Columbus arrives. Notice the cross. You can bet that message was lost on the poor natives on the right.
Don’t think the Barton crowd only wants you to think slaves didn’t have it so bad after all, or that white folks were somehow the real victims of slavery. Telling the truth about American history, particularly its settlement, makes you an “America hater.”
God forbid school kids find out American history is not about its rich white male heroes but about persecuted religious minorities, about black slaves, about poor white folk treated like slaves as indentured servants, about native Americans who had their lands stolen and their tribes decimated by disease.
Enter College Board’s AP United States History Curriculum Framework 2014-2015, which dares to point out that “traditional ways of categorizing the past” leave groups like American Indians underrepresented in our history books and that “historical phenomena or processes connect to broader regional, national, or global processes.” It dares to suggest that “Historical thinking involves the ability to define and frame a question about the past.”
You can hear conservatives now: “B-but, you’re not supposed to question the past…you’re supposed to just believe!”
John Aman at World Net Daily is aghast that anyone would consider teaching something other than David Barton’s, shall we say, Whitewashed version of history. Unsurprisingly, he calls it a “dark retelling of U.S. history.”
Aman cites the irrelevant complaints of Peter Wood, president of a “politically conservative advocacy group,” the National Association of Scholars (NAS), If you want to know where the NAS stands politically, consider that the Catholic League’s hugely bigoted William A. (Bill) Donohue, is a former NAS board member. Consider that when you read Wood’s words.
Wood calls the new AP U.S. history framework “a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past,” one which “weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”
Aman laments,
The new 124-page history curriculum is a dramatic departure from the five-page outline previously supplied by the College Board to guide AP U.S. history instructors. A much more detailed “history from below,” it focuses on how native Indians and Africans suffered at the hands of Europeans in the New World.
Oh dear, you mean it’s not WHITE history, they’re teaching kids? The NAS opposes multiculturalism, you see, so we can’t be having any identity group grievances. Indians lost your land? Tough nuts. Blacks carted over the Atlantic as slaves? Cry me a river. And history from below…well, you can’t have that either. Since when do the common people, the women, the minorities, have any significance? It’s all about the rich white movers and shakers, isn’t it?
Aman complains that,
It deletes the Pilgrims, John Winthrop, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and other long-celebrated figures central to America’s founding and growth.
Never mind that these well-known figures were hardly representative of most people during the European settlement and creation of America. What about the little guy Republicans pretend to care about? As Scott Weidensaul writes in The First Frontier (2011),
In the end, the story of the fontier is the story of people – not stereotypes, but complex individuals and societies, all trying to make sense of a new kind of world with which none of them had any experience. No one had a monopoly on heroism or unprincipled behavior.
This is the sort of thing conservatives hate. Taking the white hat away from the European Christians and handing out gray caps all around. Bartonian history can never be nuanced. There can be no shades of gray. History, for conservatives, is a struggle between good and evil, between their god’s will and those who oppose it. Just ask Aman:
In their place, America’s future leaders are given a warts-only take on America’s past that casts European settlers as villains. These Europeans disrupted ecologically balanced native American society, bringing “widespread deadly epidemics,” a “caste system,” resource exploitation and slavery. The Europeans’ “belief in white superiority” was used, the framework declares, “to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians.”
But this is all true. The Europeans did disrupt native society. They did bring widespread epidemics. They did exploit resources and slavery and they did most certain promote white superiority, much as Republicans still do today.
The settlers of Jamestown were more interested in hunting for gold, relates Weidensaul, “than building shelter or digging a well,” and “spared little time for farming,” obsessed as they were “with hunting for gold and jewels.”
The College Board’s new curriculum tells us that “European expansion into the Western Hemisphere caused intense social/religious, political, and economic competition in Europe and the promotion of empire building.”
Aman and other conservatives don’t want to talk about this, but Pocahantas (Matoaka)’s father, Powhatan,told Captain John Smith in 1609,
“Some doubt I have of your coming hither, for many have doe informe me, your coming hither is not for trade, but to invade my people, and possesse my Country.”
Of course, Powhatan’s opinion is irrelevant to conservatives because he is, after all, only a minority, and a “heathen” minority at that, in the eyes of his European contemporaries, not to mention modern ethnic nationalists who say their God “gave them” the United States and maintains its borders today.
Weidensaul tells us that these fears were confirmed when new Europeans, aristocrats among them – the people conservatives want history to be about, arrived. These men “simply terrorized the villages close to where they settled, stealing food, beating people, burning houses, and even desecrating the dead.”
Or take the example of Hernando de Soto, who arrived in Tampa Bay in 1539, as described by Weidensaul:
Although de Soto and his men were often welcomed when they arrived in a new chiefdom, the mood quickly soured when the Indians discovered what they were dealing with. The Spaniards demanded vast stores of Indian food, grabbed women and slaves, and searched frantically for gold and riches like those that had made de Soto rich in Peru. If the locals put up a fight, the Spaniards would burn captives, kidnap leaders, and torch entire communities.
And the epidemics conservatives do not want to talk about. As Weidensaul relates, “by the time all but the very earliest European colonists arrived, Indian populations along the Atlantic seaboard were a fraction of what they had been a few decades before.”
This spread of disease decimated native populations. “By 1568, just three-quarters of a century after Columbus made landfall, 90 percent of the Amerindian population was dead,” writes Weidensaul. Think about it. This was far worse than the Black Plague, which killed about a third of the population of England when it arrived in the mid-14th century.
But we can’t talk about that, apparently, or let kids know that it happened as a consequence of European settlement of the so-called New World. You can feel Aman’s growing hysteria at this point:
Things got worse with the British. Instead of establishing a “city upon a hill,” as generations of students have been told, they are cast as bigots beholden to a “rigid racial hierarchy,” indicated by their failure to intermarry with native populations or Africans (John Rolfe and Pocahontas, notwithstanding).
Oh yes, Pocahantas, who was kidnapped by these white invaders, taken from her people like chattel and converted to Christianity and married to newcomer John Rolfe. Leave it to Aman to confuse rape with romance.
Aman complains students will be told that Manifest Destiny was “built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority,” but this, too, is only the truth.
The thing about history is that the past informs the present. All we see and do and experience derives from the past. If the past is therefore going to be talked about, so that we can better understand our present, it only makes sense that we talk about it truthfully, warts and all.
But conservatives no more want to understand the past than they do participate in our shared reality. They prefer a fantasy America, built up around their ideology, to which the record of the past must be bent in subjugation, much like those blacks, Indians, women, and religious minorities they still despise.
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