This week on CounterSpin: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” recited Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984. Nowadays, news media have a good deal of control over our knowledge and understanding of the past: The Fourth of July weekend will doubtless feature media chatter about what America “stands for,” and how our history has shaped us.
But much of the talk will bear little relationship to the country’s actual history, which is roughly a million times more complicated and conflict-riddled than the image we are usually presented: a more or less steady march of “progress,” with perhaps a few bumps in the road. Someone who’s thought a lot about how we mis-learn history and how that shapes our political life is James W. Loewen. He’s the author of the classic book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which assesses the textbooks used in US classrooms, turning up falsehoods, elisions and distortions. He explains some of the reasons students say they hate history–and non-white students hate it most of all.
For Independence Day, then, CounterSpin presents an extended interview with author and professor James Loewen.
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I must have had incredible teachers back in the 80s as we were taught all the warts of American history.
I do wonder though if perhaps we do wallow in the uglier parts though, not that the ugliness should be ignored. But people’s view of history are becoming increasingly negative in nature.
Not a million times more complicated. What we have is a suppression of our history because it is taught to us from a class perspective where class itself is denied as part of the analysis. When history is regurgitated this way, it appears to be the result of the random actions of a diverse group of people–you know, a million times more complicated than it really is. For example, let me sum up the Civil War, a topic Loewen has written on (I like his writings). The rebellion was led by the planter class. The planter class wrote declarations of secession that justified slavery. It ramrodded secession through the state legislatures. Secession was not popular in the South. The planter class used violence, intimidation, and voter fraud against it’s own population. Go look at the history of Tennessee for example. The governor of TN was already engaged in secret negotiations with the Confederate war department before TN seceded. Look at the massacre of the German families in TX who didn’t want to get drafted in support of slavery. Look at pro-Union sympathizers in North Carolina and what happened to them. Why did all of this happen? Because the dominant class in the pre-War South not only wanted to perpetuate its existence but extend it as well. Simple.