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History Repeatedly Wrong (Released to the web October 8, 2007)
Does the name Mason Weems ring a bell? Unless you are a history buff, it probably doesn't. And yet, Mason Weems is one of the most influential Americans in the past two hundred years. In fact, two centuries after the effective start of his career as a book salesman, biographer and hustler, his work is still reinforcing myths, fallacies and lies in school classrooms across our country and in Readington. While a fictional story about our first president and a cherry tree may be harmless enough, other stories are less so. Mason Weems is hardly alone in constructing or perpetuating American historical fiction passed off as fact. Writers in all periods of our history have romanticized events and people; artists and lithographers have created glorified pictures to accompany the falsehoods. As we progress through the American experiment these falsehoods increasingly become part of our culture and subtly change not just our perception of history but also our outlook for the future. In our classrooms these falsehoods continue to influence the next generation, creating new citizens who are misinformed and mislead about the nature of American progress and the character of our nation. In modern times writers and historians have attempted to correct the falsehoods being taught in our classrooms as fact, and to review committee-written textbooks for their numerous errors. Lies my Teacher Told Me by James Loewen was one attempt. Another one is Founding Myths by Ray Raphael. Founding Myths details some of the more obvious falsehoods still being taught as fact in our classrooms, but also some others which are lesser known but more likely to undermine a true understanding of American history. The obvious falsehoods include events like Paul Revere's ride and Molly Pitcher. Just as the idea of Betsy Ross sewing the first flag was discredited years ago, author Ray Raphael is easily able to dispel the idea that a heroine called Molly Pitcher, so famously depicted in the Currier and Ives lithograph, really existed or acted in the way textbooks still describe. First reviewing the development of the Molly Pitcher story, and then researching the actual facts and the means by which the fiction grew from seeds of truth, Raphael is able to create a deeper, nuanced and much more meaningful understanding of the true role of women on revolutionary battlefields. The same improved meaning is true of his treatment of the actual influence of Sam Adams, the actual events at Lexington and Concord and similar myths. Of local interest is his review of the winter spent by continental troops at Valley Forge. With unrelenting fact and logic, the author is able to show that the troops stationed in 1779-1780 in Morristown NJ actually suffered a much harder winter than those in Valley Forge. Yet, Valley Forge is today celebrated as the place where continental soldiers suffered the worst and where true patriots were born of hardship. Again Mason Weems enters the picture with his distortions of fact contained in a Washington biography. Author Raphael, though, is able to provide a useful thesis about why Valley Forge became the standard bearer for ideas about soldier hardship instead of Morristown, where the suffering was demonstrably worse and on which Washington himself commented in a letter at the time. In these and many other debunked myths, Raphael creates a compelling case that American history has been so oversimplified, glorified, and outright fictionalized as to cause a disconnect between current generations and the real and important meaning and principles which underpin our republic. His advice to teachers is to introduce a more grounded approach to lessons about our nation's founding, and he even offers lesson plans from this website: http://www.nohum.k12.ca.us/tah/ Click on "lesson and resource library" and then "founding myths lesson plans." In repeating the falsehoods and fictions of history in our classrooms, we say more about the gullibility of American people to charlatans like Mason Weems than about the contributions of the people and events in our history. With so little time available for social studies, history and civics related content in schools today, it is all the more important that we improve the quality of what is taught. Social studies and history textbooks used in modern classrooms are almost universally awful, so rife with inaccuracy, mediocre writing, pandering to social and political factions, and odd emphasis on lesser historical events that they cease to be useful for anything other than a mindless exercise in cramming for multiple choice tests. One way that school districts like Readington can break away from this model is to encourage lessons that stress the use of primary sources, visits to a rich variety of local historical sites, and contact with living people with special knowledge of or who participated in historical events. Lessons which allow children to examine and debunk historical inaccuracies themselves are a means to hook children into the usefulness and import of history. By blindly following national textbook programs and failing to make needed time for history and social studies (such as creating extensive tie-ins with language arts), we are repeating the history of history and helping to create another generation without a true understanding of where we are, how we got here and where we can go. For further study: http://hnn.us/articles/7219.html http://womenshistory.about.com/od/mythsofwomenshistory/a/betsy_ross_flag.htm
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