Comments on: American History X

By: rob

rob — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:39:40 +0000

Heartfelt apologies to Paula. My remarks dated from the classroom as it existed two generations ago and were not meant to reflect the contemporary efforts of those who, from her remarks, are doing exactly what good history teachers should. There was a time when everyone one who had a hand in the making of the nation was represented as an unflawed character, perhaps with the idea that students couldn’t handle ambiguity and required the hero/villain approach. My only intention was to suggest that they can, and that the job of a good history teacher is similar in some ways to that of a good trial judge—make sure the rules of evidence are observed and don’t do the jury’s job, too.

By: tim

tim — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:10:24 +0000

“she’s expressing the desire to promote a General who comitted attrocities over a dark skinned woman ” If keith is representative, maybe she has a point. Or was he cofusing Lee with Sherman? Or Grant “The Butcher”? She did mention Grant. But losing a lot of soldiers isn’t the same as committing atrocities, so that’s not really fair to Grant. I’m sure it isn’t the case that keith is distorting his history to serve the politics of the moment….

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 13:29:10 +0000

on the question of Lee, I’d think that most would want a great deal of focus on Lee. After all, before the war he was a person respected for honor and courage. That certainly wasn’t the case after the war, so his story demonstrates that honor and courage aren’t themselves enough for someone to be praiseworthy. Much the same could be said of Colon Powell. But to the topic at hand: I think that this little gaffe on the part of Lynn Cheney is telling, in that she’s expressing the desire to promote a General who comitted attrocities over a dark skinned woman who made large social changes peacefully. It’s like the Zeitguist has her by the throat. She’s screaming, “Respect the Troops!” 150 years after they’re dead and burried, their atrocious actions long since examined and found wanting. I imagine something similar might happen in a hundred years or so concerning Generals Sanchez or Abizad. In a country where education is actually respected, Lee and Tubman would get equal study. I wonder if Canadaian schools teach anything about the US Civil War?

By: tim

tim — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 19:02:17 +0000

“Robert Lee was a military commander of a treasonous rebellion…” Excuse me? Where does the treason come in? Oh, that’s right. It comes in ex post facto when the Union wins.

By: Thorley Winston

Thorley Winston — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:10:53 +0000

Ayjay wrote:

First of all, anyone who doesn’t have access to what Cheney actually wrote ought to shut up. As anyone who has been quoted more than once or twice in an American newspaper knows, the chances of being quoted fairly and accurately — even when the reporter has no axe to grind — are pretty low. So If Brian couldn’t be bothered to track down Cheney’s essay he shouldn’t have posted the comment.

The full text of Mrs. Cheney’s 1994 article is available here: http://www.aei.org/news/filter.all,newsID.18942/news_detail.asp It took about ten seconds to find using Google and the one sentence being quoted in the LA Times excerpt. You’re quite correct though that Brian Weatherson should have included the article in his story although since reading the actual context of Cheney’s remarks might have negated his subsequent rant, it’s understandable why he didn’t include it.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 06:00:38 +0000

Juan: Keep in mind that, as I pointed out above, Cheney was inaccurately equating mention in the teaching examples with mention in the standards. Also, I might point out that the AFL/Gettysburg Address comparison is apples and oranges—one is an institution that has been around for over 100 years, the other a single event.

By: Carrick Talmadge

Carrick Talmadge — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 05:16:45 +0000

Robert E. Lee is an interesting and I agree tragic American figure. I think you will learn more about the nature of humanity in studying him over many other American figures. First I have to disagree that the Confederacy was necessarily evil. They were after all fighting over the right of Succession, a constitutionally guaranteed right which the North was refusing them. Their motivations may not have been pure, but neither were the North’s. Secondly, and more to the point, Robert E. Lee chose to side with his state over his country even though he reportedly did not agree with his state’s decision to side with the South. In other words, he made his decision based on personal honor rather than choosing what he felt was best for those involved (in my viewpoint he made an immoral choice). I have always felt that Lee’s choice led to a needlessly long war, and to the loss of countless lives and a ten-fold increase in suffering and misery over what would have occurred had he not fought for the South. Lee was in fact that good as a general. There are many other parallels of the Civil War with today, including a country which had to decide whether to have a national elections when half of its states were overrun with “insurgents”. Lincoln had some pretty nice words about that circumstance as I recall…

By: Carrick Talmadge

Carrick Talmadge — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 05:15:40 +0000

Robert E. Lee is an interesting and I agree tragic American figure. I think you will learn more about the nature of humanity in studying him over many other American figures. First I have to disagree that the Confederacy was necessarily evil. They were after all fighting over the right of Succession, a constitutionally guaranteed right which the North was refusing them. Their motivations may not have been pure, but neither were the North’s. Secondly, and more to the point, Robert E. Lee chose to side with his state over his country even though he reportedly did not agree with his state’s decision to side with the South. In other words, he made his decision based on personal honor rather than choosing what he felt was best for those involved (in my viewpoint he made an immoral choice). I have always felt that Lee’s choice led to a needlessly long war, and to the loss of countless lives and a ten-fold increase in suffering and misery over what would have occurred had he not fought for the North. Lee was in fact that good as a general. There are many other parallels of the Civil War with today, including a country which had to decide whether to have a national elections when half of its states were overrun with “insurgents”. Lincoln had some pretty nice words about that circumstance as I recall…

By: Jay Gischer

Jay Gischer — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:33:23 +0000

Well, in my opinion, Stonewall Jackson was a nutcase, Jeff Davis a stubborn git, J.E.B. Stuart a showboat, and Pickett an airhead. But Bobby Lee is a great man, or if not a great man, a tragic figure. The soldiers of the Civil War, for the most part, were eager to leave the disputes of war behind once the hostilities ceased, why can’t we? Mostly, I agreed with Brian’s post, but cheap shots at Lee I can’t abide. As a good man who served the side of slavery, I think he makes a fine person for our children to study.

By: Juan Non-Volokh

Juan Non-Volokh — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:01:09 +0000

The relevant passage from Lynn Cheney’s 1994 WSJ op-ed reads as follows:

Counting how many times different subjects are mentioned in the document yields telling results. One of the most often mentioned subjects, with 19 references, is McCarthy and McCarthyism. The Ku Klux Klan gets its fair share, too, with 17. As for individuals, Harriet Tubman, an African-American who helped rescue slaves by way of the underground railroad, is mentioned six times. Two white males who were contemporaries of Tubman, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, get one and zero mentions, respectively. Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and the Wright brothers make no appearance at all.

She further notes that individuals like Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and others “who have been ignored in the past” are “rightfully” included in any potential history standards, but objects that the Seneca Falls “Declaration of SEntiments” and the American Federation of Labor are mentioned nine times more than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Re-reading her piece makes it fairly clear Cheney’s views were misreported by the LA Times. For those interested, the article appeared in the WSJ on Oct. 20, 1994. JNoV

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:36:52 +0000

For starters, let’s remember that Cheney is part of the crowd that renamed Washington Airport into Reagan Airport. So much for the Cheneys and balance in history. As for the idea that high-schoolers can’t learn history, enterprising teachers regularly have their students “do a little history” and the students do quite well. Frankly, we would probably all be better off if we spent at least one course gathering spoken history and reconciling it with the facts on the ground and the written record. This would give people a lot better sense of how to evaluate history. Anyone who has studied much history knows that the dates are just tombstones erected over the corpses of ideas that died years previously. “The Battle of Waterloo won on the playing fields of Eton” and all that. Millions of Americans have memorized huge parts of “Lee’s Generals” and ended up knowing less about the Civil War than when they started. Harumph!- and- various grumpy old man sounds. Let them read and emulate Thucydides- that ought to keep them busy for a while.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:36:40 +0000

Fucking hell. Rant forthcoming: What paula said—except that I am pretty sure that that is not true in most US K-12 classes, because a vast majority of those classes are not taught by people trained in the discipline, and more often teach the kind of history that cafl mentions. A As far as the comments about Lee and Rommell as the kinder, gentler faces of evil regimes, WTF? Clearly, I’m a bit out of my field here, but I cannot imaging as a historian that that comes into it in a good class. It makes much more sense to me to get the students to ask themselves and the sources why it was possible for these men, men who do seem to be “good guys” for lack of a better term, to act as they did. Again, as Paula said, we synthesize and contextualize. Contextualizing is not the same as excusing. It is about allowing ourselves to put aside our own assumptions about human nature and all the other things that make us misread history and go deeper to understand another time and culture. It’s not about being presentist in our approach—or even drawing faulty parallels with current events; however, if/when we learn to study people like Lee and Rommel (for example) in context, we also learn to ask the questions that help us understand why, for example, the Iraqis might not understand ‘freedom’ to be the same thing Bush or Kerry thinks it is.

By: vernaculo

vernaculo — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:20:14 +0000

Remorse as contextual background seems like maybe a piece of the puzzle that goes unmentioned. “Politically correct…” standing in for the “Oh my God, what have we done?” that’s at the heart of a lot of people’s engagement with US history as it was in reality. There was nothing inevitable about slavery, or the genocide of indigenous people. It was done, it had no moral justification, and this nation would have been impossible to create without it. Coming to terms with that is no different, and no less arduous, than the process of remorse an individual who has erred grievously must undergo. The mental illness is pretending nothing happened. Justifying the schizoid denial because of the economic disruption an honest inventory would cause. That’s the polarizing nut right there. “Everything’s fine” versus the abject humbling of an honest assessment. What we are versus what we’d like to be.

By: cafl

cafl — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 23:48:22 +0000

Having just watched two teen-aged children take AP US History in a suburban high school, I would say that people worried about the teaching of facts in history classes should relax. That is about all their classes DID teach. And their textbook was a huge, monolithic, undifferentiated wasteland of fact after fact in such a mind-numbing array that I (who as a student used to read my entire history text at the beginning of the year because it was so fascinating) found it difficult to read an entire chapter at one sitting. I think the problem is that there is such a culture war, between Lynn Cheyney types on the one hand and the extremists among the politically correct on the other hand, that history cannot be taught in a literate, thematic way any more. All that the text book publishers can get agreement on is the catalog of facts.

By: Andrew Boucher

Andrew Boucher — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 21:14:38 +0000

Unlike Harry, I was rolling in the aisles when I read: Doing history is knowing how to evaluate, contextualize, and synthesize evidence, making a cogent argument based on evidence, and presenting the results of that argument in reasonably graceful and convincing prose. Yeah, ok, but we’re talking about American high school students here right? How many are able to evaluate, contextualize, synthesize evidence, make a cogent argument based on evidence, and present the results of that argument in reasonably graceful (graceful!!?) and convincing prose about anything, never mind the Civil War? I would also modestly suggest that deplorably notable in its omission from the list is knowing some facts about the events. I’m worried that the sneering comment about “stuffing students with factoids” means the writer thinks that knowing when the Civil War started (yes the year! as in a four digit number!) isn’t important. How can you “contextualize” without some basic knowledge?