January 10, 2007
National Histories Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST A disturbing piece in today’s New York Times describes Lebanon’s inability to produce a common vision of Lebanese history for that country’s students. Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, from 1975 to 1990, is apparently entirely avoided by all history texts, so that Lebanese history seems to end in the early 1970s, but there are also sectarian disputes about when Lebanese history begins. Christian schools seem to date it to ancient Phoenicians, Muslim schools to the Arab conquest, and the Ottomans are variously described as conquerors, occupiers, or administrators, ditto the French, in both cases the sect of the school profoundly influencing the interpretation of very elemental questions. Under Syrian pressure, which includes assassination, some government officials deprecate any view of history stressing any Lebanese national identity, since Syria’s view is that Lebanon, which it occupied for some decades, is part of Greater Syria. On that theory the simple notion that Lebanon has its own history is at best error (and at worst heresy). This made me think a bit about the teaching of American history. The varieties of Lebanese history have echoes here, although the case is of course different. Americans do not have a single national textbook of history, the way some countries do, so there is no standard official version of our past. Most school districts make their own choices about texts, and local political biases matter. Around the time of the Lebanese civil war, two central purchasing authorities, the state of Texas and the city of New York, ordered texts for the two largest American markets, which means savvy publishers tried to produce texts that annoyed neither. A very interesting book on the subject, Frances FitzGerald’s America Revised, appeared in the late 1970s. FitzGerald argued that the attempt to appease two very different political constituencies produced oddly bland accounts of our history; she thought that some of the older frankly patriotic texts were more effective at exciting the young about our history, and the extracts she printed made a pretty strong case. So at that point a lot of Americans may still have been taught a common history, although a dispiritingly unmemorable one. A few years before America Revised appeared, I met a modestly famous American historian, of distant British descent, who proudly informed me that he swiftly disabused most of his undergraduates of the misconception that the Puritans or the American Revolutionaries were their ancestors and the patriotic account of our history they had previously encountered was their history. They were the children or grandchildren of immigrants, he told them, or they were from some other marginalized group, and their history was one of indignity and humiliation; their history was not the grand and sonorous narrative of traditional political history, which none of their ancestors had made, although it was perhaps labor history, or social history, maybe women’s history. I remember being astonished that he thought he was doing those kids a favor. I myself had three immigrant grandparents, and I was not persuaded that I was being flattered to be told that those bloody footprints in the Pennsylvania snow were no history of mine. The insult was not less insulting for being wholly unintended. He was in fact a very nice man, but I thought he was in this respect a fool, and I did not think his folly would prosper. I was, of course, wrong. I have the impression that since the mid-1970s, a fair number of Americans have been taught that high political history is not their history, that their history is more partial and restricted than that, being instead the morally privileged history of oppression. The history of oppression is real, although as often taught it necessarily involves the partitioning of the population into the descendents of the wicked and powerful, and the blameless because powerless, which means there is less of a common history. It would be a mistake to worry too much about this. The Lebanese civil war did not happen because the Lebanese had no common narrative of the past; it is rather the case that the Lebanese publish no common narrative of the past because they fought a civil war, and no group among them won it. On the other hand, if the Lebanese have another civil war, which seems quite possible, that war may be the likelier, and the bloodier, because there is no notion of common identity, and the Lebanese have constructed a myriad of histories in which each group is a victim, menaced by neighboring oppressors. A recent experience reminded me that the choice does not have to be between jingo accounts of collective triumph and dystopian narratives of cruelty and injustice. During a visit to a friend’s family, for Christmas, I listened to my friend’s father’s historical anecdotes about his steel town in western Pennsylvania. That history included the fact that Pennsylvania had more Medal of Honor winners in World War II than did the rest of the country combined, but it also included a history of the state legislature’s shabby record in disputes over the sale of mineral rights to the coal companies, and the death of a grandfather of black lung, and men crippled in the mills, but also what those men, and their managers, had built to smash Hitler and Tojo, and the fates, some glorious, some awful, of the local men who had gone overseas to do that. It included racial murders, but also the Catholics of the town seeing off the Klan when it tried to come in from Indiana, and a lot more. So the history had dark passages, along with some brilliant ones, and all of it seemed to belong to all of us. It was not jingo hagiography, but it still seemed an old-fashioned view. If the Lebanese counter-example is kept in view, it is also a very sane one.
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