How Textbooks Decide What Gets Taught and What Gets Left Out of History Class

 Most people assume that what they learned in history class was the real history. The accurate version. The complete picture of what actually happened.

It was not.

What you learned in school was a selection. A curated set of events and people and stories that someone decided were worth including. And the people who made those decisions were not neutral.

How Textbooks Actually Get Made

In most states a committee reviews and approves textbooks for use in public schools. Those committees are made up of people appointed by elected officials. Which means the people deciding what gets taught in school are indirectly chosen through a political process.

Texas and California are the two biggest textbook markets in the country. Because textbook publishers want to sell their books in those states they design their books to get approved by those states' review committees. What gets approved in Texas and California ends up shaping what gets taught across much of the country.

Texas in particular has had ongoing battles over what goes into history textbooks. How slavery gets described. Whether evolution gets presented as fact. How the Civil War gets framed. Whether certain historical figures get included or excluded. These are not just academic debates. They directly determine what millions of students learn about their own history.

What Gets Left Out

Labor history is one of the biggest gaps in most American history textbooks. The fights workers had to have to win things like the 8 hour work day, the weekend, workplace safety laws and child labor protections are barely mentioned in most curricula. Most students graduate with no idea what ordinary working people had to go through to win rights that we now take for granted.

The full history of what happened to Native American communities after European contact is almost always compressed, softened or skipped. The specific policies of forced removal, forced assimilation and cultural destruction are not described in detail in most standard textbooks.

The history of how racism was built into American laws and institutions, not just practiced by bad individuals, is still contested in many states' curricula. Some states actively restrict how these topics can be taught.

What to Do About It

Read outside of what you were taught. There are excellent books written for general audiences that cover the parts of American history that did not make it into school textbooks. Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States is one. Isabel Wilkerson's Caste is another. Nikole Hannah Jones's The 1619 Project is another.

Talk to older people in your community about what they remember. Lived experience fills in gaps that textbooks leave.

Teach your kids to ask questions about history. Who wrote this account. Whose perspective is missing. What happened to the people who are not mentioned in this story.

The history you were taught was a starting point. Not the whole picture.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Victors Always Rewrite History and Here Is How to Spot It Happening Right Now

 After World War Two ended the Nazis were on trial at Nuremberg. Some of them tried to argue they were just following orders. That argument did not work and should not have.

But here is something worth thinking about. If Germany had won that war those trials would not have happened. And the history books written in a world where Germany won would have told a very different story about what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

That is not a comfortable thought. But it is an important one.

History is not just what happened. History is what people with the power to record and preserve information decided to write down and keep. And the people with that power have always had reasons to shape the story in ways that served their interests.

How This Has Worked Throughout History

When European colonizers wrote the history of their conquests they described it as exploration and civilization. The perspective of the people being conquered was not included in those accounts. Their version of events did not make it into the history books that got taught in schools for centuries.

When the Confederacy lost the Civil War former Confederate leaders spent decades building what historians call the Lost Cause narrative. They reshaped the story of the war from being about slavery to being about states rights and Southern honor. They built statues and named schools after Confederate generals. They got textbooks in Southern states changed to reflect their version of events. That rewriting influenced what generations of American schoolchildren were taught about their own history.

When corporations face accountability for environmental damage or worker deaths they hire lawyers and communications teams to shape the historical narrative around those events. The official record reflects what was proven in court and what got into the news. It does not always reflect what actually happened.

How to Spot It When It Is Happening Now

Look for who is missing from the story. Every time you read a historical account or a news story ask yourself whose perspective is not represented. Who was affected by these events but is not quoted. Whose experience of what happened is not being described.

Look for what is being emphasized and what is being minimized. When a story is told there are always choices about what to include and what to leave out. Those choices reveal what the teller wants you to take away from the story.

Look for who benefits from this version of events. If a particular telling of history makes one group look good and another group look bad it is worth asking who had the power to write that version down and what they had to gain from it.

Look for the emotions it is designed to produce. History written to make you angry at one group or proud of another without giving you the full picture is usually history that has been shaped for a purpose.

None of this means that all history is fake or that you cannot trust any account. It means that every account of history is told from a perspective and that perspective shapes what gets included. Knowing that makes you a better reader of history not a worse one.

The most honest thing you can do with history is read multiple accounts. Seek out perspectives that were left out. And stay curious about what might be missing from the version you were given first.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Women in History Had Their Names Replaced by Their Husbands and We Are Still Fixing That

 Go back far enough in most historical records and women disappear.

Not because they were not there. They were there. They were running households, raising children, working farms, starting businesses, making decisions that shaped their communities.

But the records called them Mrs. John Smith. Or wife of. Or relict of. Their own first names sometimes do not appear anywhere. Their maiden names are even harder to find. They exist in the record only in relation to the men they were connected to.

For centuries that was just how record keeping worked. Women were not considered full legal persons in most systems. They could not own property in their own names in many places. They could not vote. They could not sign contracts. The legal system treated them as extensions of their husbands and the records reflected that.

The Result Is Massive Gaps in the Historical Record

Try tracing a female ancestor back more than a few generations. You will run into a wall fast.

You find her in a census listed only as a wife with an age listed in a range. You find her in a marriage record with her maiden name, the last time that name will appear. Then she disappears into a series of documents that refer to her only by her husband's name.

If her husband died before her she becomes a widow and sometimes her own name reappears. But often she just shows up in records as "widow of."

Generations of women. Living full lives. Leaving almost no individual trace.

How Researchers Are Recovering These Stories

Genealogists have developed specific techniques for tracing women through historical records. Church records often have more detail than civil records. Probate records sometimes list women with their own names when property was involved. Letters and diaries, when they survive, are often the only places where women appear as themselves rather than as someone's wife or mother.

Organizations like the Organization of American Historians and university women's history programs have been working for decades to recover and publish the histories of women who were written out of the official record.

Projects that digitize letters, diaries and personal documents written by women are among the most important preservation projects happening right now.

What You Can Do

If you have letters, diaries or personal documents written by women in your family, preserve them. Scan them. Transcribe them. Upload them somewhere permanent.

When you do genealogy research, record the maiden names of every woman you find. Make sure those names are in your family tree. Do not let them disappear again.

If you know stories about women in your family or community that were never written down, write them down now. A woman's full name. What she did. What she was like. What she built or survived or created.

Half of history walked around for centuries without their names properly recorded. It is not too late to start fixing that.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.