History Wars

~ Clarissa

Apparently, another round of “history wars” is underway as historians battle politicians over the right to define how history will be taught in US high schools.

All I can say is that there is something deeply wrong with the way history is taught to high-schoolers. My students this year were extremely vague on the Vietnam War. And I mean vague to the point of not knowing who fought whom and for what reason. The US involvement was barely on their radar.

I don’t think I need to tell anybody on this blog why it’s absolutely crucial to know about Vietnam. But I have no space in my syllabus for it. I already have enough with needing to break the news that Hitler ‘ s been dead since 1945.

History is the most ideological of disciplines but if someone at least tried to get the students learn some basic facts, that’d help.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Clarissa

37 thoughts on “History Wars”

  1. I think this might be part of the same story you linked to. But I found this insane (I like that it was written by a history professor.) It’s astonishing to me that Americans who consider themselves patriotic would want to deny the tremendous legacy of Thomas Jefferson. And to put Moses in the textbooks? Shouldn’t that be illegal? I am starting to run out of words to express my outrage and disgust.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/22/in-texas-textbooks-moses-is-a-founding-father.html

    Like

    Reply

      1. I don’t understand why the litigious Atheist types aren’t all over this case. They lose their minds over the Pledge of Allegiance or over a Christmas tree but this– which is an actual violation of church and state and which subjects children to a grievously ignorant view of history– this they don’t seem to care about.

        Like

        Reply

        2. No, The Pledge of Allegiance and Christmas trees are sound bite and camera ready and don’t require much explanation, plus it’s much tinier in scope. Pledge of Allegiance =taking an oath to a God, which promotes theism and nationalism at the same time. Christmas tree=traditional tree associated with a Christian holiday on a government property, no words needed.

          It’s harder to make that explicit link. Is Moses a religious figure associated with Christianity? Sure, but so are Cotton Mather and Joseph Smith.

          Also, they probably don’t for the same reasons you don’t see atheists suing over abstinence only education and teaching the “controversy” of evolution, even though it’s all fundamentalist and evangelical dogma driving this.

          Like

          Reply

          1. “No, The Pledge of Allegiance and Christmas trees are sound bite and camera ready and don’t require much explanation, plus it’s much tinier in scope. Pledge of Allegiance =taking an oath to a God, which promotes theism and nationalism at the same time. Christmas tree=traditional tree associated with a Christian holiday on a government property, no words needed.”

            • Yes, it’s true that these are the kind of causes that are simpler and easier to package in a neat narrative. But it’s sad that activism has been reduced to picking the low-hanging fruit.

            Like

            Reply

  2. I actually do teach the Vietnam War as well as the earlier Indochina War against the French in one of my classes. But, I teach in Ghana not in the US. History is generally not well taught at all anywhere. I was just in a used book shop here in Bishkek looking for books on Kyrgyz history. I was somewhat limited in that I can’t read Kyrgyz well enough to tackle even a textbook so I had to ask for what they had in Russian. However, I don’t think knowing Kyrgyz would have improved the quality of the selection available to me. The overall quality of historical works published here both during Soviet times and since independence is still hampered by ideological constraints that make anything in the US look positively objective.

    Here is the class where I cover the Vietnam War. Or as the Vietnamese call it the American War.

    http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2014/02/syllabus-for-aspects-of-world-history.html

    Like

    Reply

    1. “The overall quality of historical works published here both during Soviet times and since independence is still hampered by ideological constraints that make anything in the US look positively objective.”

      • Oh yes. The way history was taught in the USSR and is now taught in Russia is downright shameful.

      Like

      Reply

  3. I learned about Vietnam in detail. But I happened to take an IB class on twentieth century world history focusing on the Cold War period and the causes and effects of war. I also had an extremely good teacher. It’s odd that this was the exception and not the rule.

    Of course, if people aren’t even being taught that Hitler died, I don’t really know what else to expect.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Oh, if more than 1 student in every cohort knew what the Cold War is, I’d be a happy person. The Cold War is very relevant to my discussion of Latin American history in the XXth century but just imagine having to explain the whole thing from the very start.

      Like

      Reply

      1. I only learned about the Vietnam War in high school because I chose to take a class after I fulfilled my history requirements. This was at a “good school.”
        I only learned about the Vietnam war in college because I had to take a particular history class to fulfill my major requirements.

        History is the most ideological of disciplines but if someone at least tried to get the students learn some basic facts, that’d help… I already have enough with needing to break the news that Hitler ‘ s been dead since 1945.
        The basic facts such as why Americans fought the war and who they fought are ideologically debated. C’mon, people can’t even agree the Southern states seceded because they wanted to practice slavery and human trafficking even when it’s been written in their articles of secession and this was over 150 years ago. Vietnam vets are still alive.

        As for Hitler’s undead status :p, I can only blame the fact that history gets cut along with the arts and recess to allow more time for people to teach to the test and push STEM.

        Like

        Reply

        1. “The basic facts such as why Americans fought the war and who they fought are ideologically debated. C’mon, people can’t even agree the Southern states seceded because they wanted to practice slavery and human trafficking even when it’s been written in their articles of secession and this was over 150 years ago.”

          • Yes, I agree that the Vietnam war is a very ideological issue. And I don’t even touch the American Civil War in class because I don’t need that kind of aggravation. It would be great, though, if somebody just delivered the information that there was a war in Vietnam and the US got involved and the losses were significant and that war had a huge effect on the US politics. Don’t tell them what the effects were if that’s too ideological. But I’d just want not to see a bunch of blank stares whenever I mention it.

          “As for Hitler’s undead status :p, I can only blame the fact that history gets cut along with the arts and recess to allow more time for people to teach to the test and push STEM.”

          • Most of my graduating students fight me to the death for the right to do research on history and not literature. Of course, they have no idea how to do research in history. But they surely want to do it.

          Like

          Reply

      2. “The Cold War is very relevant to my discussion of Latin American history in the XXth century but just imagine having to explain the whole thing from the very start.”

        -Ouch. That’s a whole course in and of itself.

        I think American primary and secondary schools treat their students with kid gloves as far as history is concerned. They receive extremely watered-down versions of a lot of events, on the premise that they just can’t handle it. The reality is that a lot of kids can handle that darker aspects of history better than many adults can. The only people hurt by watering down events are the students, and the only people benefiting are those people convinced that they must control every aspect of a child’s education to “protect” them.

        Like

        Reply

        1. “The reality is that a lot of kids can handle that darker aspects of history better than many adults can.”

          • That is absolutely true. Scores of students have thanked me for giving them a vision of Columbus’s journeys that was not the edulcorated pablum they’d been fed back in high school.

          Like

          Reply

  4. Ah, but I thought that the great Henry Ford said that “history is bunk”, and that it’s grudgingly taught until the Charing T-Towers can replace all of those decadent booksellers on Charing Cross Road … 🙂

    Better visit them while they’re still around and it’s not quite as much of a “Brave New World”.

    [right now “Patton” is showing on 5 USA, so at least here they remember that the mad Austrian corporal’s bunker in Berlin is now a mini-carpark …]

    Like

    Reply

      1. You realise it’s a popular thing to travel to the US to interview Americans on their lack of geographic sense, even when it comes to the US itself?

        This has long been a stock joke for Canadian television, of course — Rick Mercer loves talking to Americans, for instance. (Especially about the Canadian “national igloo”, as it turns out.)

        But the “you have to be joking” award goes to ABC’s “Chaser’s War on Everything” from back in the late 2000s:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ3RrqBqk14

        Go to 3:34 to see why it’s probably a good thing that some Americans don’t know where the Middle East can be found on a map …

        “What state does KFC come from?”

        “Do you know what KFC stands for?”

        OH C’MON PEOPLE YOU’VE GOT ENOUGH TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER

        🙂

        Like

        Reply

        1. Hey, after I shocked a roomful of freshmen with the news that Canada and the US share a border, there’s no surprising me. People were really pleasantly surprised to find out this shocking factoid.

          Like

          Reply

    1. Today’s students don’t read newspapers (even the ones who major in journalism) or watch television.

      The freshman class I had last year had no idea who The Beatles were. I was so shocked that I just stared at them blankly for 2 minutes. I had no idea I would live to see the times when The Beatles would become irrelevant. 🙂

      Like

      Reply

      1. “You know, the Beatles? Wings? Paul McCartney?”

        “Wasn’t he that guy who married Heather Mills?”

        NO NO NOOOO THAT’S THE WRONG REASON TO REMEMBER HIM

        [but you won’t listen to what the man said …]

        BTW, if you absolutely must do the Abbey Road zebra crossing thing while in London, get off at St John’s Wood Tube station, it’s a fairly short walk from there. Stand next to the statue near the zebra crossing for the usual shot of the zebra crossing, and be extremely patient if you want a shot of the zebra crossing itself without tourists doing re-enactments in it …

        Like

        Reply

          2. The Beatles were much more of a (middle class/urban/northern) white thing and didn’t necessarily resonate with Blacks (for some for sure, but not like with white audiences).

            The question is do they know who James Brown or the Supremes were? Do you?

            If they’re more culturally southern and white, who do they think of when they hear the name HankWilliams?

            Like

            Reply

              1. “I have no idea who Hank Williams is”

                There’s actually two, actually there’s three of them but the last hasn’t done as much with the name and/or has changed it.

                Hank Williams – A short career (relatively speaking) but more or less the inventor of modern country music was (AFAICT) the first to merge the hillbilly vocals, cowboy look and honky tonk sound into a coherent whole. Wrote a half dozen or so classics of the country canon. Died prematurely of alcoholism maybe with some other stuff.

                Hank Williams Jr – Son of the first Hank and his partner in home-dysfunction Audrey. Marketed for years as a Hank sr imitator his career was going nowhere so he cut ties with his mother and re-invented himself as an Outlaw (reactionary movement in the 1970s) and had one of the longest most successful careers in country music.

                Wrote what might be the unofficial National Anthem of modern white southerners and/or the Scots-Irish “A country boy can survive”.

                Am I to understand that you do know who James Brown and the Supremes are?

                Like

              2. Ah, of course, I wouldn’t know a country music person.

                James Brown is kind of big in Russia for some reason. So the place where I discovered his existence is, weirdly, the Russian TV. As for the Supremes, I’ve heard the name, and that’s the extent of my knowledge.

                Like

    2. Yet nowadays, regardless of who reads or watches or hears the news, the Vietnam War tends to not actually be there. It’s nearly impossible to use the news to find out anything about events older than ten to fifteen years old.

      Like

      Reply

  6. The college class of 2023 will be as far away from the events of 9/11 as I was from the Vietnam War in high school.
    Dead tree newspapers have been going the way of the dodo, and the young do not sit and watch the evening news. They tivo and stream everything onto their phones. The Beatles are as far away in time from them as Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra is away from me.
    And yes, everyone trumpets the Millennials, who will wipe away the shadow of Baby Boomers (in America), blah. blah blah. This is one of the effects.

    goes back to yelling at clouds and telling people to get of my lawn.

    Like

    Reply

  9. “Supremes, I’ve heard the name, and that’s the extent of my knowledge.”

    They were the biggest girl group in the 1960s and the premiere act on the Motown label, which did a lot to make black music more mainstream (through its extremely catchy soul music).

    Motown also helped the Civil Rights movement in some small but real way, the records and television appearances of Motown artists (esp the Supremes) presented an attractive image of young black people as sophisticated and educated, which was not the norm at the time.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to Shakti Cancel reply