HISTORY LESSONS: WHAT WE’RE TAUGHT AND WHAT’S IGNORED
By Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader
Utne Reader Online
tory/12741-1.html
Aug 21 2007
It’s been nearly 30 years since historian Howard Zinn fired a shot
across the bow of Columbus’ ship with A People’s History of the United
States (Harper & Row, 1980), a landmark book that viewed U.S.
history through the eyes of ordinary Americans and punched holes in
some of the nation’s most enduring myths: that Columbus was a gallant
adventurer, for instance, that class and race divisions have largely
been swept away, and that most of the country’s wars have served the
"national interest." The book turned "revisionist historian" into
a rote epithet among many conservatives, and turned Zinn into an
oft-struck lightning rod in the culture wars.
Zinn has endured the long storm with grace and perseverance, and
now that A People’s History has sold over a million copies and been
incorporated into more and more classroom curricula, he’s no longer
easily dismissed as an agitator from the fringe. He still speaks
tirelessly, works for social change as an unapologetic activist, and
writes in a straightforward style that retains its ability to provoke
thought and challenge assumptions ("Can We Handle the Truth?" p. 51).
Even history teachers who disagree with Zinn on some matters have found
a reliable recipe for vigorous classroom debate: Read a conventional
history book. Read Zinn. Discuss. Fireworks are sure to follow.
It’s not just the United States, of course, that’s wrestling with how
its national story is told and taught. In Australia, a disagreement
over interpretations of the country’s European colonization has
morphed into a long-running public battle known as the history wars.
Turkey has yet to collectively comprehend its involvement in the
genocide of Armenian Christians, while Germany, which has in many ways
forthrightly confronted the horrors of the Holocaust, is encountering
resistance to Holocaust studies from young members of its Arab and
Muslim minorities ("Forgetting Hitler," p. 54). Clearly, even a nation
that has gone out of its way to face the past must struggle to keep its
"revised" storyline credible and to ensure that it is widely shared.
While many of us are reflexively bored when we hear the word history
and downright repulsed by the idea of a history book, we flock to
period movies and biopics about historical figures, watch the History
Channel, and consume shelf-loads of historical fiction and biography.
We get interested, it seems, when we explore the human lives behind the
cavalcade of events. Astute educators like English professor Patrick
Hicks ("In the Trenches," p. 58) take advantage of this phenomenon to
draw connections between literature and history, World War I and the
Iraq War, today’s college students and yesteryear’s foot soldiers. We
can only hope that more nonhistorians like him continue to mine the
power of art to bring the past alive.
In the meantime, the field of history is branching out in exciting new
directions. The Internet has opened up a rich forum for all manner
of historical material and debate, from massive photo and document
archives such as those at the Library of Congress ()
to captivating blogs such as Cliopatria (hnn.us/blogs/2.html) and
Steamboats Are Ruining Everything (). Institutions
like the Holocaust Museum are bringing history alive in powerful
ways that don’t sacrifice accuracy for impact. And the historical
sciences-geology, biology, paleoanthropology-are continually adding
new information to the ancient story of humans on earth, thanks in
part to new technology and methods.
Harvard history professor Daniel Lord Smail argues in his forthcoming
book On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press,
2007) that history should trace its subjects–humans–right back to
their beginnings in the Stone Age, rather than focusing, as most
historians do, on the period since the rise of civilization and
dismissing what preceded it as "prehistory." This "deep history,"
he says, would be "a seamless narrative that acknowledges the full
chronology of the human past."
It ought to be one hell of a story, and a blockbuster of a movie.