Dry but impressive
Overall, this book is impressive, but could have been so much more powerful and provocative. Instead, I feel it suffers from the case of classic, historian dryness in its writing.
Pros:
** Each chapter provides a collection of writings on a single, historical event/topic, brought together from multiple countries, and therefor multiple perspectives. You realize quite early on how terribly biased are the history books (mainly written for schools) of ALL countries.
** The book's chapters follow the history of the U.S., from founding to the present. To manage this scope, the authors, of necessity, are selective. I found the events they selected to be quite good.
Cons:
The writing is dry.
While most educated people realize that any historical account is going to have some bias, this book presents hard evidence for the extent to which history books (especially those designed for school, and including those approved by the US government for its schools), through omission and misinformation, foster nationalistic pride at the expense of truth.
Multiple Views on U.S. History
History may be written by the winners, but that doesn't mean it's the only history that's out there. That's the premise behind "History Lessons: How Textbooks from around the World Portray U.S. History". However the only people that will run to read this book are, history teachers and history hobbyists. That's not to say it's a bad book. It is a great book, but it doesn't lend itself to be read a linier manner. It is more apt as a reference book for high school research papers on American History. The causal reader looking for a smooth mind blowing read will be bored and frustrated. The main reason that the book drags is how it's edited, there is very little writing here. Most of the passages are directly from other text books. The authors/editors do provide some brief insight before a selected passage but this is a compilation work, not a original work of non-fiction.
The idea is original however, take snippets of textbooks from around the world about American history and hold them up to what we think we know about our own nation's story. The result is like walking through a history hall of mirrors, different countries obviously have different perspectives. The main points taken away from this book are that America is still very much an isolated country in thought and that historical events happening right now make a lot more sense when you take into account other nation perspectives. That may seem obvious, but when you apply it, let's say North Korea's attempt to test nuclear missiles to it's own perspective of the Korean War ("We bent the pride of the Americans who used to boast of being the world's most powerful nation and for the first time in the history, we brought the beginning of their decay.") it seems a little more profound. Canada's view of their southern neighbor is equally surprising. Having been invaded by the U.S. several times (something hardly ever refereed to in U.S. text books), Canada, a country with less clout and a small military, has developed a "we don't support what the U.S. does privately but we go along with it publicly because we don't really have a choice" policy.
By the end of the book, most countries don't have a choice. Even the once great British Empire is lost with out American support after WWII (see the chapter on the Suez Canal). According to these other history books, the U.S. became the biggest player in the world by its geography, its luck, but mostly by its aggression. As a result there is resentment and frustration with this country. As an American reader you know there's more than just these other viewpoints, but that's, again, the point. America needs to recognize these other viewpoints. We have become too dependant on just our own.
A Good Idea, Wasted
Viewing American history from the perspective of other nations is a great idea, and could have led to some deep insights into the narrow egocentric self-image most Americans carry.
Unfortunately, the editors of this book -- and they are 'editors' not authors -- chose to present the foreign viewpoints by quoting (at length) from foreign textbooks, mostly high school level, with almost no analysis of what's being quoted. It is, as another reviewer pointed out, about as interesting as reading a high school history textbook, cover to cover.
The selections were not even very proactively chosen. Almost all of them are factual and differ little from the standard story told in the USA. Where the histories do differ, it is mostly in matters of blame or emphasis -- and even these are left to the reader to discover and interpret. Of course, high school level textbooks, from ANY nation, are far from the best source for in-depth analysis of the vagaries of history....
In short, the promise of this premise is left wholly untapped. I was very disappointed.
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