Chapter 9. Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent...

If we do not speak of it, others will surely rewrite the script. Each of the body bags, all of the mass graves will be reopened and their contents abracadabraed into a noble cause.

—George Swiers, Vietnam veteran

When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and—eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies.

—Richard M. Nixon

The aim of the historian, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past, for the present is simply the developing past. ... The goal of the historian is the living present.

—Frederick Jackson Turner

We see things not as they are but as we are.

—Anai's Nin

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.

Because we lack these Kiswahili terms, we rarely think about this distinction systematically, but we also make it. Consider how we read an account of an event we lived through, especially one in which we ourselves took part, whether a sporting event or the Persian Gulf War. We read partly in a spirit of criticism, assessing what the authors-got wrong as well as agreeing with and perhaps learning from what they got right. When we study the more distant past, we may also read critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive. Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little ground on which to stand and criticize what we read.

Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sashaof the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamanigeneralized ancestorsis more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, which may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better. I examined how the ten narrative American histories in my sample cover the five decades leading up to the 1980s. (I excluded the 1980s because some of the textbooks came out in that decade, so they could not be expected to cover it fully.) On average, the textbooks give 47 pages to the 1930s, 43.6 pages to the 1940s, and fewer than 35 pages to each later decade. Even the turbulent decade of the 1960sincluding the civil rights movement, most of the Vietnam War, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedygets fewer than 35 pages.

I used the qualifier narrative in the previous paragraph because the examination revealed a striking difference between the two inquiry textbooks and the narrative textbooks. Discovering American History and The American Adventure, which consist largely of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary sources, do not downplay the sasha. Indeed, their attention to the recent past is indicative of their authors' intention of making history relevant to current events and issues. Even these two textbooks' early chapters challenge students to apply what they learn to the present. Therefore, despite the fact that both of the books were published before the 1970s ended, they give more space to the 1960s and 1970s than do the ten narrative textbooks. Unfortunately, these textbooks have long since gone out of favor and print, and, as far as I know, no inquiry textbooks remain on the market. Their lack of continued commercial viability suggests that by slighting the recent past publishers of narrative textbooks are somehow meeting a need. Probably it is the need to avoid controversy.

Avoiding the sasha surely does not meet students' needs. Textbook authors may work on the assumption that covering recent events thoroughly is unnecessary because students already know about them. Since textbook authors tend not to be young, however, what is sasha for them is zamani to their students.

As we college professors get older, we grow ever more astonished at what our undergraduatesdon't know about the recent past. I first became aware of this phenomenon as the 1970s inexorably became the 1980s. Lecturing on the Vietnam War, I increasingly got blank looks. One in four, then one in two, and in the 1990s four in five first-year college students have not known the meaning of the four-letter words bowk and dove. On the first day of class in 1989 I gave my students a quiz including the open-ended question, “Who fought in the war in Vietnam?” Almost a fourth of my students said the combatants were North and South Korea! I was stunnedto me this resembled answering “1957” to the question “When did the War of 1812 begin?” In fact, many recent high school graduates know more about the War of 1812 than about the Vietnam War.

It makes little sense and surely does no good to blame the students. It can hardly be their fault. If our civic memories begin when we are about ten years old, then the last students to have any memory of the Vietnam War graduated from high school in the spring of 1983. The war is unknown territory to today's college undergraduates, who were not alive when it ended. So are the women's movement, Watergate, and the Carter presidency. Movies, novels, songs, and other elements of popular culture do treat the recent past, but these fuse fact and fiction, as any Rambo fan can attest.6 Students need information about the recent past from their high school American history courses. The recent past is, after all, the history with the most immediate impact upon our lives today. The notion that history courses should slight the sasha for the distant zamani is perverse. Comparing textbook coverage of the Vietnam War and the War of 18 12 illuminates this perversion.

The War of 1812 took place almost two centuries ago and killed maybe two thousand Americans. Nevertheless, high school history books devote the same quantitative coveragenine pagesto the War of 1812 and the Vietnam War. One might argue, I suppose, that the War of 1812 was so much more important than the Vietnam War that it deserves as much space. Our textbooks make no such claim; most textbook authors don't know what to make of the War of 1812 and don't claim any particular importance for it.

Since the War of 1812 lasted only half as long as the Vietnam War, authors can treat it in far more detail. They enjoy the luxury of telling about individual battles and heroes in 1812. Land of Promise, for instance, devotes three paragraphs to a naval battle offPut-in-Bay Island in Lake Erie, which works out to one paragraph per hour of battle! Vietnam gets no such detail.

Scant space is only part of the problem. Nine gripping analytic pages on ihe Vietnam War might prove more than adequate.7 We must ask what kind of coverage textbooks provide, beginning with the images they supply. Photographs have been partofthe record ofwar in the United States since Matthew Brady's famous images of the Civil War. In Vietnam, television images joined still photos to shape the perceptions and sensibility of the American people. More than any other war in our history, the Vietnam War was distinguished by a series of images that seared themselves into the public consciousness. I have asked dozens of adults old enough to have lived during the war to tell me what visual images they remember; the list of images they have supplied shows remarkable overlap, A short list includes these five specific images:

a Buddhist monk sitting at a Saigon intersection immolating himself to protest the South Vietnamese government;

the little girl running naked down Highway 1, fleeing a napalm attack; the national police chief executing a terrified man, suspected of being in the Viet Cong, with a pistol shot to the side of his head; the bodies in the ditch after the My Lai massacre; and Americans evacuating from a Saigon rooftop by helicopter, while desperate Vietnamese try to climb aboard.

Quang Due, the first Buddhist monk to set himself on fire to protest the policies of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime that the United States supported in South Vietnam, shocked the South Vietnamese and the American people. Before the war ended, several other Vietnamese and at least one American followed Quang Puc's example.

The list might also include at least two generic images: B-5s with bombs streaming below them into the pock-marked countryside of Vietnam, and a ruined city such as Hue, nothing but rubble in view, as American and Sourh Vietnamese troops move in to retake it after the Tet offensive.

Merely reading these short descriptions prompts most older Americans to remember the images in sharp detail. The emotions that accompanied them come back vividly as well. Of course, since the main American involvement in the war took place from 1965 to 1973, Americans must have been at least thirty in 1993 to have these images in their sasha. Today's young people have little chance to see or recall these images unless their history books provide them.

They don't. These photographs have gone down the memory hole, that chute to the furnace where embarrassing facts burn to a crisp in George Orwell's 1984, A single book, The American Pageant, includes one of these pictures; the police chief shooting the terrified man,10 No other textbook reproduces any of them. The American Advenmres contains an image of our bombing Vietnam, but the photograph shows B-5s and bombs from below and gives no sense of any damage on the ground.

This little girl. Kim Phuc, ran screaming down Highway 1, fleeing from an accidental napalm attack on her village by South Vietnamese airplanes. She had stripped off her burning clothing as she ran. The television footage and still photographs of her flight were among the most searing of the war. The photograph violates two textbook taboos at once: no textbook ever shows anyone naked and none shows such suffering, even in time of war.

The seven cited images are important examples of the primary materials of the Vietnam War. Hawks might claim that these images exaggerate the aspects of the war they portray. However, the images have additional claims to historical significance: they made history, for they affected the way Americans thought about the war. Several of these photographs remain “among the most wellknown images in the world even now [1991],” according to Patrick Hagopian.“ Leaving them out of history textbooks shortchanges today's readers. As a student of mine wrote, ”To show a photograph of one naked girl crying after she has been napalmcd changes the entire meaning of that war to a high school student.

In Vietnam the U.S. dropped three times as many explosives as tt dropped in all theaters of World War II, even including our nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so textbook authors have many images of bomb damage to choose from. On the ground, after the Tet offensive, in which Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops captured cities and towns all over South Vietnam, American and South Vietnamese troops shelled Hue, Ben Tre, Quang Tri, and other cities before moving in to retake them. Nonetheless, not one textbook shows any damage done by our side.

Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the national police chief of South Vietnam, casually shot this terrified man, suspected of being a Viet Cong sympathizer, on a street in Saigon as an American photographer and television crew looked on. This photograph helped persuade many Americans that their side was not morally superior to the communists.12 The image is so haunting that, twenty-five years later, I have only to cock my fingers like a gun and people who were old enough to read newspapers or watch television in 1968 immediately recall the event and can describe it in some detail.

Of course, the authors and editors of textbooks choose among thousands of images of the Vietnam War. They might make different selections and still do justice lo the war. But at the very least they must show atrocities against the Vietnamese civilian population, for these were a frequent and even inevitable pan of this war without front lines, in which our armed forces had only the foggiest notion as to who was ally or opponent. Indeed, attacks on civilians were U.S. policy, as shown by Gen. William C. Westmoreland's characterization of civilian casualties; “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn't it?”“ We evaluated our progress by bodycounts and drew free-fire zones in which the entire civilian population was treated as the enemy. Such a strategy inevitably led to war crimes. Thus My Lai was not a minor event, unworthy of inclusion in a nation's history but was important precisely because it was emblematic of much ofwhat went wrong with the entire war in Vietnam. My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now a U.S. senator, called “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, “Over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” He went on to retell how American troops "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.“ All this was ”in addition to the normal ravage of war."15 Any photograph of an American soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese hootch (house), a common sight during the war, would get this point across, but no textbook uses any photograph of any wrongdoing by an American. Indeed, no book includes any photograph of any destruction, even of legitimate targets, caused by our side. Only Discovering American History, an inquiry textbook, treats the My Lai massacre as anything but an isolated incident. In addition to leaving students ignorant of the history of the war, the silence of other textbooks on this matter also makes the antiwar movement incomprehensible.

LEFT: In the My Lai massacre American combat troops murdered women, old men, and children. Ronald Haeberle's photographs, including this one, which ran in Life magazine, seared the massacre into the nation's consciousness and still affect our culture.” Most Hollywood movies made about Vietnam include My Lai imagery; Platoon offers a particularly vivid example.

RIGHT: On April, 29, 1975, trtis American helicopter evacuated people from a Saigon rooftop. The next day Saigon fell and the long American (and Vietnamese) nightmare came to an end. Half of all Americans alive today were younger than ten or not yet born when this photograph was taken. Thus half know the war only from movies and textbooks.

The only photograph of troops in Triumph of the American Nation shows them happily surrounding President Johnson when he visited the American base at Cam Ranh Bay during the war.

Two textbook authors, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, are on record elsewhere as knowing of the importance of My Lai. “The American strategy had atrocity built into it,” Lytle said to me. Davidson and Lytle devote most of a chapter to the My Lai massacre in their book After the Fart. There they tell how news of the massacre stunned the United States. “One thihg'was cer tain,” they write, “the encounter became a defining moment in the public's perception of the war,” Plainly they do not think high school students need to know about it, however, for their high school history textbook, The United StatesA History ofthe Republic, like seven other textbooks in my sample, never mentions My Lai.

If textbooks omit all the important photographs of the Vietnam War, what images do they include? Uncontroversial shots, for the most partservicemen on patrol, walking through swamps, or jumping from helicopters. Seven books show refugees or damage caused by the other side, but since such damage was usually less extensive than that caused by our bombardment, the pictures are not very dramatic What about their prose? Sadly, textbook authors also leave out all the memorable quotations of the era. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war, opposed it in his trademark cadences: “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. . . . We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.”17 No textbook quotes King. Even more famous was the dissent of Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Ali refused induction into the military, for which his title was stripped from him, and said, “No Viet Cong ever called me 'nigger.'” All twelve textbooks leave out that line too. After the Tet offensive, a US. army officer involved in retaking Ben Tre said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” For millions of Americans, this statement summarized America's impact on Vietnam. No textbook supplies it. Nor does any textbook quote John Kerry's plea for immediate withdrawal: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”19 Indeed, the entire antiwar movement becomes unintelligible because textbooks do not allow it to speak for itself. They exclude the antiwar songs, the chants“Hell, no; we won't go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”and, above all, the emotions.20 Virtually the only people who get quoted are Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In a typical passage in The American Pageant, Nixon says, “America cannot-and will notconceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” The passage does not help to clarity the war or the opposition to it. Even Pageant's auxiliary reader quotes only Johnson and Nixon as primary sources on the Vietnam Warnot a word from those who fought in or opposed it.

Having excluded the sights, the sounds, and the feelings of the Vietnam era, textbook authors proceed to exclude the issues. Frances FitzGerald, who, in addition to America Revised, wrote Fire in the Lake, a fine book about Vietnam, called the textbooks she reviewed in 1979 “neither hawkish nor dovish on the warthey are simply evasive.” She went on to say, "Since it is really quite hard to discuss the war and evade all the major issues, their Vietnam sections make remarkable reading."21 To some degree, defining the issues is a matter of interpretation, and I would not want to fault textbooks for holding a different interpretation from my own. Perhaps we can agree that any reasonable treatment of the Vietnam War would discuss at least these six questions:

Why did the United States fight in Vietnam?

What was the war like before the United States entered it?

How did we change it?

How did the war change the United States?

Why did an antiwar movement become so strong in the United States?

What were its criticisms of the war in Vietnam? Were they right?

Why did the United States lose the war? What lesson(s) should we take from the experience?

Simply to list these questions is to recognize that each of them is still controversial. Take the first. Some people still argue that the United States fought in Vietnam to secure access to the country's valuable natural resources. Others claim that we fought to bring democracy to Vietnam's people. Perhaps more common are analyses of our internal politics: Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, having seen how Republicans castigated Truman for “losing” China, did not want to be seen as “losing” Vietnam. Another interpretation brings forth the domino theory: while we know now that Vietnam's communists are antagonists of China, we didn't then, and some leaders believed that if Vietnam “fell” to the communists, so would Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Yet another view is that America felt its prestige was on the line, so it did not want a defeat in Vietnam, lest Pax Americana be threatened in Africa, South America, or elsewhere in the world.“ Some conspiracy theorists go even further and claim that big business fomented the war to help the economy. Other historians take a longer view, arguing that our intervention in Vietnam derives from a cultural pattern of racism and imperialism that began with the first Indian war in Virginia in 1622, continued in the nineteenth century with ”Manifest Destiny,“ and is now winding down in the ”American century." They point out that GI's in Vietnam collected and displayed Vietnamese ears just as British colonists in North America collected and displayed Indian scalps.23 A final view might be that there was no clear cause and certainly no clear purpose, that we blundered into the war because no subsequent administration had the courage to undo our 1946 mistake of opposing a popular independence movement. “The fundamental blunder with respect to Indochina was made after 1945,” wrote Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, when “our Government allowed itself to be persuaded” by the French and British “to restore France's colonial position in Indochina.”!

Perhaps the seeds of America's tragic involvement with Vietnam were sown at Versailles in 1918, when Woodrow Wilson failed to hear Ho Chi Minn's plea for his country's independence. Perhaps they germinated when FDR's policy of not helping the French recolonize Southeast Asia after World War II terminated with his death. Since textbooks rarely suggest that [he events of one period caused events of the next, unsurprisingly, none of the textbooks I surveyed look before the 1950s to explain the Vietnam War.

Within the 1950s and 1960s, the historical evidence for some of these conflicting interpretations is much weaker than for others, although I will not choose sides here.23 Textbook authors need not choose sides, either. They could present several interpretations, along with an overview of the historical support for each, and invite students to come to their own conclusions. Such challenges are not the textbook authots' style, however. They seem compelled to present the “right” answer to all questions, even unresolved controversies.

So which interpretation do they choose? None of the above! Most textbooks simply dodge the issue. Here is a representative analysis, from American Adventures: “Later in the 195s, war broke out in South Vietnam, This time the United States gave aid to the South Vietnamese government.” “War broke out” what could be simpler! Adventures devotes four pages to discussing why we got into the War of 1812 but just these two sentences to why we fought in Vietnam.

One reason textbook authors tiptoe through the recent past, evading all the main issues, may be that they do not feel they have the expertise to deal with it. None of the forty-five authors of the twelve textbooks in my sample is an expert on the recent past, so far as I can tell. Of course, even textbooks written by several authors necessarily treat many subjects on which their authors cannot be expert. For topics in the zamani, however, textbook authors can use historical perspective as a shield. By writing in an omniscient boring tone about events in the zamani, authors imply that a single historic truth exists, upon which historians have agreed and which they now teach and students now should memorize. Such writing implies that historical perspective grows ever more accurate with the passage of time, blessing today's textbook authors with cumulative historical insight. They cannot use historical perspective to defend their treatment of events in the sasha, however. Without historical perspective, textbook authors appear naked; no particular qualification gives them the right to narrate recent events with the same Olympian detachment with which they declaim on events in the zamani.

Indeed, historical perspective implicitly justifies neglecting the sasha. Historians tell us how we are too close to whichever recent event we are discussing to be able to step back and view it in context. As new material becomes available in archives, they claim, or as the consequences of actions become clearer over time, we can reach a more “objective” assessment. The passage of time does not in itself provide perspective, however. Information is lost as well as gained over time.

At this point we might usefully recall a few changes in perspective noted in earlier chapters. Woodrow Wilson enjoys a dramatically more positive ranking now than in 1920. The improvement did not derive from the discovery of fresh information on his administration but from the ideological needs of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those years white historians would hardly fault Wilson for segregating the federal government, because no consensus held that racial segregation was wrong. The foremost public issue of that postwar era was not race relations but the containment of communism. During the Cold War our government operated as it did under Wilson, with semideclared wars, executive deception of Congress, and suppression of civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. Wilson's policies, controversial and unpopular in 1920, had become ordinary by the 1950s. Statesmen and historians of the 1950s rejected and even trivialized isolationism. Interested in pushing the United Nations, then thoroughly under U.S. influence, they appreciated Wilson's efforts on behalf of the League of Nations. N. Gordon Levin, Jr., put it neatly: “Ultimately, in the post-World War II period, Wilsonian values would have their complete triumph in the bi-partisan Cold War consensus.”" Thus Wilson's improved evaluation in today's textbooks can be attributed largely to the fact that the ideological needs of the 1950s, when Wilson was in the zamani, were different from those of the 1920s, when he was passing into the sasha.

The mistreatment and enslavement of the Caribbean Indians by the Spaniards was noted by Bartolome de las Casas and others while Columbus was still in the sasha. Later, however, Columbus was lionized as a daring man of science who disproved the flat-earth notion and opened a new hemisphere to progress. This nineteenth-century Columbus appealed to a nation concluding three hundred years of triumphant warfare over Indian nations. But by 1992 Columbus the exploiter had begun receiving equal billing with Columbus the explorer, and many Columbus celebrations drew countercelebrations, often mounted by Native Americans. The “new” Columbus, closer to the Columbus of the sasha, appealed to a nation that had to get along with dozens of former colonies, now new nations. The contrast between the 1892 and 1992 celebrations of Columbus's first voyage again shows the effect of different vantage points.

The Confederate myth of Reconstruction first permeated the historical literature during the nadir of race relations, from 1890 to 1920, and hung on in textbooks until the 1960s. Reconstruction regimes came to be portrayed as illegitimate and corrupt examples of “Negro domination,” Now historians have returned to the view of Reconstruction put forth in earlier histories, written while Republican governments still administered the Southern states. Eric Foner hails the change as due to “objective scholarship and modern experience,” a turn of phrase that concisely links the two key causes. Objective scholarship does exist in history, which is why I risk words like truth and lies. Mere chronological distance did not promote a more accurate depiction of Reconstruction. Because the facts about Reconstruction simply did not suit the “modern experience” of the nadir period, they lay mute during the early decades of the twentieth century, overlooked by most historians. Not until the civil rights movement altered “modern experience” could the facts speak to us.

Historical perspective is thus not a by-product of the passage of time. A more accurate view derives from Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, which suggests that the social practices of the period when history is written largely determine that history's perspective on the past.29 Objective scholarship must be linked with a modern experience that permits it to prevail. The claim of inadequate historical perspective will not do as an excuse for ignoring the sasha. Historians have no reason other than timidity for avoiding a full and thoughtful exposition of our recent past.

Textbook authors are not solely responsible for the slighting of the recent past in high school history courses. Even if textbooks gave the sasha the space it deserves, most students would have to read about it on their own, because most teachers never ger to the end of the textbook. In her year-long American history course, the fifth-grade teacher Chris Zajac, subject of Tracy Kidder's Among, Schoolchildren, never gets past Reconstruction! Time is not the only problem. Like publishers, teachers do not want to risk offending parents. Moreover, according to Linda McNeil, most teachers particularly don't want to teach about Vietnam. “Their memories of the Vietnam war era made them wish to avoid topics on which the students were likely to disagree with their views or that would make the students 'cynical' about American institutions.” Therefore the average teacher grants the Vietnam War 0 to 4.5 minutes in the entire school year!

The Vietnam War isn't nearly as contentious as some other issues from the recent past; today more than two of three adult Americans consider the war to have been morally wrong as well as tactically inept.50 More controversial is the women's movement. Every school district includes parents who strongly affirm traditional sex roles and other parents who do not. Homosexuality is even more taboo as a subject of discussion or learning. Raising the topic of affirmative action leads to angry debates. A negative evaluation of the Carter or Reagan administrations would surely offend some Democratic or Republican patents, respectively, Mel and Norma Gabler, who organize right-wingers to pressure textbook publishers, seek to make labor unions and the National Council of Churches too controversial for authors and publishers even to mention. Since all parents have opinions about events they lived through, teachers and authors may feel they must approach most topics in the sasha with extreme caution. The result is a history of the recent past along the line suggested by Thumper's mom: “Ifyou can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all.” Unsurprisingly, only 2 to 4 percent of college students say that they had any substantial treatment of the Vietnam War in high school.

When textbooks downplay the sasha, however, they make it hard for students to draw connections between the study of the past, their lives today, and the issues they will face in the future. Politicians across the political spectrum invoked “the lessons of Vietnam” as they debated intervening in Angola, Lebanon, Kuwait, Somalia, and Bosnia. Bumper stickers reading “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam” helped block sending U.S. troops to that nation.32 “The lessons of Vietnam” have also been used to inform or mislead discussions about secrecy, the press, how the federal government operates, and even whether the military should admit gays. Issues raised by the women's movement in the 1970s continue to reverberate through American society, affecting institutions from individual families to the mass media. And so on. High school graduates have a right to enough knowledge about the recent past to participate intelligently in such debates.

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It's not even past.” The sasha is our most important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students, depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them. The semi-remembered factoids students carry with them about the Battle of Put-in-Bay or Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand the world into which they move at graduation. That world is still working out sex roles. That world is full of Third World nations with the potential to become “new Vietnams.” That world is marked by social inequality. Leaving out the recent past ensures that students will take away little from their history courses that they can apply to that world.

Florida's Disney World presents an exhibit called “American Adventure,” a twenty-nine-minute history of the United States. The exhibit completely leaves out the Vietnam War, the ghetto riots of the 1960s and 1990s, and anything else troubling about the recent past," The compressed and bland accounts of the recent past in American history textbooks show a similar failure of nerve on the part of authors, publishers, and many teachers. High school students deserve better than Disney World history, especially since their textbooks are by no means as much fun as the amusement park.

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