When I read "Watching Big Brother," I placed my "T" at the bottom of the first page: "[Textbooks] still regard the actions and words of the state as incomparably more important than what the American people were doing, listening to, sleeping in, living through, or thinking about....[T]extbooks then underplay the role of nongovernmental institutions or private citizens in bringing about improvements in the environment, race relations, education, and other social issues. In short, textbook authors portray a heroic state, and, like their other heroes, this one is pretty much without blemishes. Such an approach converts textbooks into anti-citizenship manuals -- handbooks for acquiescence" (Loewen 220).
This, I think, is Loewen's major argument. Put in cultural-studies terms, Loewen is making an argument about historical agency -- who can make change in history, and how they do it. High-school American history textbooks, Loewen argues, tell American history in such a way that the only agent -- the only thing capable of making change -- is the executive branch of the U.S. government (headed by the president). This, Loewen argues further, is both factually incorrect -- providing (as evidence) many examples of historical events that have been shaped by non-government agents, from multinational corporations to civil-rights organizers -- and politically dangerous -- quoting Malcolm X (as evidence?) to argue that "[a]s long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything" (qtd. in Loewen 219).
Finally, Loewen suggests briefly near the end of the chapter, the textbooks' position on historical agency (that the U.S. State is the only important agent) is not just in textbooks: it also pervades pop culture, and as a result, it's become part of our "common sense" understanding of history and historical agency. (As evidence, he analyzes the way the popular Hollywood film Mississippi Burning tells and distorts the history of the civil rights movement (Loewen 239-240).)
In this week's blog post, I'd like you to play with this last idea. To what extent do we see this "government-as-the-only-agent" view of history in contemporary pop culture -- and specifically in that part of pop culture which is often called "the first draft of history" -- namely, the news? Here are the details:
1) Read Loewen's chapter "Watching Big Brother," slowly and carefully. Annotate. Your goal is to understand his position, arguments, and evidence in as much detail as possible.
2) Read the pages from The American Pageant, which I sent you via email. You don't need to read them as slowly and carefully, but do read them and annotate them (and print them out and bring them to class!). Your goal is to find the places where you see evidence for (and against?) Loewen's arguments about historical agency in a real, live (and very popular) American history textbook.
3) Find a piece of news -- a newspaper story, a TV or radio news report, a post from a news blog, etc. -- that presents a current event in a way that either does or does not fit with Loewen's argument about how textbooks and pop culture present historical agency.
4) Write a post in which you (a) link to (if possible) and describe your piece of news in detail, (b) explain the way it presents a current event, including who the historical agents are, and (c) argue for how it does or does not fit with Loewen's argument about how textbooks and pop culture tell history, with specific reference to the problem of historical agency. Your argument should include detailed evidence from both Loewen's chapter and The American Pageant. You are also welcome (nay, encouraged) to reference other texts from class, as they relate.
(***HINT: when looking for agency in a printed text (such as a news story), make sure to look at the subjects of the sentences. If you see sentences that start something like, "The U.S. and China agreed yesterday to a new round of currency reform...," you know you're in textbook-land. (See the first page of the American Pageant excerpt, and compare.) The historical agents in this sentence are "the U.S." and "China." Who gets to be "the U.S." and "China"? Probably not the folks working at fast-food restaurants. More likely, the presidents, or their representatives. The folks working at fast-food restaurants don't get much say in the matter, nor are their contributions considered particularly important to this telling of history. And any organizing they might have done to push their leaders into having these talks gets totally ignored.)
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