History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray American History [Hardcover]

We start by learning about Viking Exploration as it is taught to children from Norway and Canada, work our way through the American Revolution as taught to the British, slavery as taught to Nigerians, World Wars I and II as taught to Germans, visit Cuba and Vietnam, and end up in the Philippines, North Korea and the Middle East, as taught to young Israelis and Saudis. But this isn't history as Americans are taught it, the land of the free and the brave, the land of Free Trade. This is a country that is positively alien, where Americans are often the bad guys to be resisted and mistrusted. How can this be?

Those of us - from wherever we came - who have read the history of our countries in foreign books have passed through a series of emotions: denial, anger and (if we're lucky) understanding. Every child everywhere in the world is taught at school that he or she comes from the most important, most heroic and most humane country in the world. Our parents and teachers said so, therefore it must be true. The difficulty comes when we leave our home country and find that others don't have the same benign attitude to us. That is a hard enough transition for an individual. When two countries face each other, as the US and Iraq have recently, there is the potential for wholesale confusion and misunderstanding. It is incredibly hard to rethink such basic facts about our identity as those we were taught as children. It is harder still to comprehend how those foreigners could allow themselves to be cuckolded into believing such lies about us. History Lessons won't entirely resolve this difficulty, but it does make a starting point for understanding how people worldwide can have such contradictory ideas about the "facts" of history.

Taking 50 topics from Viking Exploration through New World Order, Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward present about a page of text excerpted from a history book from one or more countries. The entire list of countries comprises Brazil, Canada, Caribbean, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, N Korea, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, S Korea, Spain, Syria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. The authors have restricted their comments to a very short introduction to each section. This minimizes - but does not entirely eliminate - their own biases on the topic and lets us read the excerpts with fresh eyes, just as schoolchildren do.

Although the US is at center stage of this book, there is no suggestion that historical events involving the United States are any more prone to misreporting by foreign textbooks than are events involving any other country. Nor is there any suggestion that US textbooks are any more - or less - accurate than the textbooks of any other country. The authors claim that political correctness has reduced US textbooks to "a series of inoffensive facts and figures," but the excerpts in the book suggest that this is a worldwide failing. Few, if any, of the passages are engaging and only the Nigerian book quoted seems to assume any intelligence on the part of students.

What is not included in History Lessons is any kind of statistical analysis. The authors have not made a survey of world textbooks; they do not claim that the passages quoted are in any sense typical - or atypical - of their continents or political regimes. They do say that most countries have some kind of centralized control over school textbooks, so that these passages come from either the only book available to students, or at least one that meets standardized guidelines. Depressingly, nowhere in the world are children exposed to a wide variety of views. None of the statements in the books seem open to debate, even when their authors piously invite their young readers to "discuss" the topic.

The natural readers of History Lessons are high school history teachers and teachers at schools with immigrant children. But the book will have the greatest value if we can let our children read it at an age when their minds are still open to new and diverse ideas. The aim is not to teach them that US textbooks are "wrong", but that we need to look elsewhere than received wisdom to find what is common to humanity.