|
|
 |
|
|
|
Competing Perspectives on the Past in U.S. History Textbooks
|
|
| |
by Cora Greer
University of Maine at Machias
Machias, Maine
|
|
| | History is always interpretative of the past. Factual events, such as the Battle of Saratoga, become significant through the interpretations given to them by contemporaries and by the historians and others who view them from the distance of time, whose worldviews and biases are usually quite different from those accepted when the events took place.
In the contemporary culture wars that pair the Right versus the Left, two of the most popular surveys of the American past are written by Paul Johnson and Howard Zinn. As many AP United States History teachers have already found, Zinn's and Johnson's books show how the American past is seen from the perspectives of the contemporary Left and Right. This article compares their interpretations and discusses how to use them in an AP U.S. History survey course.
Competing Theses
Paul Johnson is an upper-middle-class English journalist/historian whose conservative roots are deep (his father supported Franco) but who, as a young man, supported the British Labour Party. By the 1970s, however, Johnson had become disillusioned with the policies and programs of Labour and realigned himself with the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher. A conservative Catholic, Johnson perceives a rejection of religion in both Darwinism and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Although he was initially a journalist (contributing reviews in America to the Wall Street Journal and National Review), he had by the 1970s turned his attention to historical interpretation.
Johnson's books that first attracted widespread interest in the United States were Modern Times (1983) and Birth of the Modern (1991). The antisecular, conservative tone of these books soon attracted the attention and praise of the American Right. The publication of A History of the American People (1997) made Johnson the historical spokesman of the American Right. His praises were sung by Rush Limbaugh; Steve Forbes termed the book "a magnificent achievement"; and Newt Gingrich announced it as "perhaps the most important history of the American people in our generation."
It is Johnson's thesis that the preeminence of the United States in the world results from the nation's adherence to capitalist economics, minimalist government, and a strong religious foundation based on Judeo-Christian principles. To Johnson, these are the roots of American exceptionalism, and when these principles are violated, as they were in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the United States is in danger.
Howard Zinn, the child of immigrants to the United States, was employed as a shipyard worker while still in his teens and was also active as a labor organizer. He served in World War II as a bombardier in the Army Air Force, and this experience was a major factor in his evolving opposition to war. The GI Bill gave Zinn the opportunity to further his education, and he received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1958. Zinn was an academic teaching at Spelman College and Boston University, and he was also an active participant in the civil rights struggle, antiwar movement, and women's rights movement of the 1960s; this involvement continues to the present. Zinn is a prolific author, and he has been an important spokesman for the American Left since the 1960s.
Zinn's A People's History of the United States -- first published in 1980 and revised in 1995 -- has sold over a million copies and is the standard text for those who want to see American history from the perspective of the Left. Zinn, like many of his contemporaries, focuses on history from the "bottom up." He argues that traditional historians neglect the role played by the common person, minorities, labor unions, immigrants, and Native Americans in the shaping of the nation. Zinn's basic thesis is that the United States, from its inception, is a country where power lies with an economic elite whose interests are not those of the common person and who do not hesitate to exploit the lower classes. A People's History reflects the belief that the nation's history is an ongoing struggle of the common people against the elites who dominate America's political, social, and economic institutions.
Points of Agreement
Although both authors analyze the American past from opposite perspectives, surprisingly they are often in agreement about particular events, albeit for profoundly different reasons. Take, for example, the New Deal. Most mainstream surveys see the legacy of this period in a positive light. This selection from Alan Brinkley's American History: A Survey (1999) is typical.
The structure of the economy remained essentially the same as in earlier times although there were some... new regulatory agencies -- and an important new role for organized labor, enforced by a new federal law. Nothing the New Deal did ended the Great Depression, but some of its policies kept it from getting worse -- and some of them pointed the way toward more effective economic policies in the future. Perhaps the most important legacy of the New Deal was to create a sense of possibilities among many Americans, to persuade them that the fortunes of individuals need not be left entirely to chance or to the workings of the market. Many Americans emerged from the 1930s convinced that individuals deserved some protections from the unpredictability and instability of the modern economy, and that the New Deal... had demonstrated the value of enlisting Government in the effort to provide those protections. (p. 901)
To Johnson, however, the policies and programs, first of Hoover and then of Roosevelt, represent a tragic failure:
[B]oth administrations, by their meddlesome activism, impede a natural recovery brought about by deflation... Far from trusting to the traditional American ability to fend for one's self, the children of the slump turned... to the state, to Big Government to save, nourish, and protect them... the [new] Democratic hegemony enabled FDR to lay the foundation for the modern welfare state. (1998, pp. 757, 762)
Thus the policies and programs of the Great Society would expand the welfare state and have disastrous consequences.
Zinn, on the other hand, believes the Great Depression provided an ideal opportunity for the people to be part of a democratic economic and social revolution that would replace rapacious capitalism and rule by elites with a people's democracy. Unlike Johnson, he sees the programs and policies of FDR as providing just enough to keep the masses from revolting:
When the New Deal was over, capitalism remained intact. The rich still controlled the nation's wealth, as well as its laws, courts, police, newspapers, churches, colleges. Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis -- the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need -- remained. (1995, p. 394)
As with Progressivism and Reconstruction, an opportunity to fulfill the American promise was missed.
Teaching About Textbook Interpretations
All too often our students tend to see history as a compilation of dull and irrelevant factoids. One of the primary tasks of those teaching any history class is to make students aware that history is a discipline that is based on the interpretations of the past by historians and others. Once the respective theses of Zinn and Johnson are understood, predicting how each will view a particular aspect of American history is not difficult. But what such an exercise cannot do is show how historical interpretation changes over time, and how contemporary values and worldviews impact these interpretations. For these reasons, it would make more sense for AP teachers to begin by having students examine how historians' views of the past have evolved.
One of the easiest ways to deal with changing historical interpretations is to have students examine how textbooks reflect these changes. The premier college text of the 1940s and 1950s was The Growth of the American Republic by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. Copies of Growth can be an invaluable resource, and copies are not difficult to find. (Teachers should note, however, that editions published after 1960 will not be as useful.)
The first exercise with students might well be an examination of the index. For instance, one could give students a copy of the page that contains references to women or Negroes, or to specific people and events; another exercise might be to check specific references on topics such as the Mexican War, treatment of slaves, Reconstruction, and Progressives. These exercises should raise a number of questions for class discussion or debate. What topics are mentioned in today's texts, but not in Growth? Why, for example, is there no reference to the Seneca Falls convention? Why is the treatment of topics so different from the text they are using? What might be the impact of Growth's interpretations on the mind-set of the generations who used them?
Exercises of this sort will provide students with a historical context from which to analyze and evaluate the writings of Zinn and Johnson. It should become obvious to students that the latter obviously respects many of the interpretations of an older generation of historians. For example, Johnson's appraisals of Reconstruction and the women's movement are more in keeping with those in Growth than with contemporary texts. Zinn, though to the left of most current historians, is closer to their interpretation of both.
Understanding these distinctions is important when analyzing the worldviews of the Right and the Left in America today. Comparing the interpretations of Johnson and Zinn, especially when done in conjunction with the interpretation of contemporary texts, can give students a sense of current historical debates. It also gives students the means to understand that the writing -- and understanding -- of history itself is an art of interpretation, but an art that is grounded by reference to particular events and facts.
References
Brinkley, Alan. 1999. American History: A Survey. 10th ed. McGraw-Hill College.
Johnson, Paul. 1998. A History of the American People. HarperCollins.
Zinn, Howard. 1995. A People's History of the United States. Rev. ed. Harper Perennial.
For More Information
BookNotes appearances of Johnson and Zinn on C-SPAN: Johnson: April 5, 1998; Zinn: March 12, 2000.
Cora Greer has taught in California, Massachusetts, and Maine -- most recently at the University of Maine at Machias. She has served as Reader and Table Leader at the AP U.S. History Reading, been a consultant in AP U.S. History, Building Success, and Vertical Teams, and won the College Board New England Region's Advanced Placement Recognition Award for Excellence in Teaching.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Course Home Pages