(That You Probably Learned in School)
June 30, 2008
Textbooks have long served as a main battlefield in the culture wars and the latest salvo comes from Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton (A Patriot's History of the United States
), who examines leading American history texts and other books that he sees as purveying “a distinctly slanted view of American history—one that portrays the United States as oppressive, imperialistic, and evil.” Each “lie” is deliberated in a brief essay. A chapter on the notion that FDR knew in advance that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor focuses largely on countering Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit.
The belief that Columbus was responsible for killing millions of Indians (“drivel”) is, he says, based on faulty statistics. In examining the belief that Richard Nixon sent burglars into the Watergate office complex, the author accepts G. Gordon Liddy's account of events over John Dean's. Regarding the Rosenbergs, Schweikart cites Soviet documents proving they were indeed spies. Schweikart marshals an arsenal of statistics and scholarly studies, and while his own biases will limit his reach, he offers an object lesson in the need for scrupulous balance in the writing of history textbooks.