In the U.S., we have a long-standing tradition of "history as argument" -- our history is rarely fixed, and instead is characterized by the ongoing back-and-forth arguments we have over The Truth.

It's been said that the victors write history. That may be true in the case of the American Civil War, after which many history books were modified to remove the contributions of the states that had seceded. The official school texts of my childhood made no mention of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the USA. Instead, I was taught that Plymoth Rock (founded a full 20 years later than the Jamestown settlement) owned that honor. (As a disclaimer of sorts, I was raised in a town barely north of the Mason Dixon line; perhaps the fighting had been particularly grim in that location).

Others say it's not the victors, but the misfits who have written much of our accepted history -- those on the fringes of society, who have nothing better to do than sit around and write commentaries on how those in power behave. This case is often made of the 1950s and 1960s in America, when the fringe elements of the Beats and the Hippies defined what "the Establishment" was doing, and painted the majority of society as conformists. The men and women who "conformed" -- who were quietly raising families, working jobs, and participating in society -- had little time or inclination to write commentaries on the times, or so the argument goes.

Historians debate how much attention to give to outliers (the "fringe" elements of an historical time). Often, the fringe elements are presented in as much detail as the majority elements, leading to a somewhat skewed perspective. From some historical discussions of the late 1960s, for example, one might believe that 80% of the adults in the USA participated in the hippie movement. Perhaps this is a natural effect of the colorful and interesting photos we have of the hippie movement; photos of my staunchly conservative parents would not make for an exciting text book chapter.

One battle currently raging involves the history of the Japanese Internment during World War II, when over 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forced from their homes on the west coast of California into internment camps in the deserts of the interior United States. Their property and rights were stripped from them, and the popular historical perspective is that these detainees accepted their lot with passive resignation in a unified spirit of patriotic sacrifice. However, a significant number of these men not only fought relocation, they refused mandatory military service, choosing to serve years in prison rather than fight for the government that had betrayed them. Today, many Japanese-American groups are trying to suppress the actions of these men, believing them to be shameful and to tarnish the reputation of all Japanese-Americans. The argument is that the actions of a minority should not be written into the historical account, because they might outweigh the historical truth of the majority. But in my opinion, history should never be a zero-sum game.

For over a decade, a U.S. Civics textbook written by my late mother-in-law was the number one 9th grade civics text in the United States. She'd devoted much of her working life to evaluating teaching materials for societal and political biases, and worked tirelessly to ensure her text was even-handed and as free from such bias as possible. But she couldn't control everything, and one particular caption in a 1986 edition of the book bothered her greatly. In the section on Immigration and Naturalization, the editors included a photo of Albert Einstein taking the oath of U.S. citizenship.



The caption in my mother-in-law's book read: "The world's most famous scientist, Albert Einstein, is sworn in as a new citizen of the United States." What the caption didn't say: the year was 1939, and Einstein, like many other Jews, had been driven out of Europe (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen him look sadder than he does in that photo). From the sanitized caption that was printed, many students were probably misled as I'd been misled about Plymoth Rock.

Given my woefully inaccurate historical education, I wonder if there are other "minority views" of history that I'm missing. And, if authors use minor details of history in their works, does it make the book less believable (because the details are not well-known) or does it add to the verisimilitude of the story? I'd love to hear your thoughts.