Against the Grain

This piece is to accompany James Loewen's feature story "Getting the Civil War Right."

Recently I spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution surveying 12 popular American history textbooks, learning how teachers use them and consulting with historians about the books' contents. Virtually absent from most of them, I discovered, is the issue of race relations.

Granted, what today's textbooks do say on the topic is more accurate than the information I received in high school in the early 1960s. The slaves my classmates and I read about, for example, were reasonably happy and well-fed; few tried to revolt or escape. Today, authors point out that slaves had no real control over their own lives. "Slavery led to despair," one book suggests, "and despair sometimes led black people to take their own lives."

In covering the post-Civil War period, however, most textbooks remain silent on race relations. Several authors even portray the failure of Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans. "Millions of ex-slaves could not be converted in ten years into literate voters, or successful politicians, farmers, and businessmen," observes one book, as though the rise of the Ku Klux Klan had no bearing on the process.

More glaringly, 10 of the 12 textbooks I examined ignore the developments between 1890 and 1920 that undermined the concept of equal rights. The period was marked by such a surge in white animosity -- toward Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and even Italian immigrants, as well as blacks -- that historians have called it the "nadir of American race relations."

During the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, race relations again claimed the national stage. Again, textbooks blunder. Instead of showing how thousands of citizens -- including many young people -- used civil disobedience and other forms of protest to win equal rights, authors simply credit the government for most of the progress.

Further, many textbooks imply that the federal government has been working to improve the lives of African Americans since the 1860s. Under this false impression, today's white students can easily respond to the next incident of televised black unrest by snarling at their TV sets, "What more do you people want us to do for you?"

Complicating the issue of textbook gaps and flaws is what I call the "tyranny of coverage." No sooner have students read what the textbooks say about the Lincoln-Douglas debates than teachers must be off to John Brown's raid. Another week, and the Civil War is but a memory. Even rushing at warp-speed, most teachers never reach the recent past.

Study after study shows that "teaching the textbook" only produces students who hate history -- and misunderstand the past. One constructive approach to both accuracy and comprehensiveness is to teach "against" the text, to engage students in critical thinking about the way history is made, interpreted and taught. Teachers can supply primary source material about a topic covered in their textbooks, for example, and invite students to critique whether the textbook summary is accurate. Using two different textbooks can prompt students to question why they differ.

When teachers present fewer topics in greater depth, using more primary sources in diverse voices, students get hooked by the issues, and more history "sticks." Such an approach provides no easy answers, no uncomplicated heroes or villains, certainly no consensus. Wrestling with the ambiguities of history, however, helps prepare students for the complexities of the world around them. Teaching history as a chorus of diverse voices inherently teaches tolerance.