story, one that encourages group cohesion, self-congratulation, and superiority vis-à-vis others, a self-serving false historical narrative available to rationalize every action.
What we have now in the United States is instructive. Several huge books compete for a very large market. The average weight of each book exceeds six pounds and contains more than one thousand pages. This is partly due to pressure to mention every state and president, every event big and small, thus precluding any study of history’s larger patterns and events. To help the teacher get students to read these bloated books, multiple free teaching aids are offered, crisscrossed with organization. One book has 840 “main ideas within the main text,” 310 “skill builders,” and 466 “critical thinking” questions. No system of human thought is known to produce coherent patterns with so many variables. Students have been described as memorizing material for each chapter, only to forget it to free up neurological space for the next chapter.
In short, US history is sliced and diced right out of existence. Main themes and topics are easily lost. One book offered little more than a paragraph on all of slavery. Conflict of any kind, or even suspense, tends to be removed. The story is one in which every problem has been solved or is about to be. The present is almost never used to illuminate the past, and we learn nothing from the past that would help us with the future and very few lessons of any kind. Thus, the study of US history has become an exercise in rote memory and self-glorification, with almost no relevant learning. Not surprisingly, students routinely describe history as the most boring subject in school, easily beating English and chemistry, yet interest in history in other contexts, including general books, museums, and films, remains high.
When I was an undergraduate major in US history at Harvard in the early 1960s, the names of the texts gave away the game: The Genius of American Democracy. You did not need to read the book; the content was right there in the title. The chief problem in American historiography was: Why are we the greatest nation that was ever conceived and the greatest people who ever strode the face of the earth? Competing answers had to do with the value of a receding frontier (a benign metaphor for territorial expansion), of having upper-class Englishmen design the society, of building a country on perpetual immigration, and so on. The key is what was assumed in advance, and of course high school history texts reflect this as well: Triumph of the American Nation, Land of Promise , The Great Republic. Meta-message—you have a proud heritage, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, look at what the United States has accomplished and just imagine what it will soon do. Be a good citizen; be all you can be.
LARGER VIEW OF US HISTORY
The pervious sections are not meant to be a representative history of the United States. US history has many virtues, among which is the fact that the US population is reconstituted every generation through a roughly 10 percent admixture by external immigration from throughout the world. Although in its history rules of immigration have favored some groups over others, all have had some opportunity. And with illegal immigration, such opportunities are sometimes greatly enhanced. From a biological standpoint, the resulting outbreeding (insofar as it takes place, as it inevitably must) will tend to be genetically beneficial. The US population is perpetually heterogeneous, about to be infused with 10 percent more genes from around the world. This continual level of in-migration, outbreeding, and cultural diversity is unusual for most countries.
One other feature of US history is highly unusual and largely positive. Its most costly war to itself—700,000 dead out of a population of about 18 million—was the Civil War, a most ironic war in that one side wished to free slaves to whom they were less related than were the slaves’ owners. The owners cared primarily about maintaining these people as their property (rather than, in some cases, their children), so they fought to maintain this right even though this sometimes harmed their own flesh and blood. In short, the Civil War was fought in great part as a moral crusade to end something that was seen as a moral evil. Loss of life was mostly suffered by European Americans and roughly equally on both sides, those fighting for justice and those against it. The later history of African Americans was in some ways