Don’t Believe Everything You Read
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In his poem “To a Louse,” the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see ourselves as others see us.” How many times have parents and teachers chastised us to “see ourselves as others see us” in hopes of improving our behavior toward others? The people who write history textbooks for schools have been trying to get this idea across to American students for at least the past generation.
Since the Vietnam War, textbook authors and curriculum experts have sought to remove any trace of national ism or patriotism from schoolbooks that once were expected to promote citizenship and tell the nation’s story. Now history textbooks struggle to find any narrative at all; they tend, instead, to emphasize the victims of our nation’s history, most particularly indigenous peoples, African- Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, and women. High school students today who study World War II are more likely to know about injustices on the home front against Japanese-Americans, African-Americans, and women than about decisive battles in Asia and Europe.
Practitioners in the social studies field employ the phrase “multiple perspectives” to mean that there can be no national narrative, only disparate and conflicting “perspectives” on every important event in history. But the “multiple perspectives” story of victimization has itself become yet another national narrative, which strengthens ethnic and gender identities while undercutting national cohesion.
“History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History” (New Press, 400 pages, $26.95), which shows what other nations say about important events in United States and world history, reflects this effort to make Americans aware of their parochialism. The authors, Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward, actually wrote very little of the book. Their contributions are limited to short introductions to the book and each of its entries. Mostly, the book consists of brief excerpts from other nations’ textbooks about, for example, Columbus, the American Revolution, the Monroe Doctrine, slavery, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the origins of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It is no surprise to learn there is no single universal interpretation of the past. Indeed, there are very different ways of looking at the past, depending on who is telling the story. It is interesting to read what Nicaragua teaches its students about interventions by the United States in Latin America, what the Cuban government teaches its students about the Cuban Revolution, what North Korea says about its “victory” over the United States in the Korean War, and what the Iranian government teaches about the hostage crisis in Iran.
What is surprising, however, is that the history lesson most firmly impressed upon the reader is that other nations’ textbooks are, by and large, nationalistic and self-centered. If the authors’ purpose is to teach Americans to see ourselves through the eyes of others, they actually teach us by ex ample that most other nations see us through their own biased lenses.
The authors refuse to make any judgments about the factual accuracy of various claims in textbooks – for example, the North Korean assertion that it was invaded by American forces in the Korean War and that it inflicted many “crushing defeats” on the American “bastards.” Similarly, the echoes of Soviet themes in contemporary Russian textbooks about the origins of the Cold War stand unrefuted.
One very amusing statement in the Russian text says that “The coming to power of Communist parties throughout Eastern Europe in 1947-48 and the partisan movement in Greece were viewed by the United States as acts of Communist expansion.” This presumably mistaken perception produced the American doctrines of “containment” and “pushing back” of communism. The Russian text does not explain exactly how the communist parties in Eastern Europe came to power, and you are left to wonder how, if at all, they discuss Stalin’s brutal suppression of dissidents in Russia and in Eastern Europe. (It is equally remarkable to discover that the Canadian textbook sounds like the Russian on the origins of the Cold War, with remarks about “the socalled Cold War” and “the so-called free world.”)
The book’s failure to include comparable excerpts from American textbooks is a serious omission, since readers might then have judged whether many of our students are, as the authors say, still subjected to an “isolationist” interpretation of United States and world history. It is not possible to compare, for instance, how paltry the treatment of the African slave trade is in our own textbooks.
Because of political correctness, American texts say little or nothing about the role of Africans in gathering slaves for sale to Europeans. The Nigerian textbook, by contrast, observes that while Portuguese kidnapped some Africans, “the bulk of the supply” came from Nigerian merchants, some of whom became rich and powerful. The Nigerian middlemen purchased slaves from other Nigerians in the interior, and many of those who were enslaved “were social undesirables who had been condemned as thieves, adulterers, or stubborn children.” Others were captives of war.
Ultimately, the reader must ask if it is even possible to establish any facts or interpretations on which historians from different societies might agree. George Orwell, in his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” suggested that it was totalitarianism that caused historians to abandon the idea that history could be truthfully written. Yet he contended that a “considerable body of fact” existed that could be discovered and agreed to by almost everyone regardless of their own nationality.
“History Lessons” implies that Orwell was wrong. Every nation, it seems, has its own narrative, its own truths, its own facts. Who are we to judge which is right? But if this is so, the implicit lesson of “History Lessons” is not to give up our own version of the truth; no one else is doing so. Instead, it is to buttress and burnish our national identity in schools with as much dedication as do people in other nations. This is not the authors’ intent, but it is the logic of their book.