The Language Police by Diane Ravitch

Author:Diane Ravitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307428851
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

History: The Endless Battle

Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and of course, competently. Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that freedom for those who do not possess it.

—Bernard Lewis, “Other People’s History”

IN HER BOOK America Revised, Frances FitzGerald wrote about the frenzied cutting and pasting of American history textbooks during the 1970s. The social upheavals of the previous decade, she observed, prompted “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place in American schoolbooks.” Responding to the demands of racial minorities and women, publishers dropped old heroes and added new ones. But the changes went well beyond the addition of new heroes. After years of civil disorder and antiwar protests, the upbeat, patriotic tone of American history textbooks written in the 1950s looked hopelessly naïve. The post-Vietnam textbooks rearranged not only surface details about American history, FitzGerald said, but also “the character of the United States.” In place of the traditional coherent narrative about a nation that was constantly strengthening and expanding its democratic institutions, the textbooks presented what she called a “bewildering” litany of problems, crises, and conflicts.1

FitzGerald recognized that revision of history textbooks was both inevitable and necessary, but she concluded that the attempts over the years by both fundamentalists and progressives to impose on the books an idealized version of the past had resulted in ubiquitous censorship. This censorship occurred not in local communities, but at the source, in the publishing offices where the books were written and edited.2

Before the 1970s, American history textbooks had told a story of steady progress and (as one popular high school textbook was titled) “the triumph of the American nation.” That triumphant march forward, however, left out important events and participants in American history. Until the civil rights movement, African Americans were scarcely noticed, except for their role as slaves, then forgotten. The transatlantic slave trade was mentioned in passing, rather than as one of history’s most heinous crimes against humanity. The older texts ignored the wanton brutality of European explorers toward indigenous peoples in the New World. Women were offstage characters, as were immigrants and other ethnic minorities. The revisions of the early 1970s aimed to rectify these omissions.

As we have seen in earlier chapters, the political orientation of textbooks has long been contested. As publishers reached for a national market, they sought to avoid the controversies that might sink their books. Authors and editors cultivated an omniscient tone, radiating objectivity and authority. Unfortunately, the very format of the history textbook compels distortions; it presumes that a single book can render objective and decisive judgment on hundreds or thousands of controversial issues. In fact, the only sure truths in the books are dates and names (and sometimes the textbooks get those wrong). Beyond that, there is seldom, if ever, a single interpretation of events on which all reputable historians agree.

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