How do American colleges and universities teach American history? Conservatives may have a ready answer: poorly. But a ready answer can just as readily be deflected. At the National Association of Scholars (NAS) we decided to find out, as precisely as possible, how history is actually taught at two major universities.
Last month we published the findings of our study “Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?”, which examines freshman and sophomore U.S. history courses at the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. We found an extraordinary emphasis on race, class, and gender. At A&M 50 percent of history course material and at UT 78 percent of the assigned readings revolve around race, class, and gender.
Howard Zinn, Gary Nash, and Eric Foner are assigned fairly often in these courses; Walter McDougall, Bernard Bailyn, and John Lewis Gaddis, not at all. Likewise, primary source documents are relatively rare. The U.S. National Archives contain what are considered to be the hundred most important documents in United States history. Seventy-seven of them make no appearance at all in these courses; the twenty-three that do show up appear in the syllabi of only five instructors. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the Missouri Compromise, the Monroe Doctrine, the Homestead Act? None.
Race, class, and gender are important, but students can’t live on an intellectual diet of Abigail Adams and Fredrick Douglass alone. They need to learn something about the other dimensions of history: diplomacy, economics, politics, war, the history of ideas, scientific discovery, and religion.
We have received fierce pushback from the academic guild on our report. The executive director of the American Historical Association, James Grossman, for example, chided us in the Chronicle of Higher Education for supposedly ignoring the complexity of books that touch on race, or class, or women—as if we believed that a book on Abigail Adams was exclusively about women and not also about politics. Not at all. That said, if all you learn in college about the Adams administration and the Federalist period is that Abigail Adams was a political force in Washington who advocated for the property rights of married women, you have missed a few things.
Grossman also suggested that the NAS wants history to be all about white men. Our report calls precisely for recognition of historical complexity and the presentation, within the limits of freshman and sophomore history courses, of something closer to a comprehensive account. That’s a history that includes slavery and abolitionists, but also international treaties, financial booms and busts, the transformation of an agricultural nation into an industrial one, trusts and trust-busting, insurrections and wars, great ideas from Jonathan Edwards to William James, the changing role of government in citizens’ lives, technological breakthroughs from the cotton gin to the atom bomb, and the claims and contentions of faith among the American people.
We set out, with no idea of what we would find, to see how these universities were meeting Texas’ requirements for public college and university students in American history. The emphasis on race, class, and gender emerged entirely from the course syllabi, not our preconceptions. And our methods were scrupulous. We read all the readings (625 of them) in all the relevant courses and triple-checked with independent analysts all the classifications.
It would be very hard to find fault with our actual methods, which has led to our critics grasping for straws. Jeremi Suri, a UT professor, faults us for not visiting the classes, as though dropping in on a class would necessarily be a better measure of a semester’s content than the instructor’s syllabus.
Perhaps the most troubling response is the oft-repeated praise of subjectivity. As phrased by UT history professor Joan Neuberger, “There is no history that is politically neutral.” Or again, from UT professor of journalism Robert Jensen: “We all politicize history.” Or by “Jacqueline,” who commented on the NAS website, “Objectivity divorced from a perspective is not possible for us humans.” These are variations on the postmodernist theme that there is no truth, but only the clash of perspectives.
No study, no matter how scrupulous, can overcome this ideological idée fixe. Of course, while perfect neutrality may be beyond our reach as limited human beings, we can—and should—strive to give full and unbiased accounts of history. The “no neutrality is possible” mantra simply exalts political partisanship under the false pretense of intellectual sophistication. College students in Texas and everywhere else deserve better. They deserve teachers committed to bringing forward not just favored fragments of the truth, but the whole truth.
Ashley Thorne is director of the Center for the Study of the Curriculum at the National Association of Scholars.
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Comments:
I have seen a school textbook on the French Revolution, with a long chapter on the Terror that failed to mention that it began just after the fall of the frontier fortresses, Condé, Valenciennes and Metz and ended with the victory of Fleurus and the Occupation of Brussels. One might expect at least some discussion that these events were not unconnected.
I cite this example because it seems the result of obtuseness and tunnel-vision, rather than political bias.
I am courious...that means they don´t use primary sources at all (which will be trully problematic) or simply that they don´t use the primary sources some have decided are the "important ones". If it is the second, who is to decide what is an important primary source, if not the problem of investigation itself? But then, you seem inmune to the idea that the selection of sources cand be subjective (something not discoverd by posmodernists, as you pretend. Historiography since the early XX century - see for example french annales school in the 20´s- already knew that.
The recognition that "No history comes from unbiased sources," is indeed common sense. The problem is the embrace of known biased sources with a particular tilt. Teach the bias along with the interpretation. More important, teach multiple interpretations. Then the teaching becomes a study and not just an indoctrination.
My kids in HS and college where constantly being presented with bogus history. What is so troubling is how history teachers, proffesors and authors play fast and loose with the MOTIVATIONS of historical figures and events. That is were all the race, class, gender and christophobia come in. No college profs today would dispute that there was a U.S. Civil War from 1861-1865. But ask them WHY and 9 times out of 10 you'll get the wrong answer.
Really? What is wrong with speaking in history about race, class and gender? What do you mean with "cristophobia"? And, please, enligth us with the correct cause(s) of the civil war.
I got the wrong answer about the reasons for the Civil War from my history teacher in Virginia in 1956. She told us emphatically that the issue of slavery had no connection whatsoever with the Civil War. It was simply unrelated. So, the Confederacy was NOT fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. I would call that "bogus" history. Of course, we may be at risk of exchanging one distorted view of history for a different one now.
The problem might be, alternatively, stated this way: Is the study of history supposed to tell us what happened and what got resolved, or is it to tell us who are the victims and who are the oppressors? The latter stresses victimization and encourages the self-perception as either victim or oppressor, "privileged" or ; the former, statesmanship, deliberation, and, in a word, "politics" in the best sense.
There is no "clash of perspectives" when the academy only teaches one perspective.
Very well stated, Mr. Clark. The facts require a cultural context to explain the great movements within history. Race, gender, class, and religion very often play a part. One of my home educated children is currently writing a lengthy thesis about the rise of Nazism in Germany within the context of mental health. What made the Germans of the age so vulnerable to manipulation by the Nazi leaders? What went on in Hitler's tortured mind? What are the current theories regarding Hitler's psychological profile. It's a wonderfully refreshing perspective. As long as she can support her opinions with facts and references, I'm very happy to see her develop her own interpretations. The social psychology of historical situations certainly influence views regarding race, class, and gender in ways that might seem very foreign to us now. History, culture, and personality are closely intertwined.
Isn't that a bit a a false choice? I'll agree that history as "search for the victim" is pretty thin gruel, but I can think of any number of historical subjects in which somebody's victimhood is rather important to a simple recounting of "what happened," and where that fact isn't exactly incidental to the telling of the story. In any event, I'm reminded of a classic Yosemite Sam line, where he tells Nero: "Sorry sir, we're all out of victims," and my guess is that victim-mania is probably on its way out in the next decade or so of historical scholarship. Doesn't mean things will get better, just that the profession will find something else to be partisan about.
It is a pity the young at Texas A & M and whichever UT campus studied cannot learn real history. There are, however, other things to do with your time. It will take a couple of generations, but eventually this mess will die out. Their work will remain for a time in college libraries. Academic libraries are great cemeteries of the world's mediocre (and worse than mediocre) literature. At some point, an acquisitions librarian will notice that she's out of space and no one has looked at this wretched book in 30 years. Then it goes in the dumpster.
Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation were touched on in these courses. The following were never mentioned or studied in any of her courses on the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant (or any Union officer), Robert E. Lee (or any Confederate officer), any battles, any causes of the war, any explanation of why the Union won and the Confederacy failed, etc., etc., etc.
Her word for "bogus history" is "mush".
I think it's possible to do a fair job of including both insights, and I think it's also possible to emphasize one and ignore the other. No doubt it's true that we see only from a point of view, and that our point of view will be partial--judged by an imagined absolute standard we are all biased.
But it's folly to move from this commonplace to the position that therefore bias is not a problem. What Howard Zinn does is not history. It's a narrow telling of the tale, an ideological brief for a particular political cause. We can do better than that--and most, I think, do.
In other words read history, talk about it, argue about it, but absolutely don't trust schools to give it. The lecture method of teaching is simply not sufficient for teaching history. I don't know how students can be encouraged to do out of class work unless they actually like history. But trusting in lectures isn't enough.
Fascinating! To reiterate my above comment, when I was studying American history in the Virginia school system in 1956, I was told that slavery had no connection at all to the Civil War. Now, even in Virginia, the Civil War is ONLY about slavery! Couldn't the pendulum stop somewhere in the middle, instead of veering to extremes?
Surely you were scrupulous in your avoidance of preconceptions.
But it can hardly have come as a surprise, right?
