make transformed textbooks possible. In California, Texas, and other states,
right-wing conservatives still influence textbook adoptions, but so now do
many others. Beginning in 1985, for instance, Texas forced some publishers to
treat evolution more honestly, avoid such stereotypical terms as go on the
warpath, when referring to Native Americans, and add white before
Southerners where appropriate.^20 The ensuing standoffs between black
nationalists, feminists, right-wingers, First Amendment groups, etc., allow
authors and publishers new room to maneuver.
Consumers of education—students, teachers, parents, and interested citizens
—are beginning to demand textbooks with real flavor, history that can even
upset the stomach. According to Michael Wallace, Americans are ready for it.
People generally “are angry at having been conned and are curious to know
more,” he claims. “Witness the triumph of Roots in a culture once seemingly
mired in the pieties of Gone With the Wind.”^21 For that matter, the success of
the first edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me provides additional evidence.
It is about time. For history is central to our ongoing understanding of
ourselves and our society. We need to produce Americans of all social-class
and racial backgrounds and of both genders who command the power of
history—the ability to use one’s understanding of the past to inspire and
legitimize one’s actions in the present. Then the past will seriously inform
Americans as individuals and as a nation, instead of serving as a source of
weary clichés. Products of successful American history courses know basic
social facts about the United States and understand the historical processes that
have shaped these facts. They can locate themselves in the social structure, and
they know some of the societal and ideological forces that have influenced
their lives. Such Americans are ready to become citizens, because they
understand how to effect change in our society. They know how to check out
historical assertions and are suspicious of archetypal “truths.”They can rebut
the charge that history is irrelevant, because they realize ways that the past
influences the present, including their own present.
Thomas Jefferson surely had it right when he urged the teaching of political
history so that Americans might learn “how to judge for themselves what will
secure or endanger their freedom.”^22 Citizens who are their own historians,
willing to identify lies and distortions and able to use sources to determine
what really went on in the past, become a formidable force for democracy.