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When, Where, and What Did You Learn in History Class?
In “Conservatives can’t win the history wars,” Matt Yglesias claims that when his wife was a kid in Texas she learned about “the war of Northern Aggression.” Yglesias was born in 1981, so I will assume his wife is the same age and attended Texas public schools from roughly 1986-1998. I find it hard to believe that, even in Texas, students learned the “lost cause” version of the Civil War.
I grew up in Florida in the 70s and 80s. Maybe not the deep South, but definitely not a progressive utopia. I learned about the evils of slavery, the rapaciousness and violence of Southern slaveowners, the broken promises of Reconstruction, and the brutal unfairness of the Jim Crow era. Martin Luther King, Jr. was presented as a national hero equal to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, a liberator who forced a recalcitrant country to finally reckon with our national sins. I did hear the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” from teachers, but tongue-in-cheek, an absurd aside to point out how backward and delusional “some people” used to be in the South.
I’ve taught U.S. history in conservative Christian private schools in the South using Bob Jones and secular textbooks. These texts unequivocally condemned slavery, tracing its introduction in 1619 and thoroughly describing the depravity of the system. They featured tragic images of slaves at the auction block, deplorable living conditions, and the horrible and iconic image of a slave’s whiplash-scarred back.
So why do we keep hearing anecdotes about what people supposedly learned in history class? This doesn’t track with my experience growing up and then teaching in the South. I can certainly believe my grandmother, growing up in the 20s and 30s in East Tennessee, or possibly that my parents, learning in Florida during the 1950s, might have received a soft-pedaled version. But in the early 90s? Really?
Is it possible a teacher was trying to describe the Lost Cause movement and his wife misunderstood? Is it possible she overheard an older relative utter the phrase with an eye roll? I wonder if those who claim this ever bothered to read their textbooks, or, more likely, their memory of history class is a mash-up of Schoolhouse Rock and bits and pieces heard and absorbed over a lifetime of pop culture and snarky memes? Because if you’re younger than 50, unless you studied 75-year-old textbooks under the tutelage of your cult leader’s one-room schoolhouse, I don’t think you learned the Lost Cause version of history as the serious and exclusive interpretation.
Am I wrong about this? Am I the only member of Generation X who received a fairly balanced history education? I really want to know—when, where, and what did you really learn in history class?
Published in History
Ventura Country School District, Thousand Oaks, CA
History was rushed and marginalized, it was as much social studies (perspectives and feelings) as it ever was true history (facts, dates, and reasons). The few decent history teachers I had were stuck in the unenviable position of having to cram it all in within allotted instruction time, and God bless Mr. Washburn, and Mr. (can’t remember his name, he looked like Wilford Brimley), they tried. Most of what stuck was what I learned after taking it on myself to read books not in the curriculum. The public school structure just didn’t have adequate time for it.
This is always the problem with teaching history, and as a history nerd and homeschool dad I wrestle with it with my kids as well. How many books do I force on them? How many documentaries and writing assignments? Do we zip past the Seven Days and get to the meat of Gettysburg ? Do we even bother with books on Reconstruction at the high-school level, or is a ten minute video adequate?
How to handle the Plains Indian wars? Most of what’s out there is garbage.
I think Gen-X overall had a pretty good foundation for history based on conversations with peers. We were raised on cable tv, had several good, historically-accurate movies and books to draw on, and the quality historians of the 50’s and 60’s we were reading told it like it is without sugar coating. Schoolhouse Rock was pretty spot-on. It was the textbooks that failed and probably continue to do so, but back then they weren’t the only game in town.
I went to high school in Virginia more than a half-century ago. The (state-mandated) Virginia history book used in all schools, public and private claimed that Virginia was on its way to abolishing slavery when Abe Lincoln rushed things and thus needlessly started the ruckus. Even that absurdly biased tome treated slavery as an abomination.
The south seceded over slavery. Secession was about slavery.
The war was not. Until the Emancipation Proclamation. And that was a tactical move, not an ethical one, or slavery would have been banned from northern states as well.
I think survey until your kid shows enthusiasm for something and then take a hiatus to dig deeper. Even if that means medieval architecture and metallurgy.
My experience as well. We spent more time on the Civil War b/c we had a personal stake in it. We could visit the battlegrounds and wrestle with the visible aftermath.
Right–I’m not really debating what the proper terminology is, but the persistent narrative that ALL southern students have learned nothing but a pro-Confederacy history. That definitely wasn’t true in my experience, and I don’t think it’s been true for a long, long time, if ever.
Very likely. However, I’ve heard this tired trope so many times, and from people I respect. I think they genuinely believe they were taught this–right after chorus class where they practiced the Rebel Yell and before recess where they practiced a good old cross burning. I’m calling foul on Yglesias, or his wife–maybe it’s a made up story, maybe it’s a repeated narrative that “seems right.”
That’s a very succinct summary that captures the dichotomy very well. I’ll have to remember that.
That’s the most concise accurate summary of the answer to the question I’ve seen. Thx.
@oldbathos, Any actual evidence of the ongoing work that led the history book writers to that claim? I have not heard this argued before. I think it would be prominent in the arguments if there were much to it. I do think absence of any serious effort by leaders in the South to abolish slavery is exactly what finally led to the political conflict that then ultimately wound up with war.
Yep. Lincoln himself wrote to Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
I attended high school in the late ’70s. We were taught the Civil War was about secession and slavery. And it was called “The Civil War.”
As I grew older and learned more, I think that was close enough for government purposes. But I also think that there are differing ways to look at the causes. But the “Lost Cause” ain’t one of them.
States’ Rights was a heavy casualty of the Civil War. But it’s sorta one of those things that if you abuse it, you lose it. They chose a bad hill to die on, I guess.
But the way Lincoln approached secession, I’m pretty certain there would have been a war over it even if the south had seceded for better reasons than slavery.
I think a lot of bad choices were made and God made the best of our sinful ways and made right a great injustice in the midst of it.
Shelby Foote has some perspective on the matter. And as always, it’s worth considering:
Yeah, when it comes to Yglesias, I tend to think he’s something along the lines of Bernhard Rust (Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture).
Thank you for this post, Thistle. It pretty well describes what was being taught in my high school U.S. History class in Connecticut in 1974.
One difference: “War of Northern Aggression” wasn’t exactly said tongue-in-cheek. We were told that’s how many in the South saw it. We called it the Civil War. We also heard that it was sometimes called “The War Between the States”.
I was in school from ‘96-2009. Florida the whole way, but I moved from Tequesta to Tallahassee between elementary and middle. My public schools were relatively good but nothing special – I received neither a racist nor a commie education, just a mediocre one. Though I suppose it’s reasonable to say I should’ve taken a better one – I did that later. (The Internet can be good for some things.)
I do remember a girl from my eight grade history class, whom I was friendly with but who had a tendency to cause unnecessary trouble with faculty, created a stink when we got to the Civil War. Our teacher had the Union and Confederate flags taped on the board, and she vaguely implied that the latter meant he was potentially a racist. Mr. Sherry – who was not to be trifled with – was furious, and he nipped it in the bud, real quick. To his credit, he didn’t really hold grudges.
Anyway, that might be relevant. “Kids” nowadays can be sociopathic liars. I don’t know if they convince themselves first, though.
I grew up in Texas in the ’60s, and I can support the opinion that Yglesias’ story about how the Civil War was taught in public schools there is a lie, plain and simple.
I don’t know when I first heard the term, “war of Northern aggression,” but I always assumed it was kind of a joke. Yes, there were some hardliners who were still fighting the Civil War (or, if you prefer, the War Between the States) but there are cranks and such everywhere, and it was kind of fun to point out that you can still find such sentiments, and yes, some people even heard that term. When I moved to Michigan in the late 70s I was told about the local car repair guy who was still fighting WWII and the “Japs” when it came to working on foreign cars. There actually were such people, but they don’t represent the region as a whole.
Which is not to say that the North and South have the same perspective on the Civil War, but it sounds like Yglesias is confusing the caricature with reality.
My dad was in the Army Air Corps. He didn’t see combat but he did have two cousins killed in the Pacific in WWII, and he spent several months in the Philippines shortly after the end of the war.
In the early 1970s, my sisters boyfriend (now her husband) drove a mazda pickup truck. The first time he drove it to our house, my dad asked him if it came with a map of Pearl Harbor in the glove compartment.
Our church had some Japanese high school students come stay with families for a few days in the late 1970s, I didn’t hear about it until later, but apparently my dad told the minister that he was still mad at the Japanese for WWII. The minister just pointed out that these kids hadn’t even been born then,
Come to think of it, maybe the car repair guy did represent the region, even though the way he spoke of the “Japs” was colorful and unique. But it was largely because Michigan was the base of American car manufacturing. There were areas around Detroit where I was told it wasn’t good to park a Japanese car. Even I couldn’t make myself buy a non-American branded car until January 2002, when I needed some surgery in Ann Arbor and there was a possibility that my wife would need to drive back and forth. We needed to have a reliable car for her, so we bought our first Toyota. It was by far the most reliable car we ever owned up to that point. That marked a sharp and immediate decline in the amount of time we spent dealing with repair shops.
Reading the Mandie books with my daughter, I did find a reference to the war of northern aggression non-ironically or bitterly.
It’s hard to say where the author picked it up as she wrote the first book at age 11 in the 30s, but they weren’t published until the 80s. She based Mandie on stories of her grandmother growing up in NC. So if her grandmother referred to it thus, it’s usage is older than the 80s and 90s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Gladys_Leppard
*Edit: mother, not grandmother