people who participated in struggles to preserve their identities and their land.
Included were Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus Attucks (first casualty of the
Revolution, who was also part black in ancestry), Sequoyah (who invented the
Cherokee alphabet), and Navajo code-talkers in World War II. In 2003, the
successor, Holt American Nation, had forty-three illustrations of American
Indians. Some other textbooks published after 2000 continue this trend of
giving more attention to Native Americans. The Americans stands out for its
honest coverage of some of the events this chapter will treat, and American
Journey, the middle-school textbook, is close behind.
Nevertheless, the authors of American history textbooks still “need a crash
course in cultural relativism and ethnic sensitivity,” as James Axtell put it in
- Even The Americans, the best of these books, devotes its first two pages
to a reproduction of Benjamin West’s 1771 painting, Penn’s Treaty with the
Indians. Painted almost a century after the event, West followed the usual
convention of depicting fully clothed Europeans—even with hats, scarves, and
coats—presenting trade goods to nearly naked Americans. In reality, of course,
no two groups of people have ever been dressed so differently at one spot on
the earth’s surface on the same day. The artist didn’t really try to portray
reality. He meant to show “primitive” (American Indian) and “civilized”
(European).