The silence of the ellipses: Why history can’t be about telling our children lies

History textbooks often tell sanitized versions of the past when a more complete story will enable us to know who we are as a country — and become even better.

Aware his days were numbered, a tuberculosis-stricken George Orwell holed away in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, off the Scottish coast, and raced to finish the book that would make his name an adjective. He left the island for the last time in 1949, the same year his novel 1984 appeared. He died a year later. I read 1984 in my 11th-grade English class in the weary Rust Belt town of Utica, New York, at a time when Russia was still the USSR and, in Ronald Reagan’s words from 1983, the “focus of evil in the modern world.” With CliffsNotes at my side, I decoded the book’s more obscure allusions. (For example, I learned that Winston Smith’s musings that the Party could declare 2 + 2 = 5 conjured up Stalin’s claim that his five-year plan had been completed in four.) But you didn’t need a study aid to get the main point. We lived in a free society; they in a tyrannical one. We respected truth; they disfigured it. Russian-speaking Winston Smiths composed their history books to achieve their leaders’ aims; ours were written by esteemed historians faithful to the documentary record. (In my own school, we read The American Pageant, written by the past president of the Organization of American Historians, Thomas Bailey.)

Mind you, we knew our textbooks weren’t perfect (we weren’t naïve — or at least not as naïve as they were). In fact, Elaine Cantor, my history teacher, openly criticized our books (the freedom to criticize being another testament to our superiority). For example, we learned from our textbook that Thomas Jefferson used his incandescent intellect to pen the Declaration of Independence, but our teacher pointed out that our book conveniently omitted how he used his intellect to devise tunnels at Monticello that hid the scourge of slavery from view. Yet, omission was one thing; outright fabrication of the Big Brother variety, another. We stooped, but not as low as they did. Or so it seemed, then.

Financed and approved by the state, history textbooks are less a reflection of the current state of historical knowledge than a collection of stories adults think will do children good, the educational equivalent of making the kids eat their peas. If a textbook veers too much from the common understanding of history — not among historians but among the chiropractors, dentists, middle managers, and other community members who sit on state boards of education — then that book is at risk of being booted from a state adoption list, costing its publisher millions.

Financed and approved by the state, history textbooks are less a reflection of the current state of historical knowledge than a collection of stories adults think will do children good, the educational equivalent of making the kids eat their peas.

Before being presented to adoption boards, textbooks incorporate reams of feedback from the most strident and well-connected special interests (sometimes inserting their recommendations, word for word; Fogo, 2010). These include deep-pocketed groups with the resources to wade through mountains of books, formulate their recommendations in numbered memoranda, and, during periods of public comment, fly to state capitals to deliver statements at open hearings. This labyrinthine process puts risk-averse publishers in a corner from which the safest course out is to make their products as similar to each other’s as they can. What distinguishes one company’s books from another is not the stories they tell, but the ancillary features that come bundled with a major adoption: test banks, online primary sources, hefty teacher’s editions, downloadable flashcards, and just about every other object that glistens. Aside from some regional differences, the narration of major events within the text — from the Constitutional Convention to the moon landing — is pretty much the same across publishers, so much so that you’ll often find the same topics discussed in about the same location across books — quite a feat in tomes that exceed a thousand pages. (Full disclosure: As one of the authors of Holt, Rinehart, and Winston’s 2007 world history textbook, I know this routine from the inside.)

The textbooks resulting from this process are about as scintillating to read as the terms of service one clicks to download a new app. Over time, inaccuracies creep into these texts. And because the books are so much alike, these inaccuracies frequently carry over from one textbook to the next.

Truths and untruths about the Boston Massacre

Take, for example, the Boston Massacre, an event that appears in every U.S. history textbook. The basic story has changed little across centuries. On a chilly March evening in 1770, a crowd assembled outside the Customs House on King Street and started taunting the British soldiers garrisoned there. With 4,000 British troops quartered among the town’s 15,000 inhabitants, tensions had simmered for months, especially between Boston’s dockworkers and off-duty soldiers, who undercut them for odd jobs. As night fell on March 5, a gaggle of dockworkers marched from the waterfront toward King Street to join the crowd and started heaving “snow balls, oyster shells, clubs, white birch sticks three inches and an half diameter” at the sentry and his compatriots (Trial of the British Soldiers, 1824). Commanded by Captain Thomas Preston, the soldiers fired their muskets. Three men died on the spot; two others later succumbed to their wounds.

Paul Revere’s engraved image of the event, “The Bloody Massacre in King-Street,” etched the night’s carnage in Americans’ collective memory: It depicts an organized line of British soldiers, their faces angular and sinister (including one who seemed to be grinning), firing in unison on helpless townspeople out for some fresh air. A travesty of historical accuracy, but highly effective as propaganda. A 1953 textbook does a better job, explaining that whenever the troops appeared on Boston’s narrow streets, “crowds jeered and threw snowballs,” and that “even the best-trained soldiers will in time lose their tempers” — which is precisely what happened on March 5, when an unnamed man “knocked a soldier down with a club and then dared the soldiers to shoot” (Riegel & Haugh, 1953). Which, of course, they did.

More recent textbooks have offered a similar account, with one exception: The anonymous, club-wielding man has been named and awarded a major role in the drama. Crispus Attucks was a seaman of mixed African and Native origin. Much of what we know about him remains speculative. However, most historians assume that he’s the same “Crispas” who appeared in an advertisement in the Boston Gazette some 20 years earlier: “Ran-way from his Master William Brown of Framingham. . . a Molatto Fellow, about 27 Years of Age, named Crispas, 6 Feet two Inches high, short curl’d Hair.”

The rise of Crispus Attucks

The story of Crispus Attucks and his role in the Boston Massacre opens the chapter called “The Coming of the Revolution” in The Americans (Danzier et al., 2014), published by Holt McDougal/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the three publishing behemoths that dominate the American market. Attired in formal jacket and ruffled white shirt, his portrait graces the side of the page, even though that portrait is a sheer fabrication. Few seaman had the leisure, not to mention the means, to sit for formal portraiture in 1770. Attucks, the text says, was “part of a large and angry crowd that had gathered at the Boston Custom House to harass the British soldiers stationed there. More soldiers soon arrived, and the mob began hurling stones and snowballs at them. Attucks then stepped forward.” A quotation from John Adams comes next, in which the Founding Father calls Attucks a “hero”:

This Attucks . . . appears to have undertaken to be the hero of the night; and to lead this army with banners . . . up to King street with their clubs . . . . This man with his party cried, “Do not be afraid of them,” . . . He had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down.

The text resumes:

Attucks’s action ignited the troops. Ignoring orders not to shoot civilians, one soldier and then others fired on the crowd. Five people were killed; several were wounded. Crispus Attucks was, according to a newspaper account, the first to die.

Attucks’ appearance in textbooks is a relatively recent phenomenon. Eclipsed from memory from the 1770s well into the 19th century, he was resurrected in 1851 by William Cooper Nell, an African American journalist and historian, author of the Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812. By mid-century, Attucks emerged as a symbol for abolitionists, Black and white. In 1888, Boston’s Black community unveiled a monument in his honor (over the objections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who believed that the “famous mulatto was a rowdyish person” and “not a fit candidate for monumental honors”; The New York Times, 1888, p. 4).

It wasn’t until the civil rights movement of the 1960s that Attucks became a regular feature in textbooks. Among the first was Henry Graff’s 1967 The Free and the Brave, which stated that “Attucks and his fellow victims had become the first martyrs in the American struggle against Britain.” A review of seven textbooks published between 2003 and 2009 found that all but one featured Attucks in their narration of the Boston Massacre (Kachun, 2017).

The Americans not only features Attucks but goes the extra mile by including his portrait and the quotation from John Adams. Knowing little else, readers would assume that John Adams was paying tribute to a fallen martyr when he called Attucks the “hero of the night.” Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Adams’ words were, in fact, part of his summation at the trial of the eight British soldiers accused of murder, a trial in which Adams served as counsel for the defense.

In taking the case, Adams faced a formidable challenge: how to undermine the jury’s natural allegiance with the slain victims and make them identify with the reviled British soldiers. He did so by driving a wedge between upstanding Bostonians and the “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs” (that is, ill-mannered non-whites, lowly Catholics, and uncouth seamen) responsible for the bloodshed (Trial of the British Soldiers, 1824). These hooligans were a different stock from “the good people of the town.” Indeed, Adams stated, “Why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.”

According to Adams, Crispus Attucks was a hero all right: the kind of hero who presided “at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together,” a hero commanding his “myrmidons” who were “shouting and huzzaing, and threatening life . . . throwing every species of rubbish they could pick in the street.” Adams repeatedly plied the trope of the fearsome non-white body and exclaimed that the looming figure of the “stout Attucks was enough to terrify any person,” including the besieged British soldiers.

In Adams’ account, the soldiers tried in vain to restore order, imploring the crowd to “stand off.” However, under “the command of a stout Molatto,” the mob would have none of it, hurling chunks of ice so big that they “may kill a man, if they happen to hit some part of the head.” Were Attucks’ skin color not enough to distance him from the jury, Adams also accented his foreignness. This “Attucks from Framingham” was an outside agitator “to whose mad behaviour, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night, is chiefly to be ascribed.”

Adams’ race-baiting proved a winning strategy. The jury found Captain Preston not guilty, along with six of his soldiers. For two others, Hugh Montgomery and Matthew Kilroy, the jury reduced charges of murder to manslaughter, and sentenced them to be branded with the letter M (for “manslayer”) on the “brawn of the thumb” along with their oath to never again break the law. As the University of Chicago legal scholar Farah Peterson (2018) explained, Adams’ strategy worked in absolving the people of Boston of the night’s carnage by convincing the jury that the soldiers had “only killed a black man and his cronies and that they didn’t deserve to hang for it.”

Sources and choices

Tracing where footnote-less textbooks get their information can be an exercise in futility. Not so with The Americans. The textbook’s authors cited The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, first published in 1973, by the University of Massachusetts historian Sidney Kaplan and his wife Emma, as the source for the Adams quote. Fairness demands that we consider the possibility that it was the Kaplans who doctored Adams’ quote, and that the textbook authors, failing to check the original, merely reproduced it. Yet, while noting that the local press singled out Attucks for both praise and blame, the Kaplans wrote that for John Adams “it was all blame.” In their quote from Adams’ summation, they leave intact the charged racial language referencing Attucks’ menacing figure (“a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks was enough to terrify any person”) and role as instigator (the “head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together”). The Americans, on the other hand, hides these references in the ellipses.

With the Kaplans’ text in hand, the authors of The Americans made a choice. Instead of helping young Americans see how a Black (or mixed race) body was stamped from the beginning, to invoke Ibram X. Kendi’s phrase, they performed laser surgery on Adams’ words in an act that would do Winston Smith proud.

I have to imagine that in editing John Adams’ words, The Americans’ authors thought they were doing something noble: giving American children of all hues a hero who is a person of color. But the sly three dots of an ellipsis cannot erase the stain of racism any more than a bathroom spray can eliminate the stench of a skunk. Editorial subterfuge only forestalls a reckoning.

History that impels us to look at the past, unflinchingly and clear-eyed, does not diminish us or make us less patriotic.

As Farah Peterson (2018) notes, Black people are allowed onto the stage of American history only if they satisfy certain conditions: “when they intersect with the triumphal tale of the creation of a white American republic.” By depicting Crispus Attucks as a hero, lauded by John Adams, The Americans presents an image of a Founding Father and a Black patriot standing together as fellow lovers of liberty. A more honest approach would present Adams’ words more completely and prompt an examination of the hoary legacy of race-baiting, stretching from Crispus Attucks to the Scottsboro boys to Michael Brown.

Truth and patriotism

In September 2020, President Donald Trump stood in the great hall of the National Archives to denounce what he called a leftist assault on American history: “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms,” he said, and teach our children a kind of history that will make them “love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.”

Love built on a lie is false love. It achieves its mirage by making truth its victim. The goal of historical study is to cultivate neither love nor hate. Its goal must be to acquaint us with the dizzying spectrum of our humanity: lofty moments of nobility mixed in with ignominious descents into knavery. When history’s mirror intones a single phrase — that we’re the fairest of them all — it freezes us in childhood and stunts our growth. 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. Understanding who we were allows us to understand who we are now. Only then can we commit to doing something about it.

That should be the goal of history education. Our children deserve nothing less.

• Also by Sam Wineburg: Why we need a new approach to digital literacy

References

Danzier, G.A., de Alva, J.K., Krieger, L.S., Wilson, L.E., & Woloch, N. (2014). The Americans: Beginning to 1914. Orlando, FL: Holt McDougal.

Fogo, B. (2010). “What every student should know and be able to do”: The making of California’s framework, standards, and tests for history-social science. [Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University].

Graff, H.F. (1967). The free and the brave: The story of the American people. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally and Company.

Kachun, M. (2017). First martyr of liberty: Crispus Attucks in American memory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, E. (1973). The Black presence in the era of the American Revolution. New York, NY: New York Graphic Society.

New York Times. (1888, November 15). The project of the Crispus Attucks monument . . . , p. 4.

Peterson, F. (2018, December 3). Black lives and the Boston Massacre. American Scholar.

Reagan, R. (1983, March 8). Evil empire speech. Washington, DC: National Center for Public Policy Research.

Riegel, R.E. & Haugh, H. (1953). United States of America: A history. New York, NY: Scribner.

The Trial of the British Soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot. (1824). Boston, MA: William Emmons.

Trump, D.T. (2020, September 17). Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History. Washington, DC: Author.