If you were to travel 2,000 years into the past and ask a couple of Romans how their city was founded, you might receive two completely different answers. One might trace the city’s origins to the twins Romulus and Remus, whose story touches on the themes of competition, resilience, and, eventually, fratricide (Adamidis, 2016). The other might refer you to Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem commissioned by Augustus Caesar, in which Aeneas (a minor Trojan character in the Iliad) comes to serve as the embodiment of pietas — the Roman virtue of duty — and founder of the city-state (Harrison, 1997). Neither of these answers would be historically accurate, but each would be true in another sense, serving to align the Roman citizenry with Rome’s guiding values, much as a mechanic would true a wheel.
The contributors to the February issue of Kappan consider the challenges facing K-12 education at a time when civic discourse has been corrupted by the specter of fake news, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories, on the one hand, and, on the other, post-modernism and a general skepticism of universalist principles. But the authors have little to say about the kind of poetic truth that we would hear from the ancient Romans we meet on the street, in which people use narratives to keep themselves true to a common sense of who they are and what they value. To explain what’s missing, I’ll focus specifically on Sam Wineburg’s article about truth and lies in the teaching of history.
I agree that history teachers have an obligation to give students an accurate account of past events. But it is important also to share narratives that help keep us true to our values.
Professor Wineburg makes a compelling argument that history education must help students develop both a knowledge of historical facts and an understanding of how people weave facts — sometimes false ones — into the narratives that tell them about themselves, their country, and the world. In particular, Wineburg points to the story of Crispus Attucks as an example of how contemporary political interests, favoring a particular understanding of who we are as Americans, have led textbook publishers to repeat a blatant falsehood about a key moment in U.S. history. In textbooks, nowadays, Attucks is described as a hero of the Boston Massacre, who was celebrated in court by then-lawyer and future president, John Adams. But in fact, Wineburg explains, textbooks usually leave out most of what Adams actually said. Far from celebrating the revolutionaries, he was defending the British soldiers, and his purpose in talking about Attucks was to discredit the Boston “mob” by associating it with “a rabble of Negroes.” It’s shameful, Wineburg concludes, to lie to children about a historical event in order to conceal a founding father’s racism. “History that impels us to look at the past, unflinchingly and clear-eyed, does not diminish us or make us less patriotic. The opposite, in fact, is true: It makes us grow up.”
I agree that history teachers have an obligation to give students an accurate account of past events. But it is important also to share narratives that help keep us true to our values. Consider the nuanced ways in which Lin-Manuel Miranda has channeled historical facts, for example. Deeply inspired by historian Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, Miranda took the story of “the ten dollar, founding father without a father” and reimagined him through casting, music, and lyrics that may not be historically accurate, but that speak to deeper truths about American underdogs, immigrants, and revolutionaries, connecting the inheritors of America’s future to powerful themes from its past. By transforming Chernow’s 800-page tome into a hit musical, Miranda created a narrative that has allowed millions of people to see themselves in a new way, identifying themselves with a history that has often excluded them.
It’s not self-evident that we need to reconcile these sorts of poetic truths completely with the historical facts they’re based on. Rather, we ought to ask ourselves, How can we honor the role that this kind of storytelling plays in creating and sustaining a multiracial and multi-ethnic democracy like our own, and how can we include it in the curriculum, while simultaneously insisting that our schools teach an accurate version of U.S. history?
Textbook publishers’ decision to feature Crispus Attucks as a hero of the Boston Massacre — the first Black man to die for the revolution — can be understood as one such attempt to show students that African Americans played a foundational role in our national narrative, beyond their enslavement. I suspect that Wineburg would argue that if publishers want to challenge the false narrative that African Americans had no place in the revolution, then they shouldn’t replace it with an equally false narrative suggesting that John Adams viewed Attucks as a hero; instead, we should find another historically accurate account to feature in our textbooks. But maybe the solution isn’t to replace it with a historical account at all.
As a high school student in Union, New Jersey, I took a multidisciplinary course called Humanities, in which our focus of study wasn’t the content of a particular subject area but, instead, a theme, the varieties of human experience, through readings and activities that spanned history and narrative, music and culture, and facts and truths. It was a thrilling class. Our teacher pushed us to think about the ways in which knowledge itself is generated. When I was a college student at Rutgers, my Africana Studies professors pursued a similar approach, posing questions such as, How has the production of scientific “facts” served to justify racism? We explored, for example, how the historical narrative about the race and ethnicity of Ancient Egyptians shifted to accommodate beliefs about white racial superiority; 19th-century European historians favored the Hamitic hypothesis that Egyptians — and, thus, their achievements — were of Caucasian descent (Eltringham, 2006). By studying both the histories of academic disciplines and the narratives that emerged (or did not) from those disciplines, we discovered truths about ourselves and our world that a typical history class wouldn’t have made possible.
Rome revised its founding myth, elevating Virgil’s Aeneid over the story of Romulus and Remus, as it transitioned from Republic to Empire. Our own nation has faced similar narrative crises many times over, as we’ve repeatedly challenged ourselves to reclaim and act upon long-ignored ideals and to discredit and jettison others. From the Declaration of Independence to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” to Miranda’s Hamilton to Amanda Gorman’s “The hill we climb,” we have looked to oratory, poetry, and narrative to connect these desires to, and to revise, the nation’s older, foundational stories. At times, such narratives may contradict the historical record, but all the same, they create and reveal truths that enrich us, and that we have a responsibility to include in the K-12 curriculum.
At the very least, I would argue, we must make more room in the curriculum for interdisciplinary studies, classes where students can see how different ways of knowing create different kinds of truth. When it comes to U.S. history, as a subject area, Professor Wineburg may be right to insist that teachers and textbooks stop lying to students. But I worry that readers will come away with his article, and the rest of the February issue, assuming a false dichotomy. As educators, we do not have to choose between historical facts and artful narratives. Sometimes facts inspire narratives, and understanding this relationship will help students better defend against its more nefarious permutation, in which narratives inspire “facts”.
Crispus Attucks was, verifiably, among the first African Americans to die in the events that led to the founding of our nation. Our history textbooks shouldn’t tell lies about him or the things John Adams said about his actions. But if somebody were to write a musical honoring his role in the American Revolution, that would be a story worth repeating.
References
Adamidis, D. (2016). The Romulus and Remus myth as a source of insight into Greek and Roman values.
Eltringham, N. (2006). ‘Invaders who have stolen the country’: The Hamitic Hypothesis, race and the Rwandan genocide. Social Identities, 12 (4), 425-446.
Harrison, S.J. (1997). The survival and supremacy of Rome: the unity of the shield of Aeneas. The Journal of Roman Studies, 87, 70-76.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Adams
DAVID ADAMS is senior director of strategy at Urban Assembly, New York, NY. He is the author of The Educator’s Practical Guide to Emotional Intelligence .
