Category Archives: History

Despite being busy with travel, workshops and the farm, I have managed to get some reading done in the past month.  I’ve been working along the shelf of English history.  Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey by Alison Weir was a good story and demonstrated how the death of a monarch led to power struggles. We tend to think of there being a perfectly orderly succession but a book like this reminds us that many nobles in England could claim at least some amount of royal blood and may have a pretty good claim to the throne.  Jane Grey was caught in one of these webs of intrigue, and letting her live, even if she really didn’t want to be queen, became too dangerous for Mary Tudor.

I moved into nonfiction with The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser.  After a slow start, I found myself really enjoying Fraser’s ironic tone and style.  She brought the unique qualities of each of the women to light, getting beyond the simply stereotypes that we’ve come to know.

Now, I’m about halfway through The Lady in the Tower, nonfiction by Alison Weir, about Anne Boleyn’s last days.  It is well researched and Weir is clearly working to dispel some of the standards beliefs about Boleyn, her various relationships and her influence on the Reformation, and I am imagining the Tudor scholars with whom she takes issue to be shaking their fists.  For the average reader like me, however, it is a bit long…I’ve still got more than 100 pages to go and we are mere days away from Anne’s death. There are interesting bits and I will finish it, but I can’t recommend it unless you want something of a minute-by-minute understanding of Anne Boleyn’s downfall.

The most compelling part of this book for me is the way is shows the bias of primary sources. Often, teachers are encouraged to move students away from the textbook to examine these primary sources as though they somehow have the lock on the “truth” of history. In the case of Anne Boleyn, truth is very much in the eye and the pen of the beholder. So, while Chapuys seems like an eye-witness to history, it is important to remember that he was a supporter of Catherine of Aragon who hated Anne Boleyn. Thus, he is more willing to believe that Boleyn would deceive the king and is only too happy when she is arrested. George Wyatt, on the other hand, was the grandson of Thomas Wyatt, often thought to be one of Boleyn’s lovers who was imprisoned but released as part of Boleyn’s downfall.  His biography can hardly be considered unbiased.

I did take a break from all this English history to read Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo.  I picked it up at Bay Books during my visit to Coronado and bought it simply because at one point, the narrator and his traveling companion stay at the General Sutter Inn in Lititz, Pennsylvania, near my own home town.  I suppose it would be considered “pop” spirituality: by the end, the narrator, something of an average Joe with a good job and happy family, learns how to make spirituality part of his life. It isn’t about being perfect, but about finding the sense of spirituality in the every day.  That and a bit of meditation seem to be the answer.

I am also reading a book for a summer book study I’m leading: Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal.  The author is a gamer and game creator who believes that gaming can save the world.  The book is a bit overwritten and sometimes borders on the fanatical, which provides good fodder for book group discussions.  We’re meeting in Second Life as well as in an online community if you’re interested in joining in.

I think the irony of the Civil War is that there was rarely a time when people either North or South were very happy with their government.  The Confederacy tried to unite states who were seceding from the Union because they did not want to be united, a paradox that haunted them while in the North Lincoln had to walk a tightrope between the radical abolitionists who wanted to crush the South and its tradition of slavery and the Democrats who had no real interest in freeing slaves, but only wanted to bring the South back to the Union.

And in the midst of all the political wrangling on both sides, soldiers–mostly farm workers and shop clerks–slaughtered each other.  Americans all, yet so entrenched in their regional loyalties that they could imagine killing another person to protect those positions.  Did they ever wonder at the futility of killing another man much more like him than any politician or military strategist?

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson is a one-volume powerhouse that manages to cover major battles, political events and home life in enough detail to bring the mid-19th century alive.  Famous people like John Brown, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are presented with sincere respect and empathy so we see beyond the stereotypes they have become.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read nearly 900 pages that wasn’t related to a boy wizard and his friends.  I’m sure there are details that have escaped me particularly related to particular battle movements, but I feel like I have a better overall understanding of the Civil War as well as larger political problems related to a failure to compromise.  Indeed, both sides rejected compromise on key issues, leading inexorably to war despite protests otherwise.  And, the final outcome was not predestined, the way hindsight might suggest.  McPherson suggests that all the explanations for why the North prevailed fail to take into account contingency, “the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently” (p. 858).  Understanding the Civil War, according to McPherson, requires the narrative approach that he adopted, and I agree.  In the midst of all his details and examinations of various arguments, he tells a great story complete with engaging characters and cliffhangers.

This volume is not for everyone…and a long winter might be a better time if you choose to tackle.  I struggled to find time to read in the midst of summer activities.  But now it lays beside me, complete, and I face the age old question: what should I read next?  But that question is for another blog post.

I finished Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen. I read the first edition, published in 1995.  I was particularly taken with his description of the more recent past and how poorly books address it: that “recent past” in 1995 was my own childhood: Vietnam, the energy crisis, and environmental degradation.  No wonder my generation tends to be a bit more cynical than say my Boomer friends who grew up with Howdy Doody and “I like Ike!” No textbook, no matter how rosy its outlook, can put a positive spin on Nixon or, for that matter, Love Canal.

There’s an update and I took a glance at the comments in Amazon.  Mostly, Loewen gets accused of his own left wing, anti-American, anti-white-male bias, a charge he anticipates and even tries to address in the book.  For instance, after revealing the people behind the caricatures of Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller, he suggests that seeing them as real people means that we provide authentic role models to students who might help them as  they face their own decisions and the potential consequences: “For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures.  Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody-goody, not merely good” (p. 27).  What Loewen argues for throughout the book is simply a more realistic viewpoint.  We don’t need to go from America the perfect to America the horrible; instead, we need to learn a realistic view of our nation that, like many others, struggled in sometimes incredibly hypocritical ways to define and practice its values, a struggle that continues today and in which every citizen can play a role.

I do wish he would reconsider the title: the book is really about textbooks, not teachers, who while they do have some control over how they teach, often have no control over what they teach. But Lies My Textbook Told Me just isn’t a snappy a title, is it?  This is another one of those complex issues that gets simplified by being laid at the door of the teachers.