Why Is America Wrong?

American history contains many encounters with the subject of race, gender, class and social justice. Although there are a number of events where America has improved as a country, there were also situations where America was in the wrong. Most of which are not properly addressed and controversies are avoided, when learning about them through textbooks. U.S. history textbooks fail to explain the whole truth about the historical figures and events pertaining to these four major themes with the use of heroification, which builds blind patriotism. Textbooks also portray America to have a constantly improving history that only gets better as time passes, which is not always the case with the contingent nature of society. From the Civil War to

When students are asked about who ended slavery, their initial response would usually be Abraham Lincoln. This is because textbooks portray Lincoln as the hero that abolished slavery with the development of the emancipation proclamation. They never fail to include his famous phrase which says “if slavery isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong,” but does not include any contradicting statements made after that (Loewen, 184). There is no obvious information about him struggling with racism. For example, he continued to refer to African Americans as “niggers” in regular conversations (Loewen, 183). Even though Lincoln helped to end slavery, the real hero of it all were the slaves themselves. After the Civil War was the start of

By 1890, ⅔ of labor were on wages rather than farming (lecture, February 6). The rise of corporations and manufacturing labor forces are mentioned, but there is nothing about the difference in social class. The only class that gets any acknowledgement is the middle class to assure people that America is a middle class country (Loewen, 206). Textbooks glorified the act of social mobility and made it seem very possible. Immigrants made up the majority of labor forces which had no labor laws for their cheap labor. The Triangle Shirtwaist workers’ strike is a well known event where workers won the fight for hours and wages but not for working conditions, which led to the famous fire. Textbooks include the number of deaths to explain the historical event but not that it took 146 deaths for America to realize that changes were necessary (Triangle Fire). The most recent labor strike discussed in textbooks is the Taft-Hartley Act of sixty years ago and none other that labor forces lost are included so that authors can portray a labor history of something that happened long time ago that was corrected long ago (Loewen, 205). Along with social class, gender inequality was another issue ignored in