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Review
| History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years, by Kyle Ward. New York and London: The New Press, 2006. 374 pages. $26.95, cloth.
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| The author assembled excerpts from United States high school history textbooks from 1794 to 2003 to show how history textbooks over the past two hundred years have been written, published, taught, and studied by people with personal biases, perspectives, and interpretations of what our past was like, and the impact this may have for us in the modern day as well as the future (p. xxv). The book takes a time rather than a space perspective as was the case in his earlier History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History (2004). Ward introduces this latest work with an enlightening description of the evolution of United States high school history textbooks over the last two hundred years. The first writings on American history for use in the schools were only part of more general reading and geography books by pedagogues such as Noah Webster and Jedediah Morse. Only in the nineteenth century, Ward relates, were proper textbooks devoted solely to American history written, especially after educators saw the need to inform the waves of new immigrants about American traditions. In the twentieth century, textbooks gradually developed into the team-produced behemoths whose content was often determined by the process of state selection of tests for all their schools in Texas and California. |
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History in the Making is organized into fifty-three chapters, each of which is devoted to a particular topic in American history and includes about a half-dozen excerpts from textbooks written presented chronologically, with introductory notes by Ward. Some of the topics Ward has selected are what one might anticipate. For example, he shows how the celebration of Columbus's landing in America in early textbooks turned to condemnation in more recent ones (pp. 26–29), and how previous racist interpretations of Reconstruction were reversed at the time of the Civil Rights movement (pp. 196–213). Others unexpectedly remind us how groups of Americans whose stories were told at some length in the nineteenth century – the French Huguenots who settled in Florida and the Swedes who colonized on the Delaware – quietly disappeared from the later textbooks (pp. 30–36, 53–57). Religion as a causal factor predictably became less evident, as shown in the treatments of Anne Hutchinson and the Salem witchcraft trials over time (pp. 58–63, 64–69). The decline of hero-worship or the "Great Man" interpretation of history is documented by the consideration of George Washington in textbooks. In a revealing chapter, Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity in 1753 was whitewashed in an 1821 textbook as an "honorable capitulation" (p. 74). In 1899, the budding hero was said to have been "taught to endure adverse fortune" by the ill-starred experience (p. 78). But by 1982, the "foolhardy and inexperienced" young colonel was castigated for having "blundered grievously" in the campaign (p. 81). |
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In general, justifications for American intervention in wars – such the Mexican, Spanish-American and Vietnam Wars – were viewed much more skeptically years after the event than they were at the time or shortly afterward. Regarding the first of these wars, an 1849 textbook claimed that the Mexicans, viewing the American annexation of Texas "with exceeding jealousy and distrust," moved troops to the Rio Grande "with the avowed object of reconquering [sic] Texas" (p. 153). By 1995, textbook authors claimed that when he sent American forces to the Rio Grande, President "Polk knew that the Mexicans claimed this land and that the move might spark a war" (p. 158). (Ward does not have chapters on the American entrances into World War I and World War II.) Only a few topics were handled consistently by the textbooks over time. One was the character of Abraham Lincoln. From the beginning, he was viewed positively, in particular the log cabin to the presidency story. Only a Progressive Era author saw fit to mildly criticize Lincoln's choice of advisors, some of his legislative proposals, and his use of patronage, which "was certainly not in accordance with the standards of the civil service of the present day" (p. 175). |
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Historians, of course, will quibble with some of Ward's selections as well as his comments about them. He tends to view the most recent account of events as the "correct" one and he generally neglects the influence of factors other than time in causing changes in historical interpretation. Thus Ward's book may not be especially eye-opening to American historians, who are generally well-versed in the historiography of their subject. It could, however, be quite enlightening to students who have not yet been exposed to differing perspectives on American history. Just as his earlier History Lessons has stimulated discussions in the classroom (see John J. DeRose, "Comparing International Textbooks to Develop Historical Thinking," Social Education 71 [January/February 2007], pp. 36–39), History in the Making is very suitable for use by teachers. High school, community college, and university teachers could use Ward's easy-to-read book to help their students discover how historians' views of the past can change over time. |
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| Fort Hays State University, Kansas |
David S. Bovee |
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