Fue el pensador y político chileno Francisco Bilbao Barquín (1823-1865) quien en una conferencia en París (1856) usó por primera vez el término «América Latina», incluyendo a México y a América Central.

Francisco Bilbao pronunció esa conferencia en París tras enterarse de que el presidente de EE. UU., Franklin Pierce, había reconocido al gobierno instalado en Nicaragua por el filibustero William Walker como el gobierno legítimo de esa nación.
De modo que, para Bilbao, lo que tenían en común los latinoamericanos no era una común «cultura latina» sino un «enemigo» común, poderoso y expansivo.

APOYADO Y UTILIZADO POR NAPOLEON III

El escritor y diplomático colombiano José María Torres Caicedo, en 1856, en su poema «Las dos Américas», se refirió a «la raza de la América latina, al frente tiene la sajona raza, enemiga mortal que ya amenaza, su libertad destruir y su pendón» y agregó que «América del Sur está llamada a defender la libertad genuina, la nueva idea, la moral divina, la santa ley de amor y caridad», pues «el mundo yace entre tinieblas hondas: en Europa domina el despotismo, en América en el Norte, el egoísmo, sed de oro e hipócrita piedad.

El término América Latina fue apoyado por el Imperio Francés de Napoleón III durante la invasión francesa a México que, oportunistamente, había aprovechado que los EE. UU. se encontraban envueltos en su sangrienta Guerra de Secesión.
Francia había entronizado al Archiduque Fernando Maximiliano, hermano del Emperador de Austria.

SEPARAR DE ESPAÑA Y PORTUGAL
El propósito de Napoleón III era construir un Imperio Latino, en oposición a la Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos, como forma de incluir a Francia entre los países con influencia en América. Así podrían, al mismo tiempo, excluir a los sajones y separar a Iberoamérica de sus ex metrópolis: España y Portugal.
TÉRMINO INCORRECTO
Sin embargo, es totalmente incorrecto el uso del adjetivo latino, que corresponde, inherentemente, a la zona de Italia designada por tal nombre en la época de la Antigua Roma (Latium), hoy Lazio.

Posteriormente, y por interés francés, este significado fue extendido a cualquier parlante de una lengua derivada del latín, cuando normalmente esta referencia es a las lenguas romances (derivadas del latín romano).

UN PROYECTO DEFENSIVO
En suma, cuando Bilbao inventó América Latina, no la veía como una fraternidad cultural, sino como un proyecto defensivo; como la única posibilidad que tenían los países al sur del Río Grande de enfrentar a una potencia económica y militar como la estadounidense, que ya se había apropiado de buena parte del territorio de México.
EL REMATE DE LA ONU
Finalmente, el término América Latina apoyado por USA ganó fuerza, en el siglo XX, cuando las instituciones multilaterales del sistema de la ONU lo adoptaron, después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Fuentes:

Xhttps://www.clarin.com/ediciones-anteriores/america-latina-sudamerica_0_BkHMQbYJCYl.html

La entrada Hispam: El término Latinoamérica se publicó primero en .

Revolucion Americana

Vital Contribución de España en el Triunfo de la
Revolución Americana.

Por: Robert H. Thonhoff.

Traducción al Castellano por:
José Ignacio Vasconcelos
y Oliva Fernández-Lana Álvarez.
Ensayo sobre un Capítulo Olvidado
de la Historia de la Revolución Americana.

POCOS NORTEAMERICANOS APRECIAN LA MAGNITUD DE LA PARTICIPACIÓN DE ESPAÑA en su Revolución de Independencia. Casi ignorada dicha participación, durante los últimos 200 años, el papel vital de España en la Guerra de Independencia de los Estados Unidos, empieza lentamente a surgir en la conciencia nacional estadounidense.
Al hablar o escribir sobre el tema anterior, nuestros compatriotas lo caracterizan,
generalmente, como algo de poca monta, escasamente digno de ser mencionado.

Copyright © 2006 by Robert H. Thonhoff
617 N. Esplanade St., Karnes City, Texas 78118-2522, U.S.A.
All Rights Reserved.

Investigaciones recientes llevadas a cabo por especialistas han sacado a luz nueva
información respecto de la Revolución Americana, misma que habia sido literalmente “Barrida bajo el tapete de la historia” por demasiado tiempo. En consequencia antiguos conceptos empiezan a ser substituidos por la verdad histórica.

Durante los siglos XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, y XIX, debemos recordar que España
descubrió, exploró, dominó y colonizó el Imperio de mayor extensión territorial en la historia del mundo. Sus dominios se extendieron en alrededor del globo e incluyen la mayor parte del hemisferio occidental. En tiempos de la Revolución American España gobernaba o reclamaba para si todo el territorio de los actuales Estados Unidos, al oeste del río Mississippi más el puerto
de Nueva Orleans. Este vasto territorio era parte de la Nueva España, la cual se extendía de Centro América a los “hielos árticos.”

Comienza la guerra

De 1776 hasta haber declarar formalmente la guerra a Gran Bretaña en 1779, España, a
través de los mercaderes Diego de Gardoqui en Bilbao y Oliver Pollock en Nueva Orleans, en
forma encubierta enviaba dinero, mosquetones, municiones y avíos militares en grandes cantidades como ayuda a los Americanos en su desigual lucha contra Inglaterra, por mucho tiempo enemiga de España y Francia.

Con anterioridad a la declaración de guerra, España disponía de una red de espionaje,
mediante observadores a lo largo y ancho de las zonas involucradas para vigilar el curso de la revuelta. Dos observadores situados en Philadelphia, Juan de Miralles y Francisco Rendón, quienes proporcionaban no sólo apoyo moral sino también servían para hacer llegar los suministros de ayuda material enviados por España a las patriotas Americanos, en tanto durara la
revolución. En 1781, Rendón ofreció la hospitalidad de su casa al General George Washington durante la visita de navidad de dicho General a Philadelphia.

En 1777, Benjamin Franklin, representante Americano en Francia, destacó a Arthur Lee
para que fuera a España, donde Lee contrató secretamente y envió a través de la Compañía
Española de José Gardoqui e Hijos 215 cañones de bronce, 4,000 tiendas de campaña, 12,826 granadas, 30,000 mosquetones, 30,000 bayonetas, 30,000 uniformes, 51,314 balas de
mosquetones y 300,000 libras de pólvora, para ser expedidos desde un barco de un puerto
Francés vía Las Bermudas a Boston. Posteriormente en una de sus cartas Franklin agradeció al ministro de Carlos III, el Conde de Aranda, por el envío de 12,000 mosquetones remitados a Boston por España.

De 1776 a 1779, a través del mercader Oliver Pollock en Nueva Orleans, España
concedió créditos a las Colonia Americanas por 7,944,906 reales para el envío de toda clase de suministros: uniformes, zapatos, mantas, alimentos, medicinas, plomo, pólvora, mosquetones, yesca, cañones y otros materiales, que fueron enviados por los ríos Mississippi y Ohio, a las mal provistas tropas de George Washington y George Rogers Clark.

Igualmente importante para la Revolución Americana, fué el control Español de la cuenca
del Mississippi a través del puerto de Nuevo Orleans, permitiendo que suministros y
comunicaciones pudieran ser enviados por los mencionados ríos. Con el bloqueo Británico de la costa Atlántica, los ríos Mississippi y Ohio sirvieron como una verdadera línea vital a las fuerzas de George Washington y George Rogers Clark. Solamente barcos Españoles, Americanos y Franceses se permitía que usaran el puerto de Nuevo Orleans y la mayor parte de la ayuda recibida por Washington y Clark ingresó por esta puerta trasera.

España entra en la guerra

Después de que España declara formalmente la guerra a Gran Bretaña, el 21 de Junio de
1779, el rey Español Carlos III comisionó al General Bernardo de Gálvez, Gobernador de
Luisiana, para que condujera una campaña militar contra los Británicos que dominaban puntos estratégicos del golfo. En consecuencia procediendo a cumplir órdenes Gálvez organizó una Armada y una Marina, derrotando a los Británicos en las batallas de Manchac, Baton Rouge y Natches in 1779, en Mobile in 1780 y en Pensacola en 1781. Entre tanto sus fuerzas Españolas protegieron el alto Mississippi y el río Ohio, derrotando a los Británicos en San Luís, Missouri y
San José, Michigan, asistiendo a George Rogers Clark en sus batallas de Vincennes (Indiana), Kaskaskia (Illinois) y Cahokia (Illinois).

En 1782 el Conde de Gálvez volvió a derrotar a los Británicos y logró el control de su
base naval de New Providence en Las Bahamas. Los Españoles se preparaban para la mayor campaña de todas contra Jamaica cuando sus planes fueron desviados por las negociaciones de España e Inglaterra que culminaron en el Tratado de Paz de París de 1783, con lo que oficialmente terminó la guerra. Al abrir un tercer frente, los Españoles eficazmente disminuyeron las fuerzas Británicas que pudieron haber sido usadas en otras partes.

Para alimentar a las fuerzas Españolas, unas 9,000 cabezas de ganado de Texas
procedentes de particulares, misiones y ranchos del valle del río San Antonio, fueron arriados por rancheros Texanos y Españoles escoltados por soldados Hispano-Texanos para las tropas del Conde de Gálvez en su campaña de Luisiana a Florida. Además, cientos de caballos fueron enviados para los requerimientos de guerra contra los ingleses.
Al mismo tiempo el Conde de Gálvez contestaba las cartas que recibía de Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, General Charles Henry Lee, Capitán George Morgan y Capitán George Gibson, quienes solicitaban más ayuda; lo que el Conde de Gálvez continuó proveyendo. Es de notar que parte de la flota Francesa estuvo bajo del mando del Conde de Gálvez durante los dos meses de sitio de Pensacola, Marzo a Mayo de 1781. Después de la exitosa batalla que permitió
la toma del Fuerte George en Pensacola, Gálvez despidió a la flota Francesa y dotándola con 500,000 pesos oro, con lo cual esta viajó a lo largo de la costa atlántica hacia la Bahía de
Chesapeake, llegando en el momento preciso para ayudar a Washington a derrotar a Lord
Cornwallis en Yorktown el 19 de Octubre de 1781.

Un impuesto voluntario de guerra fue recabado de soldados y civiles en Nueva España y
Cuba, incluyendo las provincias de California, Nuevo México y Texas partes integrantes de
Nueva España en ese tiempo, lo que sirvió para el sostén de los gastos de guerra. Parte de este dinero, según estudios recientes pudo haber sido incluido en los 500,000 pesos oro que el Comandante Español Francisco Saavedra recibió de Veracruz, mismos que él a su vez entregó a Chevalier de Monteil quien los hizo llegar al Conde de Grasse, Comandante de la Flota Francesa en el Caribe, quien usó el dinero para pagar a sus marineros y reaprovisionar sus barcos en la
Habana y Guarico en su ruta hacia Yorktown. Otro millón de pesos oro de Veracruz fueron
enviados a de Grasse mientras procedía en la ruta hacia la Bahía de Chesapeake.
España no sólo enfrentaba a los Británicos en el Norte del Continente American sino
también en la lejana Filipinas, Galápagos, las islas de Juan Fernández, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bahamas, Jamaica, Menorca y Gibraltar. En tanto que permanecía latente la amenaza de una invasión Hispano-Francesa a Gran Bretaña. Francia lograba dar al conflicto una dimensión mundial al atacar a Inglaterra en la India, La Bahía de Hudson y Sierra Leone, además de en Norte América y las Indias Occidentales.
El Conde de Gálvez tenía bajo de su comando hombres de España, Mayorca, Cuba e
Irlanda. De Luisiana reclutó Franceses, Acadios, Germanos, Españoles de las Islas Canarias, Indios y Negros, tanto esclavos como libres. Y alrrededor de unos 30 americanos, parte de la marina de Carolina del Sur, unos cuantos Texanos pertenecían también a sus tropas. Contaba
además con muchos soldados y barcos de México (Nueva España). Uno de sus Generales de mayor rango fué Gerónimo Girón, descendiente de Moctezuma. Su Ayuda de Campo en la Campaña de Pensacola fué Francisco de Miranda el precursor de la Independencia Venezolana.

A voluntarios Norteamericanos se les ofreció refugio, mismo que aceptaron en los
Puertos de Bilbao, La Coruña, Algeciras y Santa Cruz de Tenerife. El mismo John Paul Jones, utilizó La Coruña como base de operaciones durante 18 meses. Tanto voluntarios Americanos como la flota Francesa del Caribe, encontraron refugio y provisiones en los puertos españoles de la Habana y Nuevo Orleans. Los puertos franceses de Guarico en Cabo Francés de la Isla
Española, fue igualmente un importante refugio para los barcos Norteamericanos, Españoles y Franceses.

En su viaje de retorno de España a Nueva España en Octubre de 1784, Gálvez fué
acompañado por Diego de Gardoqui, quien iba en camino a Philadelphia como primer embajador de España en los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica. En Febrero de 1785, Gálvez estuvo en Savannah y Baltimore, representando a España en las negociaciones relacionadas con límites geográficos con Estados Unidos. Poco tiempo después, en reconocimiento de la ayuda proporcionada por la marina de Carolina del Sur en la invasión de las Bahamas en 1782, el rey Carlos III de España, conociendo el interés de Jorge Washington en la crianza de animales,
epecialmente la cruza para obtener mulas, ofreció a Washington el obsequio de dos burros para la procreación, en su Rancho de Mount Vernon. El 21 de Diciembre de 1785, Washington escribió una carta agradeciendo al Rey por el obsequio de los dos burros.
Al terminar la guerra en 1783, el Conde de Gálvez fué distinguido en el Congreso
Americano por su ayuda durante la Guerra de Independencia. De 1785 a 1786, el Conde de
Gálvez fungió como Virrey de la Nueva España, muriendo prematuramente a la edad de 40 años y fué sepultado en la ciudad de México el 30 de Noviembre de 1786.

En 1789 el primer Embajador de España en los Estados Unidos fué Diego de Gardoqui,
quien estuvo al lado de George Washington durante su desfile inaugural en la ciudad de Nueva York, entonces la capital de los Estados Unidos. El Embajador Gardoqui fondeó al bergantín español “Galveztown” en el puerto de Nueva York el cual sirvió como buque insignia del Conde de Gálvez durante la Campaña del Golfo, el único buque que mereció tal distinción entre los navíos de guerra extranjeros.

Desde entonces por razones inexplicables, los Estados Unidos parecen haber olvidado no sólo la gran contribución Española en la Independencia Americana sino también al gran héroe Español de la Revolución Americana: General Bernardo de Gálvez.

En tiempos más recientes, el 3 de Junio de 1976, con motivo de los Doscientos Años de
la Declaración de Independencia Norteamericana, el Rey Juan Carlos I de España, descendiente directo del Rey Carlos III, donó al pueblo de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica una estatua ecuestre del General Bernardo de Gálvez como testimonio de que España contribuyó con la sangre de sus soldados a la causa de la Independencia Americana. La estatua se encuentra
ubicada en la ciudad de Washington, cerca de la intersección de la avenida Virginia con la calle 21 del sector N.W.

Como dijimos antes: Pocos Norteamericanos aprecian la magnitud de la participación de
España en su Revolución de Independencia, participación ignorada durante los últimos 200 años, empieza lentamente a surgir en la conciencia nacional estadounidense, reconociéndose el papel vital de España en la Guerra de Independencia de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica.

Historiadores de España, México y los Estados Unidos, están actualmente trabajando con
gran ahínco, investigando, escribiendo y hablando para diseminar información que ha sido “barrido bajo el tapete de la historia”, por demasiado tiempo. En consecuencia es de esperar que España reciba el crédito que merece por la ayuda prestada a los patriotas Americanos durante la Guerra por su independencia. Y una vez que los Americanos se den cuenta cabal de la vida y los
hechos del General Español el Conde Bernardo de Gálvez, lo recordarán y honrarán en la misma forma que al General Marqués de Lafayette, al General Rochambeau y al Conde de Grasse de Francia; Barón Von Steuben y Barón DeKalb de Prussia (ahora Alemania); Thaddeus Kosciuszko
y Casimiro Pulaski de Polonia.

Autor

Robert H. Thonhoff

.Antiguo Juez del Condado de Karnes, Texas, historiador y Ex-Presidente de la Asociación Histórica del. Estado de Texas

La entrada España vital en la Independencia de USA se publicó primero en .

Cronología de La Revolución Americana  

Ayuda de España

Se firma la paz

Primer presidente

Se construye la Casa Blanca

Conclusiones

Reconocimiento de la ayuda de España

La entrada U.S: Revolución Americana, ayuda y fechas se publicó primero en .

Consigue una réplica de armas piratas

En estas direcciones puedes adquirir multitud de réplicas de armas piratas, algunas tan antiguas como de la época medieval. 

Los piratas utilizaban una gran variedad de armas. Su suministro procedía numerosas veces de las que conseguían en los abordajes a otros barcos. Por ello como además de asaltar barcos españoles, también lo hacían a barcos, holandeses, franceses e ingleses, la variedad de armas y procedencias podía ser muy grande. Cada país tenía sus propias armas con modelos, variantes y estilos propios. Aunque también es verdad que las armas iniciales procedían de los países de origen de estos piratas.

Los primeros piratas que llegaron al Mar del Caribe fueron los franceses, pero poco tiempo después se incorporaron a ellos numerosos piratas y corsarios ingleses.. Inglaterra hizo de la piratería un gran negocio. El país otorgaba licencias de corso, convirtiendo  a la piratería en algo legal y respaldado por la Corona Inglesa, incluso llegó a otorgar títulos inmobiliarios como hizo con Francis Drake.

Comprar Dagas

El Alfanje es una espada de procedencia de un sable oriental. Sin embargo se hizo popular en Europa. Los venecianos con sus contactos marítimos con Oriente y su presencia en puertos turcos, aprovecharon para armarse con las mejores armas que conocieron. Esta poderosa y práctica arma blanca procede de China y Mongolia, adoptada por los turcos y después por los musulmanes. Al tradicional estilo original de sable se le añadió mas peso, con lo cual resultó un hibrido de sable y espada.  En Venecia se utilizó una versión del alfanje, que se conoció como espada veneciana. Su característica mas destacada era hoja ancha y curva, tenía un filo en un solo lado y además un contrafilo en su último tercio opuesto.

En España se cree que una variante del arma, llegó con la invasión de los árabes a la Península Ibérica. Y durante toda la Reconquista cristiana se utilizó, y fueron hasta 700 años en las zonas del territorio controladas por los musulmanes.  Este Alfanje era una especie de sable corto de hoja corta y curva, que  se modificó posteriormente en zonas cristianas del mediterráneo. Las variantes en España se denominaron también con variantes de la palabra original como alfanjete, alfanjón, alfanjonazo, etc. También se popularizó denominarlo como Terciado.

Para los piratas era casi un arma perfecta. Mas corto que el sable original oriental, permitía utilizarlo en la lucha cuerpo a cuerpo en las cubiertas de los barcos, normalmente atiborradas de cuerdas, velas, cargas, etc. Esto proporcionaba una ventaja, no solo ante el adversario que utilizaba una daga corta o un cuchillo, sino también el que desenvainaba un sable o una espada.

La espada larga presentaba grandes dificultadas para utilizarla en espacios tan pequeños y llenos de obstáculos, como un barco.  Al contrario sería un gran error, porque normalmente antes de un par de golpes quedaría enganchado y sería su perdición. Los piratas cuando veían que se acercaba un capitán o tripulante con sable o espada se desplazaban a los lugares o rincones mas estrechos de la nave, ya que esto les daría ventaja y haría inútil normalmente, el ataque de su adversario con espada. Este error sería fatal.

La entrada ¿Dónde comprar réplicas de armas piratas? se publicó primero en .

Desvelando las claves del poder mundial 

50-España y la guerra de Cuba

La guerra de Cuba (1868-1898) se desarrolló en un contexto económico y geopolítico muy concreto. Estados Unidos necesita materias primas y energía para su industria, así como mercados para sus productos.  Por otra parte se estaba desarrollando un importante comercio con China y las Islas Filipinas aparecían como una plataforma prioritaria. Necesitaba que las materias primas fluyeran desde el resto de América hasta su territorio. Las mercancías que transitaban desde el sur de su territorio tenían que transitar por el Estrecho de Florida. Mientras que las que venían de América Central y del Sur debían pasar por la península del Yucatán. Y además consideraba un riesgo para su seguridad del Paso de los Vientos (Entre Cuba y La Española), el Canal de la Mona (Entre La Española y Puerto Rico), etc,

Estados Unidos pretendía crear una potente armada, en ambos océanos que se comunicase con un futuro canal de Panamás, idea que ya habían acariciado las autoridades españolas, para evitar tener que bordear el Cabo de Hornos, consiguiendo ahorrar una enorme cantidad de tiempo y dinero.

Importantes inversores estadounidenses presionaban a su gobierno para que se hiciera con el control de la Isla de Cuba, pues tenía intereses en el próspero sector azucarero cubano, cuya producción se destinaba casi en su totalidad al consumo estadounidense.

Los intereses eran muchos, ya solo faltaba la excusa para la guerra.

121-El Consenso de Washington de 1989

Establecía 10 grupos de recomendaciones orientadas a la premisa de que para crear riquezas es necesario eliminar todas las barreras arancelarias y abrirse al mercado mundial. Estos diez puntos estaban orientados a los países de Iberoamérica, sumidos en una gran crisis de deuda y controlados por el Banco Mundial, el Fondo Monetario Internacional y el Departamento del Tesoro de Estados Unidos.

Algunos criticaron este Consenso, por impulsar ideas Neoliberales, cuando los estados que promovían el libre comercio ya estaban en situación de supremacía.

270-Guerra de Cuba: Nace la prensa amarilla

Durante la guerra Hispano-Estadounidense la prensa jugó un papel clave a la hora de movilizar a la población norteamericana. En esos años nace en Estados Unidos lo que se denominaría la «Prensa Amarilla».

En esos tiempos era famosa la rivalidad entre los principales periódicos por ser los primeros en difundir la noticia mas llamativa o escandalosa, y así convertirse en líder de ventas. El enfrentamiento profesional entre los editores Pulitzer (New York World) y Hearst (New York Journal), su pugna dio origen a la prensa amarilla. Hearst envió un corresponsal a la isla de Cuba en busca de noticias sangrientas, pero este no las encontró. Decepcionado Hearst por la respuesta del corresponsal de que la situación era tranquila le respondió:

«Tú pon la foto, que yo pongo la guerra»

Esta prensa exageraba o falseaba informaciones sobre los excesos que se daban en la isla, cometidos por las autoridades españolas. para impulsar los ciudadanos estadounidenses, a que reclamasen a su gobierno la entrada en una guerra contra España.  Pero la obra maestra de esta prensa fue la agresiva y desproporciona campaña tras el hundimiento del acorazado Maine en la Habana. El origen de la explosión nunca fue aclarado. Pero esto no fue impedimento para que estos periódicos avivasen e odio de sus compatriotas contra los españoles. A base de repetirlo hasta la saciedad consiguieron que el pueblo estadounidense interiorizase la frase:

«Recordad al Maine, al infierno con España»

A través de la prensa los Estados Unidos unidos consiguieron el recurso para una conflagración que llevaban muchos años fraguando por intereses económicos, comerciales y geopolíticos.

303- Estados Unidos siembra cizaña en la Cuba Española

Casi un siglo antes ya hubo movimientos de Estados Unidos contra España en Cuba.

1809-El presidente Thomas Jefferson promovió ya en 1809, un alzamiento aprovechando la invasión francesa de España.

1814- James Madison su sucesor, suscitó un complot contra las autoridades españolas, que solo fue secundados por los estadounidenses que tenían propiedades en la isla.

1845-James Knox Polk ferviente antiespañol, volvió a impulsar una revuelta de los estadounidenses, que fracasó por no ser respaldada por los cubanos.

1868-Ulysses S. Grant apoyó abiertamente la insurrección cubana durante la llamada guerra de los 10 años.

1885- Stephen Grover Cleveland no hizo nada para impedir que los insurgentes fueran aprovisionados desde Estados Unidos.

1897-William Mckinley  apoyó decididamente a la resistencia cubana.

1895- Estados Unidos reconoció a los insurrectos y un sindicato les concedió un préstamo de 3 millones de dólares. Además se proporcionaron asesores militares para instruirles en el empleo de piezas de artillería.

1898-Decenas de barcos estadounidenses aprovisionaron a los disidentes desde el continente.

369-La guerra es un chanchullo

El verdadero enemigo esta dentro.

Chris Hedges veterano corresponsal de guerra y premio Pulitzer, comenta en un articulo, que tituló  «El verdadero enemigo esta dentro»:

«Nuestro mayor enemigo son los militaristas y los que se benefician de la guerra.  Emplean el miedo  apoyado en el racismo para abolir las libertades civiles, aplastar a los disidentes y llegar a acabar con la democracia.  Utilizan la fuerza militar para llevar a cabo durante décadas, que solo sirven para enriquecer a corporaciones como Lockheed Martin, General Dynamic, Rayteon, Northrop Grumman. Y . cuando los generales se retiran, ¿adivinanEs donde se van a trabajar? Los beneficios son enormes. La guerra nunca cesa. Amplias partes del mundo viven bajo el terror. El musculo militar existe para permitir que las corporaciones globales amplíen mercados y saqueen el petróleo. los minerales y otros recursos naturales, mientras mantienen subyugadas a poblaciones empobrecidas por regímenes marionetas, corruptos y brutales.»

La guerra es un fraude

Pero prácticamente sus mismas palabras fueron dichas años antes por un General norteamericano, Smedley Darlington Butler. Fue el capitán mas joven y el militar mas condecorado de la historia de los Estados Unidos. En el año 1935, una ver retirado del servicio activo del ejército, escribió un libro «The war is a racket» (La guerra es un fraude o la guerra es un chanchullo). El contenido del libro estaba dirigido a revelar la utilización de las fuerzas armadas en beneficio de Wall Street. Aportando detalles de como Washington había intervenido en Iberoamérica para satisfacer los intereses de las principales empresas norteamericanas, las cuales se habrían aprovechado de un ejército pagado por los contribuyentes, para utilizarlo en batallas regadas con la sangre de sus soldados.

La guerra es un fraude. Siempre lo ha sido.  Posiblemente el mas antiguo, fácilmente el mas rentable, seguramente el mas vicioso. Es el único internacional en alcance. Es el único en el cual los beneficios se miden en dólares y las perdidas en vidas humanas. Es efectuada para el beneficio de unos pocos a expensa de la mayoría. Unas pocas personas hacen inmensas fortunas con la guerra. Durante la Primera Guerra Mundial al menos 21.000 personas se hicieron millonarios o milmillonarios en Estados Unidos. ¿Cuántos  de estos millonarios de la guerra llevaron un fusil a la espalda?  ¿ Cuántos de estos cavaron una trinchera? ¿Cuántos supieron lo que era estar hambriento en un refugio infectado de ratas? ¿Cuántos pasaron noches de pánico sin dormir, agachados evitando granadas, esquirlas, y balas de ametralladoras? ¿Cuántos de ellos pararon el golpe de bayoneta de un enemigo? ¿Cuántos de ellos fueron heridos o muertos en combate? […] La guerra permite a las naciones hacerse con mas territorio, si resultan victoriosas. El nuevo territorio inmediatamente es explotado por unos pocos, los mismos que consiguen dólares con la sangre de la guerra. El pueblo es el que paga la factura. 

General Butler y las alforjas que soportó

 «He servido durante 30 años y 4 meses en las unidades mas combativas de las Fuerzas Armadas Estadounidenses, la Infantería de Marina. Tengo el sentimiento de haber actuado durante todo ese tiempo de  bandido altamente cualificado al servicio de las grandes empresas de Wall Street y sus banqueros. En  otras palabras he sido un pandillero al servicio del capitalismo.»

General Butler en Iberoamérica

• 1914, México- De tal manera que en 1914, afirmé la seguridad de los intereses petroleros en México, Tampico en particular.
• Cuba- Contribuí a transformar a Cuba en un país donde la gente del National City Bank podía birlar tranquilamente los beneficios.
• 1902, Nicaragua– Participé en la limpieza de Nicaragua de 1902 a 1912, por cuenta de la firma bancaria internacional Brown  Brothers Harriman.
• 1916-Dominicana-  En 1916 por cuenta de los grandes azucareros norteamericanos, aporté a la República Dominicana la «Civilización».
• 1923, Honduras– En 1923 enderecé los asuntos de Honduras en interés de las compañías fruteras norteamericanas.
• 1927- En 1927 en China afiancé los interese de la Standard Oil.

«Fui premiado con honores, medallas y ascensos. Pero cuando miro hacia atrás  considero que podía haber dado algunos consejos a Al Capone. Él como gánster operó en 3 distritos de una ciudad. Yo, como marine, operé en 3 continentes.»  

«El problema es que que cuando el dólar gana apenas el 6%, aquí se ponen impacientes. y van al extranjero para ganar el cinto por ciento. La bandera sigue al dólar y los solados siguen a la bandera.»

La entrada Asi se domina el mundo: Coronel Pedro Baños se publicó primero en .

Los libros de texto de U.S cuentan cuentos

Las patrañas que descubrió  James Loewen, cuando analizó el contenido de los principales libros de historia de las escuelas de Estados Unidos

James Loewen

Historiador y sociólogo Estadounidense, que analizó los libros de texto que se utilizaban en las escuelas de U.S encontrando graves errores.

La Leyenda Negra y sus consecuencias en las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y el Mundo Hispánico

Este profesor Estadounidense realizó un análisis de una docena de libros de texto de historia de la enseñanza secundaria.   Durante 2 años estudió y comparó estos libros de texto. Y nos explica porque no encontró ninguno adecuado. Consideró que ninguno es interesante para los estudiantes. Los estudiantes han perdido el contacto con la verdadera historia de Estados Unidos. Estos libros son una combinación de optimismo sin sentido, desinformación, patriotismo ciego además de mentiras descaradas. Estos libros ocultan todos los conflictos, dramatismos y situaciones de ambigüedad que ocurrieron en la historia de U.S.

Considera que los libros cuentas historias falsas, centradas en los europeos y elaboran mitos. Muchas de las distorsiones que cuentan estos libros ni siquiera han sido elaboradas por los autores que adornan las portadas.

Lowen parte de la idea de que la historia se contar y explicar como una serie de causas y hechos, detallando también el contexto en el que ocurrieron. Trata a través de la explicación del caso Estadounidenses enseñar como se debe divulgar la historia, en las escuelas y evitar el relato único de lo ocurrido. Recomiendo que se utilicen al menos dos libros de texto, para que los alumnos puedan comparar y hacerse preguntas sobre lo que realmente ocurrió y porque lo presentan de esa manera.

Patrañas que me contó mi profe(Loewen)

James Loewen

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Lies My Teacher Told Me:

Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong 

James Loewen

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Children of affluent white families

Even when they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they
learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds
don’t know.

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in
high school is “too neat and rosy.”
African American, Native American, and
Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history
especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in
mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in
English and most worse in history.
Something intriguing is going on here:
surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner.
Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social
studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give
history departments a wide berth.

They portray the past as a simpleminded morality play

Conversely, textbooks seldom use the past to illuminate the present. They portray the past as a simpleminded morality play. “Be a good citizen” is the message that textbooks extract from the past. “You have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has accomplished.”
While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it can become something of a burden for students of color, children of working-class parents, girls who notice the dearth of female historical figures, or members of any group that has not achieved socioeconomic success. The optimistic approach prevents any understanding of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of
color are alienated. After a thousand pages, bland optimism gets pretty offputting for everyone.
Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. “Take a look in your history book, and you’ll see why we should be proud” goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside.

The titles themselves tell the story

The Great Republic, The American Pageant, Land of Promise, Triumph of the
American Nation.
Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of the Molecule. And you can tell history textbooks just from their covers, graced as they are with American flags, bald eagles, the Washington Monument.
None of the facts is remembered, because they are presented simply as one damn thing after another. While textbook authors tend to include most of the trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks stifle meaning by suppressing causation. Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life.
Even though the books bulge with detail, even though the courses are so busy they rarely reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out most of what we need to know about the American past. And despite their emphasis on facts, some of the factoids they present are flatly wrong or unverifiable. Errors often go uncorrected, partly because the history profession does not bother to review high school textbooks. In sum, startling errors of omission and distortion mar American histories. History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources—the plantation records, city directories, census data, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters that document times past. Based on these primary materials, historians write secondary works—books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness on
Martha’s Vineyard to Grant’s tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians, working individually or in teams, then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works—textbooks covering all phases of U.S. history.
In practice, however, it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them a half-dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is written not by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher’s offices. When historians do write textbooks, they
risk snickers from their colleagues—tinged with envy, but snickers nonetheless: “Why are you devoting time to pedagogy rather than original research?”

Five-sixths of all Americans

As a result of all this, most high school seniors are hamstrung in their efforts to analyze controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter these students the next year as college freshmen.) We’ve got to do better. Five-sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens “learn” in high school forms much of what they know about our past.

At the effects of using standard American history textbooks. It shows that the books actually make students stupid.

We are not really new creatures

As a sociologist, I am reminded constantly of the power of the past. Although each of us comes into the world de novo, we are not really new creatures. We arrive into a social slot, born not only to a family but also a religion, community, and, of course, a nation and a culture. Sociologists understand the power of social structure and culture to shape not only our path through the world but also our understanding of that path and that world. Yet we often have to expend much energy trying to get students to see the influence on their lives of the social structure and culture they inherit. Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future. If our journey together through this book will make the realities of our past more apparent, then this “most irrelevant” subject—American history—might become
more relevant to you. At least, that’s my hope.

The process of hero-making

Myths

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths
about one’s heroic ancestors.
(JAMES BALDWIN)

One is astonished in the study of history at the
recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten,
distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that
Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he
was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget
that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and
simply remember the things we regard as creditable
and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this
philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive
and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations,
but it does not tell the truth.
(W.E.B. DUBOIS)

Heroes

Heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.

Spain found gold

In 1499, when Columbus finally found gold on Haiti in significant amounts, Spain
became the envy of Europe.

After 1500, Portugal, France, Holland, and England joined in conquering the Americas. These nations were at least as brutal as Spain. The English, for example, unlike the Spanish, did not colonize by making use of Native labor but simply forced the Indians out of the way.

Many American Indians fled English colonies to Spanish territories (Florida, Mexico)
in search of more humane treatment.

2- The true importance of Christopher Columbus

Columbus is above all the figure with whom the
Modern Age—the age by which we may delineate these
past 500 years—properly begins, and in his character
as in his exploits we are given an extraordinary insight
into the patterns that shaped the age at its start and still
for the most part shape it today.
—KIRKPATRICK SALE

As a subject for research, the possibility of African
discovery of America has never been a tempting one for
American historians. In a sense, we choose our own
history, or more accurately, we select those vistas of
history for our examinations which promise us the
greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to
explore the possibility that our founding father was a
black man.
—SAMUEL D . MARBLE

History is the polemics of the victor.
—WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
What we committed in the Indies stands out among the
most unpardonable offenses ever committed against
God and mankind and this trade [in American Indian
slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among
them.
—BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS

In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole
all he could see.
—TRADITIONAL VERSE, UPDATED

Must not judge Columbus

Of course, this new history must not judge Columbus by standards from our
own time. In 1493 the world had not decided, for instance, that slavery was
wrong.

Some American Indian nations enslaved other Indians. Africans enslaved
other Africans. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. To attack Columbus for
doing what everyone else did would be unreasonable.

Opposed the slavery

However, some Spaniards of the time—Bartolomé de Las Casas, for example
—opposed the slavery, land-grabbing, and forced labor that Columbus
introduced on Haiti. Las Casas began as an adventurer and became a plantation
owner. Then he switched sides, freed his Natives, became a priest, and fought
desperately for humane treatment of the Indians.

When Columbus and other
Europeans argued that American Indians were inferior, Las Casas pointed out
that Indians were sentient and rational human beings, just like anyone else.
When other historians tried to overlook or defend the Indian slave trade, begun
by Columbus, Las Casas denounced it as “among the most unpardonable
offenses ever committed against God and mankind.” He helped prompt Spain to
enact laws against American Indian slavery.
Although these laws came too late to help the Arawaks and were often disregarded, they did help some Indians survive.

Centuries after his death, Las Casas was still influencing history: Simon
Bolívar used Las Casas’s writings to justify the revolutions between 1810 and
1830 that liberated Latin America from Spanish domination.

They offend

When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans.
When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to
Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they glamorize explorers such
as de Soto just because they were white, our histories offend all people of color.
When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we
all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward
identifying with the oppressor. When textbook authors omit the causes and
process of European world domination, they offer us a history whose purpose
must be to keep us unaware of the important questions.

3. Thanksgiving

Considering that virtually none of the standard fare
surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of
authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural
perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it
necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit
and debase its victims in order to justify its history?
—MICHAEL DORRIS

European explorers and invaders discovered an
inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it
would possibly be so still, for neither the technology
nor the social organization of Europe in the 16th and
17th centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own
resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from
home.
—FRANCIS JENNINGS

The Europeans were able to conquer America not
because of their military genius, or their religious
motivation, or their ambition, or their greed. They
conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological
warfare.
—HOWARD SIMPSON

«It is painful to advert to these things. But our
forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were
nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a
cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at
whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and
futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in
pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to
cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.»
—COL. THOMAS ASPINWALL

 Their consensus answer was “1620.”

Obviously, my students’ heads have been filled with America’s origin myth, the story of the first Thanksgiving. Textbooks are among the retailers of this primal legend.

Spanish?

Starting the story of America’s settlement with the Pilgrims leaves out not only American Indians but also the Spanish. The first non-Native settlers in “the country we now know as the United States” were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt. In 1565 the Spanish massacred the French Protestants who had settled briefly at St.
Augustine, Florida, and established their own fort there. Between 1565 and 1568 Spaniards explored the Carolinas, building several forts that were then burned by the Indians.

Spanish Jews

Some later Spanish settlers were our first pilgrims, seeking regions
new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in
New Mexico in the late 1500s.
Few Americans know that one-third of the  United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been “American,” and that Hispanic Americans lived here before the first ancestor of the Daughters of the American Revolution ever
left England.

Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible mark on the American West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.
Horses that escaped from the Spanish and propagated triggered the rapid flowering of a new culture among the Plains Indians. “How refreshing it would be,” wrote James Axtell, “to find a textbook that began on the West Coast before treating the traditional eastern colonies.”

Authors are WASP

Why don’t they? Perhaps because most textbook authors are WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). The forty-six authors of the eighteen texts I surveyed ranged from Bauer and Berkin to Williams and Wood, but only two were Spanish-surnamed: Linda Ann DeLeon, an author of Challenge of Freedom, and J. Klor de Alva, an author of The Americans.

Surely. it is no coincidence that the books by these last two offer by far the fullest accounts of early Spanish settlements in “what is now the United States,” including mention of the missions the Spanish set up from the Carolinas to the Gulf of Mexico and from San Diego to San Francisco.

51 percent

Within our lifetimes, the school-age population of the United States is destined to become majority minority, with Hispanic, African, Asian, and Native Americans totalling more than 51 percent. At that point, probably after much hand-wringing and tooth-gnashing, the history books will give more attention to our Hispanic past—which they always should have done. Meanwhile, the Spanish are seen as intruders, while the British are seen as settlers.

Disease played the same crucial role

Henry Dobyns has put together a heartbreaking list of ninety-three epidemics
among Native Americans between 1520 and 1918. He has recorded forty-one eruptions of smallpox, four of bubonic plague, seventeen of measles and ten of influenza (both often deadly among Native Americans), and twenty-five of tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and other diseases. Many of these outbreaks reached truly pandemic proportions, beginning in Florida or Mexico

Disease played the same crucial role in Mexico and Peru as it did in Massachusetts.

How did the Spanish manage to conquer what is now Mexico City?

“When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city.” When the Spanish marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on them. Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself helped to crush Aztec morale.

The pestilence

The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to “settle” the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required. Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.

Exceptionalism

In their pious treatment of the Pilgrims, history textbooks introduce the archetype of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is different from—and better than—all other nations on the planet.

How is America exceptional? Well, we’re exceptionally good, for one thing.

To highlight that happy picture, textbooks underplay Jamestown and the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth Rock as the rchetypal birthplace of the United States. Virginia, according to T. H. Breen,

“ill-served later historians in search of the mythic origins of American culture.”

The Pilgrims numbered only 35 of the 102

Bear in mind that the Pilgrims numbered only about 35 of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower; the rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. Historian George Willison has argued that the Pilgrim leaders, wanting to be far from Anglican control, never planned to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana, in South America,
versus the Massachusetts coast, and, according to Willison, they intended a hijacking.

Rumors of mutiny

Only one of all the textbooks I surveyed adheres to the hijacking possibility. “The New England landing came as a rude surprise for the bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower,” says Land of Promise. “[They] had joined the expedition seeking economic opportunity in the Virginia tobacco plantations.” Obviously, these passengers were not happy at having been taken elsewhere, especially to a shore with no prior English settlement to join.
“Rumors of mutiny spread quickly.” Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a fresh interpretation of why the colonists adopted the agreement and why it was so democratic: “To avoid rebellion, the Pilgrim leaders made a remarkable concession to the other
colonists. They issued a call for every male on board, regardless of religion or economic status, to join in the creation of a ‘civil body politic.’ ” The compact achieved its purpose: the majority acquiesced.

Navigation error

Actually, the hijacking hypothesis does not show the Pilgrims in such a bad light. The compact provided a graceful solution to an awkward problem. Although hijacking and false representation doubtless were felonies then as now, the colony did survive with a lower death rate than Virginia, so no permanent harm was done. The whole story places the Pilgrims in a somewhat dishonorable
light, however, which may explain why only one textbook selects it. The “navigation error” story lacks plausibility: the one parameter of ocean travel that sailors could and did measure accurately in that era was latitude— distance north or south from the equator. The “storms” excuse is perhaps still less plausible, for if a storm blew them off course, when the weather cleared they could have turned southward again, sailing out to sea to bypass any shoals. They had plenty of food and beer, after all. But storms and pilot error leave the Pilgrims pure of heart, which may explain why most textbooks choose one of the two.

Ethnocentric

But textbook authors clearly want to package the Pilgrims as a pious and moral band who laid the antecedents of our democratic traditions. Nowhere is this motive more embarrassingly obvious than in John Garraty’s American History. “So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of people consciously created a government where none had existed
before.” Here Garraty paraphrases a Forefathers’ Day speech, delivered in Plymouth in 1802, in which John Adams celebrated “the only instance in human history of that positive, original social compact.” George Willison has dryly noted that Adams was “blinking several salient facts—above all, the circumstances that prompted the compact, which was plainly an instrument of minority rule.”
Of course, Garraty’s paraphrase also exposes his ignorance of the Republic of Iceland, the Iroquois Confederacy, and countless other polities antedating 1620. Such an account simply invites students to become ethnocentric.

Virginia

To highlight that happy picture, textbooks underplay Jamestown and the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the United States. Virginia, according to T. H. Breen, “ill-served later historians in search of the mythic origins of American culture.”
Historians could hardly tout Virginia as moral in intent, for, in the words of the first history of Virginia written by a Virginian: “The chief Design of all Parties concern’d was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming more at sudden Gain, than to form any regular Colony.”
The Virginians’ relations with American Indians were particularly unsavory: in contrast to Squanto, a volunteer, the English in Virginia took Indian prisoners and forced them to teach colonists how to farm.

Dropped dead of poison

In 1623 the English indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River, headed by Chiskiack. The English offered a toast “symbolizing eternal friendship,” whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred
followers dropped dead of poison.
Besides, the early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Native corpses to eat or renting themselves out to American Indian families as servants—hardly the heroic founders that a great nation requires.

The Pilgrims as our founders

As a result, and owing also to Thanksgiving, of course, students are much more likely to remember the Pilgrims as our founders. They are then embarrassed when I remind them of Virginia and the Spanish, for when prompted, students do recall having heard of both.

Their profit

“Their profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, “Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history.”
Profit, too, came from American Indians, by way of the fur trade, without which Plymouth would never have paid for itself. Hobomok helped Plymouth set up fur-trading posts at the mouth of the
Penobscot and Kennebec rivers in Maine; in Aptucxet, Massachusetts; and in Windsor, Connecticut.
Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to “goboldly where none dared go before.” They went to the Indians.

Marginalizes Native Americans

The civil ritual we practice marginalizes Native Americans. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best next to their almost naked Indian guests. As a holiday greeting card puts it, “I is for the Indians we invited to share our food.” The silliness of all this reaches its zenith in the handouts that
schoolchildren have carried home for decades, complete with captions such as, “They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!”

When Native American novelist Michael Dorris’s son brought home this “information” from his New Hampshire elementary school, Dorris pointed out that “the Pilgrims had literally never seen ‘such a feast,’ since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”

This notion that “We”

This notion that “we” advanced peoples provided for the Natives, exactly the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race relations. For example, we are told that white plantation owners furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food, shelter, and clothing on the plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by black labor.

Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States.

The ideological meaning

The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentric. After all, if our culture has God on its side, why should we consider other cultures seriously? This ethnocentrism intensified in the middle of the last century. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman has shown how the idea of “God on our side” was used to legitimize the open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-à-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples of the Pacific, Jews, and even Catholics. Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures.

Frank James and the Wampanoags

On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship. In 1970, for example, the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing. Frank James “was selected, but first he had to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.”

James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you . . . but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. . . . The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans. . . . Massasoit, the great leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers . . . little knowing that . . . before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags . . . and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. . . . Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. . . . What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.
What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was not some incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing James would have said, had he been allowed to speak, was false, excepting the word wheat.

Our textbooks omit

Most of our textbooks also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, and so
on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. Thus our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a process of gaining perspective but of deliberate forgetting. Instead of these important facts, textbooks supply the feel-good minutiae of Squanto’s helpfulness, his name, the fish in the cornhills, sometimes even the menu and the number of American Indians who
attended the prototypical first Thanksgiving.

Book: -Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (James Loewen)

Otros

Otros Libros Leyenda Negra Española e Imperio 

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La Leyenda Negra Española en Inglaterra: William S. Maltby

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La entrada Patrañas 0: Mentiras y exageraciones en libros históricos de U.S, James Loewen se publicó primero en .

Vigilando al Gran Hermano: qué enseñan los libros de texto sobre el Gobierno Federal

En el libro se relata «Las patrañas históricas» que descubrió  James Loewen, cuando leyó y analizó el contenido de 18 de los principales libros de texto historia que se utilizan en las escuelas de Estados Unidos

James Loewen

Historiador y sociólogo Estadounidense, dedicó mas de 1 año, a analizar libros de texto que se utilizaban en las escuelas de U.S, encontrando graves errores.

Patrañas que me contó mi profe (Loewen)

James Loewen

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Lies My Teacher Told Me:

Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong 

James Loewen

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 Watching Big Brother

 What textbooks teach about the federal Gobernment

The historian must have no country.
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of
mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It’s always right and never wrong. . . .
That’s what I learned in school.
—“WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN SCHOOL TODAY?,” TOM PAXTON, 1963

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the
affirmative side of the human story, including our own
story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We
have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us
from the official view of reality.
—BILL MOYERS

As long as you are convinced you have never done
anything, you can never do anything.
—MALCOLM X

To study foreign affairs without putting ourselves into
others’ shoes is to deal in illusion and to prepare
students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our place in
the world.
—PAUL GAGNON

The executive branch of the federal government

Some traditional historians, critics of the new emphasis on social and cultural history, believe that American history textbooks have been seduced from their central narrative, which they see as the story of the American state. Methinks they protest too much. The expanded treatments that textbooks now give to women, slavery, modes of transportation, developments in popular music, and other topics not directly related to the state have yet to produce a new core narrative. They no longer made the story of the state quite so central.
All current textbooks continue to pay overwhelming attention to the actions of the executive branch of the federal government. They still demarcate U.S. history as a series of presidential administrations.
Although textbook authors include more social history than they used to, they still regard the actions and words of the state as incomparably more important than what the American people were doing, listening to, sleeping in, living through, or thinking about.

What story do textbooks tell about our government?

First, they imply that the state we live in today is the state created in 1789. Textbook authors overlook the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution, granting some power to each branch of the federal government, some to the states, and reserving some for individuals, has been decisively altered over the last two hundred years.

The federal government they picture is still the people’s servant, manageable and tractable.

Paradoxically, textbooks then underplay the role of nongovernmental institutions or private citizens in bringing about improvements in the environment, race relations, education, and other social issues. In short, textbook authors portray a heroic state, and, like their other heroes, this one is pretty much without blemishes. Such an approach converts textbooks into anticitizenship manuals—handbooks for acquiescence.

American colossus

College courses in political science generally take one of two approaches when analyzing U.S. actions abroad. Some professors and textbooks are quite critical of what might be called the American colossus. In this “American century” (1917-2017?), the United States has been the most powerful nation on earth and has typically acted to maintain its hegemony.

This view holds that we Americans abandoned our revolutionary ideology long ago, if indeed we ever held one, and now typically act to repress the legitimate attempts at selfdetermination of other nations and peoples.

The realpolitik view

More common is the realpolitik view. George Kennan, who for almost half a century was an architect of and commentator on U.S. foreign policy, provided a succinct statement of this approach in 1948. As head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, Kennan wrote in a now famous memorandum:
«We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its
population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and
resentment. Our real test in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.
We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of
altruism and world benefaction—unreal objectives such as human rights,
the raising of living standards, and democratization.»

High school American history textbooks do not, of course, adopt or even hint at the American colossus view. Unfortunately, they also omit the realpolitik approach. Instead, they take a strikingly different tack.

Salvation Army

They see our policies as part of a morality play in which the United States typically acts on behalf of
human rights, democracy, and “the American way.” When Americans have done wrong, according to this view, it has been because others misunderstood us, or perhaps because we misunderstood the situation. But always our motives were good. This approach might be called the “international good guy” view.
Textbooks do not indulge in any direct discussion of what “good” is or might mean. In Frances FitzGerald’s phrase, textbooks present the United States as “a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world.”
In so doing, they echo the nation our leaders like to present to its citizens: the supremely moral,
disinterested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible world citizen. “Other countries look to their own interests,” said President John F. Kennedy.

Peacekeeping burden

Today this “peacekeeping burden” has gotten out of hand: the United States now spends more on its armed forces than all other nations combined and has them stationed in 144 countries. But under the international good guy interpretation fostered by Kennedy and our textbook authors, these actions become symbols of our altruism rather than our hegemony. Since at least the 1920s, textbook authors have also claimed that the United States is more generous than any other nation in the world in providing foreign aid.
The myth was untrue then; it is likewise untrue now. Today at least twenty European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of their gross domestic product (GDP) or total governmental expenditures to foreign aid than does the United States.

The desire to emphasize our humanitarian dealings with the world influences what textbook authors choose to include and omit. All but one of my original twelve textbooks contained at least a paragraph on the Peace Corps, and the tone of these treatments was adoring. “The Peace Corps made friends for America everywhere,” gushed Life and Liberty.

Multinationals

At least the Peace Corps means well. More important and often less affable, American exports are our multinational corporations. One multinational alone, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), which took the lead in prompting our government to destabilize the socialist government of Salvador Allende, had more impact on Chile than all the Peace Corps workers America ever sent to
Latin America. The same might be said of Union Carbide in India and United Fruit in Guatemala. By influencing U.S. government policies, other American based multinationals have had even more profound effects on other nations.

Military intervention

At times the corporations’ influence has been constructive. For example, when President Gerald Ford was trying to persuade Congress to support U.S. military intervention on behalf of the UNITA rebels in Angola’s civil war, Gulf Oil lobbied against intervention. Gulf was happily producing oil in partnership with Angola’s Marxist government when it found its refineries coming under fire
from American arms in the hands of UNITA. At other times, multinationals have persuaded our government to intervene when only their corporate interest, not our national interest, was at stake.

Concern to students

All this is a matter of grave potential concern to students, who after graduation may get sent to fight in a foreign country, partly because U.S. policy has been unduly influenced by some Delaware corporation, Texas construction company, or New York bank. Or students may find their jobs eliminated by multinationals that move factories or computer programming to Third World countries whose citizens must work for almost nothing.
Social scientists used to describe the world as stratified into a wealthy industrialized center and a poor colonized periphery; some now hold that multinationals and faster modes of transportation
and communication have made management the new center, workers at home and abroad the new periphery.

Multinationalization of the world

Even if students are not personally affected, they will have to deal with the multinationalization of the world. As multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart and Mitsubishi come to have budgets larger than those of most governments, national economies are becoming obsolete.

Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has pointed out, “The very idea of an American economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an American corporation, American capital, American products, and American technology.”
Multinationals may represent a threat to national autonomy, affecting not only small nations but also the United States. When Americans try to think through the issues raised by the complex
interweaving of our economic and political interests, they will not be helped by what they learned in their American history courses. The topic doesn’t fit their “international good
guy” approach.

Most history textbooks do not even mention multinationals.Among the six new books, just two books even mention the term, and both pair it with “benefit.”

Often multinationals bribe

Often multinationals bribe the elites of poor countries like Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria. IBM, Monsanto, Schering-Plough, and many other companies have had executives or corporate policies in one country or another found to be corrupt. In Equatorial Guinea, for example, oil companies pay millions of dollars to the regime’s leaders for the privilege of taking the country’s oil—supporting their children in luxury when they study abroad, leasing buildings from them, and simply paying bribes. Meanwhile, three-fourths of Equatorial Guinea’s population suffers from malnutrition. Why do our oil companies do business this way? Because they pay royalties of only about 10 percent for taking Equatorial Guinea’s oil—far less than they would pay in a justly-run nation.

An antidemocratic force

In the process, these companies comprise an antidemocratic force that helps to solidify the control of a rapacious elite on the country. This is exactly the opposite of what U.S. influence should accomplish, according to either the realpolitik or “international good guy” model. Eventually, as in Iran, our entwinement with regimes like Guinea’s may come back to haunt us.

The authors of Pageant could use a shot of the realism supplied by former Marine Corps Gen. Smedley D. Butler, whose 1931 statement has become famous:
«I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to
collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers. . . . I brought light to the Dominican
Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
“right” for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, 
I might have given Al Capone a few hints.»

Business influence on U.S. foreign polic

Business influence on U.S. foreign policy did not start with Woodrow Wilson’s administration. John A. Hobson, in his 1903 book, Imperialism, described “a constantly growing tendency” of the wealthy class “to use their political power as citizens of this State to interfere with the political condition of those States where they have an industrial stake.”
Nor did such influence end with Wilson. Jonathan Kwitny’s fine book Endless Enemies cites various distortions of U.S. foreign policy owing to specific economic interests of individual corporations and/or to misconceived ideological interests of U.S. foreign policy planners. Kwitny points out that during the entire period from 1953 to 1977, the people in charge of U.S. foreign policy were all on the Rockefeller family payroll. Dean Rusk and Henry Kissinger, who ran our
foreign policy from 1961 to 1977, were dependent on Rockefeller payments for their very solvency.

Ignore much of what the government does

Nonetheless, no textbook ever mentions the influence of multinationals on U.S. policy. This is the case not necessarily because textbook authors are afraid of offending multinationals, but because they never discuss any influence on U.S. policy. Rather, they present our governmental policies as rational humanitarian responses to trying situations, and they do not seek to penetrate the surface of the government’s own explanations of its actions.
Having ignored why the federal government acts as it does, textbooks proceed to ignore much of what the government does. Among the less savory examples are various attempts by U.S. officials and agencies to assassinate leaders or bring down governments of other countries.

The United States has indulged in activities of this sort at least since the Wilson administration, which hired two Japanese-Mexicans to try to poison Pancho Villa.

State-sponsored terrorism

The U.S. government calls actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism” when other countries do them to us. We would be indignant to learn of Cuban or Libyan attempts to influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our government expressed outrage at Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange the assassination of former President George H. W. Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993 and retaliated with a bombing attack on Baghdad, yet the United States has repeatedly orchestrated similar assassination attempts.

Anticommunism as the sole motive

Here Journey offers anticommunism as the sole motive for U.S. policies. Bear in mind that this incident took place at the height of McCarthyism, when, as commentator Lewis Lapham has pointed out, the United States saw communism everywhere: “When the duly elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz, began to talk too much like a democrat, the United States accused him of
communism.”
Fifty years later The American Journey maintains the U.S. government’s McCarthyist rhetoric. So do other textbooks, if they mention Guatemala at all.
Not one textbook includes a word about how the United States helped the Christians in Lebanon fix the 1957 parliamentary election in that then tenuously balanced country. The next year, denied a fair share of power by electoral means, the Muslims took to armed combat, and President Eisenhower sent in the marines on the Christians’ behalf.

This is standard textbook rhetoric: chaos seems always to be breaking out or about to break out, and Americans intervene only “reluctantly.” Other than communism, “chaos” is what textbooks usually offer to explain the actions of the other side. The recent edition of American Pageant relies on the older explanation, communism:
Both Egyptian and communist plottings threatened to engulf Westernoriented Lebanon. After its president had called for aid under the Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States boldly landed several thousand troops and helped restore order without taking a single life.

But communism was never a significant factor in Lebanon, and in other countries it often offers no better explanation than chaos. Kwitny points out that the United States has often behaved so badly in the Third World that some governments and independence movements saw no alternative but to turn to the USSR.

Not intelligible

Since textbook authors are unwilling to criticize the U.S. government, they present opponents of the United States that are not intelligible. This only misleads and mystifies students. Only by disclosing our actions can textbooks provide readers with rational accounts of our adversaries.

Nixon helped the Chilean army

Undaunted by its failures in Cuba, the CIA turned its attention farther south. Only six of eighteen textbooks even mention Chile. “President Nixon helped the Chilean army overthrow Chile’s elected government because he did not like its radical socialist policies,” Life and Liberty says bluntly.

Why leave our involvement open to question? Historians know that the CIA had earlier joined with ITT to try to defeat Allende in the 1970 elections. Failing this, the United States sought to disrupt the Chilean economy and bring down Allende’s government. The United States blocked international loans to Chile, subsidized opposition newspapers, labor unions, and political parties, denied spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a nationwide truckers’ strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and financed the military that staged the bloody coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed. The next year, CIA Director William Colby testified that “a secret high-level intelligence committee led by Kissinger himself had authorized CIA expenditures of over eight million dollars during the period 1970-73 to ‘destabilize’ the government of President Allende.”
Secretary of State Kissinger himself later explained, “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.”

Chilean people’s “irresponsibility”

Since the Chilean people’s “irresponsibility” consisted of voting for Allende, here Kissinger openly says that the United States should not and will not respect the electoral process or sovereignty of another country if the results do not please us.

To defend these acts

To defend these acts on moral grounds is not easy. The acts diminish U.S. foreign policy to the level of Mafia thuggery, strip the United States of its claim to lawful conduct, and reduce our prestige
around the world. To be sure, covert violence may be defensible on realpolitik grounds as an appropriate way to deal with international problems.

In Cuba, for instance, the CIA’s “pointless sabotage operations,” in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s words, “only increased Castro’s popularity.” Even when they succeed, these covert acts provide only a short-term fix, keeping people who worry us out of power for a time, but identifying the United States with repressive, undemocratic, unpopular regimes, hence undermining our long-term interests.

Leads to domestic lying

These interventions raise another issue: Are they compatible with democracy?
Covert violent operations against foreign nations, individuals, and political parties violate the openness on which our own democracy relies. Inevitably, covert international interference leads to domestic lying. U.S. citizens cannot possibly critique government policies if they do not know of them. Thus, covert violent actions usually flout the popular will. These actions also threaten our
long-standing separation of powers, which textbooks so justly laud in their chapters on the Constitution. Covert actions are always undertaken by the executive branch, which typically lies to the legislative branch about what it has done and plans to do, thus preventing Congress from playing its constitutionally intended role.
The U.S. government lied about most of the six examples of foreign intervention just described.

Congress must declare war

Our Constitution provides that Congress must declare war. Back in 1918 Woodrow Wilson tried to keep our intervention in Russia hidden from Congress and the American people. Helen Keller helped get out the truth: “Our governments are not honest. They do not openly declare war against Russia and proclaim the reasons,” she wrote to a New York newspaper in 1919. “They are
fighting the Russian people half-secretly and in the dark with the lie of democracy on their lips.”
Ultimately, Wilson failed to keep his invasion secret, but he was able to keep it hidden from American history textbooks. Therein lies the problem: textbooks cannot report accurately on the six foreign interventions described in this chapter without mentioning that the U.S. government covered them up.

Scandals called Watergate

The sole piece of criminal government activity that most textbooks treat is the series of related scandals called Watergate. In its impact on the public, the Watergate break-in stood out. In the early 1970s Congress and the Ameri an people learned that President Nixon had helped cover up a string of illegal acts, including robberies of the Democratic National Committee and the office of
Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist. Nixon also tried with some success to use the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA, and various regulatory agencies to inspire fear in the hearts of his “enemies list” of people who had dared to oppose his policies or his reelection. In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame Richard Nixon, as they should. But they go no deeper.

The problem is structural

Getting rid of Richard Nixon did not solve the problem, however, because the problem is structural, stemming from the vastly increased power of the federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, a web of secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice president, cabinet members, special operatives such
as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel, Iran, Brunei, and elsewhere, showed an executive branch more out of control than Nixon’s.
Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal clandestine foreign and domestic policies—indeed, some have argued that the Bush II administration’s post-9/11 behavior amounts to just that.

To inculcate allegiance to our country

Educators and textbook authors seem to want to inculcate the next generation into blind allegiance to our country.

Citizens who embrace the textbook view would presumably support any intervention, armed or otherwise, and any policy, protective of our legitimate national interests or not, because they would be persuaded that all our policies and interventions are on behalf of humanitarian aims. They could never credit our enemies with equal humanity.

This “international good guy” approach is educationally dysfunctional if we seek citizens who are able to think rationally about American foreign policy.

Antagonism toward African Americans

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s response to the movement’s call was particularly important, since the FBI is the premier national law enforcement agency. The bureau had a long and unfortunate history of antagonism toward African Americans. J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the FBI got their start investigating alleged communists during the Woodrow Wilson
administration. Although the last four years of that administration saw more antiblack race riots than any other time in our history.

Ku Klux Klan

Wilson had agents focus on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating blacks’ civil rights. Hoover explained the antiblack race riot of 1919 in Washington, D.C., as due to “the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women.” In that year the agency institutionalized its surveillance of black organizations, not white organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. In the bureau’s early years, there were a few black agents, but by the 1930s Hoover had weeded out all but two. By the early 1960s the FBI had not a single black officer, although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his chauffeurs.

FBI agents in the South were mostly white Southerners who cared what their white Southern neighbors thought of them and were themselves white supremacists. And although this next complaint is reminiscent of the diner who protested that the soup was terrible and there wasn’t enough of it, the bureau had far too few agents in the South. In Mississippi it had no office at all and relied for its initial reports on local sheriffs and police chiefs, often precisely the people
from whom the civil rights movement sought protection.
Even in the 1960s Hoover remained an avowed white supremacist who thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education was a terrible error. He helped Kentucky prosecute a Caucasian civil rights leader, Carl Braden, for selling a house in a white neighborhood to a black family.

Martin Luther King Jr.

In August 1963 Hoover initiated a campaign to destroy Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King’s associates, bugged King’s hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of King’s conversations with and about women. The FBI then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Senator Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters, labor leaders, foundation administrators, and, of course, the president.

The FBI tried to sabotage receptions in King’s honor when he traveled to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country” and tried to prove that the SCLC was infested with communists. King wasn’t the only target: Hoover also passed on disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project; other civil rights organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); and other civil rights leaders, including Jesse Jackson.
At the same time the FBI refused to pass on to King information about death
threats to him.

Thirty-five shooting incidents

The FBI knew these threats were serious, for civil rightsworkers were indeed being killed. In Mississippi alone, civil rights workers endured more than a thousand arrests at the hands of local officials, thirty-five shooting incidents, and six murders.

Even this helped little: white supremacists bombed thirty homes and burned thirty-seven black churches in the summer of 1964 alone.
After the national outcry prompted by the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, however, the FBI finally opened an office in Jackson. Later that summer, at the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, the FBI tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King Jr.; in so doing, the bureau was complying with a request from President Lyndon Johnson.

FBI’s attack on black was national

Because I lived and did research in Mississippi, I have concentrated on acts of
the federal government and the civil rights movement in that state, but the FBI’s
attack on black and interracial organizations was national in scope.

State troopers fired on the demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight, many of them shot in the balls of their feet as they ran away and threw themselves on the ground to avoid the gunfire.

In California, Chicago, and elsewhere in the North, the bureau tried to eliminate the breakfast programs of the Black Panther organization, spread false rumors about venereal disease and encounters with prostitutes to break up Panther marriages, helped escalate conflict between other black groups and the Panthers, and helped Chicago police raid the apartment of Panther leader Fred Hampton and kill him in his bed in 1969.
The FBI warned black leader Stokely Carmichael’s mother of a fictitious Black Panther plot to murder her son, prompting Carmichael to flee the United States.

The murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

It is even possible that the FBI or the CIA was involved in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. “Raoul” in Montreal, who supplied King’s convicted killer, James Earl Ray, with the alias “Eric Gault,” may have had CIA connections

Colleges and universities

The FBI investigated black faculty members at colleges and universities from Virginia to Montana to California. In 1970 Hoover approved the automatic investigation of “all black student unions and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students.” The institution at which I taught, Tougaloo College, was a special target: at one point agents in Jackson even proposed to “neutralize” the entire college, in part because its students had sponsored “out-of-state militant Negro speakers, voter-registration drives, and African cultural seminars and lectures . . . [and] condemned various publicized injustices to the civil rights of Negroes in Mississippi.” Obviously high crimesand misdemeanors!

How do American history textbooks treat this legacy?
They simply leave out everything bad the government ever did. They omit not only the FBI’s campaign against the civil rights movement, but also its break-ins and undercover investigations of church groups, organizations promoting changes in U.S. policy in Latin America, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Textbooks

Textbooks don’t even want to say anything bad about state governments: all sixteen narrative textbooks in my sample include part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but fifteen of them censor his negative comments about the governments of Alabama and Mississippi.
Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period. In so doing, textbooks follow what we might call the Hollywood approach to civil rights.

Simply the result of good government

The twelve textbooks I studied for the first edition of this book offered a Parker-like analysis of the entire civil rights movement. Like the arrests of the Mississippi Klansmen, advances in civil rights were simply the result of good government. Federal initiative in itself “explained” such milestones as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John F. Kennedy proposed them, Lyndon Baines Johnson passed them through Congress, and thus we have them today.

Or, in the immortal passive voice of American History, “Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act, was passed.”

Several textbooks even reversed the time order, putting the bills first, the civil rights
movement later.

This account reverses leader and led

Challenge of Freedom provided a typical treatment:

«President Kennedy and his administration responded to the call for racial equality. In June 1963 the President asked for congressional action on far-reaching equal rights laws. Following the President’s example, thousands of Americans became involved in the equal rights movement as well. In August 1963 more than 200,000 people took part in a march in Washington, D.C.»

This account reverses leader and led. In reality, Kennedy initially tried to stop the march and sent his vice president to Norway to keep him away from it because he felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil rights. Even Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy partisan, has dryly noted that “the best spirit of
Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency.”

Kennedy’s reputation

The damage is not localized to the unfounded boost textbooks give to Kennedy’s reputation. The greater danger comes from removing what scholars call “agency” from African Americans. When describing the attack on segregation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the bestselling old book, Triumph of the American Nation, and one of the bestselling current
books, The American Pageant, make no mention that African Americans were the plaintiffs and attorneys in Brown v. Board of Education or that prior cases also brought by the NAACP prepared the way. The latest Pageant actually claims that the Kennedys—Jack and Robert—prodded SNCC and other civil rights groups to register blacks to vote. All prodding went the other way around!

Desegregation was not the federal government

Today many young African Americans think that desegregation was something the federal government imposed on the black community. They have no idea it was something the black community forced on the federal government.
Meanwhile, many young white Americans can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to blacks. Crediting the federal government for actions instigated by African Americans and their white allies surely disempowers African American students today, and surely helps them feel that they “have never done anything,” as Malcolm X put it.

The greatest country in the world

Textbook authors seem to believe that Americans can be loyal to their government only so long as they believe it has never done anything bad.
Textbooks therefore present a U.S. government that deserves students’ allegiance, not their criticism. “We live in the greatest country in the world,” wrote James F. Delong, an associate of the right-wing textbook critic Mel Gabler, in his critique of American Adventures. “Any book billing itself as a story of this country should certainly get that heritage and pride across.”

Makes all education suspect

In 1964, 64 percent of Americans still trusted the government to “do the right thing”; thirty years later this proportion had dwindled to just 19 percent. Textbook authors, since they are unwilling to say bad things about the government, come across as the last innocents in America. Their trust is poignant. They present students with a benign government whose statements should be believed. This is hardly the opinion of their parents, who, according to opinion polls, remain deeply skeptical of what leaders in the federal government tell them. To encounter so little material in school about the bad things the government has done, especially when parents and the daily newspaper tell a different story, “makes all education suspect,” according to education researcher Donald Barr.

Servile approach to the government

Nor can the textbook authors’ servile approach to the government teach students to be effective citizens. Just as the story of Columbus-the-wise has as its flip side the archetype of the superstitious unruly crew, so the archetype of a wise and good government implies that the correct role for us citizens is to follow its leadership.

Certainly many political scientists and historians in the United States suggest that governmental actions are a greater threat to democracy than citizen disloyalty. Many worry that the dominance of the executive branch has eroded the checks and balances built into the Constitution.

Mockery of federalism

Some analysts also believe that the might of the federal government vis-à-vis state governments has made a mockery of federalism. From the Woodrow Wilson administration until now, the federal executive has grown ever stronger and now looms as by far our nation’s largest employer. In the last fifty years, the power of the CIA, the National Security Council, and other covert agencies has grown to become, in some eyes, a fearsome fourth branch of government. Threats to democracy abound when officials in the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and other institutions of government determine not only our policies but also what the people and the Congress need to know about them.

Narcotize students

By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance and secrecy of the executive branch. By taking the government’s side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship.

Minimize the potential power of the people

And by presenting government actions in a vacuum, rather than as responses to such institutions as multinational corporations and civil rights organizations, textbooks mystify the creative tension between the people and their leaders. All this encourages students to throw up their hands in the belief that the government determines everything anyway, so why bother, especially if its actions are usually so benign. Thus, our American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the pe

ople and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly antidemocratic.

See no evil

 Choosing not to look at the war in vietnam

If we do not speak of it, others will surely rewrite the
script. Each of the body bags, all of the mass graves
will be reopened and their contents abracadabraed into
a noble cause.
—GEORGE SWIERS, VIETNAM VETERAN

Who fought in the war

On the first day of class in 1989 I gave my students a quiz including the open-ended question, “Who fought in the war in Vietnam?” Almost a fourth of my students said the combatants were North and
South Korea! I was stunned.

U.S. policy and My Lai

In the My Lai massacre American combat troops murdered women, old men, and children. Ronald Haeberle’s photographs, including this one, which ran in Life magazine, seared the massacre into the nation’s consciousness and still affects our culture.
Most Hollywood movies made about Vietnam include My Lai imagery; Platoon offers a particularly vivid example.

Indeed, attacks on civilians were U.S. policy, as shown by Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s characterization of civilian casualties: “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”

We evaluated our progress by body counts and drew free-fire zones in which the  entire civilian population was treated as the enemy. Such a strategy inevitably led to war crimes. Any photograph of an American soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese hootch (house), a common sight during the war, would get this point across, but no textbook shows such an act.

The normal ravage of war

My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now U.S. senator, called “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” Appearing before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, “Over one hundred and fifty honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.”

He went on to retell how American troops “had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power,
cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” All this was “in addition to the normal ravage of war,” as Kerry pointed out in his testimony.

Never mentions My Lai

Two textbook authors, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, are on record elsewhere as knowing of the importance of My Lai. “The American strategy had atrocity built into it,” Lytle said to me. Davidson and Lytle devote most of a chapter to the My Lai massacre in their book After the Fact. There they tell how news of the massacre stunned the United States. “One thing was
certain,” they write, “the encounter became a defining moment in the public’s perception of the war.”
1Plainly they do not think high school students need to know about it, however, for their high school history textbook, The United States —A History of the Republic, like ten other textbooks in my sample, never mentions My Lai.

Against the war

What against the wa about their prose? Sadly, most textbook authors also leave out all the memorable quotations of the era. No textbook quotes the trademark cadences of Martin Luther King Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war, reproduced at the head of this chapter.
Even more famous was the dissent of Muhammad Ali, then heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Ali refused induction into the military, for which his title was stripped from him, and said,
“No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger.’ ” All eighteen textbooks leave out that line, too. After the Tet offensive, a U.S. army officer involved in retaking Ben Tre said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” For millions of Americans, this statement summarized America’s impact on Vietnam. No textbook supplies it.
Nor does any textbook quote John Kerry’s plea for immediate withdrawal: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Most books also exclude the antiwar songs, the chants—“Hell, no; we won’t go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”—and, above all, the emotions. Indeed, the entire antiwar movement becomes unintelligible in many textbooks, because they do not allow it to speak for itself.One period caused events of the next

Since textbooks rarely suggest that the events of one period caused events of the next, unsurprisingly, none of the textbooks I surveyed looks before the 1950s to explain the Vietnam War.

Have a right to knowledge

The lessons of Vietnam” have also been used to inform or mislead discussions about secrecy, the press, how the federal government operates, and even whether the military should admit gays. High school graduates have a right to enough knowledge about the Vietnam War to participate intelligently in such debates. After all, they are the people who will be called upon to fight in our next (and our ongoing) war— whether it resembles Vietnam or not.

Down the memory hole

The disappearanc of te recent past

We see things not as they are but as we are.
—ANAÏS NIN

Patriotism can flourish only where racism and
nationalism are given no quarter. We should never
mistake patriotism for nationalism. A patriot is one who
loves his homeland. A nationalist is one who scorns the
homelands of others.
—JOHANNES RAU

Of course the people do not want war. . . . But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the
policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist
dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
All you have to do is tell them that they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism.
—GERMAN FIELD MARSHALL HERMANN GOERING, NUREMBERG, APRIL 18,

MANY AFRICAN SOCIETIES divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote.
When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead

Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little ground on which to stand and criticize what we read.
Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha—of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani— generalized ancestors—is more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, so they may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better.

Myth of Reconstruction

The Confederate myth of Reconstruction first permeated the historical literature during the nadir of race relations, from 1890 to 1940, and hung on in textbooks until the 1960s. Reconstruction regimes came to be portrayed as illegitimate and corrupt examples of “Negro domination.” Now historians have returned to the view of Reconstruction put forth in earlier histories, written while
Republican governments still administered the Southern states.

The most important

I concluded that among the most important issues of the past decade were the terrorist attacks
of 9/11/2001, our response in Afghanistan, and our (second) war against Iraq. Far more than the Clinton impeachment, for example, these three events promise to impact our lives in the future. What do textbooks say about them? What should they say?

What about the “why” question, which today’s students do needto contemplate? In its teacher’s edition, Holt makes clea  that “why” is not something teachers should address:  Tell students that in this section they will learn about the attacks of September 11, 2001, their ec nomic and socia  onsequences, and the response by Americans and the U.S. government.” Pathwa s to the Pr sent and Boorstin and Kelley also ignore the “why” question. The Americans blurs  ny causal investigation by adding in terrorist acts by the Irish Republican Army, Peru’s Shining Path movement, and Japan’s religious cult, Aum Shinrikyo.

Terrorists attacked us

The notion that terrorists attacked us because of our values, our freedoms, or our dedication to world peace is self-serving but shallow and inaccurate. Such thinking might be termed nationalist but is hardly patriotic, to follow the distinction made by Johannes Rau at the head of this chapter. Nationalism does not encourage us to critique our country and seek its betterment. Therefore,
nationalism serves us only in the short run. In the long run, our nation needs citizens who question its policies rather than blindly saluting them. Indeed, knowledgeable Americans pointed this out to journalist James Fallows, who summarized in Atlantic Monthly: “The soldiers, spies, academics, and diplomats
I have interviewed are unanimous in saying that ‘They hate us for who we are’ is dangerous claptrap.” Fallows himself called the idea that they hate us for who we are “lazily self-justifying and self-deluding.” Michael Scheuer, first chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, agreed:

Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging
war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom,
liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and
actions in the Muslim world.

In November 2004, confirmation of this view came from an interesting source: a
Pentagon report that pointed out “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather
they hate our policies.” If we took this sentence seriously, we might question or
change our policies in the Middle East. Bush’s analysis—and most textbooks’
avoidance of any analysis—stifles such thought.

Hard to question our foreign policy

Textbooks find it hard to question our foreign policy because from beginning to end they typically assume the America as “international good guy” model we noted in Chapter 8. Consider the first page of Pathways to the Present, for example, which introduces history as a “them ” (along with geography, economics, etc.). Here is every word it supplies students about “history as a theme”:

Fighting for Freedom and Democracy: Throughout the nation’s history, Amer cans have risked their lives to protect their freedoms and to fight
for democracy both at home and abroad. Use the American Pathways
feature on pages 410-411 to help you trace specific events in the struggle
to protect and defend these cherished ideas.

Conspicuously absent are images

Conspicuously absent are images from our centuries of warfare against Native Americans, the Mexican War, Philippines War, or any other conflict that cannot be shoehorned into the
classification “to fight for democracy both at home and abroad.” Our longest war —Vietnam—rates not even a mention. To be sure, some of our military engagements—our 1999 intervention in Serbia-Kosovo, perhaps, or World War II—might fit under the “international good guy” rubric. Others—the Seminole Wars, the Philippines War—cannot. When authors blandly treat our military
history under the heading “Fighting for Freedom and Democracy,” they merel
signal students that they will not be presenting a serious analysis. In the middle of A History of the United States, right after describing the end of our war against Vietnam, Boorstin and Kelley send students a similar signal:
“Still a superpower, the United States could not avoid some responsibility for
keeping peace in the world. Since the American Revolution, the nation had
served as a beacon of hope for people who wanted to govern themselves.”

Keeping peace

Apparently students are not supposed to have noticed that the United States had just spent a decade making war, not “keeping peace,” precisely to deny the Vietnamese the ability “to govern themselves.” Such “analysis” makes it hard to understand why anyone would attack a peacekeeper, “a beacon of hope.”
The very last paragraph in Appleby, Brinkley, and McPherson’s The American Journey provides the most egregious example of all:

The United States spent the last decade of the twentieth century trying to
increase the peace and prosperity of the world. Many Americans still
believed that their nation should serve as an example to the world. As
President Clinton explained in his 1997 State of the Union address:
“America must continue to be an unrelenting force for peace—from the
Middle East to Haiti . . .”

The recommended book

 Lies My Teacher Told Me

Book: -Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (James Loewen)

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Red Eyes

To understand the making of Anglo-America is
impossible without close and sustained attention to its
indigenous predecessors, allies, and nemeses.
—JAMES AXTELL
1
The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other
Europeans would question the morality of their
enterprise. They therefore [prepared] . . . quantities of
propaganda to overpower their own countrymen’s
scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard
form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and
semantics. We live with it still.
—FRANCIS JENNINGS

Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not
have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who
does not cringe in anguish and frustration because of
these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has
not come home in shame and tears.
—RUPERT COSTO

Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the
textbooks.
—THOMAS BAILEY

Start below zero

Historically, American Indians have been the most lied-aboutsubset of our population. That’s why Michael Dorris said that, in learning about Native Americans, “One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten.”
High school students start below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologetically present Native Americans through white eyes. Today’s textbooks should do better, especially since what historians call Indian history (though really it is interracial) has flowered since the 1970s, and the information on which new textbooks might be based currently rests on library shelves.

Our Original Sin

Our journey into a more accurate history of American Indian peoples and their relations with European and African invaders cannot be a happy excursion. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to
anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.”
If we look Indian history squarely in the eye, we are going to get red eyes. This is our past, however, and we must acknowledge it. It is time for textbooks to send white children home, if not with red eyes, at least with thought-provoking questions.

An escalation of Indian warfare

Tribes that were closest to the Europeans got guns first, guns that could be trained on interior peoples who had not yet acquired any. Suddenly some nations had a great military advantage over others. The result was an escalation of Indian warfare. Native nations had engaged in conflict before Europeans came, of course. Tribes rarely fought to the finish, however. Some tribes did not want to take over the lands belonging to other nations, partly because each had its own sacred sites. For a nation to exterminate its neighbors was difficult anyway, since all enjoyed roughly the same level of military technology. Now all this changed. European powers deliberately increased the level of warfare by playing one Native nation off another.

The motive for the increased combat

Like African slaves, Indian slaves escaped when they could. This notice comes from the Boston Weekly News-Letter for October 4, 1739.
For many tribes the motive for the increased combat was the enslavement of other Natives to sell to the Europeans for more guns and kettles. As northern tribes specialized in fur, certain southern tribes specialized in people. Some Native Americans had enslaved each other long before Europeans arrived. Now Europeans vastly expanded Indian slavery.

Native Americans and good slaves

I had expected to find in ourtextbooks the cliché that Native Americans did not make good slaves, but only two books, Triumph of the American Nation and The American Tradition, say even that. American History buries a sentence, “A few Indians were enslaved,” in its discussion of the African slave trade. Otherwise, the textbooks are silent on the subject of the Native American slave trade in what is now the United States —except for one surprising standout. The American Pageant contains a paragraph that tells how the Carolina colonists enlisted the coastal Savannah Indians to bring them slaves from the interior, making “manacled Indians . . . among the young colony’s major exports.” Pageant goes on to tell how Indian captives wound up enslaved in the West Indies and New England.

In New England, Indian slavery

In New England, Indian slavery led directly to African slavery: the first blacks imported there, in
1638, were brought from the West Indies in exchange for Native Americans from Connecticut.
On the eve of the New York City slave rebellion of 1712, in which Native and African slaves united, about one resident in four was enslaved and one slave in four was American Indian. A 1730 census of South Kingston, Rhode Island, showed 935 whites, 333 African slaves, and 223 Native American
slaves.

Native American slavery

As Pageant (alone) implies, the center of Native American slavery, like African American slavery, was South Carolina. Its population in 1708 included 3,960 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured servants, presumably white. These numbers do not reflect the magnitude of Native slavery, however, because they omit the export trade.

From Carolina, as from New England, colonists sent enslaved American Indians (who might escape) to the West Indies (where they could never escape), in exchange for enslaved Africans. Charleston shipped more than ten thousand Natives in chains to the West Indies in one year.
Farther west, so many Pawnee Indians were sold to whites that Pawnee became the name applied in the plains to all slaves, whether they were of Indian or African origin.
On the West Coast, Pierson Reading, a manager of John Sutter’s huge grant of Indian land in central California, extolled the easy life he led in 1844: “The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in the south.” In the Southwest, whites enslaved Navajos and Apaches right up to the middle of the Civil War.

The slave trade

Intensified warfare and the slave trade rendered stable settlements no longer safe, helping to de-agriculturize Native Americans. To avoid being targets for capture, American Indians abandoned their cornfields and their villages and began to live in smaller settlements from which they could more easily escape to the woods. Ultimately, they had to trade with Europeans even for food.

Cultural imperialism

By the time the pitiful remnant of the Massachuset tribe converted to Christianity and joined the
Puritans’ “praying Indian towns,” they did so in response to an invading culture that told them their religion was wrong and Christianity was right. This process exemplifies what anthropologists call cultural imperialism. Even the proud Plains Indians, whose syncretic culture combined horses and guns from the Spanish with Native art, religion, and hunting styles, showed the effects of cultural imperialism: the Sioux word for white man, wasichu, means “one who has everything good.”

The global economy

To be anthropologically literate about culture contact, students should be familiar with the terms syncretism and cultural imperialism, or at least the concepts they denote. None of the textbooks I studied mentions either term, and most of them tell little about the process of cultural change, again except for the Plains Indian horse culture, which, as a consequence, comes across as unique.
Even the best of the new textbooks are short on analysis. They don’t treat the crucial importance of incorporation into the global economy, which helps to  explain why sometimes Europeans traded and coexisted with Natives and other times merely attacked them. Nor do they tell how contact worked to de-skill Native Americans.
Just as American societies changed when they encountered whites, so European societies changed when they encountered Natives. Textbooks completely miss this side of the mutual accommodation and acculturation process.

The frontier line

Instead, their view of white-Indian relations is dominated by the archetype of the frontier line. Textbooks present the process as a moving line of white (and black) settlement—American Indians on one side, whites (and blacks) on the other. Pocahontas and Squanto aside, the Natives and Europeans don’t meet much in textbook history, except as whites remove Indians farther west. In reality, whites and Native Americans in what is now the United States worked together, sometimes lived together, and quarreled with each other for 325 years, from the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565 to the end of Sioux and Apache autonomy around 1890.

Historian Gary Nash tells us that interculturation took place from the start in Virginia, “facilitated by the fact that some Indians lived among the English as day laborers, while a number of settlers fled to Indian villages rather than endure the rigors of life among the autocratic English.”

Indeed, many white and black newcomers chose to live an American Indian lifestyle. In his Letters from an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crévecoeur wrote, “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.”

Crévecoeur overstated his case: as we know from Squanto’s example, some Natives chose to live among whites from the beginning. The migration was mostly the other way, however. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Defecting to Native societies

Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. “People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, even up to the death penalty,” Karen Kupperman tells us, if caught by whites.
Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Native nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society.

 Suggested union similar to the league (Iroquois)

In the 1740s the Iroquois wearied of dealing with several often bickering English colonies and suggested that the colonies form a union similar to the league. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin, who had spent much time among the Iroquois observing their deliberations, pleaded with colonial leaders to consider his Albany Plan of Union: “It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; nd yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.”

The colonies rejected the plan

The colonies rejected the plan. But it was a forerunner of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery. In 1775 Congress formulated a speech to the Iroquois, signed by John Hancock, that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. “The Six Nations are a wise people,” Congress wrote, “let us harken to their council and teach our children to follow it.

Symbol of the new United States

As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once.

Contributions to medicine

In the nineteenth century, Americans knew of Native American contributions to
medicine. Sixty percent of all medicines patented in the century were distributed
bearing Indian images, including Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, Kickapoo Indian
Sagwa, and Kickapoo Indian Oil. In this century, America has repressed the
image of Indian as healer.

Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre

Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre shows a motif common in nineteenth-century
lithographs: Indians invading the sanctity of the white settlers’ homes. Actually,
whites were invading Indian lands and often Indian homes, but pictures such as
this, not the reality, remain the archetype.

Total Costs and Number of Battle Deaths

Our history is full of wars with Native American nations. “For almost two hundred years,” notes David Horowitz, “almost continuous warfare raged on the American continent, its conflict more threatening than any the nation was to face again.” American Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George Washington’s administration and dogged his successors
for a century as a major issue and expense.

Yet most of my original twelve textbooks barely mentioned the topic. The American Pageant still offers a table of “Total Costs and Number of Battle Deaths of Major U.S. Wars” that completely omits Indian wars. Pageant includes the Spanish-American War, according it a toll of 385 battle deaths, but leaves out the Ohio War of 1790-95, which cost 630 dead and missing U.S. troops in a single battle, the Battle of Wabash River

Native ingratitude

Textbooks give readers no clue as to what the zone of contact was like from the Native side. They emphasize Native Americans such as Squanto and Pocahontas, who sided with the invaders. And they invert the terms, picturing white aggressors as “settlers” and often showing Native settlers as
aggressors. “The United States Department of Interior had tried to give each tribe both land and money,” says The American Way, describing the U.S. policy of forcing tribes to cede most of their land and retreat to reservations. Whites were baffled by Native ingratitude at being “offered” this land, Way claims: “White Americans could not understand the Indians. To them, owning land was
a dream come true.” In reality, whites of the time were hardly baffled. Even Gen.
Philip Sheridan—who is notorious for having said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”—understood. “We took away their country and their means of support, and it was for this and against this they made war,” he wrote. “Could anyone expect less?”

Paying the wrong tribe

Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction
within a much larger nation. Often they didn’t really care; they merely sought
justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions might even have worked in
their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or faction against another. The
biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the
textbooks tell how Jefferson “doubled the size of the United States by buying
Louisiana from France.” Not one points out that it was not France’s land to sell
—it was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners before
selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did
not really sell Louisiana for $15 million. France merely sold its claim to the
territory. The United States was still paying Native American tribes for
Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century. We were also fighting them for it:
the Army Almanac lists more than fifty Indian wars in the Louisiana Purchase
from 1819 to 1890. To treat France as the seller, as all our textbooks do, is
Eurocentric. Equally Eurocentric are the maps textbooks use to show the Lewis
and Clark expedition. Even the newest maps still blandly label huge expanses
“Spanish Territory,” “British Territory,” and “French Territory,” making Native
Americans invisible and implying that the United States bought vacant land from
the French. Although the Mandans hosted the expedition during the winter of
1804-05 and the Clatsops did so the next winter, even these tribes drop out.
Apparently Lewis and Clark did it all on their own.

After 1815

All but two textbooks miss the key result of the war.“After 1815 the American people began the exciting task of occupying the western lands.” All the other books miss the key outcome: in return for our leaving Canada alone, Great Britain gave up its alliances with American Indian nations in what would become the United States. Without war materiel and other aid from European allies, future Indian wars were transformed from major international conflicts to domestic moppingup operations. This result was central to the course of Indian-U.S. relations for the remainder of the century. Thus Indian wars after 1815, while they cost thousands of lives on both sides, would never again amount to a serious threat to the United States.

The loss of part of our history

Another result of the War of 1812 was the loss of part of our history. As
historian Bruce Johansen put it, “A century of learning [from Native Americans]
was coming to a close. A century and more of forgetting—of calling history into
service to rationalize conquest—was beginning.”
87 After 1815 American
Indians could no longer play what sociologists call the role of conflict partner—
an important other who must be taken into account—so Americans forgot that
Natives had ever been significant in our history. Even terminology changed:
until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native
Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans.

It meant European Americans

After 1815 American Indians could no longer play what sociologists call the role of conflict partner— an important other who must be taken into account—so Americans forgot that Natives had ever been significant in our history. Even terminology changed: until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans.

Kupperman has shown how this process unfolded in Virginia after the Indian defeat in the 1640s: “It was the ultimate powerlessness of the Indians, not their racial inferiority, which made it possible to see them as people without rights.”

 Natives: ingenious  and industrious

Natives who had been “ingenious,” “industrious,” and “quick of apprehension” in 1610 now became “sloathfull and idle, vitious, melancholy, [and] slovenly.” This is another example of the process of cognitive dissonance. Like Christopher Columbus, George Washington changed his attitudes toward Indians. Washington held positive views of Native Americans early in his life, but after unleashing attacks upon them in the Revolutionary War and the Ohio War in 1790, he would come to denounce them as “animals of prey.”

This process of rationalization

This process of rationalization became unofficial national policy after the War of 1812. In 1845 William Gilmore Simms wrote, “Our blinding prejudices . . . have been fostered as necessary to justify the reckless and unsparing hand with which we have smitten [American Indians] in their habitations and expelled them from their country.”

In 1871 Francis A. Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, considered American Indians beneath morality: “When dealing with savage men, as with savage beasts, no question of national honor can arise.” Whatever action the United States cared to take “is solely a question of expediency.”

Thus, cognitive dissonance destroyed our national idealism. From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. Gradually we sought American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin, and, indirectly, over other nations.

European nations

Although European nations professed to be shocked by our actions on the western frontier, before long they were emulating us. Britain exterminated the Tasmanian aborigines; Germany pursued total war against the Herrero of Namibia. Most western nations have yet to face this history.

Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, “often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat” as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom people).

Alternatives to this history of war

Were there alternatives to this history of war? Of course, there were. Indeed,
France, Russia, and Spain all pursued different alternatives in the Americas.
Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States,
however, they are tricky topics for historians.

Slave owners to appropriate

As Edward Carr noted, “History is,by and large, a record of what people did, not of what they failed to do.”  On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent upon the actions of people. “The duty of the historian,” Gordon Craig has reminded us, “is to restore to the past the options it once had.” Craig also pointed out that this is an appropriate way to teach history and to make it memorable.
White Americans chose among real alternatives and were often divided among themselves. At various points in our history, our anti-Indian policies might have gone another way.

For example, one reason the War of 1812 was so unpopular in New England was that New Englanders saw it as a naked attempt by slave owners to appropriate Indian land. Peaceful coexistence of whites and Native Americans presents itself as perhaps the most obvious alternative to war, but was it really possible?

White conduct hindered

From the start, however, white conduct hindered peaceful coexistence.A thousand little encroachments eventually made it impossible for American Indians to farm near whites. Around Plymouth, the Indians leased their grazing land but retained their planting grounds. Too late they found that this did not keep colonists from letting their livestock roam free to ruin the crops. When
Native Americans protested, they usually found that colonial courts excluded their testimony. On the other hand, “the Indian who dared to kill an Englishman’s marauding animals was promptly hauled into a hostile court.”

The precedent established on the Atlantic coast—that American Indians were not citizens of the Europeans’ state and lacked legal rights—prevented peaceful white-Indian coexistence throughout the colonies and later the United States.
Even in Indian Territory, supposedly under Native control, whether Indians were charged with offenses on white land or whites on Indian land, trial had to be held in a white court in Missouri or Arkansas, miles away.

The «half-breeds” were   stigmatized

A related possibility for Natives, Europeans, and Africans was intermarriage. Alliance through marriage is a common way for two societies to deal with each other, and Indians in the United States repeatedly suggested such a policy.

Spanish men married Native women in California and New Mexico and converted them to Spanish ways. French fur traders married Native women in Canada and Illinois and converted to Native ways.

Not the English. Textbooks might usefully pass on to students the old cliché—the French penetrated Indian societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the English expelled them—for it
offers a largely accurate summary of European-Indian relationships.

In New England and Virginia, English colonists quickly moved to forbid interracial marriage.  Pocahontas stands as the first and almost the last Native to be accepted into British-American society, which we may therefore call “white society,” through marriage. After her, most interracial couples found greater acceptance in Native society. There their children often became chiefs, because their bicultural background was an asset in the complex world the tribes now had to navigate.

In Anglo society “half-breeds” were not valued but stigmatized.

Justifications

The overall story line most American history textbooks tell about American
Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them; they wouldn’t or couldn’t do it; so
we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic than the account in earlier
textbooks, this account falls into the trap of repeating as history the propaganda
used by policy makers in the nineteenth century as a rationale for removal—that
Native Americans stood in the way of progress. The only real difference is the
tone.

Back when white Americans were doing the dispossessing, justifications were shrill. They denounced Native cultures as primitive, savage, and nomadic. Often writers invoked the hand or blessings of God, said to favor those who “did more” with the land.
Now that the dispossessing is done, our histories since 1980 can see more virtue in the conquered cultures. But they still pictured American Indians as tragically different, unable or unwilling to acculturate.

White settler propaganda

When they stress Natives’ alleged unwillingness to acculturate, American histories slip into the story line of the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Come Over and Help Us” is white settler propaganda, which grew into an archetype of well-meaning Europeans and tragically different Indians.

Under penalty of death

The trouble is, it wasn’t like that. The problem was not Native failure to acculturate. In reality, many European Americans did not really want Indians to acculturate. It wasn’t in their interest. At times this was obvious, as when the Massachusetts legislature in 1789 passed a law prohibiting teaching Native Americans how to read and write “under penalty of death.”

Cherokees already were farmers

President Thomas Jefferson told a delegation of Cherokees in 1808, “Let me entreat you therefore, on the lands now given [sic] you to begin every man a farm, let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies let it belong to his wife and children after him.”
In reality, the Cherokees already were farmers who were visiting Jefferson precisely to ask the president to assign their lands to them in severalty (as individual farms) and to make them citizens.
Jefferson put them off. The American Way asks students, “Why were the Indians moved further west?” Its teachers’ edition provides the answer: “They were moved so the settlers could use the land for growing crops.” We might add this catechism: “What were the Indians doing on the land?” “They were growing crops!” When Jefferson spoke to the Cherokees, whites had been burning Native houses and cornfields for 186 years, beginning in Virginia in 1622.

Cherokee in Georgia in 1825

A census taken among the Cherokee in Georgia in 1825 (reported in Vogel, ed.,
This Country Was Ours, 289) showed that they owned “33 grist mills, 13 saw mills, 1 powder mill, 69 blacksmith shops, 2 tan yards, 762 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,923 plows, 7,683 horses, 22,531 black cattle, 46,732 swine, and 2,566 sheep.” Some Cherokees were wealthy planters, including Joseph Vann, who cultivated three hundred acres, operated a ferry, steamboat, mill, and tavern, and owned this mansion. It aroused the envy of the sheriff and other whites in Murray County, who evicted Vann in 1834 and appropriated the house for themselves, according to Lela Latch Lloyd.

Native Americans acculturated

No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. “Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except on its periphery,” according to Nash.
112 Native Americans who amassed property, owned European-style homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the first targets of white thugs who coveted their land and improvements. In time of war the position of assimilated Indians grew particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white towns, were hatcheted by their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorities who weren’t careful whose scalp they were paying for, so long as it was Indian. Through the centuries and across the country, this pattern recurred. In 1860, for instance, California ranchers killed 185 of the 800 Wiyots, a tribe allied with the whites, because they were angered by other tribes’ cattle raids.

Five Civilized Tribe

The new textbooks do a splendid job telling how the “Five Civilized Tribes”—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles— acculturated successfully, but were exiled to Oklahoma anyway. Nevertheless, authors never let these settled Indians interfere with the traditional story line. Forgetting how whites forced Natives to roam, forgetting just who taught the Pilgrims to farm in the first place, our culture and our textbooks still stereotype Native Americans as roaming primitive hunting folk, hence unfortunate victims of progress. As Boorstin and Kelley put it, “North of Mexico, most of the people lived in wandering tribes and led a simple life. North American Indians were mainly hunters and gatherers of wild food. An exceptional few—in Arizona and New Mexico—settled in one place and became farmers.”

Europeans were the nomads

Ironically, to Native eyes, Europeans were the nomads. As Chief Seattle put it
in 1855, “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is
hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and
seemingly without regret.” In contrast, Indian “roaming” consisted mainly of
moving from summer homes to winter homes and back again.

Why acculturation couldn’t work

One way to understand why acculturation couldn’t work for most Natives is to imagine that the United States allowed lawless discrimination against all people whose last name starts with the letter L. How long would we last? The first nonL people who wanted our homes or jobs could force us out, and we would be without resources. People around us would then blame us L people for being vagrants. That is what happened to Native Americans. In Massachusetts, colonists were constantly tempted to pick quarrels with Indian families because the result was likely to be acquiring their land.

The Nez Percé reservation by 1862

In Oregon, 240 years later, the process continued. Ten thousand whites had moved onto the Nez Percé reservation by 1862, so a senator from Oregon suggested that the United States should remove the nation. Senator William Fessenden of Maine pointed out the problem: “There is no difficulty, I take it, in Oregon in keeping men off the lands that are owned by white men. But when the pos essor happens to be an Indian, the question is changed altogether.”

 Without legal rights

Without legal rights, acculturation cannot succeed. Inmuttooyahlatlat, known to whites as Chief
Joseph, said this eloquently: “We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If a white man breaks the law, punish him also. Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to talk and think and act for myself.”

It was not to be. Most courts simply refused to hear testimony from Native Americans against whites. After noting how non-Indians could rise through the ranks of Native societies, anthropologist Peter Farb summed up the possibilities in white society: “At almost no time in the history of the United States, though, were the Indians afforded similar opportunities for voluntary
assimilation.”
The acculturated Native simply stood out as a target.

Indian wars

Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feelgood history for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the continent from Native Americans. Today’s college students, when asked to compile a list of U.S. wars, never think to include Indian wars, individually or as a whole. The Indian-white wars that dominated our history from 1622 to 1815 and were of considerable importance until 1890 have mostly disappeared from our national memory.

The antidote to the pious ethnocentrism

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God’s chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge, suggests historian Christopher Vecsey: “The study of our contact with Indians, the envisioning of our dark American selves, can instill such a strengthening doubt.”

History through red eyes offers our children a deeper understanding than comes from encountering the past as a story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.

Book: -Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (James Loewen)

Otros

Otros Libros Leyenda Negra Española e Imperio 

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Patrañas que me contó mi profe: James Loewen

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La entrada Patrañas 1: Ojos de piel roja, James Loewen se publicó primero en .

La tierra de las oportunidades

En el libro se relata «Las patrañas históricas» que descubrió  James Loewen, cuando leyó y analizó el contenido de 18 de los principales libros de texto historia que se utilizan en las escuelas de Estados Unidos

James Loewen

Historiador y sociólogo Estadounidense, dedicó mas de 1 año, a analizar libros de texto que se utilizaban en las escuelas de U.S, encontrando graves errores.

Patrañas que me contó mi profe (Loewen)

James Loewen

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Lies My Teacher Told Me:

Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong 

James Loewen

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The land of opportunity

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital
is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of
capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate
—that we could mold our lives into any form we
pleased. . . . I had overcome deafness and blindness
sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone
could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly
into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about
the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance
on a subject I knew little about. . . . I learned that the
power to rise in the world is not within the reach of
everyone.
—HELEN KELLER

Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and
ten million can’t buy enough to eat.
—WILL ROGERS, 1931

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily
written as the history of its dominant class.
—KWAME NKRUMAH

Ignorant of the class structure

Middle-class students, especially, know little about how the American class structure works, however, and nothing at all about how it has changed over time. These students do not leave high school merely ignorant of the workings of the class structure; they come out as terrible sociologists. “Why are people poor?” I have asked first-year college students. Or, if their own class position is one of relative privilege, “Why is your family well-off ?” The answers I’ve received, to characterize them charitably, are half-formed and naïve. The students blame the poor for not being successful.

Opportunity is not equal in America

They have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal in America and no notion that social structure pushes people around, influencing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion. High school history textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of affairs.

 No book mentions any of the major strikes

No book mentions any of the major strikes that labor lost in the late twentieth century, such as the 1985 Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, or the 1991 Caterpillar strike in Decatur, Illinois—defeats that signify labor’s diminished power today.
Nor do most textbooks describe any continuing issues facing labor, such as the growth of multinational corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas. With such omissions, textbook
authors can construe labor history as something that happened long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago. It logically follows that unions now appear anachronistic. The idea that they might be necessary for workers to have a voice in the workplace goes unstated.

Photograph of a sweatshop

This photograph of a sweatshop in New York’s Chinatown, taken in the early 1990s, illustrates that the working class still works, in America, sometimes under conditions not so different from a century ago, and often in the same locations.

These books’ poor treatment of labor history is magnificent compared to their treatment of social class. Nothing that textbooks discuss—not even strikes—is ever anchored in any analysis of social class.

Social class, social stratification

Half of the eighteen high school American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for social class, social stratification, class structure, income distribution, inequality, or any conceivably related topic. Not one book lists upper class or lower class. Three list middle class, but only to assure students that America is a middle-class country. “Except for slaves, most of the colonists were members of the ‘middling ranks,’ ” says Land of Promise, and nails home the point that we are a middle-class country by asking students to “describe three ‘middle-class’ values that united free Americans of all classes.”

Is increasingly problematic today

Stressing how middle-class we all are is increasingly problematic today, because the proportion of households earning between 75 percent and 125 percent of the median income has fallen steadily since 1967. The Reagan-Bush administrations accelerated this shrinkage of the middle class, and most families who left its ranks fell rather than rose.
As late as 1970, family incomes in the United States were only slightly less equal than in Canada. By 2000, inequality here was much greater than Canada’s; the United States was becoming more like
Mexico, a very stratified society.
The Bush II administration, with its tax cuts aimed openly at the wealthy, continued to increase the gap between the haves and have-nots. This is the kind of historical trend one would think history books would take as appropriate subject matter, but only five of the eighteen books in my sample provide any analysis of social stratification in the United States. Even these fragmentary analyses are set mostly in colonial America.

The stress on upward mobility

Boorstin and Kelley, unusual in actually including social class in its index, lists only social classes in 1790 and social classes in early America. These turn out to be two references to the same paragraph, which tells us that England “was a land of rigid social classes,” while here in America “social classes were much more fluid.” “One great difference between colonial and European society was that the colonists had more social mobility,” echoes The American Tradition. Never mind that the most violent class conflicts in American history—Bacon’s Rebellion and Shays’s Rebellion—took place in and just after colonial times.

Textbooks still say that colonial society was relatively classless and marked by upward mobility.
And things have only gotten rosier since. “By 1815,” The Challenge of Freedom assures us, two classes had withered away and “America was a country of middle class people and of middle class goals.” This book returns repeatedly, every fifty years or so, to the theme of how open opportunity is in America. The stress on upward mobility is striking.

Class inequalities or barriers

There is almost nothing in any of these textbooks about class inequalities or barriers of any kind to social mobility. “What conditions made it possible for poor white immigrants to become richer in the colonies?” Land of Promise asks. “What conditions made/make it difficult?” goes unasked. Boorstin and Kelley close their sole discussion of social class (in 1790, described above) with the happy sentence, “As the careers of American Presidents would soon show, here a person might rise by hard work, intelligence, skill, and perhaps a little luck, from the lowest positions to the highest.”

The most important variable in society

If only that were so! Social class is probably the single most important variable in society. From womb to tomb, it correlates with almost all other social characteristics of people that we can measure. Affluent expectant mothers are more likely to get prenatal care, receive current medical advice, and enjoy general health, fitness, and nutrition. Many poor and working-class mothers-tobe first contact the medical profession in the last month, sometimes the last hours, of their pregnancies. Rich babies come out healthier and weighing more than poor babies. The infants go home to very different situations. Poor babies are more likely to have high levels of poisonous lead in their environments and their bodies. Rich babies get more time and verbal interaction with their parents and higher quality day care when not with their parents. When they enter kindergarten, and through the twelve years that follow, rich children benefit from suburban schools that spend two to three times as much money per student as schools in inner cities or impoverished rural areas. Poor children are taught in classes that are often 50 percent larger than the classes of affluent children.
Differences such as these help account for the higher school-dropout rate among poor children.
Even when poor children are fortunate enough to attend the same school as rich children, they encounter teachers who expect only children of affluent families to know the right answers. Social science research shows that teachers are often surprised and even distressed when poor children excel. Teachers and counselors believe they can predict who is “college material.” Since many
working-class children give off the wrong signals, even in first grade, they end up in the “general education” track in high school.

Low income parents

“If you are the child of low income parents, the chances are good that you will receive limited and often careless attention from adults in your high school,” in the words of Theodore Sizer’s bestselling study of American high schools, Horace’s Compromise. “If you are the child of upper-middle-income parents, the chances are good that you will receive substantial and careful attention.”

Researcher Reba Page has provided vivid accounts of how high school American history courses use rote learning to turn off lower-class students.
Thus schools have put into practice Woodrow Wilson’s recommendation: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class
of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

Social class predicts

All these are among the reasons that social class predicts the rate of college attendance and the type of college chosen more effectively than does any other factor, including intellectual ability, however measured. After college, most affluent children get white-collar jobs, most working-class children get bluecollar jobs, and the class differences continue.

As adults, rich people are more likely to have hired an attorney and to be a member of formal organizations that increase their civic power. Poor people are more likely to watch TV. Because
affluent families can save some money while poor families must spend what they make, wealth differences are ten times larger than income differences.
Therefore most poor and working-class families cannot accumulate the down payment required to buy a house, which in turn shuts them out from our most important tax shelter, the write-off of home mortgage interest. Working-class parents cannot afford to live in elite subdivisions or hire high-quality day care, so the process of educational inequality replicates itself in the next generation.
Finally, affluent Americans also have longer life expectancies than lower- and working-class people, the largest single cause of which is better access to health care.

Poor health

Echoing the results of Helen Keller’s study of blindness, research has determined that  is not distributed randomly about the social structure but is concentrated in the lower class. Social Security then becomes a huge transfer system, using monies contributed by all Americans to pay benefits disproportionately to longer-lived affluent Americans.

How people think about social class

Ultimately, social class determines how people think about social class. When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed the system.
Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices: only 15 percent said the poor were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system. (Some people replied “don’t know” or chose a middle position.) The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class:   55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.

Few of these statements are news, I know, which is why I have not bothered to document most of them, but the majority of high school students do not know or understand these ideas. Moreover, the processes have changed over time, for the class structure in America today is not the same as it was in 1890, let alone in colonial America.

A study of history and social studies teachers “revealed that they had a much broader knowledge of the economy, both academically and experientially, than they admitted in class.” Teachers “expressed fear that students might find out about the injustices and inadequacies of their economic and political institutions.”

By never blaming the system, American history courses thus present Republican history.
Historically, social class is intertwined with all kinds of events and processes in our past. Our governing system was established by rich men, following theories that emphasized government as a bulwark of the propertied class.

American presidents

Edward Pessen, who examined the social-class backgrounds of all American presidents through Reagan. Pessen found that more than 40 percent hailed from the upper class, mostly from the upper fringes of that elite group, and another 15 percent originated in families located between the upper and upper-middle classes. More than 25 percent came from a solid upper-middle-class background, leaving just six presidents, or 15 percent, to come from the middle and lowermiddle classes and just one, Andrew Johnson, representing any part of the lower class. One recent president, Bill Clinton, also comes from a working-class background, for a total of two. For good reason, Pessen titled his book The Log Cabin Myth.
Clearly Boorstin and Kelley never read Pessen, or they could not have claimed that the careers of our presidents demonstrate how persons can rise “from the lowest positions to the highest.” In fact, most Americans die in the same social class in which they were born, sociologists have shown, and those who are mobile usually rise or fall just a single social class.

Vietnam War

More recently, social class played a major role in determining who fought in the Vietnam War: despite the “universal” draft, sons of the affluent won educational and medical deferments through most of the conflict. The all-volunteer army that fights in Iraq relies even more on lowerclass recruits, who sign up as one way out of poverty. Textbooks and teachers ignore all this.

Experience liberating

When my students from nonaffluent backgrounds learn about the class system, they find the experience liberating.
Once they see the social processes that have helped keep their families poor, they can let go of their negative self-image about being poor. If to understand is to pardon, for working-class children to understand how stratification works is to pardon themselves and their families. Knowledge of the social-class system also reduces the tendency of Americans from other social classes to blame the victim for being poor. Pedagogically, stratification provides a gripping learning experience. Students are fascinated to discover how the upper class wields disproportionate power relating to everything from energy bills in Congress to zoning decisions in small towns

400 years of progress

Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps

The biting quip “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” conveys the injury done to the self-image of the poor when the idea that America is a meritocracy goes unchallenged in school.
Part of the problem is that American history textbooks describe American education itself as meritocratic. A huge body of research confirms that education is dominated by the class structure and operates to replicate that structure in the next generation.

No textbook ever suggests that students might research the history of their own school and the population it serves. The only textbooks that relate education to the class system at all see it as a remedy! Schooling “was a key to upward mobility in postwar America,” in the words of The Challenge of Freedom. It was also key to continued inequality.

To avoid social class

The tendency of teachers and textbooks to avoid social class as if it were a dirty little secret only reinforces the reluctance of working-class families to talk about it.
A professional of working-class origin told me a similar story about being ashamed of her uncle “for being a steelworker.”

A certain defensiveness is built into working-class culture; even its successful acts of working-class resistance, like the Lawrence strike, necessarily presuppose lower status and income, hence connote a certain inferiority. If the larger community is so good, as textbooks tell us it is, then celebrating or even passing on the memory of conflict with it seemssomehow disloyal.

The immigrant story

But when textbooks tell the immigrant story, they emphasize Joseph Pulitzer, Andrew Carnegie, and their ilk—immigrants who made supergood. Several textbooks apply the phrases rags to riches or land of opportunity to the immigrant experience. Such legendary successes were achieved, to be sure, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. Ninety-five percent of the executives and financiers in America around the turn of the century came from upper-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. Fewer than 3 percent started as poor immigrants or farm children. Throughout the nineteenth century, just 2 percent of American industrialists came from working-class origins.  By concentrating on the inspiring exceptions, textbooks present immigrant history as another heartening confirmation of America as the land of unparalleled opportunity.

America has differed from Europe

Again and again, textbooks emphasize how America has differed from Europe in having less class stratification and more economic and social mobility. This is another aspect of the archetype of American exceptionalism: our society has been uniquely fair. It would never occur to historians in, say, France or Australia, to claim that their society was exceptionally equalitarian. Does this treatment of the United States prepare students for reality? It certainly does not accurately describe our country today. Social scientists have on many occasions compared the degree of economic equality in the United States with that in other industrial nations. Depending on the measure used, the United States has ranked sixth of six, seventh of seven, ninth of twelve, thirteenth of thirteen, or
fourteenth of fourteen.

In the United States the richest fifth of the population earns twelve times as much income as the poorest fifth, one of the highest ratios in the industrialized world; in Great Britain the ratio is seven to one, in Japan just four to one.

In 1965 the average chief executive officer in the United States made 26 times what the average worker made. By 2004, the CEO made 431 times an average worker’s pay. Meanwhile, Japanese CEOs continue to make about 26 times as much as their average workers, and it is hard to claim
that the leadership of GM and Ford is that much better than Toyota’s and Honda’s.

Selfemployed is also long gone

The Jeffersonian conceit of a nation of independent farmers and merchants is also long gone: only one working American in thirteen is selfemployed, compared to one in eight in Western Europe.
Thus, not only do we have far fewer independent entrepreneurs compared to two hundred years ago, we have fewer compared to Europe today.

Gap between rich and poor

Clearly the gap between rich and poor, like the distance between blacks and whites, was greater at the end of the Progressive Era in 1920 than at its beginning around 1890.
The story is not all one of increasing stratification, for between the Depression and the end of World War II, income and wealth in America gradually became more equal. Distributions of income then remained reasonably constant until President Reagan took office in 1981, when inequality began to grow.
Still other scholars think that little change has occurred since the Revolution. Lee Soltow, for example, finds “surprising inequality of wealth and income” in America in 1798. At least for Boston, Stephan Thernstrom concludes that inequalities in life chances owing to social class show an eerie continuity.
All this is part of American history. But it is not part of American history as taught in high school.

Level of inequality

To social scientists, the level of inequality is a portentous thing to know about a society. When we rank countries by this variable, we find Scandinavian nations at the top, the most equal, and agricultural societies like Colombia and Zimbabwe near the bottom. The policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, which openly favored the rich, abetted a secular trend already in motion, causing inequality to increase measurably between 1981 and 1992. For the United States to move perceptibly toward Colombia in social inequality is a development of no small import.

Surely high school students would be interested to learn that in 1950 physicians made two and a half times what unionized industrial workers made but now make five times as much. Surely they need to understand that top managers of clothing firms, who used to earn 50 times what their American employees made, now make 1,500 times what their Bangladeshi workers earn.

Terms of class is unacceptable

Why might they commit such a blunder? First and foremost, publisher censorship of textbook authors. “You always run the risk, if you talk about social class, of being labeled Marxist,” the editor for social studies and history at one of the biggest publishing houses told me. This editor communicates the taboo, formally or subtly, to every writer she works with, and she implied that most other editors do, too.
Publisher pressure derives in part from textbook adoption boards and committees in states and school districts. These are subject in turn to pressure from organized groups and individuals who appear before them. Perhaps the most robust such lobby is still Educational Research Analysts, led until 2004 by Mel Gabler of Texas. Gabler’s stable of right-wing critics regards even alleging that a textbook contains some class analysis as a devastating criticism. As one writer has put it, “Formulating issues in terms of class is unacceptable, perhaps even un-American.”

Social Darwinism

More often the influence of the upper class is less direct. The most potent rationale for class privilege in American history has been social Darwinism, an archetype that still has great power in American culture. The notion that people rise and fall in a survival of the fittest may not conform to the data on intergenerational mobility in the United States, but that has hardly caused the archetype to fade away from American education, particularly from American history classes.

Get left out

Facts that do not fit with the archetype, such as the entire literature of social stratification, simply get left out.
Textbook authors may not even need pressure from publishers, the right wing, the upper class, or cultural archetypes to avoid social stratification. As part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero, for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why 1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth. Could the other 99 percent of us be that lazy or otherwise undeserving? To go on to include some of  the mechanisms—unequal schooling and the like—by which the upper class stays upper would clearly involve criticism of our beloved nation.
For any or all of these reasons, textbooks minimize social stratification. They then do something less comprehensible: they fail to explain the benefits of free enterprise. Writing about an earlier generation of textbooks, Frances FitzGerald pointed out that the books ignored “the virtues as well as the vices of their own economic system.”

For capitalism has its advantages

Teachers might mention free enterprise with respect, but seldom do the words become more than a slogan.
This omission is strange, for capitalism has its advantages, after all. Former basketball star Michael Jordan, Chrysler executive Lee Iacocca, and ice-cream makers Ben and Jerry all got rich by supplying goods and services that people desired. To be sure, much social stratification cannot be justified so neatly, because it results from the abuse of wealth and power by those who have these advantages to shut out those who do not. As a social and economic order, the capitalist system offers much to criticize but also much to praise. America is a land of opportunity for many people. And for all the distortions capitalism imposes upon it, democracy also benefits from the separation of power between public and private spheres. Our history textbooks fail to teach these benefits.

Assent to its social structure and economic

Publishers or those who influence them have evidently concluded that what American society needs to stay strong is citizens who assent to its social structure and economic system without thought. As a consequence, today’s textbooks defend our economic system mindlessly, with insupportable pieties about its unique lack of stratification; thus they produce alumni of American history courses unable to criticize or defend our system of social stratification knowledgeably.

But isn’t it nice simply to believe that America is equal? Maybe the “land of opportunity” archetype is an empowering myth—maybe believing in it might even help make it come true. For if students think the sky is the limit, they may reach for the sky, while if they don’t, they won’t.

Blaming the victim

But neither here nor anywhere else do Promise or Challenge (or most other textbooks) hint that opportunity might not be equal today for white Americans of the lower and working classes.
Perhaps as a result, even business leaders and Republicans, the respondents statistically most
likely to engage in what sociologists call “blaming the victim,” blame the social system rather than African Americans for black poverty and blame the system rather than women for the latter’s unequal achievement in the workplace. In sum, affluent Americans, like their textbooks, are willing to credit racial discrimination as the cause of poverty among blacks and Indians and sex discrimination as the cause of women’s inequality but don’t see class discrimination as the cause of poverty in general.

Identify the cause of their alienation

More than math or science, more even than American literature, courses in American history hold the promise of telling high school students how they and their parents, their communities, and their society came to be as they are. One way things are unequal is by social class. Although poor and working-class children usually cannot identify the cause of their alienation, history often turns
them off because it justifies rather than explains the present. When these students react by dropping out, intellectually if not physically, their poor school performance helps convince them as well as their peers in the faster tracks that the system is meritocratic and that they themselves lack merit. In the end, the absence of social-class analysis in American history courses amounts to one
more way that education in America is rigged against the working class.

The recommended book

 Lies My Teacher Told Me

Book: -Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (James Loewen)

Otros

Otros Libros Leyenda Negra Española e Imperio 

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