¶ … American Culture) Thoughts on Book Readings

All of the readings included in Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically about Global Issues help us appreciate American culture and U.S. history from several diverse perspectives. The book urges us all to reach beyond comfortable representations of the United States -- who we are, what our role has been in shaping the world, and how we have exercised power through our actions and interactions with others across the globe -- and embrace more complex truths. In short, we should challenge traditional interpretations.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward helps expose how many American texts are biased in portrayals of the United States' role in world history. By examining the historical record of American history in English translated foreign texts, it is clear that other countries challenge the American depiction of itself in major events such as the Suez Canal, the Pueblo Incident, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Philippine-American war. There are many different ways of interpreting the same event and it always varies depending on the storyteller.

Examples include a Japanese textbook that suggests that it was a Caribbean trade rivalry that that led to the War of 1812. Canadian textbooks tend to suggest that it was Canada's nationalism that created fears of invasion in the United States which influenced everything from the American Revolution to the Civil War. The text comparisons confuse the traditional American understanding of our role in various...

For instance, most U.S. texts depict the Spanish-American War of 1898 as being necessitated due to Spain's sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana. As our texts explain, the U.S. took necessary defensive military action to protect itself and also support the struggles of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines for freedom from Spanish rule. However, as Lindaman and Ward reveal, a Philippine textbook describes it quite differently:
"The immediate cause of this was the blowing up the of U.S. battleship Maine at the harbor of Havana, Cuba on the night of February 18, 1898. Although the Maine had been blown up by American spies in order to provoke the war, the public was not informed of the truth. Instead American newspapers stirred the war spirit of the Americans and blamed Spain. The cry "Remember the Maine!" swept the United States (114)."

Lindaman and Ward propose that in many instances the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but there will always be a degree of bias that occurs whenever one country depicts itself in its own historical accounts. Often American texts downplay the savagery of our own soldiers or past injustices we have permitted such as southern slavery or the annihilation of American Indian tribes. There is also a deliberate attempt to describe the superior leadership of our nation's leaders. This is markedly different from the accounts found in textbooks in other nations. As posited by Gupta and Ferguson, culture can best be understood as a shared historical process which is handed down through generations. It is important to understand how…