Failing History Textbooks

by Kerby Anderson, Point of View: America's history textbooks are not teaching accurate history, and Professor Larry Schweikart is not pleased. He is a history professor at the University of Dayton and has been investigating what history textbooks are teaching America's students.  He says that if you "surveyed ten of the most widely used American history survey textbooks looking at the twentieth century" you would expect that the most commonly used picture would be Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If not that, perhaps you would think it would be a picture of the atomic bomb or even the famous picture of the sailor kissing the woman in Times Square signaling the end of World War II. Sadly the most used picture is a picture of the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, many of the textbooks take two pages to describe the Klan. Schweikart goes on to say that the implication of the pictures and text suggest that the "Roaring Twenties" were racist and economic growth in the decade was due to nativism and intolerance.

Schweikart finds all sorts of half-truths and lies in history books and history textbooks. One is: "The founders envisioned a wall of separation between church and state, keeping religious influence out of government." Whole books have been written to dispute this idea. Schweikart dispatches it in a few pages. The problem with this issue of church and state is that it can influence students (future judges, politicians, and citizens) to have an incorrect view of the First Amendment. Likewise, poor history books can also give us an incorrect view of the Second Amendment.

Michael Bellesiles, wrote a book titled, Arming America in which he argued that few people in early America owned guns. He then launches into an attack on the American gun culture. Schweikart points out that there have been journal articles and entire books criticizing the serious errors all through the book. Many critics show that the errors were not a result of careless mistakes but deliberate falsifications. The half-truths and lies in history books and especially in history textbooks have consequences. Schweikart shows that these books need serious revision. I'm Kerby Anderson, and that's my point of v

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