1. HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY THE PROCESS OF HERO-MAKING

Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909.

After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen!

she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union

Although women did receive the right to vote during Wilson’s administration, the president was at first unsympathetic. He had suffragists arrested; his wife detested them.

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history.

In the summer of 1918 he authorized a naval blockade of the Soviet Union and sent expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution.

democracy never had a chance against his three bedrock “ism”s: colonialism, racism, and anticommunism. A young Ho Chi Minh appealed to Woodrow Wilson at Versailles for self-determination for Vietnam, but Ho had all three strikes against him.

Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

White Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately after Wilson’s presidency. The tone set by the administration was one cause. Another was the release of America’s first epic motion picture.

At a private White House showing, Wilson saw the movie, now retitled Birth of a Nation, and returned Griffith’s compliment: “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true.”

Betsy Ross never did anything. Frisch notes that she played “no role whatsoever in the actual creation of any actual first flag.”

The textbook critic Norma Gabler testified that textbooks should “present our nation’s patriots in a way that would honor and respect them”; in her eyes, admitting Keller’s socialism and Wilson’s racism would hardly do that.

Keller did not want to be frozen in childhood. She herself stressed that the meaning of her life lay in what she did once she overcame her disability.

she was not the first deaf-blind child on record as learning to speak; that honor goes perhaps to Ragnhild Käta, a Norwegian girl whose achievement inspired Keller.

Nor was she the first deaf-blind American to learn to read and write; that was Laura Bridgman, who taught the manual alphabet to Anne Sullivan so Sullivan could teach it to Keller.

the truncated version of Helen Keller’s story sanitizes a hero, leaving only the virtues of self-help and hard work. Keller herself, while scarcely opposing hard work, explicitly rejected this ideology.

I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. . . . Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.

“There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.”

Our postwar bipartisan foreign policy, one of far-reaching interventions sheathed in humanitarian explanations, was “shaped decisively by the ideology and the international program developed by the Wilson Administration,”

We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons.

“People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed out. “Conclusions are not always pleasant.”

2. 1493 THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

now that Presidents’ Day has combined Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, Columbus is one of only two people the United States honors by name in a national holiday.

People from other continents had reached the Americas many times before 1492.

Renaissance was syncretic.

combined ideas from India (via the Turks), Greece (preserved by Muslim scholars), Arabs, and other cultures to form something new.

Turks and Moors allowed Jews and Christians freedom of worship at a time when European Christians tortured or expelled Jews and Muslims.

the Portuguese fleet in 1507 blocked the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to stop trade along the old route, because Portugal controlled the new route, around Africa.

Around 1400, European rulers began to commission ever bigger guns and learned to mount them on ships. Europe’s incessant wars gave rise to this arms race, which also ushered in refinements in archery, drill, and siege warfare.

Eventually China, the Ottoman Empire, and other nations in Asia and Africa would fall prey to European arms.

The Western advantage in military technology is still a burning issue. Nonetheless, not a single textbook mentions arms as a cause of European world domination.

In the years before Columbus’s voyages, Europe also expanded the use of new forms of social technology—bureaucracy, double-entry

A third important development was ideological or even theological: amassing wealth and dominating other people came to be positively valued as the key means of winning esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter.

in 1495, for instance, Michele de Cuneo wrote about accompanying Columbus on his 1494 expedition into the interior of Haiti: “After we had rested for several days in our settlement, it seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put into execution his desire to search for gold, which was the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers.”

A fourth factor affecting Europe’s readiness to embrace a “new” continent was the particular nature of European Christianity. Europeans believed in a transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest.

Typically, after “discovering” an island and encountering a tribe of American Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in Spanish) what came to be called “the Requirement.”

I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves. . . . The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.

sixth factor: the diseases Europeans brought with them that aided their conquest.

New and more deadly forms of smallpox, influenza, and bubonic plague had arisen in Europe

High school students don’t usually think about the rise of Europe to world domination. It is rarely presented as a question. It seems natural, a given, not something that needs to be explained.

Deep down, our culture encourages us to imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we’re smarter.

Also left festering is the notion that “it’s natural” for one group to dominate another.

Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. When textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land and dominating the natives were inevitable, if not natural.

The second expedition was heavily armed. Columbus carefully documented the voyages, including directions, currents, shoals, and descriptions of the residents as ripe for subjugation.

textbook authors seem unaware that ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians sailed at least as far as Ireland and England, reached Madeira and the Azores, traded with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and sailed all the way around Africa before 600 BC.

None of the textbooks credits the Muslims with preserving Greek wisdom, enhancing it with ideas from China, India, and Africa, and then passing on the resulting knowledge to Europe via Spain and Italy.

Cultures do not evolve in a vacuum; diffusion of ideas is perhaps the most important cause of cultural development. Contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering. Anthropologists call this syncretism: combining ideas from two or more cultures to form something new.

Ancient Roman and Carthaginian coins keep turning up all over the Americas, causing some archaeologists to conclude that Roman seafarers visited the Americas more than once.

Native Americans also crossed the Atlantic: anthropologists conjecture that Native Americans voyaged east millennia ago from Canada to Scandinavia or Scotland. Two American Indians shipwrecked in Holland around 60 BC became major curiosities in Europe.

TABLE 1. EXPLORERS OF AMERICA

As with the Norse, including the Phoenicians and Africans gives a more complete and complex picture of the past, showing that navigation and exploration did not begin with Europe in the 1400s.

When Columbus reached Haiti, he found the Arawaks in possession of some spear points made of “guanine.”

The Arawaks said they got them from black traders who had come from the south and east. Guanine proved to be an alloy of gold, silver, and copper, identical to the gold alloy preferred by West Africans, who also called it “guanine.”

From contacts in West Africa, the Portuguese heard that African traders were visiting Brazil in the mid-1400s; this knowledge may have influenced Portugal to insist on moving the pope’s “line of demarcation” farther west in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

Traces of diseases common in Africa have been detected in pre-Columbian corpses in Brazil.

Columbus’s son Ferdinand, who accompanied the admiral on his third voyage, reports that people they met or heard about in eastern Honduras “are almost black in color, ugly in aspect,” probably Africans.

The first Europeans to reach Panama—Balboa and company—reported seeing black slaves in an Indian town.

Oral history from Afro-Mexicans contains tales of pre-Columbian crossings from West Africa.

Irish legends written in the ninth or tenth century tell of “an abbot and seventeen monks who journeyed to the ‘promised land of the saints’ during

Columbus didn’t seem to be able to write in Italian, even when writing to people in Genoa. Some historians believe he was Jewish, a converso or convert to Christianity, probably from Spain.

One textbook tells us he was poor, “the son of a poor Genoese weaver,” while another assures us he was rich, “the son of a prosperous wool-weaver.” Each book is certain, but people who have spent years studying Columbus say we cannot be sure.

few people on both sides of the Atlantic believed in 1492 that the world was flat. Most Europeans and Native Americans knew the world to be round.

In 1499 Columbus “reaped” a major gold strike on Haiti. He and his successors then forced hundreds of thousands of Natives to mine the gold for them.

Columbus died well-off and left his heirs well-endowed, even with the title, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” now carried by his eighteenth-generation descendant.

On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five American Indians and took them back with him to Spain.55 Only seven or eight arrived alive,

To ensure cooperation, Columbus used punishment by example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was sent back to his village as living evidence of the brutality the Spaniards were capable of.

Spaniards hunted American Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food.

Estimates of Haiti’s pre-Columbian population range as high as eight million people.

“By 1516,” according to Benjamin Keen, “thanks to the sinister Indian slave trade and labor policies initiated by Columbus, only some 12,000 remained.”

Las Casas tells us that fewer than two hundred full-blooded Haitian Indians were alive in 1542. By 1555, they were all gone.

other nations rushed to emulate Columbus.

In 1501 the Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the now extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves.

After the English established beachheads on the Atlantic coast of North America, they encouraged coastal tribes to capture and sell members of more distant tribes. Charleston, South Carolina, became a major port of exporting American Indian slaves.

The Pilgrims and Puritans sold the survivors of the Pequot War into slavery in Bermuda in 1637.

The French shipped virtually the entire Natchez nation in chains to the West Indies in 1731.

As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape.

Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”

Because the Indians died, Indian slavery then led to the massive slave trade the other way across the Atlantic, from Africa.

This trade also began on Haiti, initiated by Columbus’s son in 1505.

Predictably, Haiti then became the site of the first large-scale slave revolt, when blacks and American Indians banded together in 1519. The uprising lasted more than a decade and was finally brought to an end by the Spanish in the 1530s.

In 1499, when Columbus finally found gold on Haiti in significant amounts, Spain became the envy of Europe. After 1500, Portugal, France, Holland, and England joined in conquering the Americas. These nations were at least as brutal as Spain.

The English, for example, unlike the Spanish, did not colonize by making use of Native labor but simply forced the Indians out of the way. Many American Indians fled English colonies to Spanish territories (Florida, Mexico) in search of more humane treatment.

Columbus’s voyages caused almost as much change in Europe as in the Americas.

Crops, animals, ideas, and diseases began to cross the oceans regularly. Perhaps the most far-reaching impact of Columbus’s findings was on European Christianity.

before America, “Europe was virtually incapable of self-criticism.”80 After America, Europe’s religious uniformity was ruptured.

American Indians had not rejected Christianity, they had just never encountered it. Were they doomed to hell?

According to the Bible, at the dawn of creation all animals lived in the Garden of Eden. Later, two of each species entered Noah’s ark and ended up on Mt. Ararat.

Since Eden and Mt. Ararat were both in the Middle East, where could these new American species have come from?

Such questions shook orthodox Catholicism and contributed to the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517.

Europe’s fascination with the Americas was directly responsible, in fact, for a rise in European self-consciousness.

there was no “Europe” before 1492. People were simply Tuscan, French, and the like. Now Europeans began to see similarities among themselves,

there were no “white” people in Europe before 1492. With the transatlantic slave trade, first Indian, then African, Europeans increasingly saw “white” as a race and race as an important human characteristic.

The Americas affected more than the mind. African and Eurasian stomachs were also affected. Almost half of all major crops now grown throughout the world originally came from the Americas.

According to Alfred Crosby Jr., adding corn to African diets caused the population to grow, which helped fuel the African slave trade to the Americas.

Adding potatoes to European diets caused the population to explode in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which in turn helped fuel the European emigration to the Americas and Australia.

Columbus’s gold finds on Haiti were soon dwarfed by discoveries of gold and silver in Mexico and the Andes.

Marx and Engels held that this wealth “gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry an impulse never before known.”

Gold and silver from America replaced land as the basis for wealth and status, increasing the power of the new merchant class

American gold and silver fueled a 400 percent inflation that eroded the economies of most non-European countries

Africa suffered: the trans-Saharan trade collapsed, because the Americas supplied more gold and silver than the Gold Coast ever could. African traders now had only one commodity that Europe wanted: slaves.

“No sensible Indian person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can celebrate the arrival of Columbus.”90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

the Columbus myth “allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a historical product issuing from a process that began with Columbus’s first voyage.”

We understand Columbus and all European explorers and settlers more clearly if we treat 1492 as a meeting of three cultures (Africa was soon involved), rather than a discovery by one,

In 1823 Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that Cherokees had certain rights to their land in Georgia by dint of their “occupancy” but that whites had superior rights owing to their “discovery.”

On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus needed help. Santa Maria ran aground off Haiti. Columbus sent for help to the nearest Arawak town, and “all the people of the town” responded, “with very big and many canoes.”

On his final voyage Columbus shipwrecked on Jamaica, and the Arawaks there kept him and his crew of more than a hundred alive for a whole year until Spaniards from Haiti rescued them.

Native Americans cured Cartier’s men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535.

They repaired Francis Drake’s Golden Hind in California so he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579.

Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides, Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters.

When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the African American Matthew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire expedition relied.

Our histories fail to mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes.

So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence.

So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the only people who really matter.

So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.

Of course, this new history must not judge Columbus by standards from our own time. In 1493 the world had not decided, for instance, that slavery was wrong.

However, some Spaniards of the time—Bartolomé de Las Casas, for example—opposed the slavery, land-grabbing, and forced labor that Columbus introduced on Haiti.

Las Casas denounced it as “among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind.” He helped prompt Spain to enact laws against American Indian slavery.99 Although these laws came too late to help the Arawaks and were often disregarded,

Simon Bolívar used Las Casas’s writings to justify the revolutions between 1810 and 1830 that liberated Latin America from Spanish domination.

When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward identifying with the oppressor.

When textbook authors omit the causes and process of European world domination, they offer us a history whose purpose must be to keep us unaware of the important questions.

3. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

“Settlers” were white, a student once pointed out to me. “Indians” didn’t settle.

The first non-Native settlers in “the country we now know as the United States” were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt.

Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s.

Few Americans know that one-third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been “American,” and that Hispanic Americans lived here before the first ancestor of the Daughters of the American Revolution ever left England.

Spanish culture left an indelible mark on the American West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.

Beginning the story in 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now Albany by 1614.

The mythic origin of “the country we now know as the United States” is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620.

the Black (or bubonic) Plague “was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind.”10 In the years 1348 through 1350, it killed perhaps 30 percent of the population of Europe.

The warmer parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa have historically been the breeding ground for most human illnesses.

Microbes that live outside their human hosts during part of their life cycle had trouble coping with northern Europe and Asia.

When people migrated to the Americas across the newly drained Bering Strait, if the archaeological consensus is correct, the changes in climate and physical circumstance threatened even those hardy parasites that had survived the earlier slow migration northward from Africa.

These first immigrants entered the Americas through a frigid decontamination chamber.

People in the Western Hemisphere had no cows, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, or chickens before the arrival of Europeans and Africans after 1492.

Many diseases—from anthrax to tuberculosis, cholera to streptococcus, ringworm to various poxes—are passed back and forth between humans and livestock.

Europe and Asia were also made unhealthy by a subtler factor: social density.

Organisms that cause disease need a constant supply of new hosts for their own survival.

most of the Western Hemisphere lacked the social density found in much of Europe, Africa, and Asia. And nowhere in the Western Hemisphere were there sinkholes of sickness like London or Cairo, with raw sewage running in the streets.

The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the basic hygiene practiced by the region’s inhabitants.

Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy,

The Pilgrims smelled bad to the Indians.

Squanto “tried, without success, to teach them to bathe,” according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.

Ironically, their very health proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes that Europeans and Africans would bring to them.

In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, a pandemic swept southern New England.

For decades, English and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast.

The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by comparison.

Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England.

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly.

The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague “miraculous.”

Many Natives likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them.

Their net result was that the English, for their first fifty years in New England, would face no real Indian challenge.

Historian Karen Kupperman speculates:

The technology and culture of Indians on America’s east coast were genuine rivals to those of the English, and the eventual outcome of the rivalry was not at first clear. . . . One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating. If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all.

A century and a half after Hernando de Soto traveled the southeastern United States, French explorers there found the population less than a quarter of what it had been when de Soto had passed through,

Likewise, on their famous 1804–06 expedition, Lewis and Clark encountered far more Natives in Oregon than lived there a mere twenty years later.

When the Spanish marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on them. Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself helped to crush Aztec morale.

The pestilence continues today. Miners and loggers recently introduced European diseases to the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, killing a fourth of their total population in 1991 alone.

Europeans were never able to “settle” China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there.

William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe had only about seventy million people when Columbus set forth.

Most current estimates of the precontact population of the United States and Canada range from ten to twenty million.

(Never mind that tiny San Marino may have formed as a republic in AD 301, Iceland became a republic in 930, and Switzerland around 1300.)

textbooks underplay Jamestown and the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the United States.

The Virginians’ relations with American Indians were particularly unsavory:

the English in Virginia took Indian prisoners and forced them to teach colonists how to farm.

The English offered a toast “symbolizing eternal friendship,” whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison.

the early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops.

Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Native corpses to eat or renting themselves out to American Indian families as servants

neither our culture nor our textbooks give Virginia the same archetypal status as Massachusetts.

Despite having ended up many miles from other European enclaves, the Pilgrims hardly “started from scratch” in a “wilderness.” Throughout southern New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a parklike environment.

They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor and “brook of fresh water.”

Throughout New England, colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.

According to Ferdinando Gorges, around 1605 an English captain stole Squanto, who was then still a boy, along with four Penobscots and took them to England.

in 1614 an English slave raider seized Squanto and two-dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Málaga, Spain.

Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, and made his way back to England. After trying to get home via Newfoundland, in 1619 he talked Thomas Dermer into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

Squanto set foot again on Massachusetts soil and walked to his home village of Patuxet, only to make the horrifying discovery that “he was the sole member of his village still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before.

Like other Europeans in America, the Pilgrims had no idea what to eat or how to raise or find food until American Indians showed them.

“Their profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip.

Squanto’s travels acquainted him with more of the world than any Pilgrim encountered. He had crossed the Atlantic perhaps six times, twice as an English captive, and had lived in Maine, Newfoundland, Spain, and England, as well as Massachusetts.

Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries.

In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman has shown how the idea of “God on our side” was used to legitimize the open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-à-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples of the Pacific, Jews, and even Catholics.

Most of our textbooks also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.

Correctly taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.

4. RED EYES

Crispus Attucks (first casualty of the Revolution, who was also part black in ancestry),

Replacing settlers by whites makes for a more accurate but “unsettling” sentence. Invaders is more accurate still, and still more unsettling.

Textbook authors still write history to comfort descendants of the “settlers.”

Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures.

Regarding the date of the first human settlement of the Americas, estimates vary from twelve thousand years before the present to more than seventy thousand

Walking across Beringia (the isthmus across the Bering Strait) is only a hypothesis.

while most scholars still accept a “Beringia” crossing, archaeological evidence is slim, and more and more archaeologists believe boat crossings, accidental or purposeful, may have been the method.

After all, people got to Australia at least forty thousand years ago, and no matter how much ice piled up on land during the Ice Age, you could never walk to Australia, across the deep ocean divide known as Wallace’s Line.

in Europe and Asia before 1769, most “simple machines” depended on horses, oxen, water buffalo, mules, or cattle—beasts unknown in the Americas.

Jared Diamond suggests that the availability of at least some of these animals for domestication was a critical factor in developing not only machines but also the division of labor we call “civilization.”

textbooks are locked into the old savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized school of anthropology dating back to L. H. Morgan and Karl Marx around 1875.

“affluent primitive” theory, which persuaded anthropologists some forty years ago that gatherer-hunters lived quite comfortably.

Decades ago, most anthropologists challenged this outmoded continuum, determining that hunters and gatherers were relatively peaceful, compared to agriculturalists, and that modern societies were more warlike

We have only to remember the history of the twentieth century to see at once that violence can increase with civilization.

if Boorstin and Kelley had looked around the world in 1392, they would have seen no such decisive differences between American and European cultures.

This is a secular form of predestination: historians observe that peoples were conquered and come up with reasons why that was right. In sociology we call this “blaming the victim.”

In the central valley of Mexico alone lived about twenty-five million people. In the rest of North America lived perhaps twenty million more.

a majority of Native Americans in what is now the United States farmed.

Even the best textbooks cannot resist contrasting “primitive” Americans with modern Europeans.

when Cortés arrived, Tenochtitlan was a city of one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, whose central market was so busy and noisy “that it could be heard more than four miles away,” according to Bernal Díaz, who accompanied Cortés.

In 1927 an organization of Native leaders called the Grand Council Fire of American Indians criticized textbooks as “unjust to the life of our people.” They went on to ask, “What is civilization? Its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original arts, stirring music, rich story and legend. We had these. Then we were not savages, but a civilized race.”

societies characterized by a complex division of labor are often marked by inequality and support large specialized armies. Precisely these “civilized” societies are likely to resort to savage violence in their attempts to conquer “primitive” societies.

agriculture, which the Native Americans had shown to the Europeans, declined, because it became easier to trade for food than to grow

English colonists sometimes used Natives as interpreters when dealing with the Spanish or French, not just with other Native American nations.

Tribes that were closest to the Europeans got guns first, guns that could be trained on interior peoples who had not yet acquired any. Suddenly some nations had a great military advantage over others. The result was an escalation of Indian warfare.

The Spanish, for example, used a divide-and-conquer strategy to defeat the Aztecs in Mexico. In Scotland and Ireland, the English had played tribes against one another to extend British rule. Now they did the same in North America.

For many tribes the motive for the increased combat was the enslavement of other Natives to sell to the Europeans for more guns and kettles.

Europeans’ enslavement of Native Americans has a long history.

students should be familiar with the terms syncretism and cultural imperialism,

In reality, whites and Native Americans in what is now the United States worked together, sometimes lived together, and quarreled with each other for 325 years, from the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565 to the end of Sioux and Apache autonomy around 1890.

In 1635 “sixteen different languages could be heard among the settlers in New Amsterdam,” languages from North America, Africa, and Europe.

many white and black newcomers chose to live an American Indian lifestyle.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair.

African Americans frequently fled to American Indian societies to escape bondage.

most American Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Native American ideas are partly responsible for our democratic institutions.

Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European thinkers then influenced Americans such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.

Through 150 years of colonial contact, the Iroquois League stood before the colonies as an object lesson in how to govern a large domain democratically.

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be “bound hand and foot” and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners “went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy,”

Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery.

In 1775 Congress formulated a speech to the Iroquois, signed by John Hancock, that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. “The Six Nations are a wise people,” Congress wrote, “let us harken to their council and teach our children to follow it.”

Of course, Dutch traditions influenced Plymouth as well as New York. So did English common law and the Magna Carta.

American democracy seems to be another example of syncretism, combining ideas from Europe and Native America.

“After King Philip’s War, there was continuous conflict at the edge of New England. In Vermont the settlers worried about savages scalping them.” This description is accurate, provided the reader understands that the settlers were Native American, the scalpers white.

It was so bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the Catawbas in North Carolina “fled in every direction” in 1786 when a solitary white man rode into their village unannounced. And the Catawbas were a friendly tribe!

American Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George Washington’s administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense. Yet most of my original twelve textbooks barely mentioned the topic.

Historians used to say, “Civilized war is the kind we fight against them, whereas savage war is the atrocious kind that they fight against us.”

Hollywood borrowed the haplessly circling Indians from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, where they had to ride in a circle, presenting a broadside target, because they were in a circus tent!

In the real West, among 250,000 whites and blacks who journeyed across the Plains between 1840 and 1860, only 362 pioneers (and 426 Native Americans) died in all the recorded battles between the two groups. Much more common, American Indians gave the new settlers directions, showed them water holes, sold them food and horses, bought cloth and guns, and served as guides and interpreters.

King Philip’s War. This war began in 1675, when white New Englanders executed three Wampanoag Indians and the Wampanoags attacked.

King Philip’s War cost more American lives in combat, Anglo and Native, in absolute terms than the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or the Spanish-American War. In proportion to population, casualties were greater than in any other American war.

In North America the major European powers, England, France, and Spain, buffered from each other by Indian land, fought mainly through their Indian allies.

Native Americans inadvertently provided a gift of relative peace to the colonies by absorbing the shock of combat themselves.

Native Americans not only fought in the American Revolution but were its first cause, for the Proclamation of 1763, which placated Native American nations by forbidding the colonies from making land grants beyond the Appalachian continental divide, enraged many colonists.

They saw themselves as paying to support a British army that only obstructed them from seizing Indian lands on the western frontier.

cliché that Native Americans held some premodern understanding of land ownership.

for example, that the Dutch “bought Manhattan from the Manhates people for a small amount of beads and other goods,”

Not one book points out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan.

Doubtless the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal which, just for the record, probably didn’t involve beads at all, but more than $2,400 worth of metal kettles, steel knives and axes, guns, and blankets, in today’s dollars.

The Weckquaesgeeks, who lived on Manhattan and really owned it, weren’t so happy. For years afterward they warred sporadically with the Dutch.

Wall Street, was named for the wall the Dutch built to protect New Amsterdam from the Weckquaesgeeks,

Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction within a much larger nation. Often they didn’t really care; they merely sought justification for theft.

The biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the textbooks tell how Jefferson “doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France.” Not one points out that it was not France’s land to sell—it was Indian land.

The French never consulted with the Native owners before selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did not really sell Louisiana for $15 million. France merely sold its claim to the territory.

The United States was still paying Native American tribes for Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century. We were also fighting them for it: the Army Almanac lists more than fifty Indian wars in the Louisiana Purchase

American Indians and Europeans had about the same views of land ownership, although Natives did not think that individuals could buy or sell, only whole villages.

in return for our leaving Canada alone, Great Britain gave up its alliances with American Indian nations in what would become the United States. Without war materiel and other aid from European allies, future Indian wars were transformed from major international conflicts to domestic mopping-up operations.

until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans.

Natives who had been “ingenious,” “industrious,” and “quick of apprehension” in 1610 now became “sloathfull and idle, vitious, melancholy, [and] slovenly.”

This process of rationalization became unofficial national policy after the War of 1812.

From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy.

Gradually we sought American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin, and, indirectly, over other nations.

Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, “often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat” as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom people).

U.S. history provides several examples of relatively nonracist enclaves. Sociologists call them triracial isolates because their heritage is white, black, and red, as it were. For centuries these communities occupied swamps and other undesirable lands, wanting mostly to be left alone.

The first English settlement in North America, Roanoke Island in 1585, probably did not die out but was absorbed into the nearby Croatoan Indians,

The English never learned the outcome of the “Lost Colony,” however. Frederick Turner has suggested that they did not want to think about the possibility that English settlers had survived by merging with Native Americans. Instead, Fausz tells us, “tales of the ‘Lost Colony’ came to epitomize the treacherous nature of hostile Indians and served as the mythopoetic ‘bloody shirt’ for justifying aggressions against the Powhatan years later.”

Textbooks might usefully pass on to students the old cliché—the French penetrated Indian societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the English expelled them

Pocahontas stands as the first and almost the last Native to be accepted into British-American society, which we may therefore call “white society,” through marriage.

most interracial couples found greater acceptance in Native society.

Another alternative to war was the creation of an American Indian state

In 1778, when the Delaware Indians proposed that Native Americans be admitted to the union as a separate state, Congress refused even to consider the idea.

The Confederacy won the backing of most Native Americans in Indian Territory, however, by promising to admit the territory as a state if the South won the Civil War.

The overall story line most American history textbooks tell about American Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them; they wouldn’t or couldn’t do it; so we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic than the account in earlier textbooks, this account falls into the trap of repeating as history the propaganda used by policy makers in the nineteenth century as a rationale for removal

Massachusetts legislature in 1789 passed a law prohibiting teaching Native Americans how to read and write “under penalty of death.”

When Jefferson spoke to the Cherokees, whites had been burning Native houses and cornfields for 186 years, beginning in Virginia in 1622.

No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them.

Forgetting how whites forced Natives to roam, forgetting just who taught the Pilgrims to farm in the first place, our culture and our textbooks still stereotype Native Americans as roaming primitive hunting folk, hence unfortunate victims of progress.

Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good history for whites.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) spurred three major Indian takeovers in the early 1970s: Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God’s chosen people.

Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world.

We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge,

History through red eyes offers our children a deeper understanding than comes from encountering the past as a story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.

5. “GONE WITH THE WIND” THE INVISIBILITY OF RACISM IN AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

WHEN WAS THE COUNTRY we now know as the United States first settled? If we forget the lesson of the last chapter for the moment—that Native Americans settled—the best answer might be 1526.

In the summer of that year, five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town perhaps near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in present-day South Carolina.

In November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to the Indians.

the first non-Native settlers in the United States were black.

It shows that Africans (is it too early to call them African Americans?) rebelled against slavery from the first.

One of the first times Congress ever overrode a presidential veto was for the 1866 Civil Rights Act, passed by Republicans over the wishes of Andrew Johnson.

Senators mounted the longest filibuster in U.S. history, more than 534 hours, to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights bill.

America’s first epic motion picture, Birth of a Nation; first talkie, The Jazz Singer; and biggest blockbuster ever, Gone With the Wind, were substantially about race relations.

The most popular radio show of all time was Amos ’n’ Andy, two white men posing as humorously incompetent African Americans.

The most popular television miniseries ever was Roots,

Until the end of the nineteenth century, cotton—planted, cultivated, harvested, and ginned mostly by slaves—was by far our most important export.

Our graceful antebellum homes, in the North as well as in the South, were built largely by slaves or from profits derived from the slave and cotton trades.

Studs Terkel is right: race is our “American obsession.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents slavery as an evil to be opposed, while Gone With the Wind suggests that slavery was an ideal social structure whose passing is to be lamented.

the “magnolia myth,” according to which slavery was a social structure of harmony and grace that did no real harm to anyone, white or black.

Merely to receive literature advocating abolition became a felony in some slaveholding states.

Meanwhile, many Northern whites, as well as some who lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, grew increasingly unhappy, disgusted that their nation had lost its idealism.

Slavery was the underlying reason that South Carolina, followed by ten other states, left the Union.

On Christmas Eve, they signed a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.”

Their first grievance was “that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations,” specifically this clause, which they quote: “No person held to service or labour in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up .

This is of course the Fugitive Slave Clause, under whose authority Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which South Carolina of course approved.

This measure required officers of the law and even private citizens in free states to participate in capturing and returning African Americans when whites claimed them to be their slaves.

Pennsylvanians still had the right to determine pay for their officers of the law, and they refused to pay for time spent capturing and returning alleged slaves.

South Carolina attacked such displays of states’ rights:

Thus South Carolina opposed states’ rights when claimed by free states.

South Carolina’s leaders went on to condemn New York for denying “even the right of transit for a slave” and other Northern states for letting African Americans vote.

Before the Civil War, these matters were states’ rights. Nevertheless, South Carolina claimed the right to determine whether New York could prohibit slavery within New York or Vermont could define citizenship in Vermont.

Although it is a complicated historical issue, racism in the Western world stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking land from and destroying indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans to work that land.

To teach this relationship, textbooks would have to show students the dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system.

Sociologists call these the social structure and the superstructure.

Slavery existed in many societies and periods before and after the African slave trade.

the slavery started by Europeans in the fifteenth century was different, because it became the enslavement of one race by another.

Unlike earlier slaveries, children of African American slaves would be slaves forever and could never achieve freedom through intermarriage with the owning class.

Before the 1450s, Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. As more and more nations joined the slave trade, Europeans came to characterize Africans as stupid, backward, and uncivilized.

By the 1850s many white Americans, including some Northerners, claimed that black people were so hopelessly inferior that slavery was a proper form of education for them; it also removed them physically from the alleged barbarism of the “dark continent.”

The superstructure of racism has long outlived the social structure of slavery that generated it.

skin color in itself does not explain racism.

Events and processes in American history, from the time of slavery to the present, are what explain racism.

Jefferson had no white sons, hence no “real” sons.

Not all whites are or have been racist. Moreover, levels of racism have changed over time.31 If textbooks were to explain this, they would give students some perspective on what caused racism in the past, what perpetuates it today, and how it might be reduced in the future.

The emotion generated by textbook descriptions of slavery is sadness, not anger. For there’s no one to be angry at. Somehow we ended up with four million slaves in America but no owners.

Textbooks canonize Patrick Henry for his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech. Not one tells us that eight months after delivering the speech he ordered “diligent patrols” to keep Virginia slaves from accepting the British offer of freedom

American history textbooks use several tactics to harmonize the contradiction between Jefferson’s assertion that everyone has an equal right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and his enslavement of 175 human beings at the time he wrote those words.

Jefferson’s slaveholding affected almost everything he did, from his opposition to internal improvements to his foreign policy.

In 1829, three years after Jefferson’s death, David Walker, a black Bostonian, warned members of his race that they should remember Jefferson as their greatest enemy.

For the next hundred years, the open white supremacy of the Democratic Party, Jefferson’s political legacy to the nation, would bear out the truth of Walker’s warning.

The idealistic spark in our Revolution, which caused Patrick Henry such verbal discomfort, at first made the United States a proponent of democracy around the world.

However, slavery and its concomitant ideas, which legitimated hierarchy and dominance, sapped our Revolutionary idealism.

Our young nation got its first chance to help in the 1790s, when Haiti revolted against France.

Whether a president owned slaves seems to have determined his policy

George Washington did, so his administration loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the French planters in Haiti to help them suppress their slaves.

John Adams did not, and his administration gave considerable support to the Haitians.

Jefferson’s presidency marked a general retreat from the idealism of the Revolution.

Like other slave owners, Jefferson preferred a Napoleonic colony to a black republic in the Caribbean.

In 1801 he reversed U.S. policy toward Haiti and secretly gave France the go-ahead to reconquer the island.

In so doing, the United States not only betrayed its heritage, but also acted against its own self-interest.

For if France had indeed been able to retake Haiti, Napoleon would have maintained his dream of an American empire.

The United States would have been hemmed in by France to its west, Britain to its north, and Spain to its south.

But planters in the United States were scared by the Haitian Revolution. They thought it might inspire slave revolts here (which it did).

Racial slavery also affected our policy toward the next countries in the Americas to revolt, Spain’s colonies.

slavery prompted the United States to have imperialist designs on Latin America rather than visions of democratic liberation for the region.

after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.

The Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared “A Negro had no rights a white man was bound to respect,”

made sure that treaties with Native nations stipulated that Indians surrender all African Americans and return any runaways.

Andrew Jackson attacked a Seminole fort in Florida in 1816 precisely because it harbored hundreds of runaway slaves, thus initiating the First Seminole War.

The Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or nation before the arrival of Europeans and Africans. They were a triracial isolate composed of Creek Indians, remnants of smaller tribes, runaway slaves, and whites who preferred to live in Indian society.

Whites attacked not because they wanted the Everglades, which had no economic value to the United States in the nineteenth century, but to eliminate a refuge for runaway slaves.

Slavery was also perhaps the key factor in the Texas War (1835–36). The freedom for which Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and the rest fought at the Alamo was the freedom to own slaves.

For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination.

In those days before television, parties held coordinated rallies.

Each of these rallies featured music. Hundreds of thousands of songbooks were printed so the party faithful might sing the same songs coast to coast.

A favorite in 1864 was sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”:

THE NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM “NIGGER DOODLE DANDY

Confederate myth of Reconstruction

overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the point: the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, not African Americans, into the new order.

As soon as the federal government stopped addressing the problem of racist whites, Reconstruction ended.

Into the 1990s, American history textbooks still presented the end of Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans.

Textbooks still fail to counter the Confederate myth of Reconstruction, so well portrayed in Gone With the Wind, with an analysis that has equal power.

Focusing on white racism is even more central to understanding the period Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations”: the years between 1890 and 1940 when African Americans were put back into second-class citizenship.

the failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later.

Between 1890 and 1907 every Southern and border state “legally” disenfranchised the vast majority of its African American voters. Lynchings rose to an all-time high. In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Only Boorstin and Kelley gets Brown right: “The problem, of course, was that there really could never be such a thing as ‘separate but equal’ facilities for the two races. When any race was kept apart from another, it was deprived of its equality—which meant its right to be treated like all other citizens.”

Textbooks need to offer the sociological definition of segregation: a system of racial etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate from the oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking or cleaning for white employers.

This stigma is why separate could never mean equal, even when black facilities might be newer or physically superior.

During the nadir, segregation increased everywhere.

Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in major league baseball. Blacks had played in the major leagues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889 whites had forced them out.

In 1911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys after they won fifteen of the first twenty-eight derbies.

Particularly in the South, whites attacked the richest and most successful African Americans, just as they had the most acculturated Native Americans, so upward mobility offered no way out for blacks but only made them more of a target.

In the North as well as in the South, whites forced African Americans from skilled occupations and even unskilled jobs such as postal carriers.

Eventually our system of segregation spread to South Africa, to Bermuda, and even to European-controlled enclaves in China and India.

Once Northerners did nothing to stop what came to be called the “Mississippi plan”—that state’s 1890 Constitution that “legally” (but in defiance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) removed African Americans from citizenship—they became complicit with it.

All other Southern states and places as far away as Oklahoma followed suit by 1907, and the nation acquiesced.

American popular culture evolved to rationalize whites’ retraction of civil and political rights from African Americans.

The Bronx Zoo exhibited an African behind bars, like a gorilla.

Theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin played throughout the nadir, but since the novel’s indictment of slavery was no longer congenial to an increasingly racist white society, rewrites changed Uncle Tom from a martyr who gave his life to protect his people into a sentimental dope who was loyal to kindly masters.

In the black community, Uncle Tom eventually came to mean an African American without integrity who sells out his people’s interests.

Minstrel songs such as “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “Old Black Joe,” and “My Old Kentucky Home” told whites that Harriet Beecher Stowe got Uncle Tom’s Cabin all wrong: blacks really liked slavery.

In politics, the white electorate had become so racist by 1892 that the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, won the White House partly by tarring Republicans with their attempts to guarantee civil rights to African Americans, thereby conjuring fears of “Negro domination”

From the Civil War to the end of the century, not a single Democrat in Congress, representing the North or the South, ever voted in favor of any civil rights legislation.

The Supreme Court was worse: its segregationist decisions from 1896 (Plessy) through at least 1927 (Rice v. Gong Lum, which barred Chinese from white schools) told the nation that whites were the master race.

Aided by Birth of a Nation, which opened in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its zenith, boasting more than four million members.

During the Wilson and Harding administrations, perhaps one hundred race riots took place, more than in any other period since Reconstruction.

Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known.

Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.

It is also crucial that students realize that the discrimination confronting African Americans during the nadir (and afterward) was national, not just Southern.

As late as the 1990s and 2000s, some Northern suburbs still effectively barred African Americans.

Lynch mobs often posed for the camera. They showed no fear of being identified because they knew no white jury would convict them.

In 2000, African American and Native American median family incomes averaged only 62 percent of white family income; Hispanics averaged about 64 percent

It should therefore come as no surprise that in 2000, African Americans and Native Americans had median life expectancies at birth that were six years shorter than whites’.

It is all too easy to blame the victim and conclude that people of color are themselves responsible for being on the bottom.

poll reveals that for the first time in this century, young white adults have less tolerant attitudes toward black Americans than those over thirty.

6. JOHN BROWN AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE INVISIBILITY OF ANTIRACISM IN AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

In the eighteen textbooks I reviewed, Brown makes two appearances: Pottawatomie, Kansas, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Recall that the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act tried to resolve the question of slavery through “popular sovereignty.”

Northerners rushed to live and farm in Kansas Territory and make it “free soil.”

Fewer Southern planters moved to Kansas with their slaves, but slave owners from Missouri repeatedly crossed the Missouri River to vote in territorial elections and to establish a reign of terror

In May 1856 hundreds of pro-slavery “border ruffians,” as they came to be called, raided the free-soil town of Lawrence, Kansas, killing two people, burning down the hotel, and destroying two printing presses.

An older textbook, The American Tradition, describes Brown’s action at Pottawatomie flatly: “In retaliation, a militant abolitionist named John Brown led a midnight attack on the proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie. Five people were killed by Brown and his followers.”

he had moved to the Adirondacks, hoping his sons would join him there, but five sons and their families instead went to Kansas, hoping to farm in peace. They then asked their father for aid when threatened by their pro-slavery neighbors.

Thoreau went on to compare Brown with Jesus of Nazareth, who had faced a similar death at the hands of the state.

Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s was white America freed from enough of its racism to accept that a white person did not have to be crazy to die for black equality.

Many black leaders of the day—Martin Delaney, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and others—knew and respected Brown.

Brown never believed God commanded him in the sense of giving him instructions; rather, he thought deeply about the moral meaning of Christianity and decided that slavery was incompatible with it.

his letter of August 22, 1862, to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune:                My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it;

the next point Lincoln made: “. . . I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere could be free.”

He was speaking not to Greeley, who wanted slavery to end, but to antiwar Democrats and antiblack Irish Americans, as well as to governors of the border states and the many other Northerners who opposed emancipating the slaves.

Saving the Union had never been Lincoln’s sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of the eleventh-hour Crittenden Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to preserve the Union by preserving slavery forever.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. In this towering speech, one of the masterpieces of American oratory, Lincoln specifically identified differences over slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, then in its fourth bloody year.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural made such an impact on Americans that when the president was shot, a month later, farmers in New York and Ohio greeted his funeral train with placards bearing its phrases.

From 1862 on, Union armies sang “Battle Cry of Freedom,”

We will welcome to our numbers the loyal true and brave,                   Shouting the battle cry of freedom.                   And although he may be poor, not a man shall be a slave,                   Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

The last chapter showed that concern for states’ rights did not motivate secession. Moreover, as the war continued, the Confederacy began to deny states’ rights within the new nation.

As early as December 1862, President Jefferson Davis denounced states’ rights as destructive to the Confederacy.

By February 1864, President Davis despaired: “Public meetings of treasonable character, in the name of state sovereignty, are being held.”

After the fall of Vicksburg, President Davis proposed to arm slaves to fight for the Confederacy, promising them freedom to win their cooperation.

When Sherman made his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because thousands of white Southerners volunteered along the way.

Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the Confederate army opposing Sherman disappeared through desertion.

Eighteen thousand slaves also joined Sherman, so many that the army had to turn some away.

Throughout the twentieth century, textbooks presented the Civil War as a struggle between “virtually identical peoples.” This is all part of the unspoken agreement, reached during the nadir of race relations in the United States (1890–1940), that whites in the South were as American as whites in the North.

White Northerners and white Southerners reconciled on the backs of African Americans in those years, while the abolitionists became the bad guys.

unlike the Nazi swastika, which lies disgraced, even in the North whites still proudly display the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy

In this sense, long after Appomattox, the Confederacy finally won.

Five days after Appomattox, President Lincoln was murdered. His martyrdom pushed Union ideology one step further. Even whites who had opposed emancipation now joined to call Lincoln the great emancipator.

At first Confederates tried to maintain prewar conditions through new laws, modeled after their slave codes and antebellum restrictions on free blacks.

Mississippi was the first state to pass these draconian “Black Codes.”

They did not work, however. The Civil War had changed American ideology.

Thus black civil rights again became the central issue in the congressional elections of 1866.

Despite Johnson’s opposition, Congress and the states passed the Fourteenth Amendment, making all persons citizens and guaranteeing them “the equal protection of the laws.”

The passage, on behalf of blacks, of this shining jewel of our Constitution shows how idealistic were the officeholders of the Republican Party, particularly when we consider that similar legislation on behalf of women cannot be passed today.

Carpetbagger implies that the dregs of Northern society, carrying all their belongings in a carpetbag, had come down to make their fortunes off the “prostrate [white] south.”

Scalawag means “scoundrel.”

They became the terms of choice long after Reconstruction, during the nadir of race relations, when white Americans, North as well as South, found it hard to believe that white Northerners would have gone south to help blacks without ulterior motives.

In reality, “scalawags” were Southern whites, of course, but this sentence writes them out of the white South,

Abraham Lincoln became a martyr and a hero. Seven million Americans, almost one-third of the entire Union population, stood to watch his funeral train pass.

Twice, once in each century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights.

Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying.

Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements.

The clandestine early meetings of anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing “We Shall Overcome.”

Iranians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., to overthrow their hated shah.

On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown.

Among the heroes whose ideas inspired the students in Tiananmen Square and whose words spilled from their lips was Abraham Lincoln.

Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men and women as heroes.

7. THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

As late as 1970, family incomes in the United States were only slightly less equal than in Canada. By 2000, inequality here was much greater than Canada’s; the United States was becoming more like Mexico,

Woodrow Wilson’s recommendation: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

social class correlates strongly with SAT scores.

social class predicts the rate of college attendance and the type of college chosen more effectively than does any other factor, including intellectual ability, however measured.

When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed the system. Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices: only 15 percent said the poor were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system.

55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.

Although rich himself, James Madison worried about social inequality and wrote The Federalist #10 to explain how the proposed government would not succumb to the influence of the affluent.

most Americans die in the same social class in which they were born, sociologists have shown, and those who are mobile usually rise or fall just a single social class.

More than any other group, white working-class students believe that they deserve their low status.

The biting quip “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” conveys the injury done to the self-image of the poor when the idea that America is a meritocracy goes unchallenged in school.

A huge body of research confirms that education is dominated by the class structure and operates to replicate that structure in the next generation.

Ninety-five percent of the executives and financiers in America around the turn of the century came from upper-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds.

Fewer than 3 percent started as poor immigrants or farm children.

Social scientists have on many occasions compared the degree of economic equality in the United States with that in other industrial nations. Depending on the measure used, the United States has ranked sixth of six, seventh of seven, ninth of twelve, thirteenth of thirteen, or fourteenth of fourteen.

the richest fifth of the population earns twelve times as much income as the poorest fifth, one of the highest ratios in the industrialized world; in Great Britain the ratio is seven to one, in Japan just four to one.

1965 the average chief executive officer in the United States made 26 times what the average worker made. By 2004, the CEO made 431 times

The Jeffersonian conceit of a nation of independent farmers and merchants is also long gone: only one working American in thirteen is self-employed, compared to one in eight in Western Europe.

not only do we have far fewer independent entrepreneurs compared to two hundred years ago, we have fewer compared to Europe today.

between the Depression and the end of World War II, income and wealth in America gradually became more equal. Distributions of income then remained reasonably constant until President Reagan took office in 1981,

For years Educational Research Analysts, led until 2004 by Mel Gabler of Texas, kept capitalism safe from harm at school. Gabler’s stable of right-wing critics regarded even a hint of class analysis taboo.

The most potent rationale for class privilege in American history has been social Darwinism, an archetype that still has great power in American culture.

Facts that do not fit with the archetype, such as the entire literature of social stratification, simply get left out.

As a social and economic order, the capitalist system offers much to criticize but also much to praise. America is a land of opportunity for many people.

affluent Americans, like their textbooks, are willing to credit racial discrimination as the cause of poverty among blacks and Indians and sex discrimination as the cause of women’s inequality but don’t see class discrimination as the cause of poverty in general.

8. WATCHING BIG BROTHER WHAT TEXTBOOKS TEACH ABOUT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

they imply that the state we live in today is the state created in 1789.

authors overlook the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution,

has been decisively altered over the last two hundred years.

George Kennan, who for almost half a century was an architect of and commentator on U.S. foreign policy,

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real test in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.

When Americans have done wrong, according to this view, it has been because others misunderstood us, or perhaps because we misunderstood the situation. But always our motives were good. This approach might be called the “international good guy” view.

the United States now spends more on its armed forces than all other nations combined and has them stationed in 144 countries.

Today at least twenty European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of their gross domestic product (GDP) or total governmental expenditures to foreign aid than does the United States.

As multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart and Mitsubishi come to have budgets larger than those of most governments, national economies are becoming obsolete.

former Marine Corps Gen. Smedley D. Butler, whose 1931 statement has become famous:                I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. . . . I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.

John A. Hobson, in his 1903 book, Imperialism, described “a constantly growing tendency” of the wealthy class “to use their political power as citizens of this State to interfere with the political condition of those States where they have an industrial stake.”

Kwitny points out that during the entire period from 1953 to 1977, the people in charge of U.S. foreign policy were all on the Rockefeller family payroll.

I examined only incidents that occurred before 1973,

Our assistance to the shah’s faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister Mossadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;

Our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;

Our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year;

Our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;

Our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and

Our role in bringing down the elected government of Chile in 1973.

The U.S. government calls actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism” when other countries do them to us.

the CIA urged the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

The federal government had tried to kill Castro eight times by 1965, according to testimony before the U.S. Senate; by 1975 Castro had thwarted twenty-four attempts, according to Cuba.

After the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, President John F. Kennedy launched Operation Mongoose, “a vast covert program” to destabilize Cuba, in the words of Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary. Salinger later wrote that JFK even planned to invade Cuba with U.S. armed forces until forestalled by the Cuban missile crisis.

the CIA had earlier joined with ITT to try to defeat Allende in the 1970 elections.

Secretary of State Kissinger himself later explained, “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.

To defend these acts on moral grounds is not easy. The acts diminish U.S. foreign policy to the level of Mafia thuggery, strip the United States of its claim to lawful conduct, and reduce our prestige around the world.

“Was it desirable to trade Mossadegh for the Ayatollah Khomeini?” asks the historian Charles Ameringer about our “success” in Iran.

On the same day in 1961 that our Cuban exiles were landing at the Bay of Pigs in their hapless attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, “The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no.”

President Eisenhower used national security as his excuse when he was caught in an obvious lie: he denied that the United States was flying over Soviet airspace, only to have captured airman Gary Powers admit the truth on Russian television. Much later, the public learned that Powers had been just the tip of the iceberg: in the 1950s we had at least thirty-one flights downed over the USSR, with more than 170 men aboard. For decades our government lied to the families of the lost men and never made substantial representation to the USSR to get them back, because the flights were illegal and were supposed to be secret.

Similarly, during the Vietnam War the government kept our bombing of Laos secret for years, later citing national security as its excuse.

Often presidents and their advisors keep actions covert not for reasons of tactics abroad, but because they suspect the actions would not be popular with Congress or with the American people.

textbooks cannot report accurately on the six foreign interventions described in this chapter without mentioning that the U.S. government covered them up.

Getting rid of Richard Nixon did not solve the problem, however, because the problem is structural, stemming from the vastly increased power of the federal executive bureaucracy.

“Our country . . . may she always be in the right,” toasted Stephen Decatur in 1816, “but our country, right or wrong!” Educators and textbook authors seem to want to inculcate the next generation into blind allegiance to our country.

Between 1960 and 1968 the civil rights movement repeatedly appealed to the federal government for protection and for implementation of federal law, including the Fourteenth Amendment and other laws passed during Reconstruction.

The bureau had a long and unfortunate history of antagonism toward African Americans. J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the FBI got their start investigating alleged communists during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Although the last four years of that administration saw more antiblack race riots than any other time in our history, Wilson had agents focus on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating blacks’ civil rights.

In the bureau’s early years, there were a few black agents, but by the 1930s Hoover had weeded out all but two.

By the early 1960s the FBI had not a single black officer, although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his chauffeurs.

Even in the 1960s Hoover remained an avowed white supremacist who thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education was a terrible error.

With the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King’s associates, bugged King’s hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of King’s conversations with and about women.

The FBI then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Senator Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters, labor leaders, foundation administrators, and, of course, the president.

at the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, the FBI tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King Jr.; in so doing, the bureau was complying with a request from President Lyndon Johnson.

after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina, refused to obey the law. Students from the nearby black state college demonstrated against the facility.

The FBI responded not by helping to identify which officers fired in what became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” but by falsifying information about the students to help the troopers with their defense.

helped escalate conflict between other black groups and the Panthers, and helped Chicago police raid the apartment of Panther leader Fred Hampton and kill him in his bed in 1969.

It is even possible that the FBI or the CIA was involved in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Raoul” in Montreal, who supplied King’s convicted killer, James Earl Ray, with the alias “Eric Gault,” may have had CIA connections.54 Certainly Ray, a country boy with no income, could never have traveled to Montreal, arranged a false identity, and flown to London and Lisbon without help.

Years later the bureau tried to prevent King’s birthday from becoming a national holiday.

In 1970 Hoover approved the automatic investigation of “all black student unions and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students.”

As historian Kenneth O’Reilly put it, “When the FBI stood against black people, so did the government.”

the Hollywood approach to civil rights.

To date Hollywood’s main feature film on the movement is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning.

In that movie, the three civil rights workers get killed in the first five minutes; for the rest of its two hours the movie portrays not a single civil rights worker or black Mississippian over the age of twelve with whom the viewer could possibly identify.

Instead, Parker concocts two fictional white FBI agents who play out the hoary “good cop/bad cop” formula and in the process double-handedly solve the murders.

in the real story on which the movie is based—supporters of the civil rights movement, including Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita, and every white northern friend the movement could muster, pressured Congress and the executive branch of the federal government to force the FBI to open a Mississippi office

Meanwhile, Hoover tapped Schwerner’s father’s telephone to see if he might be a communist.

Everyone in eastern Mississippi knew for weeks who had committed the murder and that the Neshoba County deputy sheriff was involved.

Kennedy initially tried to stop the march and sent his vice president to Norway to keep him away from it because he felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro–civil rights.

no mention that African Americans were the plaintiffs and attorneys in Brown v. Board of Education or that prior cases also brought by the NAACP prepared the way. The latest Pageant actually claims that the Kennedys—Jack and Robert—prodded SNCC and other civil rights groups to register blacks to vote.

Today many young African Americans think that desegregation was something the federal government imposed on the black community. They have no idea it was something the black community forced on the federal government.

Meanwhile, many young white Americans can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to blacks.

Textbooks treat the environmental movement similarly, telling how “Congress passed” the laws setting up the Environmental Protection Agency while giving little or no attention to the environmental crusade. Students are again left to infer that the government typically does the right thing on its own,

From the Vietnam War to Watergate to Iran-Contragate to Clinton’s sex life to the mythical weapons of mass destruction that allegedly caused George W. Bush to invade Iraq, revelation after revelation of misconduct and deceit in the federal executive branch shattered the trust of the American people,

In 1964, 64 percent of Americans still trusted the government to “do the right thing”; thirty years later this proportion had dwindled to just 19 percent.

it does seem that many nondemocratic states, from the Third Reich to the Central African Empire to the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea, have had citizens who gave their governments too much rather than too little allegiance.

Threats to democracy abound when officials in the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and other institutions of government determine not only our policies but also what the people and the Congress need to know about them.

9. SEE NO EVIL CHOOSING NOT TO LOOK AT THE WAR IN VIETNAM

One in four, then one in two, and in the 1990s four in five first-year college students did not know the meaning of the four-letter words hawk and dove.

On the first day of class in 1989 I gave my students a quiz including the open-ended question, “Who fought in the war in Vietnam?” Almost a fourth of my students said the combatants were North and South Korea!

Quang Duc, the first Buddhist monk to set himself on fire to protest the policies of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime that the United States supported in South Vietnam, shocked the South Vietnamese and the American people. Before the war ended, several other Vietnamese and at least one American followed Quang Duc’s example.

In Vietnam the United States dropped three times as many explosives as it dropped in all theaters of World War II, even including our nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

attacks on civilians were U.S. policy, as shown by Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s characterization of civilian casualties: “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”

We evaluated our progress by body counts and drew free-fire zones in which the entire civilian population was treated as the enemy.

My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now U.S. senator, called “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, “Over one hundred and fifty honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.”

He went on to retell how American troops “had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.

All this was “in addition to the normal ravage of war,” as Kerry pointed out in his testimony.

No textbook quotes the trademark cadences of Martin Luther King Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war,

Even more famous was the dissent of Muhammad Ali,

“No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger.’”

After the Tet offensive, a U.S. army officer involved in retaking Ben Tre said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

John Kerry’s plea for immediate withdrawal: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

on August 2, 1964, a U.S. destroyer, Maddox, was cruising the Tonkin Gulf four miles from islands belonging to North Vietnam.

At the same time, smaller U.S. boats were ferrying South Vietnamese commandos to attack some of those islands.

Three North Vietnamese patrol boats fired torpedos at Maddox, missing; the destroyer crippled two of them and sank the third.

North Vietnam protested to the International Control Commission.

The next day, as the smaller U.S. boats ferried South Vietnamese commandos to attack mainland targets this time, Maddox returned, thought it was again attacked, and fired in all directions.

Soon it became fairly clear that the attacks were phantoms caused by weather and misinterpretations of sonar.

Nevertheless, President Johnson professed outrage and sent what came to be called the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” to Congress, where it passed overwhelmingly.

10. DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE RECENT PAST

Americans are already more ethnocentric than any other people, partly because the immense economic, military, and cultural strengths of the United States encourage us to believe that our nation is not only the most powerful but also the best on the planet.

Even after the war with Iran ended and we knew Hussein was using these weapons on his own people, we continued to send weapons-grade anthrax, cyanide, and other chemical and biological weapons to Iraq.

Just as we supported the shah in Iran in the 1970s, we cast our lot today with repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, which prompts most Arabs and many other Muslims to consider the United States “a great hypocrite,”

In Iraq, our body armor, medical care, etc., have been much better than previously. As a result, the ratio of combat deaths to wounded is far lower—about 1 to 9, while in Vietnam it was 1 to 3. It is splendid that fewer soldiers are dying. Since many more are wounded, however, some severely, like this man, deaths no longer tell the full story.

The death toll shrinks further because many war services, like driving and guarding truck convoys, have been contracted out to private companies, whose losses are omitted from official statistics.

Iraqi deaths—far more numerous than our own—also don’t figure in the totals. Yet the death toll forms our main knowledge of a war’s cost, since most of us make no personal sacrifice.

Among its other problems, our attack on Iraq thus encouraged Iran and North Korea—along with any other nation wanting to forestall a possible U.S. attack in the future—to get nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

Many of the Bush family’s friends have long been involved in the construction of the oil industry and armed forces projects.

Vice President Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, has gotten more government money for this rebuilding than any other company—and has been charged with more fraud and malfeasance.

The Bush family has historic ties to the oil industry, and early in Bush’s presidency, Vice President Cheney convened a secret energy task force comprised mainly of oil industry insiders.

Herman Goering’s statement that to get people to back a war, “all you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked” and denounce opponents for their lack of patriotism.

Al Qaeda, which had no presence in Iraq under Hussein, found Iraq under Bush fertile ground for recruits.

Today, Iraq, instead of being a secular (if undemocratic) state, is moving toward statelessness, which breeds terrorism, or toward fundamentalist Shi’ite control with expanded Iranian influence. Iran, unlike Iraq, has sponsored terrorist groups in the Middle East, so its enhanced power resulting from our intervention is hardly in our interest.

11. PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT

Per capita income in the First World was five times that in the Third World in 1850, ten times in 1960, and fourteen times by 1970.

Each American born in the 1970s will throw out ten thousand no-return bottles and almost twenty thousand cans while generating 126 tons of garbage and 9.8 tons of particulate air pollution.

And that’s just the tip of the trashberg, because every ton of waste at the consumer end has also required five tons at the manufacturing stage and even more at the site of initial resource extraction.

Americans believed themselves to be less happy in 1970 than in 1957, and still less happy by 1998, yet they used much more energy and raw materials per capita in 1998.

12. WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS?

Until World War II, history, much more than the other social sciences, was overtly anti-Semitic and antiblack.

According to Peter Novick, whose book That Noble Dream is the best recent account of the history profession, looking at every white college and university in America, exactly one black was ever employed to teach history before 1945.

Most historians were males from privileged white families. They wrote with blinders on.

according to comparative historian Marc Ferro, the United States has wound up with the largest gap of any country in the world between what historians know and what the rest of us are taught.

To maintain a stratified system, it is terribly important to control how people think about that system. Marx advanced this analysis under the rubric false consciousness.

Rich capitalists control the major TV networks, most newspapers, and all textbook-publishing companies, and thus possess immense power to frame the way we talk and think about current events.

a national survey of 257 teachers in 1990 revealed that 13 percent had never taken a single college history course, and only 40 percent held a BA or MA in history or a field with “some history” in it, like sociology or political science.

Many teachers are frightened of controversy because they have not experienced it themselves in an academic setting and do not know how to handle it.

Teachers rarely say “I don’t know” in class and rarely discuss how one might then find the answer. “I don’t know” violates a norm.

Most teachers are far too busy

Summers offer time to retool but no money, and we can hardly expect teachers to subsidize the rest of us by going two months with no income

When asked what subject might be dropped, elementary school teachers mentioned social studies more often than any other academic area.

Students, too, consider history singularly unimportant.

In the late 1970s, survey researchers gave parents a series of statements and asked whether they believed them and wanted their children to believe them. One statement stood out: “People in authority know best.” Parents replied in these proportions:         13 percent—“believe and want children to believe”         56 percent—“have doubts but still want to teach to children”         30 percent—“don’t believe and don’t want to pass on to children”

Lying to children is a slippery slope. Once we have started sliding down it, how and when do we stop? Who decides when to lie? Which lies to tell? To what age group?

13. WHAT IS THE RESULT OF TEACHING HISTORY LIKE THIS?

William Jennings Bryan: “I do not think about things that I don’t think about.” Clarence Darrow: “Do you ever think about things you do think about?” —SCOPES TRIAL TRANSCRIPT

Learning social studies is, to no small extent, whether in elementary school or the university, learning to be stupid. —JULES HENRY

Yeah, I cut class, I got a D        ’Cause history meant nothin’ to me. —JUNGLE BROTHERS

The truth shall make us free.        The truth shall make us free.        The truth shall make us free some day.        Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,        The truth shall make us free some day. —VERSE OF “WE SHALL OVERCOME”

the answer to Eurocentric textbooks is not one-sided Afrocentric history, the kind that has Africans inventing everything good and whites inventing slavery and oppression.

we do not really want a generation of African Americans raised on antiwhite Afrocentric history, but just as surely, we cannot afford another generation of white Americans raised on complacent celebratory Eurocentric history.

when textbooks call Columbus’s 1492 voyage “a miracle” and proclaim, “Soon the grateful captain wades ashore and gives thanks to God,” they make the Christian deity God and put Him [sic] on the white side.

Omitting the Arawaks’ perspective on Haiti continues the process of “otherizing” nonwhites in this first diorama from our history.

Table 3 shows the actual outcome of the January 1971 poll:

TABLE 3

The most popular revamped theory asserts that since working-class young men bore the real cost of the war, “naturally” they and their families opposed it.

it reduces the thinking of the working class to a crude personal cost-benefit analysis, implicitly denying that the less educated might take society as a whole into consideration.

It is also wrong.

Working-class young men who enlisted or looked forward to being drafted could not easily influence their destinies to avoid Vietnam, but they could change their attitudes about the war to be more positive.

Thus, cognitive dissonance helps explain why young men of draft age supported the war more than older men, and why men supported the war more than women.

Two social processes, each tied to schooling, can account for educated Americans’ support of the Vietnam War.

The first can be summarized by the term allegiance. Educated adults tend to be successful and earn high incomes

parents transmit affluence and education directly to their children. Successful Americans do not usually lay their success at their parents’ doorstep,

Believing that American society is open to individual input, the educated well-to-do tend to agree with society’s decisions and feel they had a hand in forming them.

We can use the term vested interest here, so long as we realize we are referring to an ideological interest or need, a need to come to terms with the privilege with which one has been blessed, not simple economic self-interest.

those in the upper third of our educational and income structure are more likely to show allegiance to society, while those in the lower third are more likely to be critical of it.

The other process causing educated adults to be more likely to support the Vietnam War can be summarized under the rubric socialization.

Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform.

Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the rightness of our society.

Both the allegiance and socialization processes cause the educated to believe that what America does is right.

In late spring 1966, just before the United States began bombing Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split 50-50 as to whether we should bomb these targets. After the bombing began, 85 percent favored the bombing while only 15 percent opposed.

The sudden shift was the result, not the cause, of the government’s decision to bomb.

In 1968, war sentiment was waning; but 51 percent of Americans opposed a bombing halt, partly because the United States was still bombing North Vietnam. A month later, after President Johnson announced a bombing halt, 71 percent favored the halt.

This swaying of thought by policy affects attitudes on issues ranging from our space program to environmental policy and shows the so-called “silent majority” to be an unthinking majority as well.

Socialist leaders such as Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung vastly extended schooling in Cuba and China in part because they knew that an educated people is a socialized populace and a bulwark of allegiance.

Education works the same way here: it encourages students not to think about society but merely to trust that it is good.

educated people were and are more likely to be Republicans, while high school dropouts are more likely to be Democrats.

American history textbooks help perpetrate the archetype of the blindly patriotic hard hat by omitting or understating progressive elements in the working class.

Textbooks do not reveal that CIO unions and some working-class fraternal associations were open to all when many chambers of commerce and country clubs were still white-only.

Few textbooks tell of organized labor’s role in the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington.

In 2005, for example, the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” Twenty-seven percent of Democrats also agreed. Such responses can only come from people who have neither had a conversation with a poor person nor imagined their economic and social reality

People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not.

The same holds true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject.

Only in history is stupidity the result of more, not less, schooling.

Members of the upper- and upper-middle classes are comforted by a view of society that emphasizes schooling as the solution to intolerance, poverty, even war. Such a rosy view of education and its effects lets them avoid considering the need to make major changes in other institutions.

After years of rote education, students can become habituated to it and inexperienced and ineffectual at any other kind of learning.

AFTERWORD THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD—AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM

One does not collect facts he does not need, hang on to them, and then stumble across the propitious moment to use them. One is first perplexed by a problem and then makes use of facts to achieve a solution. —CHARLES SELLERS

Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. —NEIL POSTMAN AND CHARLES WEINGARTNER

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. —ANATOLE FRANCE

The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. —VINE DELORIA JR.

our textbooks are so Anglocentric that they might be considered Protestant history.