65 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
...to see ourselves as others see us..., July 18, 2004
This review is from: History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History (Hardcover)
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 than are events involving any other country. Nor is there any suggestion that US textbooks are any more ? or less ? accurate than the textbooks of any other country. The authors claim that political correctness has reduced US textbooks to ?a series of inoffensive facts and figures,? but the excerpts in the book suggest that this is a worldwide failing. Few, if any, of the passages are engaging and only the Nigerian book quoted seems to assume any intelligence on the part of students.
What is not included in History Lessons is any kind of statistical analysis. The authors have not made a survey of world textbooks; they do not claim that the passages quoted are in any sense typical ? or atypical ? of their continents or political regimes. They do say that most countries have some kind of centralized control over school textbooks, so that these passages come from either the only book available to students, or at least one that meets standardized guidelines. Depressingly, nowhere in the world are children exposed to a wide variety of views. None of the statements in the books seem open to debate, even when their authors piously invite their young readers to ?discuss? the topic.
The natural readers of History Lessons are high school history teachers and teachers at schools with immigrant children. But the book will have the greatest value if we can let our children read it at an age when their minds are still open to new and diverse ideas. The aim is not to teach them that US textbooks are ?wrong?, but that we need to look elsewhere than received wisdom to find what is common to humanity.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent idea. Fair execution., July 11, 2006
There used to be a wonderful news magazine called Atlas that produced little of its own material, but reprinted material on a given monthly topic (nuclear power, the EU, the Middle East, free trade, etc.) from 4-6 other news and editorial sources from different regions of the world.
What was good about Atlas, and was less well done in this book was the range of perspectives. In this book there are on many of the topics only 1 or 2 other perspectives.
An example of this is the American invasion of Russia in 1918. When I took history (in the US) this was never mentioned, and most Americans are unaware of this and very incredulous about whether it happened. In this book it is covered as perceived by Japan and the UK. A total of 5 sentences between them. I would be fascinated by what was taught in Russia about this.
The book seems to avoid topics that might be upsetting to the US world view. The US CIA toppling of the the elected government in Iran in 1953 (is this mentioned in the Middle East?) or Chile in ~1970 (how was this viewed in South America?)Cuban-American relations - only the Cuban view? why not that of Mexico which would be fascinating. Sometimes the book gets in right. 5 text book views of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki including Asian and European views.
So I found this an excellent idea, but generally not executed in a strong broad and challenging way. Too much on things like the French and Indian War and not enough on the 20th century. Too few view points.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enlightening perspectives on US history, July 11, 2005
This review is from: History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History (Hardcover)
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.
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