BIASES IN HISTORY

STUDENTS

According Michele R. Mason and Gisela Ernst-Slavit shed light on

to the American
Textbook Council, your
history textbooks often
depict an incomplete view of
Islam, misrepresenting its issues
with international security and its
foundations in a more positive light
than it actually is. This is more
commonly found in junior high
school textbooks in order to
control your opinions at a
more impressionable
age (Sewall).
how the language and word choice that your teachers
use when describing historical events, in this case Native
Americans, bring forth stereotypical representations of
Native Americans in history, and subconsciously put
biased perceptions of them in your head (Mason and
Ernst-Slavit).
You may want to be careful when considering the
accuracy of some of the history you are taught because,
according to the American Textbook Council, many
historical textbook chapters are filled with lessons on
Islam that portray it in a kinder light and do not go into
detail about some of the not so flattering past of the
religion (Sewall).

The American Textbook Council points to the issues on how history textbooks that
you have used in the past, currently use, or will use, represent terrorism and U.S.
foreign policy. Sewall specifically mentions McGraw-Hills Modern Times, World
History, Pearson Prentice Halls The Modern World, and World History: Connections
to Today. According to the American Textbook Council, American history textbooks
for high schoolers do not show as much variation than world history books, and
each textbooks covering of terrorism and Middle Eastern conflict often differ in their
tellings of events, leaving you with an unclear idea of what really happened (Sewall).

According to the Albert Shanker Institute, after reviewing four widely used U.S history
textbooks that leave out or do not give enough attention to the story of labor, hundreds of
thousands of American students go through their lives without a true understanding and
knowledge of labor in the U.S. One example of this is the almost complete absence of the
upsurge in public employee unionism in the 1960s and 70s in history textbooks, leaving
you without the knowledge of one of the most important impacts on contemporary life in
the 1960s (Cole, Megivern, and Hilgert).

As claimed by Rethinking Schools, the traditional first Thanksgiving story that you are taught at a
young age generally depicts Pilgrim and Native American encounters as peaceful, and makes it as if
the European Pilgrims discovered a New World that did not yet belong to anyone. Vera L. Stenhouse
reveals that this telling of the story is used, in a way, to deceive you to think that Europeans did not treat
them so badly, and to lighten the view of such a heavy event (Stenhouse).