Nothing Neutral about the Past: Teaching Students to Complicate World War II Textbook Narratives
One of the more challenging obstacles I try to overcome in teaching is getting undergraduates to see that the stories of the past are often much more complicated, multifaceted, and far less triumphant, than what they learned before they got to me. Students come to my lower-division undergraduate class, “American Identity and Belonging in the World War II Era,” eager to learn about how the United States defeated the Nazis—to learn about a time the good guys beat the bad guys. In my experience, my students tend to believe that because World War II was a global war against fascism, it was also an overwhelmingly democratizing event, both abroad and at home. Prejudice somehow evaporated for the duration, and everyone was eager to enlist in the military or otherwise help the war effort.
The trouble, of course, is that this “good war” narrative flattens the complexity of the story so much that it is rendered factually incorrect. Scholars have spent decades problematizing the “good war” narrative, but unfortunately, their work has not yet been fully incorporated into high school textbooks. As a former high school teacher, I know the enduring power of the textbook, so when I designed my undergraduate course on World War II, I decided to start with the hegemony of the textbook.
My summative assessment, a Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report, asks students to interrogate their tendency to think of textbooks as neutral carriers of historical knowledge. I want students to move past thinking that textbooks tell (and ought to tell) only the facts of the past. Importantly, I want them to learn that even this “stick to the facts” approach is far from unbiased; textbook authors make choices about what facts to include and exclude. These editorial decisions mean that the authors are, in fact, offering an implicit argument about the past—these decisions lead to a type of argumentation, even if it sounds neutral. I also ask students to consider the limitations of textbooks’ physical form. U.S. history textbooks are already massive tomes, even as they leave out details that could help nuance the story. With only so many pages to work with, let alone the space on a single page that text must share with images, vignettes, and tables/charts, the real estate available for presenting historical narrative becomes scarce. The goal is for students see how both content and form impact the stories we tell about the past, and why some authors end up telling overly simple narratives.
The Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report is a semester-long assignment, carefully aligned to my course aims. Because it is an unfamiliar genre, I use scaffolding to support student success, focusing on three steps across the sixteen weeks of the course. These steps include: 1) understanding the larger context of how high school U.S. history curriculum is developed; 2) completing a Textbook Chapter Review activity; and 3) completing a draft of the final assignment, the Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report.
Early Weeks of Semester: High School U.S. History Curriculum
We start by engaging present-day conversations about how high school U.S. history curriculum is developed. We talk about how, despite being co-authored by historians, high school history textbooks are largely informed by state standards, which are not always developed by historians or educators practicing in the classroom. In the United States, for instance, publishers devote much of their energy to catering to large markets, often leading to the same basic narrative but with some adaptations that reflect the standards, but also politics, of each state. We read, for instance, “Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories,” a New York Times article (2020) that compared how publishers altered the same textbooks for use in California and Texas school districts. Students also explore the National Council for Social Studies standards and the state standards for California and Texas to discuss the similarities and differences across them and against three different textbooks (the same ones they read about in the New York Times article). This discussion helps students understand the audience and purpose for which history textbooks are written and why that affects the narrative in them. At this point, it is also helpful to re-calibrate student thinking about what historical narrative is supposed to be: We don’t study the past to look for heroes and villains or happy endings (even if sometimes we do). Rather, we study the past to gain a deeper sense of human complexity—the good, the bad, and the ugly—so we can be better humans in the present.
Middle of Semester: Textbook Chapter Review Activity
After learning some content, students complete a preliminary evaluation of a textbook chapter on the World War II home front. They choose a home front chapter from one of the three textbooks examined in the New York Times article. In this Textbook Chapter Review activity, students ask questions about content and form to help them examine how the authors constructed the chapter’s narrative. This includes identifying chronology, turning points, and historical actors featured in the story, as well as considering diction, how much space on the page is devoted to a topic or person, and how chapter extras (like vignettes) are used in the narrative. Critiquing the content and form of the chapter helps students arrive at its implicit argument: Based on its construction, what main idea or theme is the reader supposed to take away from the chapter?
Nearly all students identify an implicit argument in which the United States home front was overwhelmingly united in fighting democracy abroad, despite some clear examples of discrimination; the overall opportunities provided by the war outweighed the injustices that marginalized groups experienced. In this activity, students already begin to complicate the textbook narrative using what they have learned from the class. To cite one example, many students critique the chapter for not fully discussing the various responses Japanese Americans had about enlisting in the military for a country that had racialized them as the enemy. Not all volunteered to enlist in the segregated, all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team that was created in 1943. Many Japanese Americans raised questions about racism, citizenship, and constitutionality through the immediate context of the wartime emergency, but also within the longer history of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. In this preparatory activity, students take an important first step to interrogating the textbook as a neutral carrier of information.
Last Weeks of Semester: Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report
In the final weeks of the semester, students build upon their preliminary critiques to identify three revisions they think will improve the textbook chapter narrative. In the Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report, students must provide a rationale for each revision—something that requires more advanced thinking. Adding content, for instance, is a typical revision students recommend, such as addressing the omission of certain perspectives. In completing the report, however, students are not expected to write the new content, but to justify why it will improve the narrative; the former allows students to demonstrate important skills in comprehension and synthesis, but the latter pushes them beyond those skills to evaluating the content they have learned and deciding the best application of it in the textbook. This is no easy task. In addressing omissions, for instance, students must know the material well enough to make informed choices about what information to include. Adding to this intellectual challenge is the need to consider the chapter’s physical form and structure: Should the publisher delete a paragraph for this new content? What gets deleted and why? Thus, recommending a paragraph or a few sentences on Nisei draft resisters at Heart Mountain in 1944 alongside text discussing the bravery of the 442nd Regiment, rather than in place of it, means students must explain why their proposed construction of the narrative is justified given the finite page space.
Adaptations for the High School Classroom
Learning the content: Teachers can curate a primary source set for each marginalized group that will allow students to answer questions[NM4] that encourage thinking about the narrative of unity and progress in more complex ways: How did the public construct “the enemy” in wartime, and what were the consequences of those constructions? How did African American women use the war to challenge anti-Black discrimination? How was queer gender and sexuality policed in the U.S. military, and how did queer folks respond to this? How did war and foreign policy (wartime geopolitics) shape Mexican American efforts to secure civil rights? (This is, in fact, what I do in this undergraduate course—as most of us know, novice learners need guidance and structure when exploring big topics, and often). A summative assessement might include a big question that ties these more precise questions together; in my course, I have students develop an essay outline because for me, the cognitive process of working through the precise questions and sources is much more important than the essay as a final product.
The Textbook Chapter Evaluation Report: Three adaptations could work well in a high school classroom. Teachers could adapt the assignment to be more targeted and aligned with something they already teach—especially if it tends more toward operational history. In critiquing the chapter narrative, for instance, teachers can identify a topic in the existing curriculum and instruct students to consider how it shaped the home front. How do the textbook authors describe, for instance, why Japan bombed Pearl Harbor? Or how do the authors cover the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Japan? (Importantly, teachers would need to curate a primary source set to expand upon what the textbook chapter includes, i.e., give students material they can use to recommend revisions).
Another adaptation could be to have students produce the recommended revisions. Instead of doing the metacognitive work of describing and providing rationales for each of the three revisions, as described above, students could choose just one revision and implement it: they could write a new paragraph or substantially revise an existing one, develop a vignette on a historical actor they think is significant, or annotate a primary source they think should be included in the chapter. This would work well for teachers who use the textbook as a foundation they build upon in their curriculum, ensuring that students complete the regularly assigned reading while also encouraging them to critique the base of knowledge they learn in the textbook. What the students produce could be scaled for appropriate assessment needs, as a low-stakes assignment that students frequently complete or a summative assessment at the end of a unit.
Lastly, teachers could adapt the assignment for research. As I currently teach it, students are not required to conduct research to complete the report (I have reserved that for the seminar course our history majors must take, in which I teach them historical research methods; in the course described above, conducting research is not a learning objective). Teachers could provide students with a list of topics in the textbook chapter and design a handful of lessons over several weeks/days that support historical research—this would give novice students the guidance and structure they need while also encouraging them to nurture their own intellectual curiosity.