Goodnight Moon; or, Why We Don’t Know Much about History

Why is there so much drama around U.S. history textbooks? Honestly, with the exception of people reading a review like this, everyone hates them—students, teachers, and taxpayers. Their weight and impenetrable text guarantee that they will remain unread. Even so, we spend enormous cultural energy defending or attacking them. Teachers, parents, educational and cultural critics on all sides of the political spectrum desperately want students of all ages to know something about the national past and to care about it. What this something might be is, of course, really the source of the drama.

What, how, and from whom students should learn history are deeply political questions, tied to the task of nation building. In order to avoid drama and politics, textbooks at all levels have moved in two different directions. Some, in order to be inclusive, have added all the groups, stories, and details left out of the “we the people” narrative, but that has made the texts encyclopedic, expensive, and even harder to read. Others take an opposite approach, creating “brief editions” so spare and so short that all the human actors are gone. Things just happen, but quickly and without suspense or detail. And the result has been that students report they hate history, while tests demonstrate, over and over again, that they don’t know much. Textbooks play a role in history education, but so do teachers, students, and communities, making the problem far more complicated.

Historians Roy Rosensweig and David Thelen covered much of this terrain nearly two decades ago. In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life they conducted a large survey of U.S residents and concluded that citizens do care deeply about history. However, Americans view their own personal, family, and local histories as far more accurate and important than the national story, in whatever form it is taught. More worrisome, when the “official” U.S. story of progress and uplift collided with family histories and personal experiences of struggle and isolation, such disjunctures made people distrustful and even bitter toward history classrooms, teachers, and textbooks.¹ This raises a bigger, maybe more important set of questions. What is history’s job—to tell a hopeful story of nationhood that makes some version of “us” feel good about the past or to tell a darker, more critical version to trouble another version of “us”? Can a narrative, tasked with bringing a modern nation together, even exist in a postmodern, more globally focused moment? The three books reviewed here set out the challenges and consider some answers.

James West Davidson, in his A Little History of the United States, promises to tell a more inclusive history, but also to keep it short and to maintain a strong narrative line about the “us” that makes U.S. history. The book has a warm, inviting tone, although Davidson admits a few historical episodes are “sad” from the beginning—such as violence, epidemic disease, and the dispossession of indigenous people. There is inequality, there are poor people; but all citizens “dreamed of making the United States a freer and more perfect union” (p. 130). All is well because the ideology and heart of the nation are solid; toleration, religious freedom, and a desire for equality are girded by a government designed to uphold such ideals (p. 244).

Written without footnotes or sources of any kind, which is supposed to make it more inviting to younger readers, the book operates like a long version of Goodnight Moon...