Back when I was teaching history, I used to ask my students on the first day of class why they were there. Why does the state want you to learn about history when there are so many other things you could be studying?
Answers were predictable. We study history to become better citizens, so we won't be hoodwinked by smooth-talking politicians, so we can appreciate all that our ancestors went through, or so we won't repeat the mistakes of the past. I would then reject all of these and suggest the only legitimate reason to study history is because it's fun. And if a student doesn't think it's fun to look at the past, why should that student bother?
I went on to ask whether history is cyclical - that is if certain themes develop and repeat themselves - or linear, meaning the past really doesn't have much to say about our present circumstances. And that, in turn, let me ask the students if they could think of metaphors for history.
I started them off with a couple of examples. The French historians, Will and Ariel Durant, liked to say that history is like a stream flowing between banks. The water represents all the supposedly great people, the politicians, generals, inventors and so forth, while on the banks the rest of us live, making a living, having families, singing songs and such. Historians, they said, are pessimists because they concentrate on the stream and ignore the banks.
Leo Tolstoy likened history to the image of a monkey riding the back of an elephant. The monkey chatters and screams and pulls on the elephant's ears, and thinks he's steering the elephant. Meanwhile, the elephant is just ambling along and only has about two things on his (or her) mind: getting enough to eat and making little elephants. Maybe he notices the monkey, but he doesn't pay much attention to it. Of course, like the Durants, Tolstoy equated the monkey with those "great" people and the elephant with the rest of humanity.
Other metaphors of history offered by the students included the sine curve from trigonometry and a coiled rattlesnake. Both are suggestions for a cyclical concept of history, one going up and down predictably and the other calling to our minds the image that events might be far apart chronologically, but close together on the coils. In like manner, there's the idea that history is like a long poem - it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
My own image of history, which I finally gave to the students, is that history is like going to a carnival and looking in the mirrors at the funhouse. No matter how much you try to see a true reflection, there are going to be distortions. The quest of historians is to smooth out the mirrors, knowing they'll never be truly successful.
I'm bringing all this up because there's a guy named David Barton who seems to be warping the mirrors rather than flattening them. And I wouldn't care except that Mr. Barton now has a considerable influence on the teaching of American history. And I wouldn't bring that up except that his influence seems particularly strong in Texas. And I wouldn't bring that up except that Texas buys all its textbooks in a single purchase, rather than let the individual counties and municipalities decide on textbooks themselves. And I wouldn't bring that up except that Texas has more young people in their schools than any other state other than California.
All of which means that if you're a publisher of textbooks, Texas is your biggest single customer, and you'd better write those books to comply with Mr. Barton's vision of our past, a view that is contradicted on myriad points by nearly all reputable historians.
Look him up yourself and decide if what he says is accurate. And remember, wishing something was so didn't make it so.
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