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Standish Meacham and Multiculturalism in the Public University

By Carson Wright

Notes of Dr. Standish Meacham

“What are you going to do with your degree?” This one question, asked by well-meaning family members at Thanksgiving dinner and smug strangers over the Internet alike, embodies one of the biggest obstacles to the study of the humanities today: the notion that a college degree’s main purpose should be to serve as a stepping stone to a related career. This question effectively cheapens the bachelor’s degree to a four-year job training program and ignores the power of the academy and its students to act for the public good. Dr. Standish Meacham, who served as a professor of history, department chairman, and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin in the second half of the 20^th century, can be seen as an example of this power as he used his position to advocate for social equality and consciousness in a contentious time of American history.

Meacham came to The University of Texas in 1966, lured by the idea of an “academic frontierland,” a landscape free from the restrictions of the Ivy League. In this frontier, aided by the financial support of University of Texas Chancellor Harry Ransom, Meacham was instrumental in creating an exhibition of the photography of Paul Martin, leading to an enduring interest in the history of the British working class and leftist politics. His academic interest in marginalized people is reflected in his commitment to equity and fairness as an administrator.

Dr. Meacham wanted the academy to look like the community it served. Dr. Meacham was named chair of the History Department in 1970 and he developed the department in the face of challenges from the university administration. He resigned in 1972 in protest of restrictions on faculty influence in university decision making. Returning to the chair in 1984, Meacham oversaw growth in the department once again, including the hiring of three female professors. Satisfied with his work, he stepped down following the 1987-88 academic year. At the urging of several colleagues, Meacham allowed his name to be put in the running for the new Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and assumed the office in 1989. Stepping in to the office of the deanship would open Dr. Meacham to what was the greatest moment of controversy of his already tumultuous academic career.

The university, like many other state schools at the time, was consumed by a battle over the role of higher education in Reagan’s America. Meacham advocated for a more inclusive university. In a set of undated notes, he approached the issue from a practical perspective: one day Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority demographic in Texas and that “successful society cannot exist… without willingness to welcome change and celebrate human spirit in all its diversity.” He believed that universities had an obligation to make all students feel secure to have true freedom of thought in academia. Taking the argument further, Meacham wrote that the United States had benefited from a multicultural population since its founding. He believed that even though universities had not been multicultural from the beginning, it would be worth the effort to make them so. Meacham believed that universities had an obligation to maintain a community that facilitates “mutual respect” and “guarantees psychic security.” Meacham practiced what he preached and he oversaw the hiring of nine people of color to the College of Liberal Arts faculty. However, not all of Meacham’s efforts met with success.

In 1990, a proposed class in the English department – “E 306: Writing About Difference” – became a political battleground. The course was a writing composition course focusing on matters of racism and sexism, and would have been required for all students. Meacham supported the idea, and allowed the English Department to create a syllabus. Soon, however, news of the proposed change reached the press, and “Writing About Difference” attracted national news coverage. Conservative faculty members claimed that the new syllabus was unnecessary and politicized a required course. Their argument gathered momentum, both on and off campus, as professors and columnists alike attacked the course as propaganda. At the behest of University President William Cunningham, Meacham postponed the implementation of the course for a year. In the end, the course was never taught and Meacham resigned from the deanship soon after, returning to the History Department to teach.

Although “Writing About Difference” was never taught, Dr. Standish Meacham’s support of E 306 was emblematic of his dedication to inclusivity in the university and his commitment to using the university a tool for the public welfare. He wanted a university education to reflect the complex reality of American history, not just an idealized memory. His research on English working class history went hand in hand with his actions as an administrator. In both facets of his academic life, Dr. Meacham was devoted to the building up of marginalized groups. An academic background in the humanities – in History – shaped Dr. Meacham’s view in a way that drove him to make a positive impact at the University of Texas.

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad.
Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar.

A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom.
Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are the sea.

Charo Cofré

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago. The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite. Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers. Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market. The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo. It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile (via wikimedia)

Old town Santiago sat atop an ancient network of canals. Some were small but others were regular aqueducts, lined with stone and brick. Built for irrigation, they carried quantities of water from Canal San Carlos to the Mapocho River. Before there was pavement. When Matucana and Avenida Matta were still just vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Back when every home had tomatoes, basil, and cilantro growing out back.

The central region of Chile is still crisscrossed with canals that were built by a dozen Jesuit missionaries and several thousand local Indians. The intention was to strengthen the native communities against European invasion. Taking advantage of the melting snowpack in the mountains, they transformed a semi-arid wasteland into the now-famous fertile green valleys.

The effect on the indigenous population was the opposite of what had been intended. In 1550, the conquistadors said that Nueva Extramadura was too poor and not worth the trouble. By 1750, they had changed their conquering minds. Irrigated and green, the Spanish liked it. So, they threw out the Indians and the Jesuits, and they set up their haciendas.

One hundred and fifty-three “nice families” colonized with all the rapacious vigor of their prestigious lineages. They were Spaniards, Basques, and some French. They brought their cattle and their vineyards. They brought their illusions of noble breeding and Chile criollo was born.

Their descendants became the barrio alto, the GCU, as they say, Gente Como Uno, (People Like Us), a code that only legitimate members of their tightly-closed circle were supposed to recognize. It wasn’t about money, comrade, though the GCU did tend to be rich. It wasn’t about land, either, though they controlled most of it. The GCU sustained an Old World fantasy of hereditary aristocracy. They really believed it, and they insisted on marrying their children to each other. A rich man without a pedigree was called, roto con plata, more or less, a bum with lots of cash. If he had not descended from the legendary hundred families (who were, in reality, one hundred and fifty-three), he was and always would be an outsider.

The canals in the central valleys are still functional. They are the reason why there is Chilean wine and fruit at Whole Foods. Building a canal is no joke. It has to always go downhill so that the water flows forward and never backs up. In 1600, that was an engineering masterpiece.

As the population grew in old town Santiago, the canals lost their reason for being. Family gardens became parking lots and chicken coops became bus stops. They are mostly dry today, an underground labyrinth for which there is no known map. Only the rats know their way around.

But, until the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, the water continued to flow, and there was access at strategic places. Neighbors would draw a bucket or two to water a shade tree, or to dampen the streets and vacant lots in the summer. That kept the dust down as boys upheld an important tradition, the continuous game of pick-up soccer, la pichanga. No shirts, no shoes, no score, house rules. Everyone played until it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face. As the brown water flowed constantly down into the rocky Mapocho.

Flowing water was an urban temptation. Children learned early in life to toss all their trash into the open mouths of Santiago’s filthy underside. The subterranean monster swallowed everything, without complaining. What’s more, most homes still had no indoor plumbing. The canal was where people dumped their chamber pots. Anyone who drew a bucketful had to watch out for floaters from upstream. That was emblematic of the ongoing relationship between the barrio alto and los de abajo, the people down below. It just seemed natural that those in high places would dump their refuse on those who were geographically and socially below them. That was also the reason why typhoid and hepatitis were so common, down there.

La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo) (via wikipedia)

There was an opening in the schoolyard at Andacollo. It was about two feet wide and three feet long, rimmed with discarded railroad ties. The canal water rushed by about a foot below the ground level. Like everywhere else, at Andacollo, the canal water was used to keep the dust down and get rid of the trash. There was a big willow tree in the middle of the schoolyard that provided shade on hot afternoons. The groundskeeper would make a trench around it with his trowel, and fill it with water from the canal, using his big iron bucket.

The school was all boys back then, and la pichanga never stopped. One day, the ball bounced close to the opening. As tradition demanded, the boy closest ran backwards with reckless abandon, to make the save. It’s a passion, comrade. When the ball was in play, nothing else mattered. He fell into the canal and disappeared.

The foul waters dragged him through their labyrinth. No rescue was possible; nothing anyone could do. They found him the next day in the Mapocho River. His clothes had been ripped off. His body was twisted and broken, but he was recognizable. He had been dragged through hell in an unexpected, surprising, and unavoidable way. I don’t know his name.

Back then, it never occurred to anyone to cover a hole in a schoolyard because someone might fall in. They told the boys to be careful. That was part of their education. They had to learn that any one of them could drop into the abyss at any moment.

That awful day, the dead boy’s classmates learned that destiny could betray you; that there were tragic, violent accidents; that the lives of poor boys didn’t really matter; that in five seconds, it could all be over and done with; that they, too, could disappear and be forgotten. That day, the boys learned that you have to be clever to survive in a cruel world.

Nowadays, we cover holes like that. We deceive our children with the illusion that the world is safe and trustworthy. That has never been true, but if you are under thirty, you were probably brought up to believe it and expect it.

The fickle nature of fate is the elephant in our proverbial living room. Everyone pretends it isn’t there. And the willow tree, silent witness to everything, grows tall.

The national anthem says that Chile is the copia feliz del Edén. That means a happy copy of paradise. But it’s just a copy, not the real thing. And Eden was a tricky place, comrade. You do remember what happened there?

You May Also Enjoy:

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

Civil War and Early Life: Snapshots of Early War in Guatemala by Vasken Markarian

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer.

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765: by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food. Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.

by Christopher Babits

Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work of historians. This meant more than reading primary sources, though. In addition to this, students would engage with “essential questions” that are key for understanding the United States’ recent past. Moreover, in lieu of assigning a traditional textbook, which might not fully align with these essential questions, I decided that my students would read, analyze, and critique articles from the Journal of American History.

My first preparatory task was to frame the course around the essential questions. I wanted to create questions around a broad range of potential student interests. I chose four topics: 1) America’s role in the world; 2) economics and labor; 3) women and gender; and 4) comparative civil rights. These topics covered some of the important themes of post-Civil War U.S. History.

The questions I crafted (see Figure #1: The Course’s Essential Questions) were beneficial on several levels. Initially, they helped me with one of the most daunting challenges of syllabus creation—picking and choosing content to cover. These essential questions narrowed what I would focus on; lectures and in-class activities would always have to answer (at least) one of these questions. On top of this, I used the four questions to pick articles from the Journal of American History. From a content standpoint, these articles would provide additional detail that my lectures and in-class activities might not be able to cover in depth.

Selecting academic articles for an introductory survey can be tricky. I had to think about whether students would have enough prior knowledge to truly engage with the secondary source. At the same time, I needed to be cognizant of whether the article covered a fair amount of time, which might then help students understand important historical concepts, like change over time and contingency. Moreover, if I could, I wanted the articles to be useful for answering more than one of the course’s essential questions.

The Journal of American History, March 2014

I ultimately chose fifteen articles from the Journal of American History to help students answer the course’s four essential questions. (See Figure #2: Academic Articles for a complete list.) Erika Lee’s “Enforcing the Borders,” for example, helped students compare and contrast a wide-range of racialized lived experiences from the Chinese Exclusion Act through the 1924 Immigration Act. Her article complemented lecture material on and primary sources about the history of white supremacy. Julia Mickenberg’s “Suffragettes and Soviets,” on the other hand, highlighted the interconnections between domestic and global events. Mickenberg’s article proved useful for students interested in women’s and gender history as well as those fascinated by the events of the First World War. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s classic, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” was one of my students’ favorite articles. Hall famously critiqued the “classical” phase of the Civil Rights Movements in her article. Yet, for the purposes of my course, Hall’s article also helped students better understand the history of African Americans, the intersection of race and gender, and racialized economics. Hall’s seminal article, then, could assist students with three of the course’s four essential questions.

Students who are used to reading textbooks, however, can find reading academic articles challenging. To have them gain the skills necessary to successfully engage with these academic articles, I devoted a fair amount of in-class time to reading, interpreting, and analyzing these sources. I viewed my role as an encouraging coach who kept his approach to the analysis of academic articles straightforward and accessible. For the first three articles assigned in the class, I had students (re)read the introduction and the conclusion with a partner or in small groups. I asked students to underline and annotate where the historian(s) articulated their argument. Sometimes this meant that students had to mark several parts of the introduction and conclusion, trying to make sense of complex arguments which had multiple supporting parts. At first, this was a tough task for students, consuming upwards of 20 minutes of a 75-minute class. However, as we spent more time on this skill, students slowly gained more confidence. I was able to go around the room to work with small groups of students, focusing them on specific parts of introductions and conclusions. After a couple sessions, I asked students to paraphrase arguments in their own words. Students’ confidence grew the more they worked with one part of “doing” history—understanding historical arguments. Over time, what had taken 20 or 25 minutes soon dwindled to 12 or 15.

Students were required to write an analysis for two of the academic articles they read. To ensure further success, students were provided a fair amount of scaffolding on these assignments. To assist with article analyses, I created a reading grid that asked students to: research the historian/scholar; note and critique the sources used in the article; make historical connections to lectures and/or primary sources; and reflect on how the source could answer one of the course’s essential questions. I had detailed questions for each box of the reading grid, providing a fair amount of guidance for students to understand what they should be looking for when analyzing an article. Figure #3:The Reading Grid displays the course’s emphasis on scaffolding the analysis of academic articles.

By the end of the term, I could see that the focus on teaching with and analyzing academic articles worked on several levels. The most important, in my opinion, was how students improved from their first to their second article analysis. They had a much more nuanced understanding of historical argumentation in their second analyses. In addition, students wrote more critically about the historians’ source bases and felt more comfortable critiquing “master narratives” they had learned in high school. For those afraid of using academic articles in their surveys, I want to offer a simple reassurance: students never shied away from this hard work. My provisional course instructor survey scores indicate that students recognized article analyses as a core part of their learning. I already have a strong sense of which articles students enjoyed, but I hope my course instructor surveys include constructive criticism about the articles students viewed as least helpful for answering the course’s essential questions.

There were other outcomes to using academic articles. Many of the articles I selected emphasized U.S. History in a transnational perspective. As a result, students had to think about the United States as a place which influences—and is influenced by—others parts of the world. By carefully selecting articles, I also made it so I did not have to assign a traditional textbook. Lectures, primary sources, and the articles covered enough material for students to understand the American experience and to walk away with their own informed interpretation of the nation’s history.

As an educator now weeks removed from the course I taught, I see an even greater purpose to teaching with academic articles. As we navigate a period of deep political division, one that is fraught with fear for many, teaching with academic articles has the possibility to instill crucial civic skills in our students. By respectfully challenging those who came before them, each scholar I assigned demonstrated that disagreement is a core part of the democratic experience. Using academic articles instead of a textbook allowed my students to see that disagreement does not need to be hateful or vitriolic. Instead, it can be a productive way to move forward, pushing in the direction of the “more perfect Union” enshrined in the Constitution.

Figure 1: The Course’s Essential Questions

America’s role in the world	Determine how the United States’ foreign policy changed and/or remained consistent from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War. How did the U.S. confront the challenges it faced around the globe? Are there core tenets (or beliefs) that have guided American foreign policy? If so, what are they? If not, how do foreign policy conflicts differ from each other?
Economics and labor	Evaluate the ways the American economy has changed over the past 150 years. How did “big business” alter the landscape of U.S. industry? Why did Progressive Era and New Deal reformers pass the reforms they did? Have Americans found a way to balance economic growth and workers’ rights in the post-World War II period?
Women and gender	Analyze the political and economic fight for women’s equality. To what extent has the role and status of women changed over the past 150 years? What have been landmark victories for women’s rights? Why have various political factions opposed women’s and feminist groups? Is there work left to be done?
Comparative civil rights	The continued fight for equality has, in many ways, defined the American experience. Compare and contrast the struggle for civil rights that two of the following segments of the population experienced: 1) African Americans; 2) women; 3) Mexican Americans; 4) Asian Americans; and/or 5) LGBTQ individuals. Are there commonalities that you see in the political rhetoric and tactics of these two groups? How would you describe the unique challenges these segments of the population faced? What are the arguments, agendas, challenges, etc. that have made coalitions difficult to form, both within and between different rights movements?

Figure 2: Academic Articles

Author	Article title	Year of publication	Essential question(s) answered
Erika Lee	Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924	2002	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Richard White	Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age	2003	Economics and labor
Jürgen Martschukat	“The Art of Killing by Electricity”: The Sublime and the Electric Chair	2002	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Julia L. Mickenberg	Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia	2014	America’s role in the world; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Lisa McGirr	The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History	2007	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Julia C. Ott	“The Free and Open People’s Market”: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933	2009	Economics and labor
Rachel Louise Moran	Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal	2011	Economics and labor & women and gender
James J. Weingartner	Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from “the Good War”	2008	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Thomas A. Guglielmo	Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas	2006	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Elaine Tyler May	Security against Democracy: The Legacy of the Cold War at Home	2011	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker	Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China	2005	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall	The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past	2005	Economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Michael B. Katz et al.	The New African American Inequality	2005	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Kevin J. Mumford	The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982	2011	Women and gender & comparative civil rights
Michael H. Hunt	In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?	2002	America’s role in the world

Figure 3: The Reading Grid (PDF)

Also by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:

Finding Hitler (in all the Wrong Places?)
The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)
Another perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

This week the State Board of Education holds a second round of hearings on the adoption of History textbooks for the entire state of Texas.

Here is Christopher Rose’s report on his testimony in the first round.

By Christopher Rose

The first time I tried to work with the State Board of Education, I inadvertently did something naïve and possibly a little foolish.

It was 2010, and the social studies standards—the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS (pronounced “tex”)—were up for revision in the state of Texas. Having worked with K-12 teachers of world history, world geography, and contemporary world cultures (the three required world studies classes in Texas) for a decade at that point, I really wanted to get in on the review committee for one of these courses. I had been involved in laying out the framework for a 6th grade contemporary world cultures curriculum, and I knew those standards like the back of my hand, and I had what I thought were pretty solid suggestions about the way the course could be improved.

Texas' New Social Studies Textbooks. Courtesy of Texas Tribune — Texas’ New Social Studies Textbooks. Courtesy of Texas Tribune

Review panels are appointed by members of the SBOE, so I sat down and drafted an e-mail outlining my credentials, my commitment to global studies and cross-cultural understanding, and some of the issues in the 6th grade course that I was hoping to address, and eagerly sent it off to the SBOE member who represented the district I lived in. I didn’t know until some time later that, around the same time, this member defended herself against public scrutiny for forwarding an e-mail from her SBOE e-mail account that declared that Barack Obama was going to place the US under martial law within the first year of his first term as presidency, and was on record in various places as opposing the study of the world outside of the US at all.

Needless to say, I wasn’t appointed to one of the review panels.

I submitted written comments, received a standard response, “Your submission has been received and logged,” and never heard another word.

Having missed that opportunity, I was determined not to miss another when the textbook adoption process came around earlier this summer. I had, in the intervening four years, assumed a dual identity as both an employee in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, designing and implementing community programming and professional development for educators, and as a doctoral student in the Department of History, sometimes taking classes with faculty members I’d worked alongside earlier the same day.

I had reviewed the textbooks at their last adoption in 2002, mostly to familiarize myself with the material so that I knew where the gaps were, and what material was covered. I began making inquiries around the network I’ve assembled over the past fifteen years about to how to access the textbooks submitted for adoption when an e-mail went out from the History Department. A local non-profit organization was looking for doctoral students to review textbooks for a written review they planned to publish prior to the SBOE meeting in September, which would be the first of two public hearings on the textbook adoption.

I sent in a letter of interest and this time, I was appointed to a panel looking at books submitted for the 10th grade World History course. The organization had a list of areas they wanted to review for fear of political bias, but I read the books cover to cover, taking notes anywhere I felt there was a problem.

Over the course of the review, one of the three sets of materials I read stood out—for all the wrong reasons. An e-book with no corresponding print edition, the errors I kept finding went beyond politically-charged bias into a much more black and white realm: the material was, in many cases, just wrong. I found a statement that the Romans made no major achievements in science and mathematics. A similar statement was made about the Aztec, Inca, and Maya—which was compounded with an assignment asking students to write an essay explaining why these civilizations didn’t develop further. A quick Google search revealed that, in every instance, these three Mesoamerican civilizations had, in fact, achieved everything that the text explicitly stated they had not.

The section on Islam—my own scholarly background—contained so much misinformation that my notes on the text were longer than the text itself. I feared the same for the section on Hinduism, although my knowledge of it is weaker and I am still convinced I missed some errors. Judaism, meanwhile, was covered as “Christianity without Christ,” although even this was up for debate as I found in the text of a sample essay a statement that “Jews and Muslims consider Jesus a teacher, but not the Son of God as Christians believe.” Muslims consider Jesus a Prophet. Jesus, however, has no standing within Judaism, and this text was saying that he was revered as a teacher!

The more I read, the more concerned I became. After the report was submitted, the general consensus among the reviewers was that this product was, across the board, poorly written, poorly edited, and riddled with factual errors. Since I’d spent nearly 80 hours with this text alone, who better to let the SBOE know exactly where the problems were? I decided that I would testify to the SBOE at the upcoming public hearing on the textbooks. Expecting a large crowd, I set an alarm on my computer, completed the paperwork to register, saved it as a draft and, when the clock hit 8:00 on the first day of registration, I pressed “send.”

Which is how I found myself sitting in the SBOE meeting room in the William B. Travis building, watching the board members assemble. The list with the order of testifiers came in barely ten minutes before the hearing was scheduled to start, and, to my surprise, I discovered that I was first on the list!

As we waited for the meeting to be called to order, a representative from the non-profit that had overseen the textbook review stopped by to tell me that two publishers had responded to the written report, which had been published the previous week. One had responded quite positively, asking for comments, and promising to look at areas identified as problematic and see what changes could be made. The other—the publisher of the materials that I was preparing to testify against shortly—had responded extremely negatively. While I never saw that message, it seemed clear that they didn’t like the report, and had gone further to criticize both the organization that sponsored it and the individuals who had written it.

State board of education meeting, Monday 20 Oct 2014. Courtesy of Texas Tribune

I looked at the 35 copies of my written testimony that I was about to hand over to go on the permanent record. My oral testimony, included as the cover sheet with a three-page appendix, was footnoted. Everything I was about to say appears in the text, I thought. They can call me names if they want, but they can’t deny that these things appear in print.

I had chosen to focus on areas of concern to the SBOE in my two minutes of testimony. The SBOE has, in the past, demonstrated a lack of interest in what they see as “politically correct” depictions of Islam, so I chose to focus on areas they were concerned about: the Romans; a passage that refers to Catholicism as a religion; the statement about Jesus being revered by Jews. For my dramatic opener I led with a direct quote from the text stating that most people living in sub-Saharan Africa were members of “the Negro race.” My rationale was that if I could get the board’s attention and get them to view the book unfavorably and pull it from the list of approved materials, then the material I was concerned about would be withdrawn as well.

As the first up, I got the board at their freshest. There were several gasps as I spoke, and several questions clarifying statements I had made. The two testifiers behind me spoke more thematically rather than about individual books, but at one point one of the board’s more outspoken conservative members expressed in astonishment, “We’ve been here half an hour and three of you have mentioned this book. Clearly we need to look at this one closely.” I may have done a fist pump in the back of the room where no one could see me.

While I hedged my bets and played it safe because I had ample non-controversial material to work with in my testimony, Jacqueline Jones, the Chair of UT’s History Department didn’t have that luxury. Her opening statement, which concluded with, “We do our students a disservice when we scrub history clean of unpleasant truths and when we present an inaccurate view of the past that promotes a simple-minded, ideologically driven point of view,” was quoted repeatedly in coverage of the hearing; I was pleased to hear it on the radio as I drove home that evening. I e-mailed to let her know that it was on the air, and she wrote back telling me that she had heard me on an earlier broadcast.

However, her criticism of a particular textbook’s decision to present an uncritical portrayal of the “American free enterprise system,” a term that replaced “capitalism” in the 2010 TEKS revision, landed on unsympathetic ears from two of the board members who had championed that cause. After a short speech from the floor from board member Ken Mercer, who seemed to be speaking mainly for the purpose of reminding everyone in the room that using the term had been his idea, board member Thomas Ratliff offered the rebuttal, “Well, the textbooks aren’t going to be perfect.”

Walking back to campus with Dr. Jones after her testimony, she wondered aloud, “If that’s the case, then what were we doing there?” A good question, indeed. If the SBOE, with all of its power, can’t hold textbook publishers to a higher standard, then who will?

A few days later, I received a message directly from the publisher that can best be described as “politely hostile.” Among other things, I was told that I didn’t understand what a textbook was, and that I was “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.” I am still not certain what that means. Despite this, in the written response to my comments, a number of the errors I cited were acknowledged and have been changed in the textbook.

What I have learned from this experience is that it is important for scholars like those in the Department of History to get their voice out there. As Dr. Jones pointed out in her testimony, what’s being taught in Texas schools has a direct bearing on what happens in university classrooms. We have to be active as public scholars and historians—and for me that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Politicizing the Past: Depictions of Indo-Aryans in Indian Textbooks from 1998-2007

By Abhijith Ravinutala

Download “Politicizing the Past”

This Spring, UT-Austin student Abhijith Ravinutala received the John Ferguson Prize for Excellence in the Study of History. In his thesis paper, “Politicizing the Past: Depictions of Indo-Aryans in Indian Textbooks from 1998-2007,” Abhijith links the history lessons in Indian school textbooks to broader political conflicts taking place over the nation’s religious and historical identity. He particularly concentrates on their depictions of the ancient Indo-Aryan people, arguing that these historical narratives reflect very modern political disputes. You can read Abhijith’s thesis abstract below.

Abstract:

Schools across the world strive to instill national pride in students by presenting a shared history of the nation’s development – a common past. Yet, in the case of India, there is no consensus on the common past, leaving students without a clear understanding of Indian history. From 1998-2007, Indian schools employed three different sets of history textbooks, each with radically different ideas on ancient Indian history concerning Indo-Aryans (peoples considered to be the founders of the Hindu faith). This paper endeavors to show that these textbook changes were clearly politicized; different political parties promoted conflicting ideas on Indo-Aryans due to incompatible religious beliefs. To provide context, there is also a discussion of the different historical issues regarding Indo-Aryans, such as the mystery of their origins and their relation to the Indus Valley Civilization. Additionally, this paper attempts to explain how the textbook changes were uniquely important to Indian national identity.

An Elementary School in Chittoor, India (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

To accomplish these ends, I use direct quotes from all three sets of textbooks, as well as newspaper articles from The Times of India. An analysis of the textbook quotes shows that the ruling political party could dictate its own views on the culture, identity, and society of Indo- Aryan peoples. Furthermore, an analysis of newspaper articles reveals the public’s reaction to textbook changes, showing that India is uniquely prone to such changes because its history is so ancient and ambiguous. Indians do not have the knowledge or clarity about the ancient past to pass down stories to future generations. As a result, students learn about their ancestry and identity through the material provided in textbooks, but that material is at the whim of political parties. This project reveals how political parties tamper with history to achieve their own ends, and the effect it has on the public’s conceptions of history and national identity.

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward L. Larson (2006)

by Brian McNeil

Like most teenagers growing up in Alabama during the late nineties, my first encounter with the 1925 John Scopes Trial came on the first day of my ninth grade biology class. Inside the front cover of the textbook a message from the Alabama State Board of Education stated: “This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals, and humans.” Passed by the Board of Education in 1995, the supplement went on to say, “No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.”

The disclaimer in Alabama biology textbooks was the product of a decades-long debate in the United States over science and religion in the classroom. In Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson examines this oft-contentious dispute from Darwin to Darrow to Dayton—host of the Scopes Trial and present home of Bryan College, one of the leading institutes of creationist biology. He demonstrates how contemporary thought influenced the debates surrounding the Scopes Trial and, in the last section of the book, how dramatic portrayals such as Inherit the Wind shape our own thinking on evolution today. Yet, as Larson skillfully notes, the “Trial of the Century” stays with us not because of the scientific questions it raised but because the Scopes Trial embodied “the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy.” The Scopes Trial, in other words, asked who would control curriculum in classrooms? Would it be the local many that clung fast to their bibles and looked up to the heavens for the answer to the origin of man? Or, would it be the distant few who studied science and looked down into the earth at the fossil record for the answer to the origins of species?

These are the questions that drew the major antagonists to the Scopes Trial: William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan—known as the Great Commoner for his support of the Populist Party in the 1890s—was a reformer who steadfastly held to religion and popular politics. Darrow, the most prominent lawyer in early twentieth-century America, used his sharp legal mind to challenge popular notions of morality and religion. The most memorable aspect of the trial was the back and forth between these two American giants on the lawn outside the courthouse (the trial had to be moved outside to accommodate the interested public). Darrow asked questions that had nothing at all to do with human evolution and everything to do with casting doubt over Evangelical Christianity in general and Bryan’s faith in particular. “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” Darrow asked at one point during Bryan’s testimony. “No sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her,” the Commoner acidly replied.

The great strength of Summer for the Gods is Larson’s ability to demonstrate how the debate over science and religion has changed over the decades. As unbelievable as it may sound today when the battle lines are so firmly demarcated and the trenches are so deeply dug, there was a time when fundamentalist Christians attempted to accept evolutionary biology on its own terms. The first section of the book details how this era of good feelings changed following the end of the First World War. Believing that modernism, natural selection, and eugenics caused both the Great War and the social unrest that followed it, fundamentalist Christians fought back against evolutionary biology. Because of this rising tide of conservatism, many states in the early 1920s passed laws that restricted teaching Darwinism in the classroom and ultimately led to the Scopes Trial.

I currently live in Texas, and the great debate in the Lone Star State over curriculum in the classroom has in many ways shifted away from science toward social studies and history. Conservatives and Progressives are now debating the origin and character of the United States, not the origin of human beings. But if Larson were to comment on this dispute over history textbooks, he would surely argue that the debate is not new at all. Instead, he would insist that the same struggle between majoritarian democracy and individual liberty that guided the Scopes Trial frames the present debate over history textbooks in Texas. Larson’s lucid writing, command of detail, and ability to connect the Scopes Trial to longstanding debates in American history make Summer for the Gods a great read.

Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan by Krishna Kumar (2001)

by Amber Abbas

Krishna Kumar’s study of school textbooks in Pakistan and India shows that the discipline of history in South Asia has “come under the strain of nation-building rather more than other subjects.” History teaching in these textbooks seeks to settle political and ideological points and guide children’s responses to present day situations.

The two states that were formed in 1947, India and Pakistan, share a history that national textbooks try to claim exclusively for each individual state. The freedom movement remains a controversial and tricky subject, a mere 60 years after independence. As a result of this nationalized education, informed knowledge of the other, neighboring nation, is rare in both places; powerful stereotypes have tended to stifle academic curiosity and serious enquiry. A particularly alarming discovery of Kumar’s study is the extent to which Indian and Pakistani school textbooks teach history by reading back outcomes onto causes. This tactic obscures any complexity in history, hiding the places where ideology and action fail to align, or where leaders changed their minds, altered their tactics, or went back on their word. It precludes any appreciation of the motivation of the historical actors at the time. This is history in reverse.

In both countries, textbooks deploy the freedom movement as a story about national values. The Pakistani narrative is dominated by a triumphal sense of self-protection and escape determined to serve as a unifying national ethos by emphasizing issues of the contemporary significance in the history of state-building. In India, by contrast, this narrative emphasizes the tolerance of different groups for one another in the course of an idealized and varied history. Great personalities of the freedom movement and of earlier periods are treated, not as complex and flawed historical figures, but as vessels for ideals for young readers to follow.

Kumar’s study, pensive and often self-reflective, reveals the importance of history as a practical discipline in schools. He laments the condition of education in both countries, and uses the freedom movement to investigate the political stifling of intellectual curiosity. In neither place is history considered a valuable subject for inquiry, or for students to acquire more practical skills. On the contrary, government and nationalist historians use the school textbook to train patriotic citizens willing and able to perpetuate the prejudices that led to the separation of the two states in the first place.

As textbook revision debates continue here in Texas with politically-motivated concerns about the teaching of Islam and other subjects, it is worth remembering that history is not a neutral field, rather it is often an ideological battle ground for conflicting narratives.