How Not To Write American History
In a never-before-published essay, Murray Rothbard points to a book on American history as an archetype of how not to write history.
"The first test of a historical work then, and one that the author fails, is a richness of factual material. But the historian is more than a chronicler; he must also have a command of the significance of events, he must be able to convey to the reader the meaning and interpretation of the past. If we would be grandiloquent, we might even use Schumpeter's term of "vision"; the historian must have a "vision" of the meaning, of the significance, of the material he is presenting. Lamentable as is the skimpiness of the author's factual material, it is in this area of meaning in which he fails the most; for the largest bulk of the narrative, there is no meaning, no interpretation, no vision presented of the American past: there is just dull, uninspired, unimaginative chronicle." FULL ARTICLE
Comments (1)
Ellen
Unfortunately for American education, the statements in this article are no longer true - meaning and interpretation has been added to the text, but any opportunity for critical thinking has not.
Last year, I was in my high school's AP US History course. In this course, I was taught that the 1800s were ruled by corrupt, greedy capitalists who committed atrocities unchecked by the government, tyrannized the poor workers attempting to assemble against them, and engaged in huge monopolies unimaginable today. In the early 1900s, something called the progressive movement happened, the thing from which all current good has flowed - the 8-hour day, the wide variety of social programs, the myriad regulations and agencies enforcing these regulations which protect consumers. Then there was a war, and at the end of that, a huge boom called the 'Roaring Twenties', in which speculation and debt ran rampant, resulting in the inevitable crash of 1929. This sparked the Great Depression, a terrible time which was made much worse by Hoover's failure to do anything about it. Thank God Roosevelt saved us with his New Deal, a lot of which the silly legislature took back again. By that time, World War II was on, and the resultant boom in demand for stuff led to full economic recovery and the relative stability since.
I am not as irked about the stance on history taken by my book as I am by the inability to argue with it. If, on a quiz, I had answered that Roosevelt's New Deal was a mess of interventionist policy, I would have received no credit. This situation didn't even come up, though, because neither my textbook nor my classroom offered a real alternate viewpoint or, as Rothbard pointed out, much in the way of statistics to support their viewpoint. One assumes this is because the statistics would not support it as well as they might hope.
Published: April 24, 2008 1:35 AM