place the blinders.
https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html
My family lineage parallels traditional US history. We immigrated from Holland, intermarried with English colonists and fought in the Revolutionary War. As the settled frontier moved west, so did we. In 1849 a great-grandfather joined the California Gold Rush and returned to Wisconsin with enough riches to buy land and establish a growing family on multiple farms. By 1900 we were college-educated and mobile. We worked in FDR’s federal agriculture department and fought in WW2. We thrived as the Silent and Greatest Generations and Baby-Boomers. We are middle-class America personified and we find our story told and explained in a US History text.
But our story does not mirror that of almost 50% of Americans today. Many of the children I taught and learned from cannot find their family story in a US History text. “I do not see myself or my family represented in US History” is a complaint that educators knew existed for decades and only recently have begun to address. After all, we say to children, “This is the history of our country”, the first thing children do is to look for faces, names, and stories that are like their own. As soon as we ask children to find themselves in our national history we recognize multiple stories within our history.
As examples, our history text tells that enslaved African labor created the southern plantation culture and economy. The Civil War was fought to free the slaves and resulted in amendments to the Constitution. Reconstruction brought Jim Crow laws and segregation in the south. Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement and was assassinated. Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in Major League Baseball and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods each transformed their respective sports. And Barack Obama was our first Black President.
For a century the only mention of American Indians in our texts was Pocahontas, Squanto, Sacajawea, and Sitting Bull. Pocahontas saved John Smith and married and introduced tobacco to London. Squanto taught the Pilgrims to use fish as fertilizer and sat at the first Thanksgiving. Sacajawea guided Lewis and Clarke’s expedition over the Rocky Mountains. Sitting Bull led the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn and the death of Custer.
The story of Hispanic people in the text is one of losses. The Alamo and Mexican War of 1846-48 led to the annexation of Texas and all the territory between the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific. (A student needed to visualize the states formed by the Purchase to understand this.) Simon Bolivar was the George Washington of South America.
Asians get equal short shrift. Chinese workers built the Central Pacific railroad from California to Promontory Point, Utah, to join with the Union Pacific and form our first transcontinental railroad. And Japanese Americans were interred during WW2.
A traditional US History text fit the political-cultural realities of our pre-civil rights eras. That text conformed to the victors theory. Times changed. This is a woke story but a reality story. The Declaration of Independence acknowledged certain unalienable rights held by all (men according to the Founding Fathers). Stories of how Americans came to share their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be blindered in their telling.
Historical versions
If you don’t like what is showing on your media screen, change providers. If it is television, change channels. If it is a history text, change texts. Even among the victors there are different tellings of the same stories. Depending on your state, the adopted US History text is selected according to the telling that appeals to state legislators who make the ultimate decisions regarding school text adoptions. In the textbook market, California and Texas spend the most money on state adoptions. US History in these two states reflects how they want US History to be taught to their school children. These are state-approved blinders, and they contradict the rights of all Americans to understand their stories.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html
How does the story of our history fit our nation today?
We are no longer white/European. Our population mass is shifting from white/non-Hispanic to a reflection of the melting pot our nation was destined to become. So says the plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty written by Emma Lazarus, daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.
“As of 2019, the current distribution of the U.S. population by race and ethnicity is:
- White/non-Hispanic: 60.1%
- Hispanic: 18.5%
- Black: 12.2%
- Asian: 5.6%
- Multiple Races: 2.8%
- American Indian/Alaska Native: .7%
- Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: .2%”
Within the next decade White/non-Hispanic people will no longer be the majority race/ethnicity. The aggregated majority will be people of color.
More importantly, all in our census are citizens of the United States. In the collective, we are Americans. This is true of the census of our people but not of the US History of our people. Our history curriculum does not tell the stories of our American people.
Cognitive Dissonance
What do we do when we know disparate things to be true? Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. We experience discomfort and angst when confronted with dissonance. In this case, our textual history does not accurately reflect our real histories or our histories does not tell the story we want to be told.
Dissonance can cause us to
- learn more about conflicting ideas in order to resolve a best understanding.
- affirm our version of a story and attack anyone who holds a conflicting version.
- create new versions that further strengthen our ideas and attack any other version.
And this is where we are today. These three actions are taking place in and around our classrooms as adherents deal with their own and our societal dissonance.
Some use the attack strategy claiming that any story other than the mainstreamed story written by the victors is unAmerican. They make the issue partisan and divisive. Texts and materials that do not support the victor story are suppressed and removed from school. Blinders abound.
Some use the revision and new version strategies. They cite the Founding Fathers wanting decisions today to be based on the ideas and constraints of the 1700s. The Fathers truly were a narrow slice of the census of their time – wealthy, landed, Christian, white, and male. Or they rewrite history to give the victors a moralistic superiority over the vanquished. Our history is a natural selection and progression process. More blinders.
And some understood one of the concepts they were taught in their school’s US History class. The United States is a melting pot of peoples. There is no dominant story to support one group of citizens over the interests of others. To be understood and celebrated, the good, bad, and the ugly, history cannot have blinders.
The Big Duh!
The motto of the United States has been and is today e pluribus unum. It is Latin meaning “out of many, one”. US History taught to children today needs to be the truthful telling of the many stories that represent all the people who make up our one nation. The melting pot is only getting larger and more complex. Any child who does not hear and learn from the many stories is condemned to a severe dissonance problem. A nation that does not learn from its history is condemned to repeat it. We are smarter than that.