by Joseph Moreau
Disputes over history textbooks in the United States have not sent protesters into the streets (not recently, anyway), as they have this spring in China. But as readers snap up copies of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas Woods, Jr., the old story of a fight between “traditionalists” and “revisionists” has returned. With it comes an irony. The bitter opponents in this history war actually have a common misunderstanding of the past—a vision of history teaching fundamentally transformed, for better or worse, by the 1960s.Here’s the common view, repeated endlessly in the mass media, and even in many academic circles, for the last quarter century. Before 1960 American historiography was dominated by synthesizers, scholars like Charles Beard or, going further back in time, George Bancroft. They examined the grand sweep of America’s past and explained it with a single, coherent story. Their narratives, after some pruning and simplification, then found their way into a relatively homogeneous collection of textbooks for middle and high schools.
