Teacher Understandings of Political Violence Represented in National Histories

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors examine how high school teachers understand US history textbook narratives. Because of their interest in excavating the inherent social messaging embedded in national history textbooks, they draw upon models of discourse analysis. The analysis of how US history textbooks represent the forced migration of Native Americans resulted in three central findings. They were: the understating of the degree and depth of violence inherent in the forced migrations of Indian nations; the silencing of widespread nonviolent resistance to these policies; and the marginalization of forced migrations within the dominant narrative of westward expansion, progress, the growth of democracy and nation building. The findings point to how textbook accounts sanitized and naturalized political violence, making a human catastrophe tolerable or acceptable to the reader. The findings suggest that if teachers want to become critical interrogators of historical narratives then they need the institutional support and intellectual partnerships to support and sustain that inquiry.