Unit 7
Rewriting American History
Frances FitzGerald
Teaching Tips
“Rewriting American History” is an exposition. Fitzgerald is making an argument, so it is important for the students to find out 1) what the author’s arguments are; 2) on what evidence the author bases her arguments; 3) how the author makes these arguments. After understanding the author’s arguments, the students can then evaluate these arguments: 1) are they convincing? and 2) how can I connect these arguments to what I already know about the subject matter? The essay is taken from FitzGerald’s journal articles/book America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century, so draw your students’ attention to techniques of comparison and contrast and the ways in which FitzGerald assesses current (i.e. 1970s)history textbooks. As FitzGerald is writing about the rewriting of American history, the text contains quite a number of references to U.S. history. Give the students just enough information to enable them to understand the text, but ask them to focus more on how FitzGerald makes her argument.
Here are a few suggestions for handling the essay. Ask your students to keep these in mind while scanning the essay: 1) state what the essay is about in one or two sentences; 2) enumerate its major parts in their order and relation and outline these parts; and 3) define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. In class, you can ask your students to 1) identify and interpret the author’s key words, for example, “rewriting”, “change”, “problems”, “patchwork”, “diversity”, etc.; 2) grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with her most important sentences; 3) know the author’s arguments, by constructing them out of sequences of sentences; and 4) determine which of the problems she presents the author has solved, and which she has not. At the end of the week, you can ask your students to assess FitzGerald’s writing and present good reasons for any critical judgments  they make.
Structure of the Text
Part I  Introduction
(1) It is hard to imagine history textbooks as being subject to change.
Part II American History Schoolbooks Rewritten
Section I: changing history textbooks
(2-4 )Examples of changes that have taken place
(5) It is not surprising that textbooks reflect changing scholarly research, but the changes remain shocking.
Section II: three types of changes that have taken place
(6-9) political change: patchwork replacing unity, problems replacing progress
(10-11) pedagogical change
(12-13) physical change
Part III Conclusion
(14-15) There is no perfect objectivity, but the problem with constantly changing school history textbooks is that each generation of children reads only its own generation’s textbooks and therefore learns only one particular and transient version of America, which remains their version of American history forever.
Outline and Topic Sentences:
Part I
Para. 1
Topic sentence: Those of us who grew up in the fifties believed in the permanence of our American-history textbooks.
Transitional sentence: But now the textbook histories have changed, some of them to such an extent that an adult would find them unrecognizable.
Part II
Para. 2
Topic sentence: One current junior-high-school American history begins with a story about a Negro cowboy called George McJunkin.
Example: George McJunkin, Negro cowboy, discovery of remains of an Indian civilization in 1925 →civilizations before European explorers
Para. 3
Topic sentence: Another history text—this one for the fifth grade—begins with the story of how Henry B. Gonzalez, who is a member of Congress from Texas, learned about his own nationality. Example: Henry B. Gonzalez, question of nationality: birthright or cultural heritage, melting pot vs. salad bowl
Para. 4
Topic sentence: Poor Columbus! He is a minor character now, a walk-on in the middle of American history.
Example: Columbus, prominence in U.S. history fading with time and revision, along with other  self-promoting figures in U.S. history.
Para. 5
Topic sentence: Of course, when one thinks about it, it is hardly surprising that modern scholarship and modern perspectives have found their way into children’s books. Yet the changes remain shocking.
Para. 6
Topic sentence: The history texts now hint at a certain level of unpleasantness in American history. Examples: the last “wild” Indian captured and displayed, child coal miners of Pennsylvania, cruelty in the American-Filipino War, cruelty of patriots against royalists in the American Revolution, and Japanese internment.
Para. 7
Topic sentence: Ideologically speaking, the histories of the fifties were implacable, seamless.
Para. 8
Topic sentence: But now the texts have changed, and with them the country that American children are growing up into.
A radical way of reconceptualizing past and future:
Society: uniform → a patchwork of wealth, ages, gender, and races
Smooth-running system → a rattletrap affair
Past future relationship: progress → change
The present: a haven of scientific advances → a tangle of problems
o Examples: problems of consumer society; problems of the poor and aged who depend on social security.
o Science and technology still deemed to be the magic bullet for social problems Para. 9
Transitional sentence: Even more surprising than the emergence of problems is the discovery that the great unity of the texts has broken.
Topic sentence: Whereas in the fifties all texts represented the same political view, current texts follow no pattern of orthodoxy.
Examples:
Portrayal of civil rights: as a series of actions taken by a wise, paternal government vs. the involvement of social upheaval
Portrayal of the Cold War: having ended vs. continuing
Para. 10
Topic sentence: The political diversity in the books is matched by a diversity of pedagogical approach. Types:
Traditional narrative histories
Focusing on particular topics with “discovery” or “inquiry” texts and chapters like case studies (with background information, explanatory notes and questions) (questions are at the heart of the matter; they force students to think much as historians think, to define the point of view of the speaker, analyze the ideas presented, question the relationship between events, and so on.)
o Example: Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams on the question of foreign alliances
Para. 11
Topic sentence: What is common to the current texts—and makes all of them different from those of the fifties—is their engagement with the social sciences.
Transitional sentence: In matters of pedagogy, as in matters of politics, there are not two sharply differentiated categories of books; rather, there is a spectrum.
Political and pedagogical spectrum:
o politically, from moderate left to moderate right;
o pedagogically, from the traditional history sermon, through a middle ground of narrative texts with inquiry-style questions and of inquiry texts with long stretches of
narrative, to the most rigorous of case-study books
Engagement with the social sciences
o“Concepts” as foundation stones for various elementary-school social-studies series ▪Example: the 1970 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich series, “a horizontal base or ordering of conceptual schemes” to match its “vertical arm of behavioral
themes,” from easy questions to hard
o History textbooks almost always include discussions of “role,” “status,” and “culture;” some include debates between eminent social scientists, essays on
economics or sociology, or pictures and short biographies of social scientists of both
sexes and of diverse races
Para. 12
Topic sentence: Quite as striking as these political and pedagogical alterations is the change in the physical appearance of the texts.
Comparison and Contrast
The 1950s Current (1970s)
Overall Showing some effort in the
matter of design: they had
maps, charts, cartoons,
photography, and an occasional
four-color picture to break up
the columns of print;
Looking as naïve as Soviet
fashion magazines beside the
current texts Paragons of sophisticated modern design
Print Heavy and far too black, the
colors muddy
Photographs and illustrations Photographs: conventional news
shots;
Illustrations: Socialist-realist-Far greater space given to illustrations;
The pictures far outweighing
style drawings or incredibly vulgar made-for-children paintings of patriotic events the text in importance in certain “slow-learner” books;
The illustrations having a much greater historical value: cartoons, photographs, and paintings drawn from the periods being treated
Para. 13
Topic sentence: The use of all this art and high-quality design contains some irony.
Example of how art transcends the subject matter: child laborers, urban slum apartments, the Triangle shirtwaist-factory fire, junk yards, nuclear testing
Paragraph summary: Whereas in the nineteenth-fifties the texts were childish in the sense that they were naïve and clumsy, they are now childish in the sense that they are polymorphous-perverse. American history is not dull any longer; it is a sensuous experience.
Part III
Para. 14
Topic sentence: The surprise that adults feel in seeing the changes in history texts must come from the lingering hope that there is somewhere out there, an objective truth.
Question: why is it disturbing to see the changes in history textbooks?
Paragraph summary: The texts, with their impersonal voices, encourage this hope that there is an objective truth, and therefore it is particularly disturbing to see how they change, and how fast. Para. 15
Topic sentence: In history, the system is reasonable—except that each generation of children reads only one generation of schoolbooks. The transient history is those children’s history forever—their particular version of America.
Detailed Analysis of the Text
1.Those of us who grew up in the fifties believed in the permanence of our American-
history textbooks. (Para. 1)
This is the topic sentence of Para. 1. FitzGerald starts her article by talking about how people generally believed that history textbooks would never change. She presents a few reasons why American history textbooks of that era gave the impression that they would never change: they were heavy, solemn, authoritative, imperturbable, and distant. The last sentence of the paragraph is a transitional sentence leading to a discussion of how history textbooks in the 1970s differ from those a generation earlier.
2.To us as children, those texts were the truth of things: they were American history.
(Para. 1)
Translation: 对于儿时的我们来说，历史书就代表了事实真相，因为它们是美国历史。
3.It was not just that we read them before we understood that not everything that is
printed is the truth, or the whole truth. (Para. 1)
“It” refers to the sentence that comes immediately before this one. FitzGerald discusses why children tended to believe in the permanence and authority of history textbooks. She contends that school children already understood, by the time they read American history textbooks, that what is printed in black and white is not always true. In other words, school children did not blindly trust just any books. Something special about history textbooks set them apart from other printed material. In the rest of the paragraph, FitzGerald elaborates on the uniqueness of American history texts.
4.It was that they, much more than other books, had the demeanor and trappings of
authority. (Para. 1)
Translation: 是因为和其他书比起来，历史书看起来充满了权威。
5.They were weighty volumes. (Para. 1)
Probably FitzGerald uses “weighty” as a pun, referring to the seriousness and importance of history textbooks as well as to their thickness and heaviness.
6.They spoke in measured cadences: imperturbable, humorless, and as distant as Chinese
emperors. (Para. 1)
1)measured: (of speech or writing) carefully considered, deliberate, restrained; having a
slow, regular rhythm仔细斟酌的、慎重的；缓慢而又有节奏的
Examples: measured language; measured terms
2)Translation: 美国历史教材字斟句酌、严谨慎重、呆板无趣，而且像中国皇帝一样拒connect下载
人于千里之外。
7.Our teachers treated them with respect, and we paid them abject homage by
memorizing a chapter a week. (Para. 1)
1)homage: from the word for “man,”originally referring to the acknowledgement of
allegiance a vassal gave to a feudal lord. In modern usage, homage connotes a similar show of respect and commitment, but often in a less formal and binding relationship.
Synonyms: honor, deference, reverence,  loyalty, respect, admiration, allegiance, honor
Antonyms: disrespect
Examples:
He paid homage to his ancestors by maintaining as many of his family’s Native American traditions as he could. (respect, loyalty)
The actor was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in homage to his many achievements. (honor, reverence)
2)Paraphrase: Our teachers took American history texts seriously, and we respected them
by memorizing a chapter a week.
3)The attitude of the teachers and the students further illustrates that the American history
texts in the 1950s were taken seriously and believed not to be subject to change.
8.But now the textbook histories have changed, some of them to such an extent that an
adult would find them unrecognizable. (Para. 1)
This is a transitional sentence that introduces the changes that had taken place since the 1950s. “To such an extent that” emphasizes the amount of changes that had occurred.
9.One current junior-high-school American history begins with a story about a Negro
cowboy called George McJunkin. (Para. 2)
1)junior-high-school: this hyphenated phrase modifies American history. When a phrase is
used to modify a noun, it is often hyphenated, for example, state-of-the-art scientific and engineering knowledge and expertise; an up-to-the-minute report.
2)George McJunkin’s story shows that new discoveries may change the writing of history.
McJunkin’s discovery led to archaeological excavations that identified Native American activities near present-day New Mexico ten thousand years ago. On the other hand, McJunkin came upon the Indian relics in 1925, but it was nearly fifty years later that this discovery found its way into a textbook. This suggests the gap between the latest historical discoveries and the writing of textbooks. Yet more importantly,the discussion of Indian civilizations before the European colonization of North America became a critical part of historical discourse after the 1960s civil rights movements. The rise of multiculturalism disrupted the white-male-Anglo-Saxon-centered perspective and

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