I was looking over a US history textbook with my brother tonight, when I noticed another side of bias that we didn't really mention in class. The text seemed to throw all its support behind the winning side, whether in an election or in a war. For me, it just seemed to further cement the idea of constant bias serving as a roadblock against the achievement of a historian's ideal (to portray events completely objectively). This bias towards the winning side reinforced for me how omnipresent bias is in history, and how it's essentially impossible to be rid of. Any other thoughts?
-Tara
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I agree with you. The discussion we had in class about being biased made me think how the textbook briefly mentions the Trail of Tears and the Native Americans. I clearly remember Mr. Kingston saying how ironic it was that the textbooks have approximately one paragraph discussing the Trail of Tears even though there were a lot more to be said than that.
ReplyDelete-Joanne
I definitely think our US History education was biased, most notably when we were younger. If I had to summarize what I learned in first through sixth grade history, I would probably list a few wars ("Revolution War, Civil War, WW1, WW2") and then note the outcome of the wars (which would probably be something along the lines of "we won"). Especially when students are in younger grades, there is a huge amount of pro-America bias in our classes.
ReplyDelete-Bryce C.
History is very often written in the eyes of the victor. This especially becomes true for ancient civilizations. The winning civilization records what happened, and the losing one is wiped out or oppressed and then not recording much. Therefore, we only get get one view. We really don't know much about the places Caesar conquered from the conquered people, but from books written by Caesar himself. Those are clearly biased.
ReplyDelete~Becca
I think we all think a lot, even too much sometimes, in terms of win and lose, pass and fail. I don't even remember the candidates our past presidents went up against in the elections; I only remember who won. My history notes contained a lot of "he won, that guy lost" and promptly forgot that other guy. And in an accomplishment-driven society, we tend to forget to apply that quote by Thomas Edison about failing a thousand times before succeeding at perfecting the lightbulb. Society is increasingly outcome-driven now.
ReplyDelete-- tori
Textbooks don't only support the winning side, but also try to cover up failures, or not-quite-complete-victories. In the lower grades, we learned about the wars America won- Revolution, Civil, WWI, and WWII, as Bryce said. I don't even remember hearing anything about Vietnam until 9th grade, maybe 8th at the earliest, even though we certainly did cover that time period.
ReplyDelete-Audrey