Publius' Forum

-By Warner Todd Huston

American history has been under attack since the 1920's when Communist and American historian, Charles Beard, made himself famous by pushing the claim that the Constitution was merely a document of hate and greed as opposed to one based on any sort of high principle. Needless to say, an ever-left leaning Academia loved him for it.

Now, what passes for "History" in our schools is repeated waves of fad history focusing on what is considered the latest minority who had been given short-shrift in our eeevil and racist past, crashing upon the eroding shoes of our schools decade after decade. Anymore, “history” is little more than successive waves washing away "America" and leaving in its wake, the flotsam and jetsam of the small incidents of the American shoreline while slowly tearing down the great rocks upon which it is built.

Enter ABC News to give us another story about how wonderful such a focus on minorities is for American students. Erin Texeira gives us a typical PC view of how American history should be taught to our children in her August 20th story, "Minorities Seek History Class Changes".

American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads. The lessons have left out a lot.

There is the typical PC view of traditional American history all wrapped up in one paragraph. Unfortunately, what she and all who bemoan our history don't understand is that we trace our country to that Jamestown settlement for a reason. The United States of America was not founded by Blacks, Asians, or "Latinos", even though each added to the flavor of the stew.

White, Anglo-Saxons where who won the battles to make the United States possible. That is why we focus on them. Yet, at the same time, any casual look at even those old, stuffy history books reveals the diversity that was the times. We all remember the American Indians, the French, the Spaniards and the blacks that fought alongside or against those Englishmen as they carved out these United States. It is impossible to read even old historical treatments and not see these "minorities" even if they lost the battle for supremacy.

But, because Whites are portrayed as the "winners" and some of these minorities as the "losers"... well, we MUST destroy that notion as far as the PC historical revisionists at ABC news are concerned.

The worst part of Texeira's story was her lamentations about how our nation does not have a "Latino" museum and her worries that all the many Asians in these ignorant United States are so unduly ignored.

The Mall has dozens of sites highlighting American culture and history, including the National Museum of the American Indian that opened in 2004, 20 years after it was authorized. Organizers in June settled on the future site of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but its opening date is still years away. A Latino museum would be even further off.

Sadly for Ms. Texeira there is no such thing as a "Latino", historically. If you would have strode the byways of Spanish Florida in the early 1800's asking for all the "Latinos", for instance, you'd have gotten nothing but blank stares from the Spaniards, Indians and blacks living there at the time. "Latino" is a modern, made-up term to describe a demographic, not a term that describes a nationality or a "race".

So much for Texeira’s own "history" quotient! But, she doesn’t stop there.

Asian-Americans are the only immigrants in U.S. history to have faced laws explicitly written to bar their entry laws that were not overturned until immigration reform in the 1960s, said Dmae Roberts, whose eight-hour public radio program on Asian immigration, "Crossing East," airs on hundreds of stations.

"People know very little of this outside of California," she said.

Of course, few of the early Chinese immigrants that faced these discriminations wanted to become Americans initially. Many merely intended to make it rich in California's gold fields and go back to China with their riches in tow and many 49ers reacted to them along those lines. For that matter, few Asians even lived outside California for many years in our early Republic. They just weren't a factor in our founding and growth, railroad-building aside.

Early Asian history in the US is interesting, certainly, but it hardly classifies as a subject that we should waste time on with young students who don't know when the Civil War was fought, who our first president was, or what country we rebelled against in 1776. To waste time with all these "minority" views of history in our grade schools cheats our children out of learning the basics while they focus on the less important minutia.

Certainly in higher education it behooves us to expand the vision of subject matter, but why would a child NEED to know that the Chinese had a hard time of it in California at the expense of learning about the Monroe Doctrine? Why do we need to force young students to read umpteen accounts of "Latinos" in America before teaching them about the Declaration of Independence?

Of course, it is a good thing to have a full view of history. We need a well-rounded understanding of what our ancestors went through as it reveals a nation's character and can, in the best examples, help us understand why we are how we are. But, to focus on every small subject to the detriment of the big ones is a mistake. To people like Texeira, history should be about "diversity", not about presenting a program based on what is important and formative before presenting the minutia. After all, do we teach children algebra before we teach them subtraction?

Yes, it's all about "diversity" to those who make a fetish out of "minority" studies ...

Some tales have gone untold because, in the less-diverse America of the past, minorities didn't make the decisions on textbooks and other means of passing along history. And in many cases, minorities who had faced blatant discrimination wanted to discard evidence of past horrors.

As long as we can knock down those old dead white guys and all the "past horrors" they are responsible for, I guess that is of much higher importance. And, talking about those farther down the foodchain is more important than worrying about who wrote the Gettysburg Address... or what it even said.

If we enjoyed baseball, for instance, the way these people want us to learn history we'd be rooting for the groundskeepers, or excited to get the autograph of the lumberjack that cut the tree down that made Babe Ruth's bat.

In fact, who is Babe Ruth? What's HE ever done for the sport? But, do you know how important his COBBLER was??