precisely to deny the Vietnamese the ability “to govern themselves.” Such
“analysis” makes it hard to understand why anyone would attack a
peacekeeper, “a beacon of hope.”
The very last paragraph in Appleby, Brinkley, and McPherson’s The
American Journey provides the most egregious example of all:
The United States spent the last decade of the twentieth century
trying to increase the peace and prosperity of the world. Many
Americans still believed that their nation should serve as an
example to the world. As President Clinton explained in his
1997 State of the Union address: “America must continue to be
an unrelenting force for peace—from the Middle East to Haiti.. .”
Now, really. This is hardly “telling the truth about history,” the title of
Appleby’s 1995 book on historiography. Such a passage may amount to mere
pandering to the right, and if so, it seems to have worked. In 2004, the Thomas
B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., released A
Consumer’s Guide to High School History Textbooks by Diane Ravitch,
Chester Finn, and others, rating six American history textbooks. Journey won
highest ranking: “Analysis overall seems to be fair, measured, and
reasonable.”^19 But surely neither Ravitch nor Finn would claim in a lecture on
American foreign policy, “The United States spent the last decade of the
twentieth century trying to increase the peace and prosperity of the world.” It’s
not even clear that the nation should have this agenda. Like all nations, the
United States seeks first to increase its own prosperity and influence in the
world.
Carrying a 2000 copyright date, Journey is the oldest of the six new
textbooks I studied for this book, so we cannot know for sure what its authors
might have said when the United States—no longer “trying to increase the
peace and prosperity of the world”—preemptively attacked Iraq three years
later. But would they have been astonished at behavior so at odds with their
assessment of our national character? Surely not; after all, the United States
had been at war somewhere almost every one of the sixty years before their
book came out. To close a textbook with that paragraph is to confuse
justification with fact, to present ideology instead of analysis. Again, such
words do not help students comprehend why others might attack such a
selfless, innocent nation.