History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History

by Kyle Roy Ward, Kyle Ward, Dana Lindaman

Book Overview

History Lessons offers a lighthearted and fascinating challenge to the biases we bring to our understanding of American history. The subject of widespread attention when it was first published in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565848942
• ISBN13: 9781565848948
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 404 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

The most important history book ever published in the US

I won't repeat the excellent synopsis and commentary in the review below. Instead, as a non-American living in the US, I'd like to add my thoughts on the importance of this book. I think this textbook should be compulsory reading in all US schools, and its equivalent should be compulsory reading in all schools in all countries throughout the world. I highly recommend that parents buy it for their children. I have a grandmother in my native country who was born in 1909. She genuinely believes that her country is the greatest in the world and that other nationalities are unfortunate and inferior. Every battle we lost is played down (after all, our enemies were evil and did not fight fair); every victory we won was the most splendid and the most deserved. We regard her with affectionate amusement; she is, after all, in the minority in my country in these modern times. Although most of my country's history textbooks are no doubt still biased to a greater or lesser extent (and I don't claim to be qualified to judge), my modern-day history teachers taught the difference between what is fact, what is opinion and what is point of view. However, among my US peers, the ideology of blind patriotism is common. Don't US children deserve the same opportunities to understand the world beyond their doorsteps and to evaluate their history for themselves? In other countries their one-sided education is often seen as deliberate narrow-mindedness: another misconception that is only adding to the mix of problems that cause antagonism between nations. The US is currently occupying the position of the Most Powerful Country in the World. It in particular has a responsibility to educate objectively. Five stars are due just for conceiving of and publishing this work.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around The World Portray U.S. History

Perhaps, the U.S. should adopt a move even handed approach to the educational system.

Enlightening perspectives on US history

This volume sheds some interesting light on US history from countries around the world through excerpts from foreign textbooks. Its strength lays not so much in the facts that it presents, but in the perspectives. Some entries, like those from North Korea, may not provide much insight, but most show US history in a different perspective than the parochialism found in many classroom texts. Taken as a whole, the entries will introduce the reader to various ways of interpreting US history.Entries are listed chronologically, with explanations between each section/country to introduce each countries' particular relevance to the US subject being discussed. Often, the entries tell us something about these other countries, too. This book will be of primary interest to educators and those familiar with US history. I've used this with my students and found it very helpful (even when I disagreed with the particular interpretation). On a minor note, some of the factual mistakes that have made their way into these histories is also enlightening: i.e. that John Brown was black or that US spies blew up the USS Maine.

Brilliant Concept, Well Implemented

I bought a Tee-Shirt on an Apache reservation. It had the headline "Homeland Security," then a picture of a handfull of indian warriors of the late 1800's, and finally another line of type: "Fighting Terriorism Since 1492." This Tee-Shirt uses just a bit of humor to make us see ourselves in a quite different light. This book brilliantly takes this concept a giant step further. The authors take fifty subjects, from the Viking Exploration to The New World Order, then they print a view on this subject from other countries. For the Viking Exploration there are two other views, one from Norway, and one from Canada. On Slavery they have reports from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Portugal, Great Britain and Mexico. Where the report was in English it is reprinted as is. Otherwise it was translated with instructions to the translators to keep the language as close to the original as possible, in both syntax and vocabulary. I have only one request of the authors. If there is a new revision, add religion. I suspect that the Islambic world sees us as doomed infidels, and after the recent election I suspect that Europe sees us almost as fanatically religious as they to the Islambic world.

...to see ourselves as others see us...

In History Lessons, a philologist and a historian walk us through US history as it is presented to high school children in 28 other countries by their history textbooks. For each of 50 topics that normally appear in US junior or senior high school history books, the authors have located about a page of text from one or several foreign books that address the specified topic. We start by learning about Viking Exploration as it is taught to children from Norway and Canada, work our way through the American Revolution as taught to the British, slavery as taught to Nigerians, World Wars I and II as taught to Germans, visit Cuba and Vietnam, and end up in the Philippines, North Korea and the Middle East, as taught to young Israelis and Saudis. But this isn?t history as Americans are taught it, the land of the free and the brave, the land of Free Trade. This is a country that is positively alien, where Americans are often the bad guys to be resisted and mistrusted. How can this be? Those of us ? from wherever we came ? who have read the history of our countries in foreign books have passed through a series of emotions: denial, anger and (if we?re lucky) understanding. Every child everywhere in the world is taught at school that he or she comes from the most important, most heroic and most humane country in the world. Our parents and teachers said so, therefore it must be true. The difficulty comes when we leave our home country and find that others don?t have the same benign attitude to us. That is a hard enough transition for an individual. When two countries face each other, as the US and Iraq have recently, there is the potential for wholesale confusion and misunderstanding. It is incredibly hard to rethink such basic facts about our identity as those we were taught as children. It is harder still to comprehend how those foreigners could allow themselves to be cuckolded into believing such lies about us. History Lessons won?t entirely resolve this difficulty, but it does make a starting point for understanding how people worldwide can have such contradictory ideas about the ?facts? of history.Taking 50 topics from Viking Exploration through New World Order, Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward show how that subject is treated by one or more countries. The entire list of countries comprises Brazil, Canada, Caribbean, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, N Korea, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, S Korea, Spain, Syria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. The authors have restricted their comments to a very short introduction to each section. This minimizes ? but does not entirely eliminate ? their own biases on the topic and lets us read the excerpts with fresh eyes, just as schoolchildren do. Although the US is at center stage of this book, there is no suggestion that historical events involving the United States are any more prone to misreporting by foreign textbooks