A History of US Inaccuracies

[mycalling]

I've heard of many inaccuracies and biases in the first printing of A History of US by Hakim. Were those edited for the second printing with the 11 books?

 

If you have experience with this set, what inaccuracies or biases have you noticed in the books?

[Mrs Mungo]

There is bias in *all* history books. I don't think Hakim's particular biases would (or even should) be edited out.

 

Eta: the view in these books is somewhere between Howard Zinn and the Texas school board.

[JudyJudyJudy]

There is bias in *all* history books. I don't think Hakim's particular biases would (or even should) be edited out.

 

Eta: the view in these books is somewhere between Howard Zinn and the Texas school board.

So it's pretty moderate then?

 

I agree that all history books are biased. I actually like to teach my son different viewpoints, but, of course, I show my own bias in my teaching.

[Mrs Mungo]

I think it's pretty moderate. People on the far right might disagree.

[mycalling]

What about inaccuracies? I don't know enough about history to point them all out as we come across them. I'd hate to be teaching my impressionable elementary and jr high children erroneous "facts" on our first trip through US History.

[Crimson Wife]

I've only read Ms. Hakim's Story of Science Vol. 1 book but her bias against Christianity in that book was enough for me to decide I wasn't going to use anything else written by her. According to this review, the same anti-Christian bias is found in Story of US.

[Shelly in the Country]

I haven't used A History of US yet (although I do own it, and plan to use it), but The Textbook League had a listing of some errors they found in the series. From what I could determine, they are not a "right wing" organization either, since they also attack the Intelligent Design movement. The Textbook League

[JudyJudyJudy]

I haven't used A History of US yet (although I do own it, and plan to use it), but The Textbook League had a listing of some errors they found in the series. From what I could determine, they are not a "right wing" organization either, since they also attack the Intelligent Design movement. The Textbook League

Some of the criticisms The Textbook League has about Hakim's series (and about Glencoe's history books as well) are some of the same criticisms I have about SOTW. However, I still used SOTW but made sure to point out the difference between history and religious beliefs to my son.

[Reya]

So it's pretty moderate then?

 

I agree that all history books are biased. I actually like to teach my son different viewpoints, but, of course, I show my own bias in my teaching.

 

You can have your own opinions but not your own facts. Hakim has her own facts. We will NOT be using it. It is facile and deliberately deceptive.

[Gratia271]

You can have your own opinions but not your own facts. Hakim has her own facts. We will NOT be using it. It is facile and deliberately deceptive.

 

:iagree::iagree:

[JudyJudyJudy]

You can have your own opinions but not your own facts. Hakim has her own facts. We will NOT be using it. It is facile and deliberately deceptive.

History is written to be factual; thus, every writer chooses his/her own "facts." If you have found a history book that is unbiased, then you have accomplished the impossible. The fact is that most people choose which "facts" they want to believe and/or teach.

 

I haven't read Hakim's books, so I can't say whether or not her views are in line with my own. However, I've yet to find a history book that I don't think has at least some incorrect "facts," and I've yet to find a history book that doesn't show the author's bias. Unfortunately, as a child when I had only been presented one view, I didn't know how to see the bias, but having expanded my horizons since then, I now can. I choose to present various viewpoints to my son so that he doesn't have just one distorted set of "facts."

[Guest]

You can have your own opinions but not your own facts. Hakim has her own facts. We will NOT be using it. It is facile and deliberately deceptive.

 

I think it's important to realize that all history is interpretation. Every author must choose was events and people (or facts) to include and others to leave out; no book can contain them all. By being selective, including some events and people while excluding others, all writers of necessity present one particular view or interpretation of history. It's inevitable. Some writers begin with a political agenda and choose their inclusions and omissions to suit, producing a more overtly politicized interpretation than others. But each and every history is political to one degree or another. Just one word choice -- calling colonialists patriots, for instance -- can implicitly slant a narrative toward one political viewpoint even if the author otherwise sticks to narrating what you agree on as facts. The choice of illustrations can make similarly implicit judgments. It's a very complicated issue.

 

You can disagree with or dislike someone's interpretation of history. You can point out errors of fact that almost every book is bound to contain. It's everyone's right to do so. (I am not all that fond of Hakim myself, for a number of reasons.) But nowhere does there exist a pure, unsullied, complex history made up only of facts.

[jld]

KarenAnne, I'd be interested in hearing more about why you're not too keen on Hakim, if you don't mind. Thank you.

[Mrs Mungo]

Personally, I think it is completely and totally necessary to research these issues for yourself and educate your children about the various types of bias.

 

Yes, Hakim presents some religious stories as fact (so does SOTW, so do other programs). That doesn't bother me because I am a Christian. Although, I find it a little strange that she's being accused of being religious and anti-religious in the same thread.

 

Yes, Hakim is guilty of a particular brand of multi-culturalism. These are things easily corrected and/or researched as necessary.

 

However, she does a pretty good job in a lot of ways. There are *much* worse examples of bias out there (coughabekacough).

[JudyJudyJudy]

Yes, Hakim presents some religious stories as fact (so does SOTW, so do other programs). That doesn't bother me because I am a Christian. Although, I find it a little strange that she's being accused of being religious and anti-religious in the same thread.

I think the poster who accused her of anti-Christian bias actually meant anti-Catholic, or, at least, that's what the review she linked to was saying.

[Reya]

Here's a shining example of her disingenuousness. This is, hands down, the single most deceitful misrepresentation of the Gilded Age that I have EVER read.

 

"In America, everyone could see what was wrong..... People were becoming to materialistic, too concerned with money and things. The economic system wasn't working well. Industry was ravaging the nation's resources. Thomas Jefferson's agrarian (farm-centered) world was vanishing, and the new world of corporations and capitalism didn't seem very noble. For the most part, presidents and congresses were weak and money magnates and city bosses strong. Railroads and industries had changed the nation; laws and ideas hadn't caught up.

 

"Some people had a simple solution to the new problems. They blamed others. First they blamed the rich. Actually, the rich industrialists were no different from the poor farmers. Many were greedy, but so were many ordinary people. Some industrialists, like Carnegie and Rockefeller, who had abused and exploited others to gain power and wealth, were doing a surprisingly good job of sharing their wealth.

 

"When blaming the rich didn't work, people turned to other scapegoats. Unfortunately, many turned racist. Some were anti-Catholic. Others were Anti-Semitic (which means they blamed Jews for their problems). Many Americans became anti-immigrant. (Immigrants were competing for jobs. One Populist leader called them "foreign scum.") On the West Coast, many citizens were anti-Asian.

 

"Some Americans lost their way. Their wrongheadedness would hurt the nation. They didn't mean to be wrong. Few do. They were trying to define America. But it as as if they had tried to look through a telescope the wrong way. They narrowed the vision. They were looking backward to a past they thought was ideal...."

 

Et cetera.

 

There is no way she really believes that the scientific racism of the early 1900s was a result of confused nativists (never mind her equally deceptive characterizations of the standard of living in the early 1900s versus the past)--nor that this was some sort of populist movement rather than an intellectual and scientific movement, endorsed and promulgated by the luminaries of American intellectual, financial, and cultural life. She also characterizes anti-immigration groups, predictably, as wrongheaded and unions as good--when unions were probably the single most organized anti-immigrant group, not out of "wrong-headedness" but because you have a hard time pushing for artificially high wages (versus market demand) when people arrive who are used to such low standards of living that they consider themselves rich on half the actual market wages. Remember, children: Immigration is GOOD and outsourcing is BAD. No, no, it doesn't have to make a lick of sense, and I'm going to try to hide the issues to trick you so that you'll have to agree with me, but you must remember this and chant after me: Immigration is GOOD and outsourcing is BAD.

 

The patronization and dishonesty here are over-the-top. Here is what she is saying:

 

Everyone agreed that America was really messed up in the early 1900s, and they agreed that problem was that people were materialistic, greedy earth-rapers who didn't share money nicely. This confused simple people, who went around blindingly accusing different groups because they thought the old days used to be great and they thought the other groups didn't exist then and so must have caused the problems.

 

If this makes no sense to you, it SHOULDN'T. It shouldn't make a LICK of sense because it's completely and utterly false.

 

Here's a good rundown on the historical standard of living in the US. Look at the data from 1870 through 1920:

 

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/steckel.standard.living.us

 

And what's even more ridiculous is that she then goes on to blow up the myth that America was created to be a great melting pot and these were just confused deviants from that ideal--uh, yeah, ever looked at the history of Asian immigration? And then she goes on to insanely claim that immigrants and newly freed blacks were the one who would make America richer in the next 30 or so years.

 

:001_huh:

 

It sounds nice. It's a great story of an underdog, maligned group emerging triumphant, but it's just not true. Individual blacks have, of course, contributed great things, and so have individual immigrants, but to declare that they were responsible for America's greatness around the time of WWI????? Uh, what about those greedy industrialists who were busy raping the earth? :glare:

Edited April 18, 2010 by Reya

[Reya]

I'm forgiving of errors. I'm pretty forgiving of minor bias. I'm not forgiving of deliberate misrepresentation and fiction-spinning to make sure everyone agrees with you.

[Reya]

But nowhere does there exist a pure, unsullied, complex history made up only of facts.

 

You don't understand what I'm saying.

 

Facts provable or disprovable. Opinions are the interpretation of the facts BASED ON EVIDENCE, not on wishful thinking.

 

You can select facts to align with your bias either out of innocence or out of a deliberate desire to deceive. For example, I could be a strict objectivist. As such, I could write a history and only include incidents that support an objectivist viewpoint and leave out or radically reinterpret fact that don't to make it seem like they do. Or I could be a strict objectivist who seeks to write an accurate history whose objectivism colors my interpretation of the facts--the facts that I select being those that are most commonly known and historically significant in my judgment, not those being the facts that align best with my philosophy, though my philosophy will influence my judgment. Or I could write a history and include only facts that align best with my philosophy and also insert, where needed, over-generalized, wishy-washy "facts" with any number of blatantly false assertions (well, they SHOULD be true, and that's good enough!) to make sure the argument is as strong as possible in my direction.

 

The first is dishonest. The second is honest. The third is outright fraud.

 

Hakim is somewhere between The Birth of a Nation and a typical left-wing whitewashing of American History in terms of accuracy. This is does not adhere to the standards of good research (yes, these do exist!), nor does her constant condescension and frank emotional manipulations do her any credit. It is quite the sophisticated manipulation, complete with superficial "evenhandedness" to make a child think she's being fair--the fake fairness, in fact, is one of the slickest tricks she pulls in the book.

[sagira]

You don't understand what I'm saying.

 

Facts provable or disprovable. Opinions are the interpretation of the facts BASED ON EVIDENCE, not on wishful thinking.

 

You can select facts to align with your bias either out of innocence or out of a deliberate desire to deceive. For example, I could be a strict objectivist. As such, I could write a history and only include incidents that support an objectivist viewpoint and leave out or radically reinterpret fact that don't to make it seem like they do. Or I could be a strict objectivist who seeks to write an accurate history whose objectivism colors my interpretation of the facts--the facts that I select being those that are most commonly known and historically significant in my judgment, not those being the facts that align best with my philosophy, though my philosophy will influence my judgment. Or I could write a history and include only facts that align best with my philosophy and also insert, where needed, over-generalized, wishy-washy "facts" with any number of blatantly false assertions (well, they SHOULD be true, and that's good enough!) to make sure the argument is as strong as possible in my direction.

 

The first is dishonest. The second is honest. The third is outright fraud.

 

Hakim is somewhere between The Birth of a Nation and a typical left-wing whitewashing of American History in terms of accuracy. This is does not adhere to the standards of good research (yes, these do exist!), nor does her constant condescension and frank emotional manipulations do her any credit. It is quite the sophisticated manipulation, complete with superficial "evenhandedness" to make a child think she's being fair--the fake fairness, in fact, is one of the slickest tricks she pulls in the book.

 

Reya, could you please give a few examples of good sources of American History for children (besides SOTW)?

 

Thank you.

[melmichigan]

I have the books and just started looking at the IG for SL Core 100. I see the student notes on Hakim are extremely lengthy. How do they approach this? Do they correct any of the inaccuracies? More reading for this summer.

[mycalling]

 

Yes, Hakim is guilty of a particular brand of multi-culturalism.

I don't have the books. What do you mean?

[Guest]

JLD: I have this automatic recoil against Hakim's rather patronizing tone of voice -- a stylistic issue, not a historical viewpoint one. But then I'm not a grade school kid, who might rather enjoy the idea of an author talking to her rather than a voiceless textbook.

 

I also found parts of The Story of Science problematic, in large part because of her elevation of theoretical science and the written, documented use of the scientific method (therefore Western science) over technological invention and innovation (the East has a history of discovery and experimentation that outpaces the West for most eras). I wrote to her about this and she feels quite strongly that the Western approach is "real" science in some way, and that the evolution of the free market and democracy is critical to its development. I am not a historian of science, but I would want this proven to me in a lot more detail before I would necessarily become a believer. However, of course a children's history is not the place she is going to be able to do this in the kind of detail I'm wanting and I understand this.

 

I have used The History of US -- which my daughter greatly enjoyed and found a relevation after the textbook used by the co-op she attended. My own leanings are away from any kind of spine, though, and toward trade books of all sorts, and comparison of the way the story is told through those picture and chapter books, how they are illustrated, and by the end of elementary school, what the author's sources and background are.

 

Reya: I rather do think I understand what you're saying. You're saying you prefer a more Republican, pro-business version of history, and Hakim is too left-wing for you (in fact you do say outright she is objectionably left-wing). That is a political stance based on differing points of view -- you would interpret the facts differently. It's not a question of her lies vs. your truth. After reading your own interpretation, I'd say my own biases -- I freely admit they are biases -- are toward a middle point that takes, for instance, BOTH the industrial capitalists' investments and the immigrant's underpaid labor into account.

 

It's always helpful for me to remember that any history book is written in the context of a larger dialogue among historians and between other books. Hakim was responding to a particular type of schoolroom history textbook in which everything the US did was glorious and right, the contributions of middle and lower class workers were overridden and their problems ignored, contentious moments in race relations tidied over, etc. James Loewen has analyzed high school history textbooks from the 1970s to around 2000 and found similar patterns. Both of them, I think, realize that much of what they saw as problematic resulted from the process of textbook vetting and approval by the various states (Diane Ravitch goes into this process in fascinating detail in her book The Language Police if anyone is interested). As a response to that era of textbook, and an attempt to incorporate the kinds of history that were and are blossoming among university researchers, I think Hakim's book is actually quite moderate.

[Crimson Wife]

I think the poster who accused her of anti-Christian bias actually meant anti-Catholic, or, at least, that's what the review she linked to was saying.

 

I am a Catholic Christian so my primary concern is the treatment of my denomination. However, the Story of Science Vol. 1, I found Ms. Hakim's writing to have an anti-Christian bias beyond just anti-Catholic. It's a shame because I really liked the first 3/4 of that book covering ancient times. :glare:

[LizzyBee]

JLD: I have this automatic recoil against Hakim's rather patronizing tone of voice -- a stylistic issue, not a historical viewpoint one. But then I'm not a grade school kid, who might rather enjoy the idea of an author talking to her rather than a voiceless textbook.

 

I tried using History of US with my kids when my older two were upper elementary. After a couple of chapters, they begged me not to read any more. They didn't like the style at all. There are very few things they've asked not to use in our homeschool, so I was quite surprised at how vehemently they dislked History of US.

[kokotg]

Reya--are you suggesting that the only racism in the early 20th century is "scientific racism"? That there was no economic basis to racism? Maybe I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're arguing that populism and racism are wholly unconnected. Baiting race for class is a time-honored tradition in American politics, and I don't really see Hakim arguing for more than that in the passage you quote. Certainly racism has multiple causes, but I've never heard anyone argue that there's no connection between economics and racism.

[WishboneDawn]

I've only read Ms. Hakim's Story of Science Vol. 1 book but her bias against Christianity in that book was enough for me to decide I wasn't going to use anything else written by her. According to this review, the same anti-Christian bias is found in Story of US.

 

I'm a Christian and I found no anti-Christian bias in the books of hers that I have read.

 

But that's the problem with this kind of thread - all we can offer is the view from where we're standing. From where CW is Hakim looks biased in one way. From where I am she doesn't. Where does that leave you?

 

Check out some reviews online, maybe see if you can get a copy from your local library to look over. I think you'd probably do better with that approach.

[Mrs Mungo]

I don't have the books. What do you mean?

 

What I mean is, IMO, the idea of "the noble savage" is damaging in a way that is similar to the idea of indigenous people as ignorant heathens. I am constantly addressing both.

[Reya]

Reya--are you suggesting that the only racism in the early 20th century is "scientific racism"? That there was no economic basis to racism? Maybe I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're arguing that populism and racism are wholly unconnected. Baiting race for class is a time-honored tradition in American politics, and I don't really see Hakim arguing for more than that in the passage you quote. Certainly racism has multiple causes, but I've never heard anyone argue that there's no connection between economics and racism.

 

Scientific racism has an economic and social basis. In fact, that IS the basis of scientific racism--social science and biological science were not very differentiated at that time. Populism threw its weight behind scientific racism. This wasn't a different for or a different rhetoric--it was the SAME form with the SAME rhetoric, which spread to a class of people who would otherwise be uninterested in such things because of the immediate impact of black migration and immigration from poorer parts of Europe upon them. Hakim engaged in outright deception in that area--and here's why.

 

There was no concept of racism, ***as we now conceive of it,*** until the late 1700s. (That doesn't mean there wasn't racism but that it didn't look like ours.) What there was before was a concept of "nations," which had to do as much with culture as anything else. Germans are logical and stoic; the English are romantic; Asians are mysterious and half-magical. (Yes, English men were stereotypes as great romantics by the French.) In areas such as South America, race was conflated with class in the new dominant society--the criollos versus mestizos versus mulatos, indios, and negros. This was the kind of "racism" that has many parallels in history, such as the position of Christians and Jews under the Ottomans. Low-power legally-defined groups with unequal rights are, sadly, the norm of most societies and even more so in societies that embrace several cultures. The rhetoric of such social divisions are easily identifiable.

 

Because it isn't the SAME racism as that of the 19th century and 20th/21st century, some people like to go on about how tolerant, say, the Egyptians were of people from different "races" (um, yeah, the same Egyptians who called uncircumcised cultures horrible names and treated them as the lowest kind of scum, fit only for slaughter, when captured in battle, while treating circumcised cultures with more respect even in war--think of this as the ancient Geneva Convention signatories) or how the Moors in Spain had a kind of multicultural paradise (yeah, sure--and I take it these people have never read any Islamic laws from the period concerning the horrible legal positions of the non-Moslems).

 

But the racism of the 19th century on in the US and Europe is its own "beast," and it has its own language. Whatever personal reason individuals disliked those of other races, the rhetoric was couched in the terms of scientific racism--this was the justification and the philosophy that dominated all racial discourse of the times.

 

Sure, you might not like that Mickey is undercutting your wage-rates, but in what way are you going to protest? What will be your justification? You might say that the Irish are destroying the families of the American working class, which was true enough. But instead, the greater justification already promulgated by the intelligentsia was embraced and further disseminated. Even the above protest, when voiced, was laden with the "natural state" of the Irish (or free blacks or Poles or Italians or Chinese or Jews or....) and its inferiority and corrupting potential. No dogs or Irish, see--because Irish aren't really human.

 

This justification was pre-packaged for them not by a few, despised intellectuals but by mainstream American and European academics. The origins of scientific racism began with fall of the Great Chain of Being from favor. The Great Chain of Being was a conceit that, for many centuries, satisfied people's questions about why some people are rich and others poor, some are powerful and others weak. It was a pseudo-theological vision of a chain with God at the top and rocks at the bottom and angels, men, animals, and plants in between--and among each group, there was another "chain in miniature." In humans, the powerful or holy were on the top (depending on whose version) and the poorest beggars, of course, on the bottom.

 

Men were weak or powerful because God had made them that way. And as for the poorest, the mentally handicapped, and the ill--well, in a strange way, they were actually closer to God as God shows a great interest in the seemingly insignificant as since Jesus took up the role of a poor and foolish person, to the foolish, and so serving or helping the miserable or "foolish" or ill was in itself a holy task and a demonstration of charity.

 

So the system worked for many centuries until the idea of God directly ordaining temporal powers was violently rejected in a serious of revolutions, both philosophical and theological. This can be traced directly to the overthrow of the role of the Pope in the Reformation--this was a second, political Reformation, one that many of the temporal leaders had foreseen two centuries before. If God did not grant special authority to the Pope, He certainly did not to the temporal powers. And so what REALLY separated the great from the weak? Nothing--we must be equals in political stature as we are equal souls in God's eyes.

 

So now the Great Chain of Being is seen as intellectually bankrupt, and all the high-minded philosophy in the world can't change the fact that some people are poor and some are rich, some are corrupt and some are virtuous, some are criminal and some law-abiding, some are stupid and others intelligent. It is current left-wing dogma that the disparity in wealth alone causes all these other differences (as saying aloud anything else sounds harsh). This, of course, is wishful nonsense, and the thinkers of the late 18th century weren't sidetracked for a moment by the idea. They very well knew that some sailors, upon getting leave from their ship, would immediately waste everything in gambling, drink, and whoring, while others would save it or keep support a small family in dignity, if not in a great deal of comfort. This was one of a thousand examples that confronted them every day, and they still wanted to know *why.*

 

Why do some men seek to better themselves, while others live miserable lives, wasting whatever gain they get on foolish things? Why do some men become "aristocrats of labor" while others are shiftless, working only when they must? Why do some men move up through the newly permeable social classes, while others sink to the lowest levels?

[Reya]

God had, at this point, been utterly rejected as a cause for anything by the intellectual elite (Hakim's moronic reinterpretation of "materialist" into "materialistic" notwithstanding), and with God went Western virtues as a cause rather than a result. If some people fail because they have no self-control--well, that means nothing. From where does self-control come? Since the answer couldn't be God, it was concluded that men were either good or bad--lazy or industrious, intelligent or stupid--by nature. And how does nature come about? The amazing success of scientific methods of animal breeding showed the effects of heredity in animals on temperament, health, size, and intelligence, and any cursory analysis of familial traits show that, with the exception of a "sport" here and there, criminal and stupid families produce idiots and criminals, while industrious and intelligent families produce intelligent and industrious offspring.

 

If a person's "line" were inferior, then of course the person and their kinsmen would be inferior. This was obvious to them within London, when comparing a gentleman with the people at the gates of the casual ward, and even more obvious when an average Englishman is compared with an average East African or Indian or Moor. Why is the Indian so superstitious, with his prohibitions about eating cattle? Why can the Moor not embrace the scientific mind instead of being stuck in a backward mysticism? Why are Africans savage and stupid? (These are not my opinions but the opinions of the day.) It must be because they are of different breeds--different races.

 

Then came the idea of identifying what physical traits corresponded to moral/mental inferiorities--this was the inception of phrenology and the idea of the "criminal type" (with his sloping brow showing low intelligence--ALWAYS a sloping brow, etc., etc.). If this type can be identified and controlled and maybe even eliminated, then the world's misery and poverty would be lifted forever!

 

And into this strolled Darwin. Don't forget that the subtitle of his first book is "or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." While he spoke mainly in that book about the findings in animals, he was coming from the same background as his fellow philosophers in seeking a non-deist explanation for why some human cultures were technologically advanced and others primitive. Men are not a unified group but are divided into races. The most favored race (*cough* Englishmen *cough*) is the most sophisticated, the most advanced, and the furthest removed from man's animal ancestry (as further articulated in The Decent of Man). Darwin did NOT go to Galapagos with an open and inquiring mind. His conclusions were not foregone from the evidence there but were, in fact, specifically formulated to address his driving concern and that of most other natural philosophers of his day--and his conclusions were guaranteed to give him the most palatable answer possible, of course.

 

From the whole of his writings and those of his compatriots, this overwhelming preoccupation with explaining and controlling human "race" is evident. Men came from apes, and in that long descent, blacks "dropped off" first, the the other "races", then Europeans--with, of course, the English being the most advanced of all and Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans being more "corrupted."

 

It became the dominant language for discourse about social caste and culture, full of sententious warnings about the dangers of crossbreeding with corrupt or inferior races and the worthiness of any endeavor that seeks to control or limit the reproduction of such undesirables. Charity was even painted as evil and misguided, as it prolonged the miserable existence of the inferior, for whom the only mercy would be a faster extinction of their line. Most history books paint Nazi racism as a freak horror of its time and say nothing of the widespread Nazi sympathies among American and British intelligentsia and industrialists--in fact, I would even say it was the DOMINANT opinion of the day that forced sterilization/birth control and imprisonment or containment of undesirable groups was laudable, though many (but far from all!) would have stopped short of outright murder. (Yes, forced institutionalization and sterilization of "inferior" people occurred at this time, including do-gooders screening poor people to try to find people who might be a threat to society because of their poor genetics. I'm sure you'll be shocked to discover that the people found were, without exception, Jewish, Eastern or Southern European, or black.) American Indians and "idiots" and the mentally ill were forcibly sterilized. Studies were done on the pernicious effects of allowing even one Draconian miscegenation laws come from this age for a reason, when intermarriage had been reasonable common before in some places. It wasn't not fear of black people taking white people's jobs. It was the fear of black corruption of the white race--inbreeding is dangerous only from a scientific racist standpoint. Eugenics wasn't some sort of freakish indulgence of a very few people--the surge of the popularity of the name "Eugene" from the mid-1800s until Hitler soured their taste for the idea is only one of hundreds of indications that you can find in popular culture. The certainty that other races or genetic lines are inferior and the double certainty that they pose a great threat to civilization was something that was taken for granted, popularized by spin-off publications of The Kallikak Family and many other similar publications. (Common tricks included the alterations of photos of "inferior" children in such publications to make them look more stupid or sinister. After all, it's hard otherwise to see the dire threat posed by a six-year-old.)

 

This had been the overwhelming rhetoric for many years by the time that immigration and black migration became a threat to low-skill workers in the north and midwest. These workers didn't reinvent the wheel in justifying their opposition to immigration/black migration. They simply joined their support to the dominant rhetoric on racism that had been in place for many years. The rationalization for the severe limitation on Asian immigrants is but one example of this--the lawmakers spoke only of scientific racist concepts, without reference to any other reason.

 

Were there other reasons for workers to dislike blacks and immigrants? Sure. But their arguments all dripped of scientific racism BECAUSE THEY WERE FOUNDED I N SCIENTIFIC RACISM. You can't say they were of a different type. One particular worker's dislike might have been triggered by passed over in favor of an immigrant, but his racism still took the form of that of his day.

 

This is a very long way of saying that late-19th century American racism WAS scientific racism. There weren't inventions of new justifications, just a layering on of reasons why the "impure" were a threat. That Hakim entirely ignores this an invents a fake source for racism (it was the fault of immigrants and blacks that industry was plundering mother nature? SERIOUSLY, NOW? Read what she wrote--she honestly stated that was one of the reasons!!!!) rather than saying that scientific racism gained popular strength among the lower classes for this reason.

[Reya]

Just about anything written by Fiona MacDonald is excellent. For others, I pick and choose. Some "You Wouldn't Want to Be" are quite good--others not so much. Peter Connolly is anti-Semitic in a Roman kind of way, but his books on the Romans and Greeks are good. I like Macaulay. Some of the Horrible Histories are really quite excellent--others are pretty biased. I've found few outright errors in them, and some very "standard" errors they don't commit. Some Dead Famouses are great. Others...not so much.

 

I don't know what, if any, main textbook I'll used for the middle years. I'd take just about anything before Hakim's ridiculously loaded and dishonest text, though--lists of dry facts is better than cheap emotional manipulations and deliberate obfuscations. I'll probably use quite a few Teaching Company lectures--yes, there are biases, but they are (with one exception--the Famous Greeks/Romans series) not deliberate distortions.

[lauracolumbus]

Great, I just bought the TC's Greek/Roman series.

 

Thanks for taking the time to write all of this Reya.

 

Laura

[mammaofbean]

ha! i find them a little too protestant christian for my liking.

 

for my young child i like the brown paper school books for united states history through the civil war. we will use separate texts for any related memory work.

[Orthodox6]

Both this and the associated "Hakim thread" interest me greatly. Several of you have added very useful insights ! I readily admit that I have skimmed, only, the Hakim history series.

 

There truly is nothing -- or next to nothing -- suitable for a middle-schooler from an Orthodox Christian family to use for American history. We won't use Protestant interpretations of history, we can't cosy up to either right-wing or left-wing premises, we refuse to excise God from His governance of and activity through human history, . . . and dd is too young to use the college-level books which I could feel at ease with enough to use as bases for coursework.

 

Massive correction and tweaking remain the only choices. [ sigh . . . ]

 

P.S. That's why I posted somewhere that I supposed we would combine Hakim, Zinn, and anything else workable for that grade-level.

Edited April 19, 2010 by Orthodox6

[Kimber]

As my daughter has gotten older, she's 12 as of this month, I have decided to use books that are written from a different bias. Basically, we use a conservative christian book for one point of view and a secularly based book, simultaneously, for another.

 

This is the only way that I see to combat the skewed writings without having the time or money to find the text that would be perfect for us.

[siloam]

I used up through book 8 with my oldest. I bought an old SL 100 IG for the notes.

 

There is definite bias, but the way it is presented it at times confuses the facts. She also tells history from our perspective now, with our values and moral judgments. Not from the perspective of the people who lived it, their values. I prefer the second. I want to understand why these people did what they did, and how their own society saw them. I can figure out what people today would think of them on my own, I don't need to be told. :001_huh:

 

At first I didn't mind it, but as it continued I just got tired of it. We never finished book 9 or did book 10, and I am going to sell them.

 

They aren't horrendous, just tedious.

 

Heather