As a former adjunct US History instructor at a local community college, one particular moment stands out. I was dividing the class into groups to discuss dropping the bomb on Hiroshima as well as consider other alternatives President Truman could have used to end World War II. A 19-year-old student in the back row jumped up, pointed his finger at me and yelled “Are YOU saying YOU don’t believe we should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima?”

While it was never my job to teach my opinion, it haunts me still to think that in 2009 a teenager would feel that strongly about an incident that happened more than 40 years before he was born. At the moment, I assumed he had either been taught a particular version of US History, or he had a grandparent that fought in WWII. Maybe both.

Over seven years of teaching US History at this community college, I found many young students who had deep and profound beliefs about their heritage and who could not consider any alternate viewpoints, even in an academic discussion. I started each semester with the disclaimer, “US History is full of the good, the bad and the ugly,” and I witnessed a few angry students and one who left the classroom in tears, and I never taught any history more recent than the Vietnam War era. I never covered any history that occurred in their lifetime!

The general assumption is that history is boring but, if so, why are people so passionate about it?

I grew up in Canada and moved to the United States at the age of 19, when I married an American. Ten years later I was a mother of three, a pastor’s wife in small town Kansas, and looking for something for me. I found an opportunity for a night out each week when I enrolled in a class at a community college extension at our local high school. That sparked a tradition for me (some may have called it an obsession) wherein I began my journey into higher education. In the course of my studies, I began to learn American history for the first time. And as I continued to pursue American history, I began to realize that I was coming at it from a different perspective than the people around me. Because I wasn’t from the United States. I noticed that I hadn’t learned the “lore” of American history that is taught to American children, for example George Washington and the cherry tree. I’m still not familiar with the story but that image of the first president as an honest man was deeply ingrained in my students and all new information had to pass through their preexisting beliefs.

One of those early moments came in church one Sunday. My daughter brought me her Sunday School paper and I started to casually read it. The back side was a story about George Washington. While I don’t remember the exact story, I was confused to read of Washington as a godly man for church children, while in a college environment we discussed the land he promised to give soldiers who fought under his command, and then reneged on his promise and kept the land for himself. Plus Washington was a slaveowner, also missing from the Sunday School story. What accounted for these differences? And why was George Washington even a part of the Sunday School curriculum?

That moment in church, followed by other similar moments, led me to my Master’s thesis fifteen years later. In it, I researched and compared the study and teaching of U.S. History in three high schools in the Wichita, Kansas area: a public school, a Catholic school and a Christian school, using each of their chosen (or assigned) textbooks. There was a huge difference!* To be honest, I never expected my thesis to be relevant, or even interesting to anyone but myself. But, as more and more states are reevaluating what part of history is taught and what is excluded, I am continually reminded of the importance of what I learned.

A pivotal book from 1979, America Revised by Frances Fitzgerald, studied trends of history textbooks from the late 1800s forward, noticing what is included, what is left out, and what perspectives change over time. For example, 1920s textbooks began to portray immigrants as “nothing more than a problem” (p. 78). By the 1940s and early 1950s (post WWII), immigrants were “fine people, because their decision to come to the U.S. proved this is a land of liberty” (p. 81). Imagine the generational shift, not to mention the necessary rewriting of history, where tolerance and acceptance were taught in comparison to the perspectives passed on to the previous generation.

During the first half of the 20th century, African-Americans were rarely mentioned in U.S. history textbooks. Maybe George Washington Carver’s name appeared or a reference to slaves, who “appeared magically in this country at some unspecified time and had disappeared with the end of the Civil War” (p. 83).

Then came the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Voting Rights Act. Textbook companies had a dilemma: “either the blacks belonged to American history or they did not and if they did they belonged to all of it” (p. 84). How do you cover the Civil Rights movement in a textbook that had not mentioned Black men and women in America? And how do you cover the 1960s for students who could go home and watch the changes unfold on television? And how do you confront what was happening without explaining why it was happening?

The unexpected realization, while writing my thesis, was that history textbooks are written to create and perpetuate an identity. Versions of history can be written and revised and tidied up and purified. But they can’t stay sanitized or comfortable. History is the evolving story of people—broken, messy people—and sooner or later the reality of this mess is revealed. We cannot focus only on the good and be afraid of the bad and the ugly. If you’re curious, read (or skim) a public school history textbook. Then find a history textbook used at a Christian school. What differences stand out? And why are they there? I’d love the conversation.

Here’s why this matters: Stories shape us. They tell us who we are. They tell us what kind of world we live in. And they give meaning to our lives. I always took great comfort in teaching students that heroes were not perfect, but human. We don’t identify with perfection. We identify with stories of struggle, pain, survival. History can never be divorced from story. Stories about the past have always been vital to community formation and identity. Think of the stories in the Old Testament. Imagine not having the Golden Calf incident, or Elijah’s depression, or Samson’s lack of self-control, or Jonah’s unfaithfulness to learn from. So many of the stories in the Old Testament are shameful. The Bible isn’t afraid to show failings and imperfection. Nor should we be.

*I found the coverage of US History at the Catholic high school to be the most well-rounded. While public school books are typically political history, recounting each president and what they did, the textbook used by the Catholic high school was more social history. It caused students to question the effects of policies on people and brought in a bigger worldview as it tackled effects of US policies and actions on people in other countries. (I could tell which students in my classrooms came from area Catholic high schools by their attitudes and comments in class.) The Bob Jones University Press textbook used by the Christian high school was disturbing in so many ways. It was unabashedly anti-Catholic, anti-multiculturalism. It assured students that the church portrayed in Acts 2 was not socialism happening. An interesting detail to point out!