a Pentagon report that pointed out “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but
rather they hate our policies.” If we took this sentence seriously, we might
question or change our policies in the Middle East. Bush’s analysis—and most
textbooks’ avoidance of any analysis—stifles such thought.^18
Textbooks find it hard to question our foreign policy because from beginning
to end they typically assume the America as “international good guy” model
we noted in Chapter 8. Consider the first page of Pathways to the Present, for
example, which introduces history as a “theme” (along with geography,
economics, etc.). Here is every word it supplies students about “history as a
theme”:
Fighting for Freedom and Democracy: Throughout the nation’s
history, Americans have risked their lives to protect their
freedoms and to fight for democracy both at home and abroad.
Use the American Pathways feature on pages 410-411 to help
you trace specific events in the struggle to protect and defend
these cherished ideas.
Turning to these pages as instructed reveals the same heading and the same
prose, accompanied by images from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World
War I, World War II, and the iconic shot of firemen raising the U.S. flag in front
of the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11/2001. Conspicuously absent
are images from our centuries of warfare against Native Americans, the
Mexican War, Philippines War, or any other conflict that cannot be shoehorned
into the classification “to fight for democracy both at home and abroad.” Our
longest war—Vietnam—rates not even a mention. To be sure, some of our
military engagements—our 1999 intervention in Serbia-Kosovo, perhaps, or
World War II—might fit under the “international good guy” rubric. Others—the
Seminole Wars, the Philippines War—cannot. When authors blandly treat our
military history under the heading “Fighting for Freedom and Democracy,” they
merely signal students that they will not be presenting a serious analysis.
In the middle of A History of the United States, right after describing the
end of our war against Vietnam, Boorstin and Kelley send students a similar
signal: “Still a superpower, the United States could not avoid some
responsibility for keeping peace in the world. Since the American Revolution,
the nation had served as a beacon of hope for people who wanted to govern
themselves.” Apparently students are not supposed to have noticed that the
United States had just spent a decade making war, not “keeping peace,”