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Reviews
| 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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| Most students of history do not seriously study historiography until graduate school or perhaps in senior seminars in college. Kyle Ward makes a strong case for the inclusion of historiography in the curriculum at the high school level and early years of college. He argues that too often, U.S. history textbooks are considered as an immutable authority in the classroom. This conclusion by students, he surmises, is based on a lack of understanding of how history is researched and written. His purpose in writing this book is to show that textbooks are a repository at a point in time of the nation's collective stories "passed down and agreed on by society" (p. xiii). He also wants to emphasize that stories about the past are often revised, and to remind students that textbooks reflect the biases of their times and their authors. Students must be taught this because what they learn will shape their lives today and in the future. |
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Ward employs excerpts from 108 U.S. history textbooks published from 1774 to 1999 to show how the story of the nation's history has changed. The book is divided into eight parts: Exploration and Colonization; The American Revolution; The New Nation; The Civil War Era; Industrialization, Imperialism, and War; The Great Depression and World War II; The Cold War and Postwar American; and The Vietnam Era. It consists mainly of excerpts from the textbooks on specific topics, such as "George Washington and Fort Duquesne," "The Boston Massacre," and "Lexington and Concord," preceded by short introductions by Ward. |
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Unlike James W. Loewen's Lies My History Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1996), Ward's book "is not meant as an attack on U.S. history textbooks or their publishers," although he is not hesitant to include passages that show a textbook's warts. The author successfully demonstrates that there have been four themes in textbook stories over time: 1) those that have disappeared (i.e. the Vikings, the Caroline Affair, Laos); 2) those that have become more prominent (i.e. Squanto, the Alamo, Nixon and China); 3) those that have changing interpretations (i.e. Anne Hutchinson, Reconstruction, Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs); and 4) those that always have had a multiplicity of interpretations (i.e. Witchcraft in America, Causes of the Stock Market Crash, The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). |
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The book could be employed successfully as an additional reader in a high school or in an introductory college U.S. history course. Many history educators will also be able to use the book as a resource to create historiography assignments for their classes. The book is easy to read, and the repetition of accounts adds to the reader's understanding of an event from different perspectives. The strength of the book is the excerpts and their selection, but Ward's commentary occasionally is mystifying. Given that one of his goals is to show that historical interpretation changes over time and reflects when it was written, it is perplexing to read, "Over the past two hundred years, the story of the American Revolution has not changed a great deal in how it has been taught to U.S. students" (p. 90). In a similar vein, it is surprising to read: "Following World War II, the historiography concerning the League of Nations changed forever" (p. 261) or "McCarthy's story will probably never be debated in textbooks since in the years following this event [his Senate censure], there has been little partisan rancor over his deeds and legacy" (p. 301). There is only one reference to the background of an author discussed in the book. Useful as this book might be for introducing historiography in the classroom due to the compelling nature of the excerpts themselves, Frances Fitzgerald's American Revisited (1996) would be better suited to explore the context in which history textbooks have been written for the twentieth century. Ward does not provide a satisfactory explanation for why the textbooks he cites were selected for his book. Since 26 of the 108 books he cites were published after 1950, some rationale for the use of these specific, more recent works would have been useful. |
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| Everett Community College |
Thomas M. Gaskin |
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