There is a show on "American Heroes Channel" that talks about many of history's untruths: things that we were taught in history class that really are not true. Recently, there has been a trend in this country to rewrite our history, which is important to a point, because so much of our history is built on slave labor and stolen land. Even renowned British historian Gavin Menzies wrote a book claiming that China actually discovered America in 1421, and many historians claim there is evidence of Viking settlements in America as early as the 10th century. All these change our views on history as we learned it in school.
Americans are, as I have noted before, appallingly ignorant of their own history and institutions. Late last year, American Council of Trustees and Alumni found in a survey of college graduates that less than 20 percent could accurately identify in a multiple-choice survey the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. One-third did not know that Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, and nearly half could not correctly identify the term lengths of senators and representatives.
No one exemplified that dangerous ignorance more than former President Donald Trump. He reportedly had no idea what happened at Pearl Harbor, and he even went so far as to say that there were airports during the War of Independence; that Andrew Jackson was "really angry" about the Civil War, which occurred 16 years after his death; and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, “is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more."
Even more worryingly - as was evidenced during his last year in office - Trump seemed unaware of the rule of law or the separation of powers - the bedrocks upon which our constitutional republic is built. “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said, at one point, which would certainly come as news to the Founders.
So, in theory, it was not a bad thing that President Trump, before the election in November, unveiled an initiative to reinvigorate civics education. The former president himself would be a prime beneficiary of any such schooling. But, of course, what Trump announced was not a serious educational undertaking - something that is badly needed. His speech at the unveiling of the initiative at National Archives was simply the latest salvo in the waning days of his failing campaign to try to convince his white supporters that the country they love would be destroyed by a pack of anarchists and radicals led by his Democratic rival and now president, Joe Biden.
“The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies,” said a president not known for his own fidelity to the truth. He pointedly named his project the 1776 Commission, to distinguish it from New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning series, "the 1619 Project", which, he said “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”
Trump was certainly not wrong to criticize the 1619 Project. After it was published, it came under fire from distinguished historians, (nary a conservative among them), for mistakenly claiming that support for slavery was a principal cause of the American Revolution. Even one of the historians consulted by the Times warned its fact-checkers that “the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war,” but her correction was ignored.
More broadly, the Times overhyped its work by saying that 1619 was “our true founding,” and that the arrival of 20 enslaved Africans was “the moment” that America “began.” This is untrue on multiple levels - not least because, as historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote, "the Africans who arrived in 1619 were not actually slaves but indentured servants, like many Europeans. The institution of racialized slavery did not develop until decades later." The Times itself has implicitly acknowledged the validity of some of these criticisms by quietly removing claims from its website about 1619 being the starting point of United States history.
But, the 1619 Project, if shorn of inaccuracies, plays a useful role in correcting an earlier version of “patriotic” United States history that President Trump was eager to revive. This was the triumphalist narrative crafted by white historians who played down the crimes committed against African Americans, Native Americans and other people of color. This older history also promoted pernicious Southern myths about the glories of the "Lost Cause" and the evils of Reconstruction and largely ignored the experiences of women and minorities. Trump is an inveterate racist who denies that “White Privilege" exists, embraced nationalism and sought to protect the monuments of traitors who waged war on the United States to preserve slavery. He wanted schools to ratify his own prejudices, not to teach what actually happened.
What we need is a new national narrative - as Harvard University historian Jill Lepore has argued - that rejects the extremes of both left and right. It is possible to find a middle ground that fully acknowledges the sins of United States history - which continue to haunt us to the present day - while also showing that generations of Americans have struggled, sometimes at great personal cost, to realize the highest ideals of the Founders. It is imperative to teach that the United States was not created based on shared ancestry - as nativists such as Trump seem to believe - but on shared devotion to the “unalienable rights” enumerated in Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is important, as well, to simply teach the nuts and bolts of United States government about which so many know so little.
Here is the elephant in the room in all of this: The federal government cannot mandate school curricula (that power, by Constitutional law, belongs to the states) but, it can use its power of the purse to encourage schools across the country to reinvigorate the teaching of history and civics - as has already happened with the common core for English and math.
Students do need to learn more about the true history of our country and its institutions, but they do not need the White Power propaganda that Trump's 1776 Project attempted to promote.
Opmerkingen