Who Writes History?

Hardly any student in high school or college questions the validity of history written in their textbooks, taught in their classrooms. Teachers are instructed to adhere to the curriculum they are given. But who writes the history books that are treated as unquestionable?

Four publishing companies, Pearson, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Bedford/St. Martin’s, manage the flow of history to most of the American school boards who have ultimate control over the texts. These publishing companies derive significant revenue from history books. Over $9 billion of educational revenue is generated from the sale of textbooks each year, and it represents almost 1/3 of all publishing companies’ sales.

Very few publishers in this market are willing to offer history that isn't politically safe.

For centuries, observers have noted that the victors in wars were the unchallenged authors of their view of the battles. Contrary to public opinion, Winston Churchill never said those words; however, a contemporary, Hermann Goering of the German Third Reich, came closest. At the Nuremburg trials that meted out justice to the Nazis, Goering said, "The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”

Interestingly, the Desantis government in Florida and the Trump regime in Washington have been the latest purveyors of that German rant.

Should it surprise any true historian that provable acts have oftentimes been viewed as a non-event? For instance, Jim Crow laws were not as bad as Martin Luther King portrayed them as being.  Or that institutional racialism has never been part of American history.