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American history curriculum, with an eye to bias
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Question:
I'm looking for a book that I can use for American history next year,
with four kids in (next year) grades 7-12.
Plenty of history books are available. Most of the books marketed to
homeschoolers appear to present America as a land of heroes, and
conservatism as God's gift to humanity.
(And you can find a few that present the opposite view: books that
paint America as a land of oppressors. Zinn, _A_People's_History_ is
one such example.)
Although I have my own political leanings, I want my kids to get a
view from all sides.
But so far, I've only seen two sides! America is ALL GOOD or ALL BAD.
The author wants to persuade the reader to become LIBERAL or
CONSERVATIVE.
We have almost a third of a billion people in this nation, and only
two viewpoints? Surely, there are more than these two!
What else is out there? (In terms of curriculum or classroom
supplies.)
Obviously, I'll want to use more than one resource for this class.
can you help me??
Answer:
-I recommend _Daughter of Time_ by Josehpine Tey. This is a detective
novel, not a history book. As a modern detective investigates the alleged
murder of the "princes in the tower" by Richard III of England, it shows
how history is co-opted by ideology and explains how to investigate history
from primary sources. I suggest you and your children all read and discuss
this book together. Then you might pick a specific issue or period in
American history and do research from primary sources.
-All I can say is what we do. We do "American history" in roughly
three passes. First is when the kids are in elementary grades and still
learning to read. So, with each of our children we have had them read
aloud the complete "Little House" series (well, the Laura Ingalls Wilder
authorship thereof). That starts to teach a sense of history, of there
having been a past time in which things were different. We supplement
this with unit studies and other interests as they come up. For example,
Martha is doing "Indians" with Galen, our 7 yo at the moment, and
plans to for the whole of this year. She was motivated to do this both
by Galen's interest in the subject and an annoyance with
encountering blanket assertions in other contexts that portrays all
Native Americans as though they came from one single monolithic culture
and as though they all were and are unswervingly paragons of
environmental correctness. In any event, she's been getting lots of
books from the library and doing more intensive reading into specific
Native American cultures. And we've been supplementing that as we have
materials to hand. For instance, Galen and I watched "Black Robe" as
a kind of capstone to the section they did on the Iroquois. That's quite
an adult film, with sex and very graphic violence. However, it exactly
matches the picture of life among the Iroquois and related nations
(Algonquin and Huron) that I got from reading the history of the Jesuit
missions to the Hurons in Francis Parkman's great history of "France and
England in North America". (I do not censor young eyes from sex
or violence, and in fact it seems to me one of the spurs to show Galen
this film was the fact that many of the books-for-children in the
library about the Iroquois tended to soft-pedal the violence and the
warrior-culture of that people. It is simply obvious to me that, to
Galen, descriptions of how the women made baskets or the wierd system of
clan structure was a whole lot less interesting than how they made
captives run the gauntlet, and how they cut captured enemies' ears and
fingers off, prior to maybe killing them or no.)
Anyway, that kind of stuff is what we do, as I said, during what
I would call the "learning to read" stage. I mean, Galen knew how
to read from his Grandma's lap before we ever started homeschool
with him, but we still teach reading as a subject, and ramp the kids up
to an adult level of reading by using the McGuffey Readers and having
them read aloud from them, as well as books like the "Little House"
series and "Narnia" and "Old Yeller" and such. Anyway, during this
"elementary" or "learning to read" stage, a lot of "subject" reading---
such as history or science---gets read to the child by the parent.
Towards the end of this stage, we do a second pass at American history
where the parent reads Joy Hakim's 10- or 11-volume "A History of US" to
the child. It's easy to do in a school year reading a couple of chapters
a day. I know Kanga is less than enthusiastic about it, but, for younger
kids especially I think it is wonderful. The chapters are short, and
she writes history as story. They are written by an evident person, and
that person a writer, not a committee, and a writer who is writing
a story to children. Their scope is huge. Not only Presidents
and Gettysburg, but Osceola and Ida B. Wells and Robert Carter III and
Richard Feynman. Also, I like this history for the fact that it goes
all the way up to Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings. [Bit of
an explanatory digression here: The part of James W. Loewen's _Lies
My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong_ that I
personally like the best is the opening to Chapter Nine on the
Vietnam War where he talks about what he claims is an
African categorization of all people into the living, the sasha
and the zamani. The living is an obvious category and the zamani
are the dead. But what is meant here is the "historically
dead"---Frederick II "Il Stupor Mundi" or Abraham Lincoln or Whiskey
and Soda of the Lafayette Escadrille. Then the sasha is a third category
of people who are "living-dead", meaning the more recent past, people
and events in living people's living memory. And Loewen says that there
is a tendency both in his own experience of American history as
taught in public schools, and in the American history textbooks that
he specifically reviewed in his book, for history to ignore the sasha.
That is, one avoids in K-12 history classes the *recent past*. And
Loewen basically says that the reason for this is that the ghosts of
the recent past are too much alive, too much with us, too controversial
still. I say I like this categorization he proposes because, in my
experience of public-school "history" classes, this was exactly my
experience. We seldom got into the 20th century. Probably in part this
was a time-management thing---we just never got to those chapters in the
book. But, also, the books certainly didn't want to come within a
country mile of the subject of Vietnam, say.] Anyway, I also want to
praise Joy Hakim for including the sasha. That said, I think Hakim's
political preferences are obvious---she really dislikes Ronald
Reagan, for example, and really likes, say, FDR and LBJ (though she
certainly doesn't softpedal LBJ's lying us into the Vietnam War) and
Bill Clinton.
Anyway, that sums up the "second pass" through American history in the
Morris household. Joy Hakim, read to the child aloud by the parent.
Then, once the kids "graduate" from learning to read, history becomes a
full-time subject where they are assigned reading to read on their own.
So, we get to the third pass through American history. On that pass,
we use Samuel Eliot Morison's three-volume "Oxford History of the
American People" as the backbone text. Morison is, in my opinion,
probably *the* great American narrative historian from the 20th century.
And this history was first recommended to me as a "profound" supplement
to "great books" reading in Clifton Fadiman's _Lifetime Reading Plan_.
I love his biography of Columbus, his two volumes on the European
voyages of discovery, his work on Puritan settlements in New England,
and what I've read so far of his multivolume official "History of US
Naval Operations in World War II"---he made art for the navy where the
other services produced committee-written dullities. Morison I think is
deeply conservative, but maybe not in the sense you would take that
word, Ted. He's a Massachusetts Brahmin, having met and conversed with
half the Presidents he writes about. I suspect that he probably voted
as a Democrat, though I'm not sure of that. In any event, his
treatment of the issue of slavery and the Civil War is, well,
profound, as is his treatment of the Hamiltonian versus
Jeffersonian argument about American government that continues as a
constitutional theme to this day, and his treatment of the second
world war and the run-up thereto and aftermath therefrom. And,
in Morison I like the fact that he is simply better at politics and
war than many another US history, and that he manages to convey a
wealth of information about social history as well. He loves horses,
and you'll find a history of famous horses and the development of
horse breeds in his text, and I defy anyone to read him and come
away without a love and appreciation for clipper ships as well
(I think he calls them something like "our pyramids"). Anyway,
we use this as a backbone text in US history at a middle-school
age.
We also supplement it a lot. Helen is paused in the third volume of
Morison at the moment, having read through WWI. So we stopped here there
and gave her James L. Stokesbury's _A Short History of the First World
War_, which she is reading. When she is through with that, we plan to
put her through the short chronological descriptions of WWI battles in
David Eggenberger's _An Encyclopaedia of Battles: Accounts of Over 1560
Battles from 1479 BC to the Present_, and then watch WWI-relevant films,
which off the top of my head include "All Quiet on the Western Front",
"Paths of Glory", "Sergeant York", "The Blue Max", "Nicholas
and Alexandra", "Reds", "Gallipoli", "Lawrence of Arabia", and
the BBC documentary "The Great War". We also, for her subject of
"literature" gave her Siegfried Sassoon's 3-volume "Memoirs of George
Sherston" to read (which ties in both Helen's love of horses with
the character Sherston's enthusiasm for fox-hunting, and the horrors of
trench warfare in WWI).
We alternate a year or two of American with years of world
history (meaning mostly but not exclusively Western history).
I don't know if we will have time for a fourth pass through
American history. Zan will finish his pass through world history
this year, and will probably spend one more year after this one
with us doing homeschool. Probably what we will
do is let Zan pick what he wants to do for history, and encourage him to
delve deeply into one event or period, although doing something like
Chinese history or African history might be also an idea.
Anyway, I guess if I were to have time for doing a fourth pass
through the whole of American history, I might take again Clifton
Fadiman's recommendation for Page Smith's multivolume "A People's
History of the United States". Fadiman basically says you read
Page Smith for the vast detail, and Morison for the profundity.
I will say I'm not at all taken with Jayne's suggestion of
Josephine Tey's novel, _The Daughter of Time_. Nor am I impressed
with the idea of "going to primary sources". I've listened to
Tey's novel as a book on tape. It's a fun piece, with her detective
stuck in bed convalescing and using the time to read up and
think about the historical mystery of who exactly killed the
"Princes in the Tower", which ...
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