Rewriting History for Children

Some things never change, but the presentation of American history is not one of them. According to Frances FitzGerald, in her recent analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history texts, these works have variously tucked away unpleasantries and wrapped up with high-minded moralizing the facts and figures that make up our American heritage. In America Revised, FitzGerald traces shifts in the interpretive stances taken by authors and publishers of history schoolbooks, ranging from an emphasis on historical personages to attention to social groups to today's case studies, or "discovery" texts, which offer no definitive interpretation but ask the child reader to act as historian and draw conclusions from primary and secondary evidence.

Even the recorded facts have changed: Columbus has been superseded by such social reformers as Jacob Riis and William Lloyd Garrison, and once-heralded military generals have faded away as black Americans, ethnic minorities, and women emerge in the newer tellings of American history. The books sound and look different, too. The anecdotal style of the nineteenth century gave way in the 1890s to a telegraphic style that conveyed a new tone of restraint and (spurious) objectivity. In current textbooks, the word "progress" has become "change," and terms like "fatherland" and "founding fathers" are not to be found. As a result of attention to reproductions of folk art, photography, and other primary materials, these contemporary texts also diverge in visual style from their predecessors. FitzGerald likens the physical appearance of new history books to Architectural Digest or Vogue.

What has not changed throughout all the repackagings the American past has endured in the textbooks, FitzGerald tells us, is the regrettable mediocrity inherent in the conception of these texts. She calls textbook editors the "arbiters of American values" (p. 27); and history textbooks, in particular, a "kind of lowest common denominator of American tastes" (p. 46). Always quick to avoid controversy, developers of recent history schoolbooks—for, FitzGerald notes, they are "developed," not "written"—approach history "backward or inside out, as it were, beginning with public demand and ending with the historian" (p. 69). "New scholarship trickles down extremely slowly into the school texts," FitzGerald writes (p. 43). In fact, she finds the most disheartening constant in the texts to be their silence on the subject of intellectual history; it remains a "well-kept secret," for example, that the founding fathers were intellectuals (pp. 150-51). (They and other powerful Americans are never credited with serious thinking.) And texts make no attempt to link the politics, economics, and culture within a given period or from one era to another. This failure to provide conceptual connections for historical events leads to what FitzGerald calls the "Natural Disaster" theory of history: "events . . . simply appear, like Athena out of the head of Zeus. And History is just one damn thing after another" (p. 161).

All this is not to say that FitzGerald finds no relief from the mediocrity underlying old and new history schoolbooks. Her descriptions of the personality behind the sixty-five-year success of David Saville Muzzey's "American History," of the scholarly Renaissance in history textbooks between 1910 and 1930, of the inductive method in today's "discovery" texts demonstrate that there has, here and there, been substantial, if not total, respite for American children from the stultifying "history-as-truth" tradition. And, for FitzGerald's readers, considerable relief from the dreariness of the subjects dealt with comes from the author's own witty but never facile style, as well as from her careful avoidance of reductive conclusions regarding her sad tale of the oversimplified vision in the schoolbooks of an America "sculpted and sanded down by the pressures of diverse constituents and interest groups" (pp. 46-47). Her continual inquiries into the problems publishers have faced—and into their motivations for watering down history—provide an ongoing subplot in addition to a partial explanation of why the subject matter of American history texts has been so protean.

My only reservation about FitzGerald's work is the diffusion...