If by "solid" you mean "full of shit", yeah, it's solid. It's garbage, unverified alternative history, just towards a more liberal bent than a lot of conservative American teachings.
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Facing Facts: American Identity is Based on Alternate History (article)
- Thread starter More_Badass
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If by "solid" you mean "full of shit", yeah, it's solid. It's garbage, unverified alternative history, just towards a more liberal bent than a lot of conservative American teachings.
OG Shaka Zulu
Member
Children aren't stupid and giving a more objective light to history and thinking about its losers would benefit US children. For example current US societal treatment of minorities, Blacks in particular, is completely shaped by slavery and history.
We are a perpetually divided nation race-wise because true US history is not actually taught and widespread discrimination is still pervasive. If whites were properly taught the lengths as to which the US undermined its minority population in the past and present, then its more likely the average white would view minorities as their fellow Americans instead of a class of do-nothings or some other stereotype. Being taught that Martin Luther King made racism vanish with one speech helps no one and robs people of the context needed to understand what's going on in the US today.
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Yep now we are at the top and have established a global capitalist economy that will permanently subjugate the world's nations, don't want anyone getting any ideas.
More_Badass
Member
Given the current state of things in this nation, this one really shook me. I never learned about that stuff in school, only through GAF threads and books that I read about the fact. Its an utterly chilling and disturbing part of this countrys history and If you told 95% of people about it, they would think youre lying or being unamerican or something. Because the idea of American being so fervently pro-eugenics and having such a strong blatant pro-Nazi element (well maybe not so shocking anymore) is so opposite what were taught, and our parents and their parents have had ingrained in them for years.
Pro Third Reich indoctrination is still not a thing in Germany.
What you describe sounds more like the children of the children of the children of migrants teaching their children a romanticised version of German history (a country they've most likely never been to) and indoctrinating them. Those are US Americans.
What exactly does this have to do with how Germany and GERMAN people handle this issue? What you describe is not a thing here.
TheRealCanadianBros.
Banned
Wow....I didnt know that teaching children the truth about their country's origins was a bad thing.
/s
Great points all around. I find it increasingly difficult to discuss history with others in context and not through the modern lens.
Your example of the Eastern Front (WWII) is a particularly good one. To reduce events such as the Battle of Stalingrad to mere footnotes in many textbooks simply because it wasn't a Western endeavor is maddening. No study of WWII is complete without the Eastern Front.
Ghost Rider
Member
I teach 7th grade. The past year and a half have been brutal in terms of the attitude kids and parents have. I got the district to allow me to teach The Breadwinner. I teach some fundamental history of Islam with it and use articles about the racism and prejudice Muslims face in America. I also use The Watsons go to Birmingham1963 and do a research project on the Civil Rights movement.
Last year I had a parent complain that Im radical and racist against white people. She suggested I read more uplifting books like Anne Frank. I literally spit when she said it.
prag16
Banned
Eh, iirc that was basically "white people are totally evil, guys, especially Americans (pay no attention to all the heinous atrocities committed by non-Europeans though)." I remember thinking it didn't really live up to the promise indicated by the title.
The USA was built on genocide of the Native Americans and the backs of slaves. It has a blood soaked history of imperialism and is still the most violent developed nation on the planet. None of these facts are properly taught in school. Is it really any surprise the situation the USA finds itself in now when kids from a young age are taught manifest destiny instead of aggressive genocide of native peoples? They get a skewed view of the country and how it operates from birth and its destroying the country.
One of the issues with the counter arguments here is that in the case of the civil war, the losers got to write their own version of history in a lot of places, which is a fucking disaster. We'd be a lot better off if the government had forced the south to stop being complete shitbags in their history books.
prag16
Banned
This is spot on, and it's exactly why that "Lies your teacher told you" book some in this thread are puffing up, isn't worthwhile imo (or at least there are much better vehicles for such an examination than that lackluster polemic).
All national received histories are based on interpretations that are generally pretty wonky.
Actually it's never been true outside of perhaps the quite earliest written accounts. How and why history gets written varies quite greatly.
While this is true, you've also neglected that history as a field changes all the time. I would actually argue we're not in an age of being sensitive to uncomfortable truths, especially not in history. Now more than ever before we're confronting it.
But yes, this is the key issue with thinking historically. If you actually want to try to understand the past well you need to avoid anachronism, and there is no greater anachronism than simply projecting current thought into the past. After all, the past is like a foreign country.
Actually it's never been true outside of perhaps the quite earliest written accounts. How and why history gets written varies quite greatly.
While this is true, you've also neglected that history as a field changes all the time. I would actually argue we're not in an age of being sensitive to uncomfortable truths, especially not in history. Now more than ever before we're confronting it.
But yes, this is the key issue with thinking historically. If you actually want to try to understand the past well you need to avoid anachronism, and there is no greater anachronism than simply projecting current thought into the past. After all, the past is like a foreign country.
Sounds unfree.
More_Badass
Member
Well, theres a pretty big difference between the losers who were fighting to maintain slavery, and, for example, the nature of manifest destiny and Native American genocide and the losers in that conflict
Good on you for fighting the good fight. That parent was fucking crazy for saying that btw holy shit
How many historians exactly do you think are blind to this? The issue isn't history and historians. It's the popular imagining of the past.
The "Lost Cause" isn't an argument for history being poorly done. It's an argument against people dismissing actual history in favor of believing whatever they want to believe because of the relative lack of legitimacy that historians are given over their field.
Probably because this is actually impossible to do. The best we can do is actively try to avoid anachronism.
MiamiWesker
Member
What kind of history books did you guys have in school? All my history classes clearly talked about every bad terrible event and why. Chapters on chapters of war, genocide, massacres, history is bloody and we read about it.
You sure about that? We don't have an active censorship board that tries to control what we do in the US, but their are absolutely various power structures that serve this very purpose especially at the public universities in red states, and three of the best public universities for history, ut, madison, and chapel hill, are in such states.
You're right, of course. I don't mean to take away from the other screwed up things we've done as victors. I'm just really salty, as someone who went to high school in Mississippi, over the fucked up version of history they teach. If they even bothered to mention civil rights, it was in a tone that made it sound like the good ole boys club was being victimized at every turn by them uppity negroes(or far fucking worse).
Makes my blood boil thinking about it.
Lies My Teacher told me isn't about "white people being evil", it's about the fact that the Americas were colonized by criminals. Undeniably evil people.
I'd say it's easier now than every before with the varied large scale theoretical frameworks set up and the interdisciplinary nature of the field at the present.
I think what he's saying is that those things are the natural outcomes of states. He is kinda correct on that matter. That doesn't make them okay though; it means we need to do better.
Every country does this, though by the nature of what the states of the Western Hemisphere are it's probably worse there. America is particularly bad because it's historically been powerful enough to do particularly bad things.
Isn't a lot of the tension from one side being ignorant to America's history and thinking everything is fine and you should stand up for the anthem and respect the country. And the other side who feels the reality of America not being fair to people. I would think that most of this division comes from the American school system has swept its history under the rug.
More_Badass
Member
Of course, but neither history textbooks nor the ingrained narrative of the past are written by historians, which is what I thought we were talking about in how such beliefs and perceptions persist and are taught
Blaming the American school system for its populace's poor understanding of the past seems like taking the easy way out. America's historians more than those of any other developed country have a legitimacy crisis. Until we rectify that, and other cultural issues, we won't make any progress on this front.
Right, but at the end of the day we have to question the reasons why the ideas of historians aren't making it down into textbooks. In my experience it actually isn't even that intentional. Americans just have a particularly poor understanding of the past and our creation of it couple with a general anti-intellectualism. Which is of course quite ironic given that the American academy is certainly at least tied for the best these days.
Sorry if that comment sounded like it was suggesting you were the issue, I was just going off of what you were talking about there.
I'm not an Americanist, though the nature of my work does touch upon the Atlantic world of the 18th century, but historians of the Americas generally have made really monumental strides in the last 50 years. They've generally be received quite well in Latin America, probably because they tend to overemphasis it's importance as a corrective to previous narratives of their peripheral status, but progress has been slower, but noticeable, in the US. The issue with the states then is that these narratives are percolating down from the college educated crowd because Americans as a culture are actively against intellectuals generally, and particularly unreceptive to the new narratives of historians.
This is a complex issue with a lot of moving parts though, and the only solution I see, assertion of historians privileged access to knowledge about the past, is one that won't be popular with very many Americans, even the ones that are generally receptive to historians.
On the bright side, once America comes to term with at some some of its decline I do think it'll become more receptive to some of the kinda of narratives that historians have been producing, even if they won't be more receptive to historians themselves.
Kids can get nuance to a degree, but historical nuance is a relatively quite difficult one to grasp. I struggle with getting nuance across to even upper level history undergraduates in a field that they generally have no emotional attachment to. Subtract 15 years from their age, add emotional attachment, and a strongly ingrained received narrative and the problem become exponentially harder, and is given to people who are, no offense to any teachers here, going to be less skilled at dealing with the philosophical aspects of the problem.
The best hope here is that primary and secondary school teachers are generally more respected, and that they have pedagogical training that is fundamentally different that the philosophical ones of historians. Which is to say they might be better at getting a specific better narrative across. But this leaves us with the root problem still in place.
Don't the school systems get their information from the historians. The point I was trying to make is that there is a very large portion (if not the majority) of America thinks that nothing is wrong with the country and tries to downplay its sins. That seems to cause conflict with the other populace who doesn't.
Very rarely, and generally through many intermediary levels. The fact that you think they do is indicative of how serious this problem is. The "radical" discourse getting disseminated through tumblr and twitter for the last several years is actually coming from the work of historians along with various humanists and social scientists. For example the current understanding of racism, or the increasingly common understanding of its historical origins lying in the attempt of the elite to stabilize their control.
Historians and anthropologists generally tend to be the most progressive disciplines on matters of race.
Right, and part of the problem with that is they don't have to face the far better understandings of the past created by historians. It's not the only problem, American nationalism and the culture around it is obviously the other major one, but the two are connected and this is the more pertinent one when talking about history.
If you don't even acknowledge its sins, as many of these people don't, you don't even have to downplay them.
This seems like a good place for me to point out that this issue is wider than it seems. Denying the horrors of slavery, imperialism, and the like are obviously the worst manifestations of this, and they all come from the right, but the root thinking that produces this is hardly lacking on the left. We need to address this understanding of what history is itself.
There was a poster on a few other threads that was making some nonsense claims about how the majority of Irish/Scottish Gaelic, he didn't seem to understand they aren't the same, speakers were black and that the Jacobite transports from the '45, he puts them at 50,000 thought the actual number was about 4,500, were the core of the Black population in the US. When I called him out on this on several fronts, using my credentials, showing him the problems in his logic, showing him the errors in his understanding of the actual facts and chronology, and referring him to scholarship on the subject, he just essentially asserted I was part of some evil cabal of historians bent on disseminating lies.
Now this doesn't really hurt anyone in isolation, what it does do is further attacks on the legitimacy of historians and the historical method. As this happens from both the left and the right historians ability disseminate good useful information about the past is greatly adversely affected. As people understand vapid assaults on the claims of historians to be culturally acceptable their ability to stabilize any sort of meaning in the past is lost. And instead people can just substitute their own understandings generally made up on the spot, received culturally, or from reading bad pop history that confirms the beliefs one already has. Whether this is the actively harmful narratives of conservatives or the generally benign but poor narratives of the left.
Obviously this is a particularly egregious case, but I see these attacks on the legitimacy of intellectuals in general, and historians in particular, all the time on this site. We need to do better about this if we actually want to solve problems.
As a historian myself, there is an issue here with insisting that history not be viewed through a "modern lens."
In a perfect world, sure, history would 100% be objectively viewed because we all 100% understand everything about everything and everyone would be able to politely discuss and agree on the fine points of what our history is and what it means to us. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have books like Lies My Teacher Told Me to document deficiencies in our text books or books like History on Trial to document the struggles historians go through with the government to even work out the standards for text books, because history would be an easier clean cut subject that is just as simple to explain as math.
But this isn't a perfect world, and history can't be removed from the modern lens, or any additional lenses period. You can go into a primary source and start interpreting it with the intention of being 100% objective and trying to view it only "in context", and you're still ultimately going to be injecting your own biases in the end because your own background, your education, your politics, your methodology, and so on are all going to uniquely inform how you process that information and how you choose to repeat it to others. Your modern understanding, be it good or bad, is going to be a part of how you view and discuss history, regardless of whether you want it to or not. Even the very decision to try and "objectively" discuss/interpret history just "in context" is itself a bias that is going to skew the way you see things, because you are having to arbitrarily establish the lines of what that context actually is. And establishing where that line of "context" lies is very important in the end to how you and others view historical events.
It's easy to claim that anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism is a "modern" lens and that society was "fine" with it, but that ignores that we had people fighting and writing against colonialism and imperialism the whole time.
It's easy to claim that slavery was the "norm" for the world leading into the American Civil War, but that ignores how slavery was always a complicated issue for society, both in modern and pre-modern times.
It's easy to claim that our revered historical figures were monolithic entities that were fine in the context of their time and that we are only just now revisiting them with a more critical lens, but then that ignores the voices of dissent at the time who may have been speaking out against those figures or resisting them in other ways.
That's ultimately the problem we historians face. "Context" is vast, nebulous, and arbitrary. Ultimately, that context is also eroding every single day, as people die, sources are destroyed, and more people get taught specific ideologies and methodologies that push other understandings out the wayside. The only way to compensate is to apply our own interpretation of what is left, and that interpretation is always going to have a modern lens by establishing where the lines of those context lie and how to fill in the missing spaces. As it stands, the kind of history this article is attacking, the history being taught that everything was and is fine and uncomplicated, is itself a relatively modern and slanted interpretation in its own right. The idea of Columbus being a renowned hero deserving of our praise as the ur-discoverer of both America and the world being round is itself history already being viewed through a relatively modern lens compared to how people would have viewed it at the time.
Now, yes, it is possible to limit that modern interpretation of history as much as you can. That said, history doesn't need to be about and absolutely shouldn't be about a pure 100% objective regurgitation of the facts. That modern lens is what lets us grow and understand when we should reconsider how we engage with certain parts of our past. It's also important for letting us understand how our views of the past before may have been biased by certain circumstances.
So, yeah, we should reconsider how we teach certain things. Andrew Jackson may have been "normal" for the context of the time (which, again, is even debatable when you expand what you are consider what that context is), but that doesn't mean we can't look back now, reinterpret what he means for us now, acknowledge that, yes, he was instrumental in some pretty horrific things, and hold a genuine discourse on whether or not he should be enshrined as a positive part of our history.
And as a historian, that is fine. History is not monolithic and unchanging.
tl;dr Keeping the historical context in mind is important, but we are injecting biases no matter what and it important to always reevaluate how we interpret and present history because of that.
This is rather odd, I don't come across too many historians suggesting this, especially the bolded.
Positivism isn't bad just because it doesn't work, which is true, but because it's fundamentally philosophically unsound. No perfect world could ever make the social sciences, and especially the humanistic ones, as clear as math. That's simply not what these things are.
(as a total aside math is not nearly as simply and clear cut as people tend to assume)
While this is all true it sounds a bit negative to me. I feel like when I see things like this it's based on a misinterpretation of Skinner. There is no objective history as you say, but attempting to look at it in a more objective way. Can, and often is, useful.
Kinda true, but as a historian we should be both critical of the stability of both words, especially colonialism but of course they weren't using the word Imperial in a way recognizable to anyone who isn't a historian of the period before the 19th century, and careful of what we mean when we say things like "fighting and writing against" these topics. There have been problems with it, but, especially in the context of what your replying to, this runs the danger of anachronistically assuming that their complaints were similar enough to ours for these people to be our historical stand ins.
I see people do this all the time with Las Casas. And the British abolitionists, especially Quakers. It ends up being quite similar to the problem Marxist historians run into constantly trying to turn 17th century England into their battleground of history.
Quite true.
True, and this is a call for more history from below which I think most people, and I'm including lay people, have accepted as being valid for quite some time now.
Nick Jardine's done some good work ion this topic, but ultimately it's a philosophical dead end. Positivism is wrong, but I'm not sure there's anywhere further to go on this front other than recognizing out limitations. Which I'm all for, but I also quite sure nuancing the understanding of historians of lay people is particularly useful in a context where historians aren't actually seen as having a particularly valid claim to understanding the past.
And here's the rub that I constantly come across. The fact that biases are inevitable doesn't justify anacrhoniostic moralizing. Historians should be trying to understand the past on its own terms as best we can. We can do other things in addition to this, but moralizing the best for its own sake seems like a useless endeavor. To use a similar example from my own field. Cromwell is what he is. He did horrible things that we should never be repeating. That kind of moralizing is good, at some level that might be the very point of our craft. What is less useful is framing our understandings of him around some understanding of good or evil that we essentialize to the person. This is bad enough to do with people that are currently alive, it's even less meaningful with the dead.
At some level Cromwell legitimately struggled with his actions and thought deeply with what the right thing was. I have no qualms with saying he was wrong, I do have qualms with people focusing their understanding of him on some idea that he was bad. To nuance this further I also have no qualms with those that ask that we take down monuments to him and be careful in our instruction of the figure to primary and secondary students, because these things have a social value in the here and now that is actually removed from the historians work.
Admittedly, it's more my poor wording here.
I agree.
Again, agreed. I'm not trying to say that we should never attempt to be objective, just that we should understand that there will always be limits to how objective we can be.
And this is also an important consideration with how we do deal those points, but my point still stands in that the context of that subject is a little more complicated.
I completely agree here. Injecting our own morals is definitely a danger we approach when we reevaluate historical events and figures, and it's something we have to always keep ourselves aware of when we do go about that.
That said, it's not what I was really suggesting we do there (and I apologize if that's how it came off).
Ravensmash
Member
It does make me wonder what my education was like here (UK).
I'd love to find my old history textbooks, although I think it was fairly rounded.
We studied (off the top of my head); The English reformation, WW2 (specifically remember the Blitz) across a few topics, the civil rights movement in the USA.
Man, need to try and recall more.
I'd love to find my old history textbooks, although I think it was fairly rounded.
We studied (off the top of my head); The English reformation, WW2 (specifically remember the Blitz) across a few topics, the civil rights movement in the USA.
Man, need to try and recall more.
Elegant Weapon
Member
Um, you realize that the lies our teachers taught us were largely about the greatness, bravery and purity of white men?
So that's why a book titled "lies my teacher taught me" would focus on the actions of white men, right?
Really, exactly what lies were we as American students taught about the atrocities committed by non-europeans that were twisted into acts of virtue?
Fucking none, right? So obviously a book called "lies my teacher taught me" wouldn't be about non-europeans at all, since we barely learn the history of anyone but europeans
like, cmon. It's not that hard to think it through
Bolivar687
Banned
The only thing that feels like alternate history so far is this thread discussion itself. From my earliest memories of school, we learned about the barbarity of the conquistadors, the inhumanity of the 3/5 rule and later the Dred Scott decision, the trail of tears, the social cost of the first industrial revolution and how the military was used to suppress laborers during the second. I remember teachers setting aside entire classes to debate the ethics of the use of nuclear weapons in World War II.
Later in college, I started picking up on a lot of the things my school had left out. Like how the Mesoamericans did things to their own people that were far more horrific than anything any European ever did to them. My public school taught us about the Scopes trial but they never told us that Gregor Mendel was a Catholic priest. And we were told people in Columbus' time thought the earth was flat and the Pope burned anyone who said otherwise at the stake, despite the fact that the clergy of the Middle Ages not only knew the earth was round but could give you a close estimation of its circumference as well. By the time my professor told me that was nativist anti-Catholic propaganda, I was no longer surprised.
Public education is local and indoctrination cuts both ways.
Muppet of a Man
Member
This. The centrists/moderates of our time who purport to be social do-gooders have a blind spot for their own consumer-centric comforts (i.e., the latest annual iPhone or other non-essential bullshit they don't really need on the cheap) at the expense of fair wages, acceptable working conditions, and mitigating detrimental environmental externalities. They'd rather just NIMBY it out of their purview and pretend it doesn't exist. They also like to use the, "but it elevated so many out of poverty!" line, while their ilk benefited by far the most, consolidating global wealth and power, by skimming off the top by selling out workers across the globe.
Fuck these people and their convenient arm chair excuses.
prag16
Banned
Get off your high horse. That book was a biased piece of crap.
We clearly didn't have the same teachers. Maybe elementary school teachers didn't go too deep on that stuff, but in higher grades, absolutely. Basically the below (and the posts he was quoting):
Glass Shark
Banned
Oh my sweet summer child
Sure, there's material much to work with, but you will inevitably end up borrowing a large amount of other people's ideas to form your own. The poster seemed disappointed that the argument of his thesis has been made already, but my point is that doesn't stop him from building on it with new ideas.
Elegant Weapon
Member
Dude, how?
You said its biased because it focused on white men, but aren't white men the people most americans primarily learned about in school?
I haven't even read the book, I'm just poking holes through your assessment that it was biased against white men because it focused on them, because who the fuck else would it focus on?
Y'all learned about the barbarity of the conquistadors in elementary/middle school? We sure as fuck didn't. Columbus was not taught as anything other than a hero who was confused where he landed, we didn't learn about him as a Hitler like figure at all. Cmon, most people are taught history that elevates certain figures in a flattering light.
But for you to sit here and act like a book called "lies my teacher taught me" should focus on other cultures that weren't taught at all.... wtf?
again, exactly what non european atrocities were most americans taught in school in a virtuous light that you would have the book detail?
The bolded's been a huge deal in history since it was modernized. Opening chapters being historiographical essays goes back to at least Butterfield.
That being said a program worth its salt shouldn't be taking counterfactuals as a complete thesis. Counterfactuals are supposed to be analytical tools, thought experiments.
I think you're being a bit mean here. Part of Capitalism involves the cultural and intellectual framework that justifies it to people. Breaking free from this is really really hard. Look at all the leftists that have an incredibly poor grasp on Marx and later theory. People don't just believe this because they are mean, they believe it because the society we live in is oriented towards thinking about certain things in certain ways, which by the way neither Marx nor Weber attributes to malice.
The book just isn't very good history as well, but that's not really what it's supposed to be. It's a shock treatment against just blindly accepting received narratives.
I think part of the problem is people don't realize that and act like this, and Guns, Germs, and Steel are the pinnacle of the discipline.
Yeah, I'd wager it's heavily dependent on both class level and location. I was raised somewhere without public education on sex ed, but the classes I took even there addressed that the civil war was about slavery. I also think most classes probably aren't particular bad about how they mention the natives, it think most textbooks acknowledge that what America did was horrible and also do not support the traditional popular justification for it. But they probably don't talk about Natives enough.
I think the real problems are to be found in how the Revolution, this is straight up Myth history, what going into the actual struggle for minority rights, and post-WW2 foreign policy are taught. A lesser issue, but more personal to me, lies in not sufficiently focusing on how horrible the market was to people in the 19th century.
All primary education is indoctrination, I don't think that's actually a problem. You've got a list of a couple of common misconceptions here, but baring the first none of those are particularly important.
There are huge amounts of random untrue facts flying around. Pythagoras almost certainly neither discovered nor proved the Pythagorean theorem, he probably didn't even do much in the way of math. That doesn't really matter. It'd be nice to clear that up, but it's whatever. They vast majority of the popular history of both Math and Science is garbage, but ultimately the way we teach those subjects is so poor that this has no real affect on people's day to day lives. Though I should mention that's only accepting that this poor understanding is the result and not a driver of scientist, it could be the other way around.
It's when those facts are part of a narrative that is currently hurting people that we need to make sure to set the record straight. For instance in showing that every state in the south succeed over slavery. Or that racial and gender equality has still not been created.