Lindaman, Dana and Kyle Ward. (2004). History Lessons: How Textbooks from around the World Portray U.S. History. N.Y., N.Y.: The New Press.
Pp. xxi + 404.
$26.95 ISBN 1-56584-894-2
Reviewed by Brett Berliner
Morgan State University
August 18, 2004
Perhaps the most current banal cliché in American politics is the claim that 9-11 changed everything. Rather, little has changed in the world, save the introduction of emotive fodder for political agendas. Nowhere has this more impacted secondary schools than in history classes, where teachers are asked to explain some people's contempt of America—or at least the American government. One attempt to show how others view us is in Lindaman and Ward's timely History Lessons, an anthology of excerpts from secondary school history textbooks from around the world. Although Lindaman, a Harvard graduate student in Romance Philology, and Ward, an Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Vincennes University, offer virtually no analysis (their thoughts are almost solely expressed in the excerpts they selected), the implications of their work raises profound questions about the larger utility of our test-driven curricula in an epoch when culture wars lead to bloody geo-strategic wars.
The secondary school United States History survey course provides many functions; most notably, it transmits national myths, develops a national identity, and forms a national citizenry. It has done this for years through the construction and perpetuation of a master narrative: the rise, development, and flourishing of democratic values, institutions and American power. But for some four decades, the U.S. narrative has been under siege: social historians and so-called revisionists have not only exploded the grand narrative, but greatly expanded the American story. The experiences of women, minorities, and excluded or marginalized populations can no longer be overlooked, though often they are only acknowledged in a blurb set alongside, but outside, the grand narrative in a textbook. Nevertheless, our history is now more nuanced, richer, and longer, as evidence by the heft of textbooks today.
Still, though, the master narrative is a limited or, as Lindaman and Ward suggest, an "isolationist" national story (p. xviii). Our national history texts parsimoniously account for other societies or perspectives. This has not gone unnoticed in the profession. Indeed, in 2000 the Organization of American Historians in its "La Pietra Report," edited by Thomas Bender, published a call to internationalize the American history survey. The La Pietra Report suggested that the American experience should be placed in the widest possible context. Our story would no longer be about our exceptionalism but our connections and comparisons to global forces, events, and ideas. The consequences of this are potentially profound: U.S. periodization may be altered and the viewing of American history from other angles will not just widen the lens on our history and refine our ideas, but even call into question our national myths and identity. At a minimum, this project will teach us that others do not see us as we see ourselves.
History Lessons proves this maxim. Lindaman and Ward judiciously assume that all national textbooks assert a particularistic national identity and grand narrative. Moreover, by virtue of their adoption in state supported or recognized schools, "textbooks are a quasi-official story, a sort of state-sanctioned version of history" (p. xviii). Studying foreign texts, then, will provide us with "foreign perspectives on U.S. history" (p. xx) and an indication of the identity, if not counter-identity of our global neighbors. In this the authors succeed quite well. Although they articulate no unifying themes in their anthology, one does emerge: foreign nations have no choice but to acknowledge and wrestle with both the rise of American power and the relative or real weakness of their own nation's power.
History Lessons demonstrates this by organizing the excerpts much like a U.S. survey textbook, from the first explorations of North America by Vikings and later Columbus to the American Revolution to westward expansion to world power and contemporary history. Excerpts have been selected from secondary school texts from our ostensible allies in Europe, Canada and Israel, to our Latin and South American neighbors, to countries with which we have more problematic relationships, such as Russia, North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Surprisingly, texts from such powers as China, India and Pakistan are not represented in the book. Each excerpt is preceded by the briefest of introductions, and selections generally, but not exclusively, address issues covered in American history that impact other countries.
Some of what we learn from foreign countries is unexceptional. A Caribbean text, for example, presents Columbus as a flawed and equivocal figure. He is not a heroic figure but one enmeshed in royal politics and subject to royal whims. Caribbean students learn that he forcibly taxed the indigenous Arawaks, and when they did not pay, he enslaved them. Later, his activities in the New World led to his ultimate arrest. There is much that is accurate, though not new, in this rendition of Columbus. The larger question that we must ask, however, is if we expand our narrative to include this information, how will it affect our founding myths? Perhaps by knocking down mythic straw men we as a people could become more democratic and honest, rather than less.
More problematic and much more interesting is the wary eye Canadian texts cast on American expansionist desires and power. The War of 1812, texts inform Canadian students, was not so much about trade disputes, security, and lingering power struggles with Britain; rather, "most of all, the Americans coveted Canada (p. 53). Canadians further learn that the U.S. invasion of their land led to heightened nationalism, but their texts emphasize the danger of an expansionist America. In discussing the Civil War, for example, Canadian texts state that the North was considering annexing Canada to make up for lost Southern states. Finally, Canadians are taught to accept their subordinate status to the U.S. In the wake of World War II and British weakness, "Canadian foreign policy began to mirror that of the Americans. In this respect, Canada was in step with the major European industrial powers, which depended on American aid…and rarely questioned American foreign policy" (p. 248). This lack of challenging the U.S. does not, however, suggest Canada agrees with us; rather, despite Canadians believing our foreign policy intentions to have been exaggerated in the past, "publicly…Canada supported American views" (p. 248). Students thus learn what it means to be subordinate—and duplicitous.
Furthermore, foreign students learn that interests and realpolitik not moral imperatives or special relations govern world politics. Indeed, British texts explain that despite their instrumental history against the slave trade, Britain was sympathetic to the Southern cause because of economic ties. Like its former colony Canada, Britain too articulates its weakness relative to the U.S. The Suez Crisis, not a major topic in the U.S. survey, was of crucial world significance, especially because American and Soviet actions halted the invasion. The consequences of this are made clear to all British school children: "the Suez Crisis underscored the real limits to Britain's freedom of action on the international stage" (p. 288). French texts are more strident in their analysis of the crisis: "Thus the two Great powers demonstrated their desire to control the planet….The crisis also marked the decline of both France and the [sic] Great Britain which were no longer able to act without the agreement of the two Great Powers" (p. 289).
Countries south of our border are no less wary of American power. Mexico, which lost significant territory to the United States, sees in the Monroe Doctrine only U.S. ambitions: "The political and military events of the American continent demonstrated how such a declaration could be manipulated in order to justify the imperialistic comportment of the United States, itself" (p. 62). Brazil's critique of U.S. interventions go further: "the US aimed to serve its own political and economic interests and as such guaranteed itself the right to use military force to intervene in the countries of the continent, claiming for itself the title of America" (p. 134).
The Great Depression, which began in America, had profound effects around the globe. Post-communist Russian texts still suggest ambivalence toward capitalism: "the victorious slogans about crisis-free economic development and optimistic predictions of an upcoming time of prosperity turned out to be no more than an empty bluff" (p. 193). While American texts discuss those out of work and the coming of the New Deal, French texts cast a slightly teleological eye to the horrors of the subsequent years: "Democracy suffered the most because it has taken root in the wealthy countries, those most affected by the depression….On the European continent, the social crisis led to a radicalization of the extremes…[and] a renaissance of racism and anti-Semitism" (pp. 189-199).
The American use of atomic weapons to end World War II is a topic that lends itself to moral, political, and strategic debates. American texts raise some of these issues and often suggest the bomb was necessary to save American lives. Japanese texts, by contrast, not only question its necessity, but put it in a broader geo-strategic context: "[the U.S.] had succeeded in experiments to create the world's first atomic bomb and motivated also by the desire to come out of the war more powerful than the Soviet Union, dropped an atomic bomb.… making this the worst tragedy in the history of mankind" (pp. 239-240) Thus contemporary Japanese students are taught that the U.S. will sacrifice anything for its strategic ends, a sobering thought in today's world.
Most pressing today is our ability to understand Islamic nations and their beliefs about the U.S. Perhaps we need only examine Saudi Arabian texts to shed light on our standing in the Islamic Middle East. In discussing Israeli wars, one Saudi text claimed, "the forces of Imperialism, Crusadism and Zionism cooperated in pouring their hidden malice on the Arabs and the Muslims" (p. 352). One could only imagine what is taught in the medrasas.
If one has the patience to slug through many excerpts from foreign textbooks, most as poorly written as American texts, one will find that Lindaman and Ward have provided us with a rich, even entertaining, but limited source for understanding the U. S. from non-American perspectives. Indeed, its very structure limits its utility. Excerpts are typically brief and devoid of any context or analysis, and the professional will find little new "factual" information here. In addition, this book begs for further studies: we know some of what is taught, but what foreign students actually learn from their texts should be addressed. Furthermore, one would wish the authors investigated or at least speculated on the instrumentality of the ideas presented in these texts.
These reservations really are asking the authors to write a different and more sophisticated book, admittedly an unfair criticism. What the authors did is a very yeoman job of collecting and organizing interesting selections, and their book is useful not only for the classroom teacher, but also for challenging our educational policies. First and most obviously, History Lessons is a useful complement and corrective to any American history textbook, and it takes a small step toward internationalizing our national history. In addition, it allows us to problematize our identity and investigate the national identity of others. Most dramatically, it demonstrates that history is subjective, not a startling point but one that must be addressed, especially for its significant policy implications. Indeed, if one accepts that good history is an expansive view of history that incorporates the widest array of sources and viewpoints, we should include the type of examples Lindaman and Ward excerpt in our courses. But how compatible, for example, is either the Saudi view of Middle Eastern history or the Japanese view of Hiroshima with our view of history? Clearly, "objective" high-stakes testing is antithetical to multiple perspectives of history, and open-ended essay exams that give credit to many foreign views, though conceivable, is as unlikely today as it was during the Cold War, World War II, or any other epoch in our history. Given our current testing mania and political climate, History Lessons not withstanding, our teaching of history is impoverished and our national myths and identity continue to be reified. The costs of this national project may be high, as one French text warns: "The Cold War is finished but it still remains to construct a new international order….the law of the jungle prevails." (p. 377) Never has a text been so accurate and never has the broadening of our national history been more needed.
Reference
Bender, T. (2000). The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession. http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra.
About the Reviewer
Brett A. Berliner is an Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He teaches World History and Western Civilization, both from ancient times to the present. Trained as a cultural historian, he researches interwar exoticism, racism, and marginal movements and peoples. Email: bberline@morgan.edu.
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