Textbooks and "Lies"

Getting to work on courses today.

Scrolling through the OpenStax US History, I think the most interesting aspects are the images. As I look at a lot of the rest of the stuff, I frequently ask myself what's the point? Do I care whether the students achieve the "Objectives" listed at the beginning of each section? Do the quiz questions at the ends of chapters seem relevant or important? Do the "Key Terms" reflect anything important about the chapter?

While it's not always useful to return to "first principles" every single time you do something, I' am making a transition this fall between teaching these courses (especially US II, which I have taught many times) at a university as a permanent professor and teaching them to community college students as a temporary instructor. The students may be a bit different from the ones I have been used to teaching, but probably not that much. My embededness in a history program at the institution will probably be a bit different (although the two permanent instructors have gone out of their way to make me feel welcome and valued). One thing I have said I'm going to work at this summer and fall is making my history content interesting, valuable, and attractive to people outside classrooms as well as inside. There's a "market", I think, for talking about the past in ways that connect with people's efforts to understand their own pasts (and the pasts of their families and communities) and make sense of the present so they can imagine the future.

The things I would talk about in this context are not necessarily the things a textbook would focus on, and maybe that difference ought to be part of my focus. Maybe my course or text should address the question, "What's the difference between what a history textbook wants you to know about the past and what you'd want to know in order to understand the world you're confronted with today and figure out what to do about it?" There was a bit of antagonism in the way that someone like Jim Loewen approached a similar question in Lies My Teacher Told Me; you get that message clearly in the title and I certainly felt the negative elements of that approach in the few interactions I have had with him. Even Howard Zinn, I think, leaned a bit too much into the idea that there was a sinister element to the Master Narrative or national myth. I think this was true at times, but probably not uniformly or for the same reasons.

In any case, I think people are interested in history, actually. But not necessarily in the history the textbooks want to focus them on learning. I'm not convinced, though, that the main axis of difference is about truth and falsehood. This was an explanation Loewen pursued in talks like the one above about "Doing History in the Age of Trump" where I think he made a couple of good points but they tend to get buried in the framing that makes Trump the big change. I imagine the Kenyans Loewen mentions in the clip probably had more on their minds than the US president.

One of the things I'm doing, in reminding myself what I want to focus on in this new version of US II, is making a simple list of the decades I'm going to cover, from the 1870s to the 2010s. It's useful, I think, to jot down the main events of the decades, so I have a list of three to five big things I know I want to use to anchor the story. There are some very obvious ones. I don't want to talk about the 1910s without focusing on the Great War, even if that were possible. But what are the other half dozen things that need to be said about that decade? Do they all relate to the war, or are there other changes that deserve attention?

The point is not to just create lists of disparate elements that I address one at a time. One of the things I noticed as soon as I looked at the OpenStax textbook was that there are several chapters in a row that cover exactly the same span of years. Chapters 17 through 20, as a matter of fact, all cover the thirty years between 1870 and 1900 (17 begins in 1840, actually, but continues to 1900). But each looks at different elements: Westward Expansion (17), Industrialization (18), Urbanization (19), and Gilded Age Politics (19). I have done something similar in my courses; occasionally telling my students that for the next couple of weeks, we're going to be looking at the same time period, but from different perspectives. Or focusing on different regions, or different people. There was significant overlap, for example, between my units on "Capital and Labor", "The West", and "Empire and Jim Crow". I'm not entirely satisfied with this, but I think it's also a bit arbitrary and artificial to try to jam a stake in the ground and say something like the labor movement or populism or progressivism existed only at a specific time and place, and didn't develop gradually (and contingently and in relation to the others). It makes sense to present these as themes, I think, and also to show them changing over time.

So although I'm going to make sure I talk about things that must be covered in each decade, I'm going to focus on some of these themes that develop gradually, and chapters/units will probably be organized around them. To ask and answer questions like, what was populism anyway? When, where, and why did it develop? Does it mean something similar or different today? Or, to return to those Kenyans Loewen mentioned in the clip, what were American or international civil rights activists struggling to achieve? Did they actually find themselves, as Loewen said, finally arriving at "the table" only to discover that the conversation was not what they had hoped to have? Do we even understand, in our remembrance of figures like Martin Luther King Jr., what they were really saying?

I think these are some of the questions that are relevant for people today, and that they might find interesting to explore. In any case, I'm going to construct my course around thematic questions that expand on some of the events and ideas we assume we understand, but may not. The point is not to say that other histories or teachers "lied" to you and that I'm going to return you to "truth", but to suggest that the past is a bit more complicated than some have claimed but that we can still learn from it.