Lies my teacher told me chapter 11

History

Assignment #7-Slavery and Reconstruction

STEP#1

Please watch this short film on lynching in America from the authors of the book Without Sanctuary.

Be aware this film contains graphic images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=dGrXCOIx6QQ&feature=emb_logo&has_verified=1

STEP#2

Take a look at this clip from the film Birth of a Nation. What do you notice about how the African American Congressmen are portrayed in the film?

(Bear in mind, this film is not meant to be taken as a comedy. It is meant to be taken as an historical reenactment of what actually happened.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4v_yRFf4-Y&feature=emb_logo

STEP#3

From the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, please read Chapter 5, "Gone With the Wind."

Please include your 5 five things on Discussion Board.

STEP#4

Complete the discussion board assignment

Assignment #8-The Gilded Age

STEP#1

Please click the image below to watch the South Park episode "Something Wallmart This Way Comes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTbYOOSAoEI&feature=youtu.be

STEP#2

Please watch this documentary about Wal-Mart. How does this issue tie in to the Gilded Age and what we are studying about the late 1800s?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXmnBbUjsPs&feature=emb_logo

STEP#3

Please read the chapter "Robber Barons and Rebels," from Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States.

Please be prepared to discuss at least five things from this chapter you thought were interesting!

http://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/11-robber-barons-and-rebels

STEP#4

Complete the discussion board assignment

Assignment #9-The Progressives

STEP#1

Please click the title above to take you to the PBS Frontline productions entitled "A Dangerous Business" AND "A Dangerous Business Revisited" concerning the working conditions of one of today's iron foundries.

Pay special attention to the time period.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/

STEP#2

Please read the chapter entitled "The Socialist Challenge," from Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States.
Be prepared to discuss this on Discussion Board.

http://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/13-the-socialist-challenge

STEP#3

Please read chapter 7 "The Land of Opportunity," from Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Be sure to have at least 5 things to discuss on discussion board!

STEP#4

Complete the discussion board assignment

Assignment #10-Imperialism

STEP#1

Please watch the following film on the far-reaching consequences of our imperial designs throughout Latin America in the early 20th century:

https://login.dcccd.idm.oclc.org/login?qurl=https://dcccd.tugg.com%2ffull-movies%2fharvest-of-empire

STEP#2

Please read the chapters "The Empire and the People" and "War is the Health of the State" from Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States.

Please be prepared to discuss at least five things from this chapter you thought were interesting in Discussion Board.

http://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/12-the-empire-and-the-people

STEP#3

Please click the image to watch this graphic novel presentation of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire."

After watching the film and reading the chapter, how does our involvement in Cuba and The Phillipines begin to shed light on our current situation in the Middle East?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg

STEP#4

Albert Beveridge to Congress:

Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, "territory belonging to the United States," as the Constitrltion calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.

* * *

Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics: deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing hut vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given its the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many thing."

From Congressional Record(56th Cong., 1st Session) Vol XXXIII, pp.705, 711.

https://wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/workbook/ralprs30.htm

STEP#5

Complete the discussion board assignment

American Domain
Attached Files:

File American Empire? (80.655 KB)
Please click the link to see a map of all the countries in the Pacific Ocean the United States took over by 1900 in an effort to get to China.

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN Title Page Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. - HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY Chapter 2. - 1493 Chapter 3. - THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING Chapter 4. - RED EYES Chapter 5. - “GONE WITH THE WIND” Chapter 6. - JOHN BROWN AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN Chapter 7. - THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Chapter 8. - WATCHING BIG BROTHER Chapter 9. - SEE NO EVIL Chapter 10. - DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Chapter 11. - PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT Chapter 12. - WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS? Chapter 13. - WHAT IS THE RESULT OF TEACHING HISTORY LIKE THIS? AFTERWORD NOTES APPENDIX INDEX Copyright Page

ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus

The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White

Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with Charles Sallis et al.)

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History

Social Science in the Courtroom

Sundown Towns:

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Dedicated to all American history teachers who teach against their textbooks (and their ranks are growing)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE PEOPLE LISTED BELOW in alphabetical order talked with me, commented on chapters, suggested sources, corrected my mistakes, or provided other moral or material aid. I thank them very much. They are: Ken Ames, Charles Arnaude, Stephen Aron, James Baker, Jose Barreiro, Carol Berkin, Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill Bigelow, Michael Blakey, Linda Brew, Tim Brookes, Josh Brown, Lonnie Bunch, Vernon Burton, Claire Cuddy, Richard N. Current, Pete Daniel, Kevin Dann, Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio, Susan Dixon, Ariel Dorfman, Mary Dyer, Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John Fadden, Patrick Ferguson, Paul Finkelman, Frances FitzGerald, William Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch, Mel Gabler, James Gardiner, John Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick Hagopian, William Haviland, Gordon Henderson, Mark Hilgendorf, Richard Hill, Mark Hirsch, Dean Hoge, Jo Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson, Clifton H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge, Stuart Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger Kennedy, Paul Kleppner, J. Morgan Kousser, Gary Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken Lawrence, Mary Lehman, Steve Lewin, Garet Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Marciano, J. Dan Marshall, Juan Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer, Deborah Menkart, Donna Morgenstern, Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Roger Norland, Jeff Nygaard, Jim O’Brien, Wardell Payne, Mark Pendergrast, Larry Pizer, Bernice Reagon, Ellen Reeves, Joe Reidy, Roy Rozensweig, Harry Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins, John Salter, Saul Schniderman, Barry Schwartz, John Anthony Scott, Louis Segal, Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian Sherman, David Shiman, Beatrice Siegel, Barbara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold Starr, Mark Stoler, Bill Sturtevant, Lonn Taylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan Van Sertima, Herman Viola, Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara Woods, Nancy Wright, and John Yewell.

Three institutions helped materially. The Smithsonian Institution awarded me two senior postdoctoral fellowships. Members of its staff provided lively intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow fellows at the National Museum of American History. Interns at the Smithsonian from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and especially Portland State University chased down errant facts. The flexible University of Vermont allowed me to go on leave to work on this book, including a sabbatical leave in 1993. Finally, The New Press, André Schiffrin, and especially my editor, Diane Wachtell, provided consistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.

TO THE SECOND EDITION

AS I ENDURED THE MORAL and intellectual torture of subjecting myself to six new high school American history textbooks in 2006-07, the following assisted in important ways: Cindy King, David Luchs, Susan Luchs, Natalie Martin, Jyothi Natarajan, the Life Cycle Institute and Department of Sociology at Catholic University of America, and Joey the guide dog in training. Many of the folks thanked for their assistance with the first edition—including those at The New Press—also helped this time. So did Amanda Patten at Simon & Schuster.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE SECOND EDITION

I really like your book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve been using it to heckle my history teacher from the back of the room.

—HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT1

I just wanted to let you know that I don’t consider Lies My Teacher Told Me outdated; I really don’t see much improvement in textbooks at all!

—HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, SHERWOOD, AR2

I was expecting some liberal bullshit, but I thought it was right on. —WORKER, BAYER PHARMACEUTICALS, BERKELEY, CA3

READERS NEW TO Lies My Teacher Told Me should go straight to page one. This introduction tells old friends (and enemies?) how this edition differs from the first and why it came to be. Since it came to be largely because reader response to the first edition was so positive, the introduction seems self- congratulatory to me—another reason to skip it. Lies My Teacher Told Me does take readers on a voyage of discovery through our past, however, and some readers may want to learn of the reactions of fellow passengers.

From the first day, readers made Lies a success. As its name implies, The New Press was a small fledgling publisher without an advertising budget; word of

mouth caused Lies to sell. The book first created a stir on the West Coast. “Although the book is considered controversial by some, libraries in Alameda County [California] can’t keep it on their shelves,” reported an article at California State University at Hayward. A high school student wrote to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner: “I was a poor (D-plus) student in history until I read People’s History of the United States and Lies My Teacher Told Me. After reading those two books, my GPA in history rose to 3.8 and stayed there. If you truly want students to take an interest in American history, then stop lying to them.” 4 An early review in the San Francisco Chronicle called Lies “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education,” and my book spent several weeks on the Bay Area bestseller list in 1995.5

Independent bookstores—the kind whose owners and clerks read books and whose customers ask them for recommendations—spread the buzz across North America. “Turns American history upside down,” wrote “Joan” of Toronto in 1995 in a column called “Best New Books Recommended by Leading Independent Bookstores.” “A landmark book,” she went on, “a must read, not only for teachers of history and those who write it, but for any thinking individual.” 6 The Nation, a national magazine, said that Lies “contains so much history that it ends up functioning not just as a critique but also as a kind of counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past.” Soon Lies reached the bestseller lists in Boston; Burlington, Vermont; and other cities. It was also a bestseller for the History and Quality Paperback Book Clubs. In paperback, Lies has gone through more than thirty printings at Simon & Schuster. From the launch of Amazon.com, Lies has been the sales leader in its category (historiography). So, as far as I can tell, Lies is the bestselling book by a living sociologist.7 Counting all editions, including Recorded Books, sales of the first edition totaled about a million copies.

I wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me partly because I believed that Americans took great interest in their past but had been bored to tears by their high school American history courses. Readers’ reactions confirmed this belief. Their responses were not only wide, but deep. “My history classes in high school, I found, were not important to me or my life,” e-mailed one reader from the San Francisco area, because they “did not make it relevant to what was happening today.” Some adult readers had always blamed themselves for their lack of interest in high school history. “For all these years (I am forty-nine), I have had the opinion that I don’t like history,” wrote a woman from Utah, “when in truth,

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what I don’t like is illogic, or inconsistency. Thank you for your work. You have changed my life.”

Many readers found the book to be a life-changing experience. A forklift operator in Ohio, a forty-seven-year-old housewife in Denver, a “do-gooder” in upstate New York were inspired to finish college or graduate school and change careers by reading this book. “Words cannot describe how much your book has changed me,” wrote a woman from New York City. “It’s like seeing everything through new eyes. The eyes of truth as I like to call it.” While readers repeat adjectives like “shocked,” “stunned,” and “disillusioned,” many have also found Lies to be uplifting.

To be sure, not every reaction was positive. Although one reader “never could decide whether you were a Socialist or a Republican,” others thought they could and that Lies suffers from a leftward bias. “Marxist/hippie/socialist/ anti- American/anti-Christian” commented one reader at Amazon.com, who would be shocked to learn my real feelings about capitalism. “What a piece of racist trash,” said an anonymous postcard from El Paso. “Take your sour mind to Africa where you can adjust that history.”

That was, of course, a white response—a very white response. Very different has been the reaction from “Indian country.” A reader who I infer is part-Indian wrote:

Your book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and especially the chapter “Red Eyes,” has had an unprecedented effect on how I view the world. I have never felt inclined to write a letter of approval for anything I’ve read before. Your description of the Indian experience in the United States and, more importantly, the concept of a syncretic American society has subtly, but powerfully, changed my understanding of my country, and, in fact, my own ancestry.

If, as Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, history is the least-liked subject in American high schools, it is positively abhorred in Indian country. There it is the record of five centuries of defeat. Yet, properly understood, American history is not a record of Native incompetence but of survival and perseverance. From speaking before Native audiences in six states, I have come to understand to what extent false history holds Native Americans down. I now believe that only when they accurately understand their past—including their recent past—will young American Indians find the social and intellectual power to make history in

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the twenty-first century. That understanding must include the concept of syncretism—blending elements from two different cultures to come up with something new. Syncretism is how cultures typically change and survive, and all Americans need to understand that Native American cultures, too, must change to survive. Natives as well as non-Natives often labor under the misapprehension that “real” Indian culture was those practices that existed before white contact. Actually, real Indian culture is still being produced—by sculptors like Nalenik Temela (page 133), musicians like Keith Secola, and American Indian parents everywhere.

Lies has also enjoyed huge success among African Americans. In the fall of 2004, for example, it reached number three on the bestseller list of Essence magazine and was the only book on that list by a nonblack author. “My students, who are all African Americans, were immensely enthused and energized by your book,” wrote a sociology professor at Hampton University. A Missouri native wrote that he found Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America “incredibly empowering” and planned “to buy an extra copy of both books and leave them in the barbershop I patronize in downtown St. Louis. I figure if one or two kids read it, it will make a huge difference for generations to come.”

Working-class groups and labor historians have also enjoyed Lies. “Thanks again for your scholarship and solidarity in helping show the side of the story that best reflects the roots of the other 90 percent who aren’t wealthy,” wrote a nonwealthy reader in 2004. Programs in gay and lesbian studies and women’s studies have also invited me to speak, even though Lies My Teacher Told Me— unlike its successor Lies Across America—contains no explicit treatment of sexual identity or preference or gender issues.8 Prisoners respond positively, too: a Wisconsin inmate, for example, wrote, “My congratulations to you for the courage you had to have to write such a book that goes against the grain.” Hardly least, “regular” white folks—even males—like my book, too, perhaps because I take obvious satisfaction in and give credit to those white men from Bartolomé de Las Casas through Robert Flournoy to Mississippi judge Orma Smith who have fought for justice for all of us.

If Lies My Teacher Told Me has made such an impact, why this new edition? Especially when the book, as of 2007, was selling better than ever, averaging nearly two thousand copies per week?

Back in 2003, writing from Walnut Creek, California, a devoted reader

convinced me of the need for a new edition. “I think many people believe that your book describes problems that USED TO exist in school textbooks, not as current problems,” she e-mailed me. “My own anecdotal experience with my own kids’ school textbooks is that many of your original findings remain valid. An updated edition would make it harder for people to minimize your book’s truth by characterizing it as dated.” Questions from audiences over the years taught me that despite my debunking of automatic progress in Chapter 11, many readers still believe in the myth, even as applied to the textbook publishing industry. The problems I noted with high school history books were so galling that these readers want to believe—and therefore do believe—that the books must have improved. Unfortunately, we cannot assume progress. Whether history textbooks have improved is an empirical question. It can only be answered with data. And it is an interesting question, especially to me, because it subsumes another query: Did my book make any difference?

So I spent much of 2006-07 pondering six new U.S. history textbooks. I did find them improved in a few regards—especially in their treatment of Christopher Columbus and the ensuing Columbian Exchange. I also found them worse or unchanged in many other regards—but that is the subject of the rest of the book. It’s safe to conclude that Lies didn’t influence textbook publishers very much. This did not surprise me, because fifteen years earlier, Frances FitzGerald’s critique of textbooks, America Revised, was also a bestseller, but it, too, made little impact on the industry.

However, Lies did reach and move teachers. Doing so is important, because one teacher can reach a hundred students, and another hundred next year. Teachers were a central audience I had in mind as I wrote Lies. What have they made of it?

Sadly, a few teachers rejected Lies unread, concluding from its title that I am one more teacher-basher. The book itself never bashes teachers. As a former college professor who in a typical semester appeared before students for nine hours a week, I have great respect for K-12 teachers. Many work in classrooms for as many as thirty-five hours a week; on top of that they must assign, read, and comment on homework, prepare and grade exams, and develop next week’s lesson plans. When are they supposed to find time to research what they teach in American history? During their unpaid summers and weekends? Moreover, I realize that a sizable proportion—I used to estimate 25 to 30 percent, but the number is growing—of high school American history teachers are serious about

their subject. They study it themselves and get their students involved in doing history and critiquing their textbooks. In speeches to teacher groups, I used to begin by acknowledging all the foregoing, trying to persuade them to venture beyond the book’s title.9 Moreover, there is a certain tension between the title and the subtitle, “Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.” If teachers merely rely on their textbooks, however, and try to get students to “learn” them, and if the textbooks are as bad as the next eleven chapters suggest, then teachers are complicit in miseducating their charges about our past.

In central Illinois, a teacher provided an example of what to do about bad textbooks. In autumn 2003, treating the early years of the republic, she told her sixth graders in passing that most presidents before Lincoln were slave owners. Her students were outraged—not with the presidents, but with her, for lying to them. “That’s not true,” they protested, “or it would be in the book!” They pointed out that the book devoted many pages to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and other early presidents, pages that said not one word about their owning slaves. “Maybe I’m wrong, then,” she replied, suggesting that they check her facts. Each chose a president and found out about him. When they regrouped, they were outraged at their textbook for denying them this information. They wrote letters to the putative author and the publisher. The author never replied, which did not surprise me—as we shall see, many authors never wrote “their” textbooks, especially in their later editions. Some are even deceased. The students did get a reply from a spokesperson at the publisher. “We are always glad to get feedback on our product,” it went, or boilerplate to that effect. Then it suggested, “If you will look at pages 501-506, you will find substantial treatment of the Civil Rights Movement.” The students looked at each other blankly: how did this relate to their complaint?

Such a critique is a win-win action for students. Either they improve the textbook for the next generation of students, or they learn that a vacuum resides at the intellectual center of the textbook establishment. Either way, they become critical readers for the rest of the academic year.

The story of these sixth graders shows that we underestimate children at our peril. Teachers who have gotten students as young as fourth grade to challenge textbooks and do original research have found that they exceeded expectations. A fifth-grade teacher in far southwestern Virginia wrote me that at the start of the year his students say they hate history. “Within two weeks, all or most love history.” He gets them involved with:

primary source documents such as newspaper accounts and actual photos of freedmen being lynched. This is tough on the kids sometimes but they handle it well. They get an attitude about evil and vow to keep it from happening. They no longer think that video games with people getting blown up are funny. They even start to check out books on history and read them and get away from the sanitized vanilla yogurt in the textbooks and shoot for a five-alarm chili type of history. They love history that has “the good stuff ” in it. And then they are promoted and go back to the textbook! Which creates a problem. They raise hell with the next teacher! They become politically active within the middle school. They look like they will become good citizens.

Surely good citizens are what we want—but what do we mean by a “good citizen”? Educators first required American history as a high school subject as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign around 1900. Its nationalistic genesis has always interfered with its basic mission: to prepare students to do their job as Americans.

Again, what exactly is our job as Americans? Surely it is to bring into being the America of the future. What should characterize that nation? How should it balance civil liberties and surveillance against potential terrorists? Should it allow gay marriage? What should its energy policies be, as the world’s finite supply of oil begins to impact upon us? To participate in these discussions and influence these debates, good citizens need to be able to evaluate the claims that our leaders and would-be leaders make. They must read critically, winnow fact from fraud, and seek to understand causes and results in the past. These skills must stand at the center of any competent history course.

These are not skills that American history textbooks foster—even the recent ones. Nor do courses based on them. Why then do teachers put up with such books? The answer: they make their busy lives easier. The teachers’ edition of Holt American Nation, to take one example, begins with twenty-two pages of ads making this point. One page touts its “Management System.” It contrasts two photographs. One shows a teacher struggling to carry a textbook, several other books, some overhead projections, a binder of lecture notes, and miscellaneous papers, the other a teacher smiling as she slips a single CD into her purse. “Everything you need is on one disk!” trumpets the ad, including “editable lesson plans,” “classroom presentations” containing lecture notes suitable for projection, and an “easy-to-use test generator.” No longer do teachers need to

make their own lesson plans or construct their own tests, and if they run out of things to say in the classroom, the disk also contains previews of the teaching resources and movies that Holt offers as ancillary materials. Many of these supplements, including a series of CNN videos, are more valuable education tools than the textbook itself. The problem is that the purpose of all the ancillaries is to get teachers to adopt Holt’s textbook. Then, since the textbook runs to 1,240 pages—and all too many teachers assign them all—students are unlikely to have time to do anything with any of these additional materials.

Sometimes help comes from the top down. Many school systems have grown displeased with the low student morale in these textbook-driven history courses. As a matter of school-board policy, at least two systems require any teacher in social studies or history to read my book. Homeschoolers have also found their way to Lies My Teacher Told Me. Wrote David Stanton, editor of a resource catalog for homeschoolers, “I read it cover to cover (including the footnotes), found it hard to put down, and was sad when it ended.”

Students have also taken matters into their own hands. A fourteen-year-old in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, going into the ninth grade, had already read Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. “These are EXCELLENT books!” she wrote. “After reading them, I spread them around the school to different teachers. All were shocked and, due to this, are changing their teaching methods.” John Jennings, a high school student somewhere in cyberspace, wrote that he and a group of his friends “have read your book Lies My Teacher Told Me and it has opened our eyes to the true history behind our country, positive and negative.” He went on to add that he is “signed up to take American History next semester . . . and we are using one of the twelve textbooks you reviewed, so I can’t wait to attempt to start discussions in class concerning issues discussed in your book and use your book as a reference.” A North Carolina dad wrote, “My daughter uses Lies My Teacher Told Me as a guerrilla text in her grade eleven Advanced Placement U.S. History, and loves it—although the teacher isn’t always as pleased.” My favorite e-mail of all came in from a lad somewhere at AOL.com: “Dear Mr. Loewen, I really like your book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve been using it to heckle my history teacher from the back of the room.” My friends all like it, too, he went on. “If I could get a group price on it from the publisher, I could sell it in the corridors of my high school.” I got him the group price, and since then, several teachers—perhaps including his—have told me that my book, in the hands of precocious pupils, made their lives miserable until

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they got their own copy, which jarred them out of their textbook rut. So there is also hope from the bottom up.

Best of all has been the response in the “aftermarket”—adults who have turned to Lies because they sensed something remiss about their boring high school history courses. Many find it a book to share. “I read it twice and then it made the round of friends who were stubborn about returning it, but I finally got it back and now I’m reading it again,” wrote a security guard in California. “After completing each successive chapter, I always felt that I had to comment to a friend about what I just learned,” wrote a graduate-student-to-be in education. “I have been sharing your information with every teacher I can get to stand still for five minutes,” wrote a teacher’s aide in Montana. “This is a book that you buy two of,” wrote a professor in New Hampshire, “one to read and keep, and one to lend or give away.” A reader in Sherman Oaks, California, said, “It is more than just interesting: it is life-enriching. I will give copies as gifts . . . for years to come.” Some readers get them cheap: they join the Quality Paperback Book Club to obtain four copies of Lies for a dollar each, give them to four friends, quit the club, then join again to get four more.10

I hope you find this new edition of Lies as useful as the first in getting people to question what they think they know about American history. If you do, share it with others. No doubt the publisher would like to sell everyone you know a copy, but I’m happiest when Lies gets multiple readers. I’m also happy to get readers’ reactions—positive or negative11—to my work. You can reach me through my website, uvm.edu/~jloewen/, or jloewen@uvm.edu.

http://uvm.edu/~jloewen/
INTRODUCTION

SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY WRONG

It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.

—JOSH BILLINGS1

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

—JAMES BALDWIN2

Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.

—GEN. PETRO G. GRIGORENKO, SAMIZDAT LETTER TO A HISTORY JOURNAL, c. 1975, USSR3

Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

—JAMES W . LOEWEN

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English.4

Even when they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don’t know.5

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.

Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test.

College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.

Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society

wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

Outside of school, Americans show great interest in history. Historical novels, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr, et al.) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho!, Utah!, Nebraska!, Oregon!, Missouri!, and on! and on!) often become bestsellers. The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The series The Civil War attracted new audiences to public television. Movies based on historical incidents or themes are a continuing source of fascination, from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to Dances with Wolves, JFK, and Saving Private Ryan. Not history itself but traditional American history courses turn students off.

Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. These same stories show what America has been about and are directly relevant to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.

What has gone wrong?

We begin to get a handle on this question by noting that textbooks dominate American history courses more than they do any other subject. When I first came across that finding in the educational research literature, I was dumbfounded. I would have guessed almost anything else—plane geometry, for instance. After all, it would be hard for students to interview elderly residents of their community about plane geometry, or to learn about it from library books or old newspaper files or the thousands of photographs and documents at the Library of Congress website. All these resources—and more—are relevant to American history. Yet it is in history classrooms, not geometry, where students spend more time reading from their textbooks, answering the fifty-five boring questions at the end of each chapter, going over those answers aloud, and so on.9

Between the glossy covers, American history textbooks are full of information —overly full. These books are huge. The specimens in my original collection of a dozen of the most popular textbooks averaged four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. To my astonishment, during the last twelve years they

grew even larger. In 2006 I surveyed six new books. (Owing to publisher consolidation, there no longer are twelve.) Three are new editions of “legacy textbooks,” descended from books originally published half a century ago; three are “new new” books.10 These six new books average 1,150 pages and almost six pounds! I never imagined they would get bigger. I had thought—hoped?— that the profusion of resources on the Web would make it obvious that these behemoths are obsolete. The Web did not exist when the earlier batch of textbooks came into being. In those days, for history textbooks to be huge made some sense: students in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, say, or Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, had few resources in American history other than their textbooks. No longer: today every school that has a phone line is connected to the Web. There students can browse hundreds of thousands of primary sources including newspaper articles, the census, historic photographs, and original documents, as well as secondary interpretations from scholars, citizens, other students, and rascals and liars. No longer is there any need to supply students with nine months’ reading between the covers of one book, written or collected by a single set of authors.

The new books are so huge that they may endanger their readers. Each of the 1,104 pages in The American Journey is wider and taller than any page in the twelve already enormous high school textbooks in my original sample. Surely at 5.6 pounds, Journey is the heaviest book ever assigned to middle-school children in the history of American education. (At more than $84, it may also be the most expensive.) A new nonprofit organization, Backpack Safety America, has formed, spurred by chiropractors and other health care professionals. Its mission is “to reduce the weight of textbooks and backpacks.” In the meantime, pending that accomplishment, chiropractors are visiting schools teaching proper posture and lifting techniques.11

Publishers, too, realize that the books look formidably large, so they try to disguise their total page count by creative pagination. Journey, for example, has 1,104 pages but manages to come in under a thousand by using separate numbering for thirty-two pages at the front of the book and seventy-two pages at the end. Students aren’t fooled. They know these are by far the heaviest volumes to lug home, the largest to hold in the lap, and the hardest to get excited about.

Editors also realize how daunting these books appear to the poor children who must read them, so they provide elaborate introductions and enticements,

beginning with the table of contents. For The Americans, for example, a 1,358- page textbook from McDougal Littell weighing in at almost seven pounds, the table of contents runs twenty-two pages. It is profusely illustrated and has little colored banners with titles like “Geography Spotlight,” “Daily Life,” and “Historical Spotlight.” Right after it comes a three-page layout, “Themes in History” and “Themes in Geography.” Then come hints on how to read the complex, disjointed thirty- to forty-page chapters. “Each chapter begins with a two-page chapter opener,” it says. “Study the chapter opener to help you get ready to read.”

“Oh, no,” groan students. “Nothing good will come of this.” They know that no one has to tell them how to get ready to read a Harry Potter book or any other book that is readable. Something different is going on here.

Unfortunately, having a still bigger book only spurs conscientious teachers to spend even more time making sure students read it and deal with its hundreds of minute questions and tasks. This makes history courses even more boring. Publishers then try to make their books more interesting by inserting various special aids to give them eye appeal. But these gimmicks have just the opposite effect. Many are completely useless, except to the marketing department. Consider the little colored banners in the table of contents of The Americans . No student would ever need to have a list of the “Geography Spotlights” in this book. One spotlight happens to be “The Panama Canal,” but the student seeking information on the canal would find it by looking in the index in the back, not by surmising that it might be a Geography Spotlight, then finding that list within the twenty-two pages of contents in the front, and then scanning it to see if Panama Canal appears. The only possible use for these bannered lists is for the sales rep to point to when trying to get a school district to adopt the book.

The books are huge so that no publisher will lose an adoption because a book has left out a detail of concern to a particular geographical area or group. Textbook authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every U.S. president, even William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. The Americans, to take one example, highlights 840 “Main Ideas Within Its Main Text.” In addition, the text contains 310 “Skill Builders,” 890 “Terms and Names,” 466 “Critical Thinking” questions, and still other projects within its chapters. And that’s not counting the hundreds of terms and questions in the two-page reviews that follow each chapter. At year’s end, no student can remember 840 main ideas, not to mention

890 terms and countless other factoids. So students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test on that chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder so many high school graduates cannot remember in which century the Civil War was fought!12

Students are right: the books are boring.13 The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out fine in the end. “Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges,” in the words of one textbook. Most authors of history textbooks don’t even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as “mumbling lecturer.” No wonder students lose interest.

Authors almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might ask students to consider gender roles in contemporary society as a means of prompting students to think about what women did and did not achieve in the suffrage movement or the more recent women’s movement. They might ask students to prepare household budgets for the families of a janitor and a stockbroker as a means of prompting thinking about labor unions and social classes in the past and present. They might, but they don’t. The present is not a source of information for writers of history textbooks.

Conversely, textbooks seldom use the past to illuminate the present. They portray the past as a simpleminded morality play. “Be a good citizen” is the message that textbooks extract from the past. “You have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has accomplished.” While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it can become something of a burden for students of color, children of working-class parents, girls who notice the dearth of female historical figures, or members of any group that has not achieved socioeconomic success. The optimistic approach prevents any understanding of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color are alienated. After a thousand pages, bland optimism gets pretty off- putting for everyone.

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and

to indoctrinate blind patriotism. “Take a look in your history book, and you’ll see why we should be proud” goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside.14 The titles themselves tell the story: The Great Republic, The American Pageant, Land of Promise, Triumph of the American Nation.15 Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of the Molecule. And you can tell history textbooks just from their covers, graced as they are with American flags, bald eagles, the Washington Monument.

None of the facts is remembered, because they are presented simply as one damn thing after another. While textbook authors tend to include most of the trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks stifle meaning by suppressing causation. Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life.

Even though the books bulge with detail, even though the courses are so busy they rarely reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out most of what we need to know about the American past. And despite their emphasis on facts, some of the factoids they present are flatly wrong or unverifiable. Errors often go uncorrected, partly because the history profession does not bother to review high school textbooks. In sum, startling errors of omission and distortion mar American histories. History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources—the plantation records, city directories, census data, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters that document times past. Based on these primary materials, historians write secondary works—books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness on Martha’s Vineyard to Grant’s tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians, working individually or in teams, then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works—textbooks covering all phases of U.S. history.

In practice, however, it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them a half-dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is written not by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher’s offices. When historians do write textbooks, they

risk snickers from their colleagues—tinged with envy, but snickers nonetheless: “Why are you devoting time to pedagogy rather than original research?”

The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks list up-to-the-minute secondary sources in their bibliographies, yet the narratives remain totally traditional—unaffected by recent research.16

What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read a poem? The editor’s voice in an English literature textbook might be as dull as the voice in a history textbook, but at least in the English textbook the voice stills when the book presents original works of literature. The omniscient narrator’s voice of history textbooks insulates students from the raw materials of history. Rarely do authors quote speeches, songs, diaries, or letters. Students need not be protected from this material. They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech as read American Adventures’ two paragraphs about it.

Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is facts to be learned. “We have not avoided controversial issues,” announces one set of textbook authors; “instead, we have tried to offer reasoned judgments” on them—thus removing the controversy! Because textbooks employ such a godlike tone, it never occurs to most students to question them. “In retrospect I ask myself, why didn’t I think to ask, for example, who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, and how did it change when Columbus arrived,” wrote a student of mine in 1991. “However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture,” she continued, “so I never thought to doubt that it was.”

As a result of all this, most high school seniors are hamstrung in their efforts to analyze controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter these students the next year as college freshmen.) We’ve got to do better. Five-sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens “learn” in high school forms much of what they know about our past.

This book includes eleven chapters of amazing stories—some wonderful, some ghastly—in American history, including a new chapter on our two Iraq wars and the continuing “war on terrorism.” Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere details but events and processes with

important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave out or distort these events and processes. I know, because for twenty years I have been lugging around eighteen textbooks, taking them seriously as works of history and ideology, studying what they say and don’t say, and trying to figure out why. I chose these eighteen as representing the range of textbooks available for American history courses.17 These books, which are listed (with full citations) in the Appendix, have been my window into the world of what high school students carry home, read, memorize, and forget. In addition, I have spent many hours observing high school history classes in Mississippi, Vermont, and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and more hours talking with high school history teachers.

Chapter 12 analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption in an attempt to explain what causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must confess an interest here: I once co-wrote a history textbook. Mississippi: Conflict and Change was the first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although the book won the Lillian Smith Award for “best nonfiction about the South” in 1975, Mississippi rejected it for use in public schools. In turn, three local school systems, my coauthor, and I sued the state textbook board. In April 1980 Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. resulted in a sweeping victory on the basis of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The experience taught me firsthand more than most writers or publishers would ever want to know about the textbook adoption process. I also learned that not all the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the adoption agencies.

Chapter 13 looks at the effects of using standard American history textbooks. It shows that the books actually make students stupid. Finally, an afterword cites distortions and omissions undiscussed in earlier chapters and recommends ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American history more honestly. It is offered as an inoculation program of sorts against the future lies we are otherwise sure to encounter.

As a sociologist, I am reminded constantly of the power of the past. Although each of us comes into the world de novo, we are not really new creatures. We arrive into a social slot, born not only to a family but also a religion, community, and, of course, a nation and a culture. Sociologists understand the power of social structure and culture to shape not only our path through the world but also our understanding of that path and that world. Yet we often have to expend

much energy trying to get students to see the influence on their lives of the social structure and culture they inherit. Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future. If our journey together through this book will make the realities of our past more apparent, then this “most irrelevant” subject—American history—might become more relevant to you. At least, that’s my hope.

1.

HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY

THE PROCESS OF HERO-MAKING

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.

—JAMES BALDWIN 1

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

—W.E.B. DUBOIS2

By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. . . . We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.

—CHARLES V. WILLIE3

THIS CHAPTER is about heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.

Many American history textbooks are studded with biographical vignettes of the very famous (Land of Promise devotes a box to each president) and the famous (The Challenge of Freedom provides “Did You Know?” boxes about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, among many others). In themselves, vignettes are not a bad idea. They instruct by human example. They show diverse ways that people can make a difference. They allow textbooks to give space to characters such as Blackwell and Hansberry, who relieve what would otherwise be a monolithic parade of white male political leaders. Biographical vignettes also provoke reflection as to our purpose in teaching history: Is Chester A. Arthur more deserving of space than, say, Frank Lloyd Wright? Who influences us more today—Wright, who invented the carport and transformed domestic architectural spaces, or Arthur, who, um, signed the first Civil Service Act? Whose rise to prominence provides more drama—Blackwell’s or George H. W. Bush’s (the latter born with a silver Senate seat in his mouth4)? The choices are debatable, but surely textbooks should include some people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to achieve it.

We could go on to third- and fourth-guess the list of heroes in textbook pantheons. My concern here, however, is not who gets chosen, but rather what happens to the heroes when they are introduced into our history textbooks and our classrooms. Two twentieth-century Americans provide case studies of heroification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller. Wilson was unarguably an important president, and he receives extensive textbook coverage. Keller, on the other hand, was a “little person” who pushed through no legislation, changed the course of no scientific discipline, declared no war. Only one of all the history textbooks I surveyed includes her photograph. Most books don’t even mention her. But teachers love to talk about Keller and often show audiovisual materials or recommend biographies that present her life as exemplary. All this attention

ensures that students retain something about both of these historical figures, but they may be no better off for it. Heroification so distorts the lives of Keller and Wilson (and many others) that we cannot think straight about them.

Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump. At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller’s life. Each yields its version of the same cliché. A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential.” 5

To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it. Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history. The result is that we really don’t know much about her.

Over the past twenty years, I have asked hundreds of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. All know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most remember that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to speak. Some can recall rather minute details of Keller’s early life: that she lived in Alabama, that she was unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and so forth. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. “She wrote, didn’t she?” or “she spoke”—conjectures without content. Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968. To ignore the sixty- four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new

communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!” 6 Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist Party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

Always a voice for the voiceless, Helen Keller championed women’s suffrage. Her position at the head of this 1912 demonstration shows her celebrity status as well as her commitment to the cause. The shields are all from western states, where women were already voting.

Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely

with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller’s research was not just book learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it.” 7

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.”

Keller recalled having met this editor: “At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.” She went on, “Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.” 8

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the

sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!” 9

One may not agree with Helen Keller’s positions. Her praise of the USSR now seems naïve, embarrassing, to some even treasonous. But she was a radical—a fact few Americans know, because our schooling and our mass media left it out.10

What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson is even more remarkable. When I ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive causes like women’s suffrage. A handful of students recall the Wilson administration’s Palmer raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or speak about two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries.

Among the progressive-era reforms with which students often credit Woodrow

Wilson is women’s suffrage. 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. Public pressure, aroused by hunger strikes and other actions of the movement, convinced Wilson that to oppose women’s suffrage was politically unwise. Textbooks typically fail to show the interrelationship between the hero and the people. By giving the credit to the hero, authors tell less than half of the story.

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson’s presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua’s president and to force passage of a treaty preferential to the United States.

In 1917 Woodrow Wilson took on a major power when he started sending secret monetary aid to the “White” side of the Russian civil war. 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. With the blessing of Britain and France, and in a joint command with Japanese soldiers, American forces penetrated westward from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and White Russian forces that had declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk. After briefly maintaining front lines as far west as the Volga, the White Russian forces disintegrated by the end of 1919, and our troops finally left Vladivostok on April 1, 1920.11

Few Americans who were not alive at the time know anything about our “unknown war with Russia,” to quote the title of Robert Maddox’s book on this fiasco. Not one of the twelve American history textbooks in my original sample even mentioned it. Two of the six new books do; Boorstin and Kelley, for example, write: “The United States, hoping to keep stores of munitions from falling into German hands when Bolshevik Russia quit fighting, contributed some 5,000 troops to an Allied invasion of northern Russia at Archangel. Wilson likewise sent nearly 10,000 troops to Siberia as part of an Allied expedition.” It is possible, although surely difficult, for an American student to infer from that passage that Wilson was intervening in Russia’s civil war.

Russian textbooks, on the other hand, give the episode considerable coverage. According to Maddox: “The immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society. And there were longer- range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear proof . . . that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance.”12

This aggression fueled the suspicions that motivated the Soviets during the Cold War, and until its breakup the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion.

Wilson’s invasions of Latin America are better known than his Russian adventure. Textbooks do cover some of them, and it is fascinating to watch textbook authors attempt to justify these episodes. Any accurate portrayal of the invasions could not possibly show Wilson or the United States in a favorable light. With hindsight we know that Wilson’s interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate.13 Even in the 1910s, most of the invasions were unpopular in this country and provoked a torrent of criticism abroad. By the mid-1920s, Wilson’s successors reversed his policies in Latin America. The authors of history textbooks know this, for a chapter or two after Wilson they laud our “Good Neighbor Policy,” the renunciation of force in Latin America by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, which was extended by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Textbooks might (but don’t) call Wilson’s Latin American actions a “Bad Neighbor Policy” by comparison. Instead, faced with unpleasantries, textbooks —old and new—wriggle to get the hero off the hook, as in this example from the old Challenge of Freedom: “President Wilson wanted the United States to build friendships with the countries of Latin America. However, he found this difficult. . . .” Several textbooks blame the invasions on the countries invaded: “Wilson recoiled from an aggressive foreign policy,” states the new American Pageant. “Political turmoil in Haiti soon forced Wilson to eat some of his anti- imperialist words. . . . Wilson reluctantly dispatched marines to protect American lives and property.” This passage is sheer invention. Unlike his secretary of the navy, who later complained that what Wilson “forced [me] to do in Haiti was a bitter pill for me,” no documentary evidence suggests that Wilson suffered any such qualms about dispatching troops to the Caribbean.14

Every textbook I surveyed mentions Wilson’s 1914 invasion of Mexico, but they posit that the interventions were not Wilson’s fault. “Cries for intervention burst from the lips of American jingoes,” according to Pageant in 2006. “Yet President Wilson stood firm against demands to step in.” Soon Wilson did order troops to Mexico, of course, even before Congress gave him authority to do so. Walter Karp has shown that this view of a reluctant Wilson again contradicts the facts—the invasion was Wilson’s idea from the start, and it upset Congress as well as the American people.15 Wilson’s intervention was so outrageous that leaders of both sides of Mexico’s ongoing civil war demanded that the U.S. forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in the United States and around the world finally influenced Wilson to recall the troops.

Textbook authors commonly use another device when describing our Mexican adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our forces to withdraw, but nobody is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting information in a passive voice helps to insulate historical figures from their own unheroic or unethical deeds.

Some books go beyond omitting the actor and leave out the act itself. Half of the textbooks do not even mention Wilson’s takeover of Haiti. After U.S. marines invaded the country in 1915, they forced the Haitian legislature to select our preferred candidate as president. When Haiti refused to declare war on Germany after the United States did, we dissolved the Haitian legislature. Then the United States supervised a pseudo-referendum to approve a new Haitian constitution, less democratic than the constitution it replaced; the referendum passed by a hilarious 98,225 to 768. As Piero Gleijesus has noted, “It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not democracy.”16 The United States also attacked Haiti’s proud tradition of individual ownership of small tracts of land, which dated back to the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the establishment of large plantations. American troops forced peasants in shackles to work on road construction crews. In 1919 Haitian citizens rose up and resisted U.S. occupation troops in a guerrilla war that cost more than three thousand lives, most of them Haitian. Students who read Pathways to the Present learn this about Wilson’s intervention in Haiti: “In Haiti, the United States stepped in to restore stability after a series of revolutions left the country weak and unstable. Wilson . . . sent in American troops in 1915. United States marines occupied Haiti until 1934.” These bland sentences veil what we did, about which George Barnett, a U.S. marine general, complained to his commander in Haiti:

“Practically indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time.” Barnett termed this violent episode “the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps.” 17

During the first two decades of this century, the United States effectively made colonies of Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and several other countries. Nor, as we have seen, did Wilson limit his interventions to our hemisphere. His reaction to the Russian Revolution solidified the alignment of the United States with Europe’s colonial powers. His was the first administration to be obsessed with the specter of communism, abroad and at home. Wilson was blunt about it. In Billings, Montana, stumping the West to seek support for the League of Nations, he warned, “There are apostles of Lenin in our own midst. I can not imagine what it means to be an apostle of Lenin. It means to be an apostle of the night, of chaos, of disorder.”18 Even after the White Russian alternative collapsed, Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. He participated in barring Russia from the peace negotiations after World War I and helped oust Béla Kun, the communist leader who had risen to power in Hungary. Wilson’s sentiment for self-determination and 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 refused to listen, and France retained control of Indochina.19 It seems that Wilson regarded self-determination as all right for, say, Belgium, but not for the likes of Latin America or Southeast Asia.

At home, Wilson’s racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations. African Americans took part in the Republican Party’s national conventions and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A Southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that flatly refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist—his wife was even worse —and told “darky” stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted an extensive legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as

chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed Southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. His administration used the excuse of anticommunism to surveil and undermine black newspapers, organizations, and union leaders. He segregated the navy, which had not previously been segregated, relegating African Americans to kitchen and boiler work. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson’s legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the

1950s and beyond.20 In 1916 the Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wilson that, though partisan, was accurate: “No sooner had the Democratic Administration come into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors entered upon a policy to eliminate all colored citizens from representation in the Federal Government.”21

Of all the history textbooks I reviewed, eight never even mention this “black mark” on Wilson’s presidency. Only four accurately describe Wilson’s racial policies. Land of Promise, back in 1983, did the best job:

Woodrow Wilson’s administration was openly hostile to black people. Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed that black people were inferior. During his campaign for the presidency, Wilson promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another. This was the first time such segregation had existed since Reconstruction! When black federal employees in Southern cities protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired. In November, 1914, a black delegation asked the President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude and hostile and refused their demands.

Most of the textbooks that do treat Wilson’s racism give it only a sentence or two. Some take pains to separate Wilson from the practice: “Wilson allowed his Cabinet officers to extend the Jim Crow practice of separating the races in federal offices” is the entire treatment in Pathways to the Present. Omitting or absolving Wilson’s racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. It is

overtly racist. No black person could ever consider Woodrow Wilson a hero. Textbooks that present him as a hero are written from a white perspective. The cover-up denies all students the chance to learn something important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led. 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.22

The filmmaker D. W. Griffith quoted Wilson’s two-volume history of the United States, now notorious for its racist view of Reconstruction, in his infamous masterpiece The Clansman, a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for its role in putting down “black-dominated” Republican state governments during Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a book by Wilson’s former classmate, Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with race was “unrivaled until Mein Kampf,” according to historian Wyn Wade. 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.” Griffith would go on to use this quotation in successfully defending his film against NAACP charges that it was racially inflammatory.23

This landmark of American cinema was not only the best technical production of its time but also probably the most racist major movie of all time. Dixon intended “to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . And make no mistake about it—we are doing just that.”24 Dixon did not overstate by much. Spurred by Birth of a Nation, William Simmons of Georgia reestablished the Ku Klux Klan. The racism seeping down from the White House encouraged this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction predecessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state (South Carolina) and discouraging nationally for a time. The new KKK quickly became a national phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic Party in many Southern states, as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. Klan spectacles in the 1920s in towns from Montpelier, Vermont, to West Frankfort, Illinois, to Medford, Oregon, were the largest public gatherings in their history, before or since. During Wilson’s second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whites lynched blacks as far north as Duluth.25

Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection

between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response. To accomplish such education, however, textbooks would have to make plain the relationship between cause and effect, between hero and followers. Instead, they reflexively ascribe noble intentions to the hero and invoke “the people” to excuse questionable actions and policies. According to Triumph of the American Nation: “As President, Wilson seemed to agree with most white Americans that segregation was in the best interests of black as well as white Americans.”

Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called “hyphenated Americans.” “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” said Wilson, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”26 The American people responded to Wilson’s lead with a wave of repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people, not Wilson. The American Tradition admits that “President Wilson set up” the Creel Committee on Public Information, which saturated the United States with propaganda linking Germans to barbarism. But Tradition hastens to shield Wilson from the ensuing domestic fallout: “Although President Wilson had been careful in his war message to state that most Americans of German descent were ‘true and loyal citizens,’ the anti-German propaganda often caused them suffering.”

Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing. “Congress,” not Wilson, is credited with having passed the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year, probably the most serious attacks on the civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have threatened the war effort. Robert Goldstein served ten years in prison for producing The Spirit of ’76, a film about the Revolutionary War that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably. 27 Textbook authors suggest that wartime pressures excuse Wilson’s suppression of civil liberties, but in 1920, when World War I was long over, Wilson vetoed a bill that would have abolished the Espionage and Sedition acts.28 Textbook authors blame the anticommunist and anti-labor union witch

hunts of Wilson’s second term on his illness and on an attorney general run amok. No evidence supports this view. Indeed, Attorney General Palmer asked Wilson in his last days as president to pardon Eugene V. Debs, who was serving time for a speech attributing World War I to economic interests and denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic.29 The president replied, “Never!” and Debs languished in prison until Warren Harding pardoned him.30 The American Way adopts perhaps the most innovative approach to absolving Wilson of wrongdoing: Way simply moves the “red scare” to the 1920s, after Wilson had left office!

To oppose America’s participation in World War I, or even to be pessimistic about it, was dangerous. The Creel Committee asked all Americans to “report the man who . . . cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.” Send their names to the Justice Department in Washington, it exhorted. After World War I, the Wilson administration’s attacks on civil liberties increased, now with anticommunism as the excuse. Neither before nor since these campaigns has the United States come closer to being a police state.

Because heroification prevents textbooks from showing Wilson’s shortcomings, textbooks are hard-pressed to explain the results of the 1920 election. James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson’s would-be successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just wanted a “return to normalcy.” The possibility that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our authors.31 It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known!”

It isn’t only high school history courses that heroify Wilson. Those few textbooks that do discuss Wilson’s racism and other shortcomings, such as Land of Promise, have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.

For twenty-five years now, Michael Frisch has been conducting an experiment in social archetypes at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He asks his first-year college students for “the first ten names that you think of” in American history before the Civil War. When Frisch found that his students listed the same political and military figures year after year, replicating the privileged positions afforded them in high school textbooks, he added the proviso, “excluding presidents, generals, statesmen, etc.” Frisch still gets a stable list, but one less predictable on the basis of history textbooks. Most years, Betsy Ross has led the list. (Paul Revere usually comes in second.)

What is interesting about this choice is that Betsy Ross never did anything. Frisch notes that she played “no role whatsoever in the actual creation of any actual first flag.” Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, largely

invented the myth of the first flag. With justice, high school textbooks universally ignore Betsy Ross; not one high school textbook lists her in its index.32 So how and why does her story get transmitted? Frisch offers a hilarious explanation: If George Washington is the Father of Our Country, then Betsy Ross is our Blessed Virgin Mary! Frisch describes the pageants reenacted (or did we only imagine them?) in our elementary school years: “Washington [the god] calls on the humble seamstress Betsy Ross in her tiny home and asks her if she will make the nation’s flag, to his design. And Betsy promptly brings forth—from her lap!—the nation itself, and the promise of freedom and natural rights for all mankind.”33

I think Frisch is onto something, but maybe he is merely on something. Whether or not one buys his explanation, Betsy Ross’s ranking among students surely proves the power of the social archetype. In the case of Woodrow Wilson, textbooks actually participate in creating the social archetype. Wilson is portrayed as “good,” “idealist,” “for self-determination, not colonial intervention,” “foiled by an isolationist Senate,” and “ahead of his time.” We name institutions after him, from the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Decatur, Illinois, where I misspent my adolescence. If a fifth face were to be chiseled into Mount Rushmore, many Americans would propose that it should be Wilson’s.34 Against such archetypal goodness, even the unusually forthright treatment of Wilson’s racism in Land of Promise cannot but fail to stick in students’ minds.

Curators of history museums know that their visitors bring archetypes in with them. Some curators consciously design exhibits to confront these archetypes when they are inaccurate. Textbook authors, teachers, and moviemakers would better fulfill their educational mission if they also taught against inaccurate archetypes. Surely Woodrow Wilson does not need their flattering omissions, after all. His progressive legislative accomplishments in just his first two years, including tariff reform, an income tax, the Federal Reserve Act, and the Workingmen’s Compensation Act, are almost unparalleled. Wilson’s speeches on behalf of self-determination stirred the world, even if his actions did not live up to his words.

This statue of George Washington, now in the Smithsonian Institution, exemplifies the manner in which textbooks would portray every American hero: ten feet tall, blemish-free, with the body of a Greek god.

Why do textbooks promote wartless stereotypes? The authors’ omissions and errors can hardly be accidental. The producers of the filmstrips, movies, and other educational materials on Helen Keller surely know she was a socialist; no one can read Keller’s writings without becoming aware of her political and social philosophy. At least one textbook author, Thomas Bailey, senior author of The American Pageant, clearly knew of the 1918 U.S. invasion of Russia, for he wrote in a different venue in 1973, “American troops shot it out with Russian armed forces on Russian soil in two theatres from 1918 to 1920.”35 Probably several other authors knew of it, too. Wilson’s racism is also well known to professional historians. Why don’t they let the public in on these matters?

Heroification itself supplies a first answer. Socialism is repugnant to most Americans. So are racism and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that authors selectively omit blemishes to make certain historical figures sympathetic

to as many people as possible.36 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.37 In the early 1920s the American Legion said that authors of textbooks “are at fault in placing before immature pupils the blunders, foibles and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our Nation.”38 The Legion would hardly be able to fault today’s history textbooks on this count.

Perhaps we can go further. I began with Helen Keller because omitting the last sixty-four years of her life exemplifies the sort of culture-serving distortion that will be discussed later in this book. We teach Keller as an ideal, not a real person, to inspire our young people to emulate her. Keller becomes a mythic figure, the “woman who overcame”—but for what? There is no content! Just look what she accomplished, we’re exhorted—yet we haven’t a clue as to what that really was.

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. Certainly 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. In 1929, when she was nearing fifty, Keller wrote a second volume of autobiography, Midstream, that described her social philosophy in some detail. She wrote about visiting mill towns, mining towns, and packing towns where workers were on strike. She intended that we learn of these experiences and of the conclusions to which they led her. Consistent with our American ideology of individualism, 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 had once believed that we were all masters of our fate—that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased. . . . I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. 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.39

Textbooks don’t want to touch this idea. “There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.” While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all. Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well. Educators would much rather present Keller as a bland source of encouragement and inspiration to our young—if she can do it, you can do it! So they leave out her adult life and make her entire existence over into a vague “up by the bootstraps” operation. In the process, they make this passionate fighter for the poor into something she never was in life: boring.

Woodrow Wilson gets similarly whitewashed. Although some history textbooks disclose more than others about the seamy underside of Wilson’s presidency, all eighteen books reviewed share a common tone: respectful, patriotic, even adulatory. Ironically, Wilson was widely despised in the 1920s. Only after World War II did he come to be viewed kindly by policy makers and historians. 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,” according to Gordon Levin Jr.40 Textbook authors are thus motivated to underplay or excuse Wilson’s foreign interventions, many of which were counterproductive blunders, as well as other unsatisfactory aspects of his administration.

A host of other reasons—pressure from the “ruling class,” pressure from textbook adoption committees, the wish to avoid ambiguities, a desire to shield children from harm or conflict, the perceived need to control children and avoid classroom disharmony, pressure to provide answers—may help explain why textbooks omit troublesome facts. A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past, especially when we’re passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? 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.”41 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom. One reason is habit: we are so accustomed to blandness that the textbook or teacher who brings real intellectual controversy into the classroom can strike us as a violation of polite rhetoric, of classroom norms. We are supposed to speak well of the deceased, after all. Probably we are supposed to maintain the same attitude of awe, reverence, and respect when we read about our national heroes as when we visit our National Cathedral and view the final resting places of Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson, as close physically in death as they were distant ideologically in life.

Whatever the causes, the results of heroification are potentially crippling to students. Helen Keller is not the only person this approach treats like a child. Denying students the humanness of Keller, Wilson, and others keeps students in intellectual immaturity. It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history: The Hall of Presidents at Disneyland similarly presents our leaders as heroic statesmen, not imperfect human beings.42 Our children end up without realistic role models to inspire them. Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate forays into Nicaragua, for instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt to understand why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a “done deal.”

Do textbooks, educational videos, and American history courses achieve the results they seek with regard to our heroes? Surely textbook authors want us to think well of the historical figures they treat with such sympathy. And, on a superficial level at least, we do. Almost no recent high school graduates have anything “bad” to say about either Keller or Wilson. But are these two considered heroes? I have asked hundreds of (mostly white) college students on the first day of class to tell me who their heroes in American history are. As a rule, they do not pick Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, Miles Standish or anyone else in Plymouth, John Smith or anyone else in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, or indeed anyone else in American history whom the textbooks implore them to choose.43 Our post-Watergate students view all

such “establishment” heroes cynically. They’re bor-r-ring.

Some students choose “none”—that is, they say they have no heroes in American history. Other students display the characteristically American sympathy for the underdog by choosing African Americans: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, perhaps Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, or Frederick Douglass. Or they choose men and women from other countries: Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandela.

In one sense this is a healthy development. Surely we want students to be skeptical. Probably we want them to challenge being told whom to believe in. But replying “none” is too glib, too nihilistic, for my taste. It is, however, an understandable response to heroification. For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures. Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody-goody, not merely good.

Students poke fun at the goody-goodiest of them all by telling Helen Keller jokes. In so doing, schoolchildren are not poking cruel fun at a disabled person, they are deflating a pretentious symbol that is too good to be real. Nonetheless, our loss of Helen Keller as anything but a source of jokes is distressing. Knowing the reality of her quite amazing life might empower not only deaf or blind students, but any schoolgirl, and perhaps boys as well. For like other peoples around the world, we Americans need heroes. Statements such as “If Martin Luther King were alive, he’d . . .” suggest one function of historical figures in our contemporary society. Most of us tend to think well of ourselves when we have acted as we imagine our heroes might have done. Who our heroes are and whether they are presented in a way that makes them lifelike, hence usable as role models, could have a significant bearing on our conduct in the world.

We now turn to our first hero, Christopher Columbus. “Care should be taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition,” wrote Washington Irving, defending heroification.44 Irving’s three-volume biography of Columbus, published in 1828, still influences what high school teachers and textbooks say about the Great Navigator. Therefore, it will come as no surprise that heroification has stolen from us the important facets of his life, leaving only melodramatic minutiae.

2.

1493

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Columbus is above all the figure with whom the Modern Age—the age by which we may delineate these past 500 years—properly begins, and in his character as in his exploits we are given an extraordinary insight into the patterns that shaped the age at its start and still for the most part shape it today.

—KIRKPATRICK SALE1

As a subject for research, the possibility of African discovery of America has never been a tempting one for American historians. In a sense, we choose our own history, or more accurately, we select those vistas of history for our examinations which promise us the greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to explore the possibility that our founding father was a black man.

—SAMUEL D . MARBLE2

History is the polemics of the victor.

—WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in American Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.

—BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS3

In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole all he could see.

—TRADITIONAL VERSE, UPDATED

IN FOURTEEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO, Christopher Columbus sailed in from the blue. American history books present Columbus pretty much without precedent, and they portray him as America’s first great hero. In so canonizing him, they reflect our national culture. Indeed, 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. The one date that every schoolchild remembers is 1492, and sure enough, every textbook I surveyed includes it. But most of them leave out virtually everything that is important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize Columbus so readers will identify with him.

Columbus, like Christ, was so pivotal that historians use him to divide the past into epochs, making the Americas before 1492 “pre-Columbian.” American history textbooks recognize Columbus’s importance by granting him an average of a thousand words—three pages including a picture and a map—a lot of space, considering all the material these books must cover. Their heroic collective account goes something like this:

Born in Genoa, Italy, of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew up to become an experienced seafarer. He sailed the Atlantic as far as

Iceland and West Africa. His adventures convinced him that the world must be round. Therefore the fabled riches of the East—spices, silk, and gold—could be had by sailing west, superseding the overland route through the Middle East, which the Turks had closed off to commerce.

To get funding for his enterprise, Columbus beseeched monarch after monarch in western Europe. After at first being dismissed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got his chance when Queen Isabella decided to underwrite a modest expedition.

Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and set forth from Spain. The journey was difficult. The ships sailed west into the unknown Atlantic for more than two months. The crew almost mutinied and threatened to throw Columbus overboard. Finally they reached the West Indies on October 12, 1492.

Although Columbus made three more voyages to America, he never really knew he had discovered a New World. He died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring American history would have been very different, for in a sense Columbus made it all possible.

Unfortunately, almost everything in this traditional account is either wrong or unverifiable. The authors of history textbooks have taken us on a trip of their own, away from the facts of history, into the realm of myth. They and we have been duped by an outrageous concoction of lies, half-truths, truths, and omissions that is in large part traceable to the first half of the nineteenth century.

The textbooks’ first mistake is to underplay previous explorers. People from other continents had reached the Americas many times before 1492. Even if Columbus had never sailed, other Europeans would have soon reached the Americas. Indeed, Europeans may already have been fishing off Newfoundland in the 1480s.4 In a sense Columbus’s voyage was not the first but the last “discovery” of the Americas. It was epoch-making because of the way in which Europe responded. Columbus’s importance is therefore primarily attributable to changing conditions in Europe, not to his having reached a “new” continent.

American history textbooks seem to understand the need to cover social changes in Europe in the years leading up to 1492. They point out that history passed the Vikings by and devote several pages to the reasons Europe was ready

this time “to take advantage of the discovery” of America, as one textbook puts it. Unfortunately, none of the textbooks provides substantive analysis of the major changes that prompted the new response.

Most of the books I examined begin the Columbus story with Marco Polo and the Crusades. Here is their composite account of what was happening in Europe:

“Life in Europe was slow paced.” “Curiosity about the rest of the world was at a low point.” Then, “many changes took place in Europe during the 500 years before Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492.” “People’s horizons gradually widened, and they became more curious about the world beyond their own localities.” “Europe was stirring with new ideas. Many Europeans were filled with burning curiosity. They were living in a period called the Renaissance.” “The Renaissance encouraged people to regard themselves as individuals.” “What started Europeans thinking new thoughts and dreaming new dreams? A series of wars called the Crusades were partly responsible.” “The Crusaders acquired a taste for the exotic delights of Asia.” “The desire for more trade quickly spread.” “The old trade routes to Asia had always been very difficult.”

The accounts resemble each other closely. Sometimes different textbooks even use the same phrases. Overall, the level of scholarship is discouragingly low, perhaps because their authors are more at home in American history than European history. They don’t seem to know that the Renaissance was syncretic. That is, Italians combined ideas from India (via the Turks), Greece (preserved by Muslim scholars), Arabs, and other cultures to form something new. Authors also provide no real causal explanations for the age of European conquest. Instead, they argue for Europe’s greatness in transparently psychological terms —“people grew more curious.” Such arguments make sociologists smile: we know that nobody measured the curiosity level in Spain in 1492 or can with authority compare it to the curiosity level in, say, Norway or Iceland in 1005.

Several textbooks claim that Europe was becoming richer and that the new wealth led to more trade. Actually, as the historian Angus Calder has pointed out, “Europe was smaller and poorer in the fifteenth century than it had been in the thirteenth,” owing in part to the bubonic plague.5

Some teachers still teach what their predecessors taught me fifty years ago: that Europe needed spices to disguise the taste of bad meat, but the bad Turks cut

off the spice trade. Three books in my original sample—The American Tradition, Land of Promise, and The American Way—repeated this falsehood. In the words of Land of Promise, “Then, after 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, trade with the East all but stopped.” But A. H. Lybyer disproved this statement in 1915! Turkey had nothing to do with the development of new routes to the Indies. On the contrary, the Turks had every reason to keep the old Eastern Mediterranean route open, since they made money from it.6

In 1957 Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff published a book that has become a standard treatise for graduate students of history, The Modern Researcher, in which they pointed out how since 1915, textbooks have perpetuated this particular error. Probably several of the half-dozen authors of the offending textbooks encountered The Modern Researcher in graduate school. Somehow the information did not stick. This may be because blaming Turks fits with the West’s archetypal conviction that followers of Islam are likely to behave irrationally or nastily. In proposing that Congress declare Columbus Day a national holiday in 1963, Rep. Roland Libonati put it this way: “His Christian faith gave to him a religious incentive to thwart the piratical activities of the Turkish marauders preying upon the trading ships of the Christian world.” Of course, recent developments, most especially the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reinforce this archetype of a threatening Islam. College students today are therefore astonished to learn that Turks and Moors allowed Jews and Christians freedom of worship at a time when European Christians tortured or expelled Jews and Muslims. Not a single textbook tells that 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.7

Most textbooks note the increase in international trade and commerce, and some relate the rise of nation-states under monarchies. Otherwise, they do a poor job of describing the changes in Europe that led to the Age of Exploration. Some textbooks even invoke the Protestant Reformation, although it didn’t begin until twenty-five years after 1492.

What is going on here? We must pay attention to what the textbooks are telling us and what they are not telling us. The changes in Europe not only prompted Columbus’s voyages and the probable contemporaneous trips to America by Portuguese, Basque, and Bristol fishermen, but they also paved the way for Europe’s domination of the world for the next five hundred years.

Except for the invention of agriculture, this was probably the most consequential development in human history. Our history books ought to discuss seriously what happened and why, instead of supplying vague, nearly circular pronouncements such as this from The American Tradition: “Interest in practical matters and the world outside Europe led to advances in shipbuilding and navigation.”

Perhaps foremost among the significant factors the textbooks leave out are advances in military technology. 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. In 1493, the Americas began to succumb.8

We live with this arms race still. But the West’s advantage in military technology over the rest of the world, jealously maintained from the 1400s on, remains very much contested. Just as the thirteen British colonies tried to outlaw the sale of guns to Native Americans,9 the United States now tries to outlaw the sale of nuclear technology to Third World countries. A key point of George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been to deny nuclear weapons and other “weapons of mass destruction” to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and keep them out of the hands of terrorists like al-Qaeda. Since money is to be made in the arms trade, however, and since all nations need military allies, the arms trade with non- Western nations persists. 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 bookkeeping, and mechanical printing. Bureaucracy, which today has negative connotations, was actually a practical innovation that allowed rulers and merchants to manage far- flung enterprises efficiently. So did double-entry bookkeeping, based on the decimal system, which Europeans first picked up from Arab traders. The printing press and increased literacy allowed news of Columbus’s findings to travel across Europe much farther and faster than news of the Vikings’ expeditions.

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. As Columbus put it, “Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.” 10 In 1005 the Vikings intended only to settle Vineland, their name for New England and the maritime provinces of Canada. By 1493 Columbus planned to plunder Haiti.11 The sources are perfectly clear about Columbus’s motivation: 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.”12 Columbus was no greedier than the Spanish, or later the English and French. But most textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to the Americas when they describe Columbus and later explorers and colonists. Even the Pilgrims left Europe partly to make money, but you would never know it from our textbooks. Their authors apparently believe that to have America explored and colonized for economic gain is somehow undignified.

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. (Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) 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.” Here is one version:

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.13

Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Native Americans a

chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards then felt free to do whatever they wanted with the people they had just “discovered.”

A fifth development that caused Europe’s reaction to Columbus’s reports about Haiti to differ radically from reactions to earlier expeditions was Europe’s recent success in taking over and exploiting various island societies. On Malta, Sardinia, the Canary Islands, and, later, in Ireland, Europeans learned that conquest of this sort was a route to wealth. As described below, textbooks now do tell about a 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 since the Vikings had sailed.14

Why don’t textbooks mention arms as a facilitator of exploration and domination? Why do they omit most of the foregoing factors? If crude factors such as military power or religiously sanctioned greed are perceived as reflecting badly on us, who exactly is “us”? Who are the textbooks written for (and by)? Plainly, descendants of the Europeans.

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. (It’s interesting to speculate as to who, exactly, is this “we.”) Of course, there are no studies showing Americans to be more intelligent than, say, Iraqis. Quite the contrary: Jared Diamond begins his recent bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel by introducing a friend of his, a New Guinea tribesman, who Diamond thinks is at least as smart as Diamond, even though his culture must be considered “primitive.” Still, since textbooks don’t identify or encourage us to think about the real causes, “we’re smarter” festers as a possibility. Also left festering is the notion that “it’s natural” for one group to dominate another.15 While history brims with examples of national domination, it also is full of counterexamples. The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination. The traditional picture of Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately, and this is based on fact: 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. This is unfortunate, because Columbus’s voyages constitute a splendid teachable moment. As official

missions of a nation-state, they exemplify the new Europe. Merchants and rulers collaborated to finance and authorize them. The second expedition was heavily armed. Columbus carefully documented the voyages, including directions, currents, shoals, and descriptions of the residents as ripe for subjugation. Thanks to the printing press, detailed news of Haiti and later conquests spread swiftly. Columbus had personal experience of the Atlantic islands recently taken over by Portugal and Spain, as well as with the slave trade in West Africa. Most important, his purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade, but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale.16 If textbooks included these facts, they might induce students to think intelligently about why the West dominates the world today.

The textbooks concede that Columbus did not start from scratch. Every textbook account of the European exploration of the Americas begins with Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, between 1415 and 1460. Henry is portrayed as discovering Madeira and the Azores and sending out ships to circumnavigate Africa for the first time. The 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. Instead, the textbooks credit Bartolomeu Dias with being the first to round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488. Omitting the accomplishments of the Phoenicians is ironic, because it was Prince Henry’s knowledge of their feats that inspired him to replicate them.17 But this information clashes with another social archetype: our culture views modern technology as a European development. So the Phoenicians’ feats do not conform to the textbooks’ overall story line about how white Europeans taught the rest of the world how to do things. 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. Instead, they show Henry inventing navigation and imply that before Europe there was nothing, at least nothing modern. Several books tell how “the Portuguese designed a new kind of sailing ship—the caravel,” in the words of Boorstin and Kelley.

In fact, Henry’s work was based mostly on ideas that were known to the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians and had been developed further in Arabia, North Africa, and China. Even the word the Portuguese applied to their new ships, caravel, derived from the Egyptian caravos.18 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. Children in elementary school learn that Persian and Mediterranean civilizations flowered in antiquity owing to their location on trade routes. Here with Henry at the dawn of European world domination, textbooks have a golden opportunity to apply this same idea of cultural diffusion to Europe. They squander it. Not only did Henry have to develop new instruments, according to The American Way, but “people didn’t know how to build seagoing ships, either.”19 Students are left without a clue as to how aborigines ever reached Australia, Polynesians reached Madagascar, or prehistoric peoples reached the Canaries. By “people” Way means, of course, Europeans—a textbook example of Eurocentrism.

These books are expressions of what the anthropologist Stephen Jett calls “the doctrine of the discovery of America by Columbus.”20 Table 1 provides a chronological list of expeditions that may have reached the Americas before Columbus, with comments on the quality of the evidence for each as of 2006.21 While the list is long, it is still probably incomplete. A map found in Turkey dated 1513 and said to be based on material from the library of Alexander the Great includes coastline details of South America and Antarctica. 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.22 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.23

The evidence for each of these journeys offers fascinating glimpses into the societies and cultures that existed on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia before 1492. They also reveal controversies among those who study the distant past. If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged students to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they would also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of evidence—oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic changes, human genetics, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrations—that researchers use to derive

knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately, textbooks seem locked into a rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, coauthors of the textbook The United States—A History of the Republic, have also written After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.24 Davidson and Lytle’s high school textbook, however, like its competitors, presents history as answers, not questions.

TABLE 1. EXPLORERS OF AMERICA

New evidence that emerges, as archaeologists, historians, and biologists compare American cultures and life forms with cultures and life forms in Africa, Europe, and Asia, may confirm or disprove these arrivals. Keeping up with such evidence is a lot of work. To tell about earlier explorers, textbook authors would have to familiarize themselves with sources such as those cited in the three preceding notes. It’s easier just to retell the old familiar Columbus story.

Most of the textbooks I studied at least mention the expeditions of the Norse. These daring sailors reached America in a series of voyages across the North Atlantic, establishing communities on the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. The Norse colony on Greenland lasted five hundred years (982-c. 1500), as long as the European settlement of the Americas until now. From Greenland a series of expeditions, some planned, some accidental, reached various parts of North America, including Baffin Land, Labrador, Newfoundland, and possibly New England.

Most textbooks that mention the Viking expeditions minimize them. Land of Promise writes, “They merely touched the shore briefly, and sailed away.”

Perhaps the authors of Promise did not know that, around 1005, Thorfinn and Gudrid Karlsefni led a party of 65 or 165 or 265 homesteaders (the old Norse sagas vary), with livestock and supplies, to settle Vineland. They lasted two years; Gudrid gave birth to a son. Then conflict with Native Americans caused them to give up. This trip was no isolated incident: Norse were still exporting wood from Labrador to Greenland 350 years later. Some archaeologists and historians believe that the Norse got as far down the coast as North Carolina. The Norse discoveries remained known in western Europe for centuries and were never forgotten in Scandinavia. Columbus surely learned of Greenland and probably also of North America if he visited Iceland in 1477 as he claimed to have done.25