On many polls that ask students what class they find most boring, history is often the choice. I've always found that surprising. But when you look at the general run of history textbooks, this reaction is not too hard to understand. History is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And U.S. history is a story that helps us see where our country has been and where we should be heading.
But most history textbooks still read like they were put together by committees more concerned with squeezing as much material as possible than with telling a coherent story. So kids see history as a confusing bore -- a welter of unconnected names and dates.
But to give young people a real sense of the values and conflicts that have created our country, we probably need more than history books with good narrative lines. People make history, and what they said and wrote helps bring it to life.
Ken Burns, the filmmaker who created the magnificent television series, "The Civil War," understands this very well. In addition to the narrative voice describing the progress of the war, Burns gives us the words of eyewitnesses. We hear ordinary foot soldiers on both sides talking about their fears and hopes -- and complaining about the food. And we hear people laying out their arguments in public debates, like the one about the Emancipation Proclamation. This gives a powerful sense of how the events looked to the people who lived through them. And it brings home how complex and controversial the issues are, even now.
Diane Ravitch also understands the importance of the voices of the people who made American history in conveying who we are and why. That is one of the points of her new collection, The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).
A number of the selections in The American Reader will be familiar to people my age who sang them in music class or homeroom or around the campfire. They'll remember others as pieces they had to memorize -- and maybe recite in assembly. But Ravitch's book is more than a collection of old, and dear, chestnuts that teachers and parents might like to share with a new generation.
The American Reader is valuable resource to anyone teaching American history to young people because it presents the word of men and women who witnessed important moments in history, and it touches on most of the themes and preoccupations important to Americans.
Many of the voices speak with extraordinary confidence and optimism about the United States' uniqueness. Samuel Gompers demands a shorter working day of "eight hours and nothing less" because this country has shown that working fewer hours makes people more productive not less. And Horace Mann contrasts the "European theory" that separates people into classes with a system that breaks down the social barriers through public education and gives everybody "an equal chance for earning, and equal security in the enjoyment of what they will earn."
There are voices of dissent, too, eloquent because they imply confidence in our freedom to go against the opinion of the majority. Robert F. Kennedy calls for and end to the Vietnam War, and some hundred years earlier, Senator Thomas Corwin denounces the Mexican War from the point of view of the people who's land was being invaded: "If I were a Mexican I would tell you, 'Have you not room enough in your own country to bury your dead?"'
And there are the voices of people who did not share in the promises on which this county was founded but who invoke those promises to hold this country to account. The writers of the Seneca Falls Declaration use the language of the Declaration of Independence to demand equal rights for women: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.. .. " And Frederick Douglass, speaking at Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852, asks what Independence Day has to do with him and his people: "The rich inheritance, justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me .... You may rejoice, I must mourn."
The American Reader helps us -- and can help young people studying American history -- appreciate the enormous variety of voices that have joined in defining us as a nation. Indeed, one of Ravitch' s purposes in putting together this volume is to reaffirm the slogan on the Great Seal of the United Stars -- E Pluribus Unum, we are a single nation created from many different groups -- and the conviction that we can be nurtured by our common history. Some people now would challenge that idea in the name of a new form of multiculturalism that isn't really multiculturalism at all but ethnocentrism (something we've been fighting against for decades). The people I'm talking about maintain, paradoxically, that groups need to be interested only in their own history. That our common history and the values we have shared are meaningless, perhaps even a sham.
This country has not always lived up to its ideals, as The American Reader makes clear, but they are standards by which we have judged ourselves. And the many groups that make up this country share a vision of equality and justice unlike that of any other nation in human history; that's the reason we get so angry about our failures. And this vision is not something we should cast away; it's a gift we must pass on to our children.