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Oct. 6th, 2009 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAnother one of the nonfiction books that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gramarye1971 recommended to me was History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Potray U.S. History, by Dana Lindeman and Kyle Ward. The book does pretty much exactly what it says on the cover: goes methodically through the history of the United States, from the "discovery" of the Americas through to the present, using excerpts from international history textbooks. Each excerpt is introduced by a couple of sentences pointing out Differences of Note, but for the most part the authors/compilers pretty much let them speak for themselves. Unsurprisingly, Canadian and Central and South American textbooks get the most representation; the UK and the Caribbean also feature prominently, and other countries sort of weigh in as their history intersects. I doubt it will surprise most of you guys to hear that the US does not often appear as the good guy!
It's definitely worth the read, and is great for noticing what tends to get glossed over in American textbooks - many of the U.S. interventions below the south border get a lot of play, which the history textbooks tend to be unsurprisingly unhappy about. The descriptions of the Korean and Vietnam wars in the textbooks of those countries are pretty fascinating too. (The Canadian excerpts, on the other hand, are occasionally kind of adorable, and full of comments like "CANADIAN FORCES played an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ROLE in this war" and "naturally, in the wake of this shift in American policy, all eyes were on CANADA to see how they would react!") I noticed, too, that the closer I got to the present, the more of a difference there tended to be from our textbook version of American history and the accounts presented in other places - older history had shifts in focus, but less factual disagreement.
The one big glaring gap that I noticed in the compilation: I really wanted to know what age-range a lot of these textbooks were aimed at. It was obvious that there were differences (sometimes you'd have two different textbooks from one country) and that was the one pieces of information the authors didn't provide. Other than that, they did a pretty good job picking and presenting the selections; I would have liked to read more analysis, but on the other hand, I respect their decision to let the excerpts stand on their own.
(Sidenote: When I was in Israel, I tended to get sort of surprised praise when people saw this book, with an undertone of "Americans interested in someone else's perspective? That is so legit shocking it deserves a cookie!" We're so respected abroad.)
gramarye1971 recommended to me was History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Potray U.S. History, by Dana Lindeman and Kyle Ward. The book does pretty much exactly what it says on the cover: goes methodically through the history of the United States, from the "discovery" of the Americas through to the present, using excerpts from international history textbooks. Each excerpt is introduced by a couple of sentences pointing out Differences of Note, but for the most part the authors/compilers pretty much let them speak for themselves. Unsurprisingly, Canadian and Central and South American textbooks get the most representation; the UK and the Caribbean also feature prominently, and other countries sort of weigh in as their history intersects. I doubt it will surprise most of you guys to hear that the US does not often appear as the good guy! It's definitely worth the read, and is great for noticing what tends to get glossed over in American textbooks - many of the U.S. interventions below the south border get a lot of play, which the history textbooks tend to be unsurprisingly unhappy about. The descriptions of the Korean and Vietnam wars in the textbooks of those countries are pretty fascinating too. (The Canadian excerpts, on the other hand, are occasionally kind of adorable, and full of comments like "CANADIAN FORCES played an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ROLE in this war" and "naturally, in the wake of this shift in American policy, all eyes were on CANADA to see how they would react!") I noticed, too, that the closer I got to the present, the more of a difference there tended to be from our textbook version of American history and the accounts presented in other places - older history had shifts in focus, but less factual disagreement.
The one big glaring gap that I noticed in the compilation: I really wanted to know what age-range a lot of these textbooks were aimed at. It was obvious that there were differences (sometimes you'd have two different textbooks from one country) and that was the one pieces of information the authors didn't provide. Other than that, they did a pretty good job picking and presenting the selections; I would have liked to read more analysis, but on the other hand, I respect their decision to let the excerpts stand on their own.
(Sidenote: When I was in Israel, I tended to get sort of surprised praise when people saw this book, with an undertone of "Americans interested in someone else's perspective? That is so legit shocking it deserves a cookie!" We're so respected abroad.)
