While the list is long, it is still probably incomplete. A map found in Turkey
dated 1513 and said to be based on material from the library of Alexander the
Great includes coastline details of South America and Antarctica. Ancient
Roman and Carthaginian coins keep turning up all over the Americas, causing
some archaeologists to conclude that Roman seafarers visited the Americas
more than once.^22 Native Americans also crossed the Atlantic: anthropologists
conjecture that Native Americans voyaged east millennia ago from Canada to
Scandinavia or Scotland. Two American Indians shipwrecked in Holland
around 60 BC became major curiosities in Europe.^23
The evidence for each of these journeys offers fascinating glimpses into the
societies and cultures that existed on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia
before 1492. They also reveal controversies among those who study the distant
past. If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which
claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged
students to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they
would also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of
evidence—oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic
changes, human genetics, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrations—that
researchers use to derive knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately,
textbooks seem locked into a rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and
Mark H. Lytle, coauthors of the textbook The United States—A History of the
Republic, have also written After the Fact, a book for college history majors
in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of
arguments, issues, and controversies.^24 Davidson and Lytle’s high school
textbook, however, like its competitors, presents history as answers, not
questions.
TABLE 1. EXPLORERS OF AMERICA