Back in the early 1960s, when I was growing up, there was a silly pop song called What Did Washington Say When He Crossed the Delaware? Sung to a tarantella beat, the answer was something like "Martha, Martha, there'll be no pizza tonight." Of course, these lyrics were absurd; everybody knew Washington only ate cherry pie.
On that December night in 1776, George may have told himself that if this raid on an enemy camp in Trenton, New Jersey, didn't work, he might be ordering a last meal before the British strung him up. But as the general rallied his ragged, barefoot troops across the icy Delaware, one of his actual comments was far more amusing than those lyrics. Stepping into his boat, Washington - the plainspoken frontiersman, not the marbleized demigod - nudged 280-pound General Henry "Ox" Knox with the tip of his boot and said, "Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you'll swamp the damned boat."
According to A.J. Langguth's fascinating history of the Revolution, certainly never heard that version of the crossing when I was in school. And that's too bad, because it reveals more of Washington's true, earthy nature than all the hokey tales about cherry trees and nonexistent prayer vigils in Valley Forge. And that's the point of this book: much of what we remember about our history is either mistaken or fabricated. That is, if we remember it at all.
For all too many Americans who dozed through American History 101, the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car. Reconstruction has something to do with silicone implants. And the Louisiana Purchase means eating out at a Cajun restaurant. In recent years, several writers have enjoyed remarkable success by lambasting Americans' failure to know our past. Americans were shown to be know-nothings in the books Cultural Literacy and The Closing of the American Mind.
Well, we're probably not as dumb as these books would have us. But the sad truth is clear: we are no nation of scholars when it comes to history. On the 1988 hustings, for instance, vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle had trouble fielding a question about the Holocaust - fumbling the facts as to when and to whom it happened.
Another highly publicized example of our "historical illiteracy" was the 1987 survey of high school juniors that exposed astonishing gaps in what these seventeen-year-olds knew about American history and literature. A third of the students couldn't identify the Declaration of Independence as the document that marked the formal separation of the thirteen colonies from Great Britain. Only 32 percent of the students surveyed could place the American Civil War in the correct half century.
But why dump on the kids? While there are constant warnings issued about the yawning gaps in the education of American students, another question looms larger. Would their parents score any higher? Most thirty-seven-year-olds or forty-seven-year-olds might not do any better on a similar pop quiz. Don't ask for whom the gap yawns. The gap yawns for thee.
The reason for these common historical shortcomings is simple. Most of us learned history from textbooks that served up the past as if it were a Hollywood costume drama. In schoolbooks of an earlier era, the warts on our Founding Fathers' noses were neatly retouched. Slavery also got the glossy make-over - it was merely the misguided practice of the rebellious folks down South until the "progressives" of the North showed them the light. American Indians got the same portrayal in textbooks that you saw in B-movies.
Truth isn't so cosmetically perfect. Our historical sense is frequently skewed, skewered, or plain screwed up by myths and misconceptions. Schools that packaged a tidy set of simplistic historical images are largely responsible for fostering these American myths. There was a tendency to hide the less savory moments from our past, the way a mad aunt's photo gets pulled from the family album. If anyone thinks it only happens in George Orwell's in Tiananmen Square. How will Chinese history books tell that in ten or twenty years?
The gaping chasms in our historical literacy have been reinforced by images from pop culture. Books, movies, and television have magnified the myths and make-overs. But looking past these myths is revealing. The real picture is far more interesting than the historical tummy-tuck.
This book's intent is to bridge those chasms with some simple, accessible answers to basic questions about American history. This single volume is obviously not an encyclopedic history of America. For simplicity, I have used a question-and-answer approach, and there are literally shelves of books about each of the questions I have included. My intent is to refresh the shaky recollection or reshape the misconception with some simple answers. Or, in some cases, to point the way to longer answers.
The book is organized along chronological lines, moving from America's "discovery" by Europe to more recent events, including the fallout from the Iran-Contra affair. I have attempted to focus on the sort of basic questions that the average person might have, emphasizing names, places, and events that we vaguely recall as being important, but forget exactly why. The reader is welcome to read the book straight through as a narrative history, or to use it as a reference book by dipping into a particular question or period. Because wars have been central, shaping events in our history, and because many people lack a sense of what actually happened during these wars, I have included a series of chronologies that condense the events of the major conflicts in American history. Also scattered throughout the book are and court decisions that reflect the spirit of the times.
Following the seeming ambivalence of the American public about the 1988 election, it also seemed appropriate to include an election primer that explains some of the more mysterious elements of the process, from caucuses and delegate counts to the nearly mystical electoral college. A second appendix presents a quick guide to the American presidents. An annotated list of sources for each chapter offers a selective rather than an exhaustive bibliography. The books cited are either widely accepted standards or recent works that offer fresh insights or update accepted wisdom. I have also tried to single out those critically well-received books written for the general reader rather than the specialist, such as James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, a masterful single-volume history of the Civil War. A general bibliography lists books that cover broader periods and themes.
In some cases, these sources take very specific political view-points. While I have attempted to present a spectrum of opinions on those issues where there is no broad consensus, I have tried to avoid any particular stance. If there is an underlying theme here, it is that the struggle for power is the essence of history. The battle between those holding power - whether it be the power of land, money, church, or votes - and the have-nots - the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised, the rebellious - is the main thread in the drama of history.
A second thread is one that our schools sadly bury, either out of laziness or owing to a shortfall in imaginative teaching. This is the impact of personality in history. At many turning points, it was the commanding presence of an individual - Washington, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Roosevelts, and Susan B. Anthony, to name a few - that determined events, rather than the force of any idea or movement. Great ideals and noble causes have died for lack of a champion. At other times, the absence of a strong personality has had the reverse effect. For example, if a dominant president had emerged in the years before the Civil War, instead of a string of mediocrities, Lincoln's emergence might have been stillborn.
I came to this project with the same misconceptions many people may have about our past. I have learned a great deal about the Americans who shaped the country, and it hasn't always been a pleasant discovery. The simple view of men like Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt as beatified heroes of the American epic doesn't always stand up to scrutiny. The American story is not that simple. There are moments in our past that can breed feelings of cynicism and disgust. Yet there are other moments that evoke pride and admiration.
Generally speaking, Americans have behaved worse than our proudest boosters proclaim. On the other hand, Americans have also shown a capacity to be better than the worst claims of their detractors. Barely two hundred years old, America is still young in the broad sense of history, even though the pace of history has accelerated radically as the twentieth-century techno-revolution has transformed media, travel, and communications. The history of this country is not necessarily a continuum moving toward a perfectly realized republic. More accurately, history has acted like a pendulum with long swings creating a flux in one direction or another. America remains shockingly divided along racial and economic lines. One can look at that rift and feel pessimism. But the optimist points to the distance America has come in a relatively brief time. Of course, that is small consolation to those who have always received the short end of the stick.
Perhaps what is more important is the commitment to an acknowledgment of the true American dream. Not the one about the house with two cars in the driveway and a barbecue in the backyard, but the dream Jefferson voiced two hundred years ago. Even though his vision of "all men created equal" was probably different from our modern understanding, it remains the noblest of dreams and the greatest of aspirations. The struggle to fulfill that dream has been a long, strange trip. And it is never over.
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Title:
Don't Know Much About History
Author:
Davis, Kenneth C.
Date: New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1990