Peoples and Places in World History
The first volume, The Ancient World, starts with the prehistoric
origins of our species, then covers historical times from the
rise of Middle Eastern civilizations to the spread of
Christianity in the Roman Empire. Each historical chapter in
this volume includes a section about geography; topics covered in
the geographical sections include oceans, climates, maps,
deserts, and trade routes. The second book, Medieval and Early
Modern Times, opens with a chapter about archaeology, then
provides a series of exclusively historical chapters that span a
period from the decline of the Roman Empire to the 18th century.
The format employed in both volumes has clearly been designed to
be accessible to middle-school students. The basic narrative is
presented in large type, on pages that have wide margins.
Inserts printed in blue ink discuss important individuals or
ideas, or present relevant quotations. Questions in the margins
tell the student what to expect in the main text.
The designers of the Peoples and Places books have made frequent
use of line maps and sketches, along with occasional pictures of
historic sites or scenes. Although the maps and other
illustrations are generally useful in supporting the narrative,
the maps sometimes do not clearly distinguish land from water.
Some of the maps are not directly linked to the adjacent text,
and this may confuse students.
Each chapter is followed by a helpful vocabulary exercise, a set
of "Review Questions," and a number of "Think It Over" questions
that vary from stimulating to historically irrelevant. (For an
example of historically irrelevant questioning, see the fifth
chapter of The Ancient World. While the chapter deals with
ancient Egypt, the writers have injected a "Think It Over"
question that pertains to a current controversy over the
protection of desert tortoises in the southwestern United States:
"Ravens often make desert tortoises their meal. Some people
suggest killing the ravens. Do you think this is right? Why
should a tortoise have a better claim to life than a raven?")
The Peoples and Places books are based on the premise, declared
in the introduction to The Ancient World, that "We must
understand the past in order to understand our lives today." The
emphasis is on helping students to understand the connections
between different places and periods, as well as the
relationships between the past and the present. In the
introduction to Medieval and Early Modern Times, the writers set
forth an additional goal: to provide a systematic account of the
human experience, giving attention not only to political events
and institutions but also to the social, cultural and
intellectual dimensions of life.
Of these two aims, the first is realized more effectively than
the second. The writers' narrative is relentlessly
present-minded, repeatedly noting and emphasizing the historical origins
of technological developments, scientific advances, and social or
political institutions that resonate in our own society. A
consequence of this approach is that the books have a heavily
Eurocentric thrust, giving preponderant attention to peoples who
are presumed to have contributed significantly to the
development of the Western tradition. If the writers had adopted
an alternative approach, exploring the varying, equally viable
ways in which various societies have resolved fundamental social
questions and universal intellectual problems, the books would
have turned out much differently.
Clearly, any attempt to present the history of humanity from
prehistoric times to the French Revolution, and to do so in terms
intelligible to 6th-graders and 7th-graders, is a daunting task.
On the whole, the writers of Peoples and Places have done well.
The accounts of different peoples and societies are generally
clear and understandable. The analyses of major historical
controversies or unsettled questions -- e.g., the question of
whether all humans are descendants of a single African female, or
the questions surrounding the origin and compilation of the
various books of the Bible -- are reasonably up-to-date and
sometimes are surprisingly nuanced, given that they have been
written for a young audience. In the chapters about the ancient
Middle East and medieval Europe, the descriptions of daily life
and work concisely convey the different textures of life in the
past.
I find the books less satisfactory in some other respects. In
The Ancient World the sections about geography interrupt the
flow of the historical material and distract the reader. In both
books, and especially in Medieval and Early Modern Times, the
narrative sometimes becomes bogged down in political matters that
are presented in greater detail than seems necessary in a book
for middle-school students. And both books show considerable
variation in the quality of the passages that describe important
ideas and beliefs. For example, the account of concepts
underlying the ancient Egyptian view of life and death is quite
well done, as is the discussion of the achievements of
Hellenistic philosophy and science; the discussions of Islamic
and Indian thought, on the other hand, sometimes neglect key
elements or conflate discrete ideas.
The overall interpretation of the human adventure offered in the
Peoples and Places books revolves around the rise of the West;
and as I already have noted, the writers devote particular
attention to peoples who are identified as contributors to
Western civilization. Among the ancient Middle Eastern peoples,
for example, the Sumerians and the Egyptians and the Hebrews are
discussed in detail, but groups who are not closely associated
with the West -- e.g., the Hittites or the Persians -- are only
mentioned in passing or are ignored. The history of ancient
Greece and Rome, of course, receives extended treatment (five
full chapters in The Ancient World). So does the history of
Europe from the later days of the Roman empire to the early
modern period (six chapters in Medieval and Early Modern Times).
In contrast, the history of the rest of the world is accorded
only eight chapters in the two volumes together: one chapter for
India, one for the Islamic world, one for the Americas, one for
Japan, two for Africa, and two for China.
Embedded in the text are some casual ethnocentric judgments about
the virtue of the Western tradition. For example, Medieval and
Early Modern Times offers an evaluation of Europe's High Middle
Ages: "This was a period of great intellectual and artistic
activity. Few periods in the history of the world can match the
achievement of those years." Such a judgment may be comforting
to the Western reader, but it is questionable as historical
analysis.
The books' coverage of the two regions with which I am most
familiar -- India and the Middle East -- suffers from some major
omissions and some failures to deal satisfactorily with
particular topics. In regard to India, I find that there is
adequate discussion of the evolution of Indian ideas up to the
time of the Upanishads, but the text is sketchy and unclear in
its treatment of later developments. The analysis of caste (a
page and a half in The Ancient World) is much too brief, failing
to capture the substance and uniqueness of the Indian social
order.
In the material about Islam, which forms a chapter of Medieval
and Early Modern Times, the substantive differences between
Sunnism and Shi'ism are not clarified; the central intellectual
discipline of Islamic civilization, law, is ignored; and there is
no systematic account of how Islam grew and spread through much
of the Old World. The fact that a significant portion of
humanity eventually became Muslim is a major historical
development that needs both emphasis and explanation. It
receives neither here.
A broader shortcoming of the Peoples and Places books is their
failure to deal adequately with the transmission of ideas from
people to people and from region to region. In The Ancient World
the writers tell about the dissemination of the alphabet and of
the use of iron, and they give some attention to inter-regional
contacts (both commercial and intellectual) in the chapters
about ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Otherwise, however, the
writers generally neglect such contacts until, in Medieval and
Early Modern Times, they describe the European explosion after
1400. As a consequence, there is little sense of the
dissemination of crucial technologies and seminal ideas among
different societies, and little sense of the shared
technological and intellectual advances which have moved
humanity, as a whole, to new levels of achievement and
understanding. These are complicated skeins to unravel, and
difficult to present in a middle-school text; but much of the
adventure of world history is lost if they are ignored.
Both Peoples and Places books offer a rather rosy picture of
history. The world that they present is a world without much
exploitation except for slavery (the existence of which, in
different societies, is duly noted). It is also a world without
peasants, save in ancient Sumer, ancient Egypt and medieval
Europe. The ubiquitous institution of taxation is almost never
mentioned, and the various forms of domination based on class or
gender are not discussed in any detail. This avoidance of the
unpleasant and disturbing dimensions of history may reflect the
writers' judgment that 6th-graders and 7th-graders don't need to
fret about inequality, exploitation and injustice. The result,
however, is a skewed version of the human experience which
downplays its darker side.
The first volume, The Ancient World, has three units: "Early
People and the First Civilizations," "Asia and Africa in the
Ancient World" and "Greeks and Romans." According to the
writers' introductory statement, the material in this book is
united by some "common threads": the influence of geography on
culture; the daily life of common people; the role of religion;
artistic accomplishments and scientific advances; and political
structures.
The Ancient World suffers from a number of problems, the most
important of which are these:
A lesson on geography concludes each chapter, but the lesson
usually bears only a minimal connection to the chapter's content.
Indeed, for all its apparent emphasis on geography, this book
does a poor job of helping the student to fit a given culture
into a geographic context.
The book also fails to make geographic connections across
cultures. In a typical case, a culture is treated as if it
existed in a vacuum. The writers do little to explore cultural
diffusion, and the reader is left wondering how ideas and
technologies spread through the ancient world.
The book begins with putative, sometimes fictional, descriptions
of the earliest humans, augmented by two paragraphs about the
current argument surrounding "Eve," the purported ancestor of all
the humans living today. It is encouraging that the writers have
said something about this argument, but they could have done much
more with it. It could have formed the core of a whole chapter
on how archaeologists, anthropologists and historians work.
What are their methods and their sources of information? How do
they use the scientific analysis of remains and artifacts in
reconstructing the past? Such topics could have been used to
get students involved in building hypotheses and sorting
evidence.
In their introduction (page vii) the writers claim to focus on
daily life, education and some other aspects of social history.
However, they devote a majority of their pages to military and
political history, which too often becomes a superficial
recitation of which monarch followed which, or which dynasty rose
after another dynasty fell. As a result, the text gives only a
poor reflection of the new scholarship that has been offered by
social historians, and there is far too little information about
people's everyday lives -- especially the lives of women and
children.
In Medieval and Early Modern Times, as in The Ancient World, maps
are frustratingly scarce. In the chapter on Japan, for example,
the writers say that Mongoloid people first entered Japan from
Korea, but there is no map that shows Japan, Korea and the
geographical relation between them. There is a map showing Korea
alone, with a caption saying that Korea "was always the gateway
for new people to enter Japan," but this is simply not helpful.
In the same chapter, the text mentions Japan's Yamato Plain
several times, but the chapter's one and only map of Japan
doesn't show where the Plain is. Similar failures to provide
proper maps, and to make text and maps work with each other,
occur throughout the book.
The need to cover a great deal of material in a limited space
requires a condensed style of writing, but the writing in
Medieval and Early Modern Times is needlessly disjointed and
sometimes bizarre, and several passages left me scratching my
head or even laughing aloud. One of these occurs on page 69, in
a section titled "Byzantium's Problems":
Another passage, on page 381, isn't quite as bad, but it still
strikes me as odd:
People typically spring from nowhere and "appear on the scene"
in plays and pageants. Unfortunately, they also do it in this
schoolbook.
In some places, the text of Medieval and Early Modern Times is
maddeningly disconnected. The chapter dealing with Japan (on
pages 261 through 297) again provides an example, because the
writers mention feudalism a number of times but never describe
it. (On page 293 they casually say that feudalism is "a society
in which kings have little power while rural landowners have
much," but that remark is wrong.) No description of feudalism
appears until the next chapter, which deals with medieval Europe.
In summary: These Peoples and Places volumes don't advance the
teaching of history at the middle-school level. Middle-school
students of history are hungry to study relevant, controversial
and complex issues from the past. They cannot be satisfied by a
sketchy parade of events punctuated by religious preaching.
James Jankowski is a professor in the Department of History at
the University of Colorado at Boulder. He specializes in the
history of the modern Middle East.
Sara Thompson is a high-school social-studies teacher and
curriculum-development consultant. Her most recent project has
been the writing of a curriculum about contemporary Japan for
the Laurasian Institution (Atlanta, Illinois). She lives and
works in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Reviewing two middle-school books in world history
The Ancient World
1993 (second edition). 500 pages. ISBN: 1-878473-63-8.
1990. 486 pages. ISBN: 1-878473-56-5.Clearly Written Textbooks
with a Eurocentric ThrustJames Jankowski
Peoples and Places in World History comprises two volumes,
intended for use in the 6th and 7th grades respectively.
Sketchy, Superficial History
That Can't Satisfy StudentsSara Thompson
The Peoples and Places books, intended for use in successive
middle-school grades, conduct their readers on a breathtakingly
rapid but almost continuously dull journey through the past. By
attempting to cover too much, the writers have produced a
fragmented and shallow account of human history. Complexity,
drama, controversy and romance, all of which combined to
stimulate my own interest in history, are conspicuous by their
absence.
Superficiality
A survey text has to condense material and has to paint in broad
strokes. But if doing so means that stories, themes and
connections are lost, what has been gained? In The Ancient
World, China is a blur of dynasties while Greece and Rome are
generally reduced to military entities. What is missing is a
sense of life on the human scale. How did people live? What did
they look like? What did they eat? How did their values affect
their decisions about how they should conduct their lives?
Poor integration of geography
There are only 29 maps in this 500-page book. Moreover, the maps
are often of poor quality and often fail to show key places
mentioned in the text. Migrations of peoples, important trade
routes, military campaigns, and such events as the Babylonian
exile appear in the text, but there are no pertinent maps.
Without maps, some of these topics are almost meaningless.
Devotion to cut-and-dried facts
This text, like so many others intended for use in middle schools
or high schools, presents history as a series of established
facts. The processes of examining evidence, building hypotheses,
and testing hypotheses against observations -- all of which are
parts of the historian's craft -- are not described. Yet this is
exactly the kind of material that would enliven the study of
history, would show students that historiography is based on
inquiry, and would give students an idea of where facts come
from.
Another missed opportunity is seen in the chapter about the
Hebrews. In contrast to the ones that precede it, this chapter
is lively and is filled with accounts of individuals and their
actions. It is also specious, misleading and devoid of
educational merit, because much of it consists of biblical myths
disguised as history. Instead of using the Bible for building a
lesson about how historians approach folklore, the writers
repeatedly present Hebrew tales as factual information. I shall
say more about this below.
The second volume, Medieval and Early Modern Times, covers
history from late Roman times to the period of European
expansion and colonialism. Its five units are "History
Underground" (consisting of a single chapter about archaeology),
"The Early Middle Ages in Europe," "Asia, Africa, and the
Americas," "Medieval Europe and Early Modern Europe" and
"Learning from History" (which consists of a single chapter about
links between the past and the present). Unlike The Ancient
World, this book attempts to weave geographical information into
the main text, instead of isolating it in end-of-chapter lessons;
and on the whole, this book does a better job of establishing
geographical contexts.
In the Eastern Balkans, the mixed population of Dacia took refuge
in nearby mountains to avoid the Avar and Slavic invaders. They
went into hiding for a full 500 years. Later they reappeared as
the Romanians.
In 1428 a remarkable woman appeared on the scene. Her name is
[sic] Joan of Arc. She was only a young girl . . . .
The writers have a curious tendency to make value judgments that
strike me as inappropriate or even silly. For example:
return to top
go to Home Page
read our Index List, which shows all the textbooks, curriculum manuals,
videos and other items that are considered on this Web site
support the work of The Textbook League
contact The Textbook League by e-mail
The Textbook Letter is published, copyrighted and distributed by
The Textbook League (PMB 272, 40 Fourth Street, Petaluma, California 94952)