Illustration: Randall Enos
History, like politics, is based on framing and spin. For two centuries, authors of history texts have used whitewashed tales of our nation's founding to provide young people with a shared view
of America, a national self-portrait deemed to be patriotic. The biases in old textbooks are transparent—but have we left mythologizing behind?
Although textbooks in recent years have certainly become more inclusive, giving the nod to multiculturalism is not synonymous with getting the story right. We've come a long way, baby—but we have a long way to go.
In conjunction with my latest book, Founding Myths: Stories that Hide our Patriotic Past , I have reviewed 22 current elementary, middle school, and high school texts. Fourteen were displayed at a recent National Council for the Social Studies convention, while eight are approved for use in California, which has among the strictest criteria in the nation. I compared the 13 mythologies of the American Revolution discussed in my book with those perpetuated in these texts, and the results are startling. Although some texts fare better than others, all contain some serious lapses.
Most texts do mention African-American participation in the war, but they focus primarily on those who sided with the Americans. In fact, those who sided with the British were far more numerous, but you'd never guess it from reading the texts. When they offer numbers, they typically compare the estimated number of black patriot soldiers during the course of the entire war (5,000) with the number of slaves who sought freedom with the British in a single week (generally cited as 300). The myth of the patriotic slave is not far removed from that of the happy slave.