Comparative historian Marc Ferro claims that the largest discrepancy in knowledge between what academic historians and what the aver- age citizen knows about history is found in the United States. How has this situation come about? Certainly the problem does not lie with the secondary literature. Whereas in the past. American historians were handicapped by sec- ondary literature that was clearly biased towards a European viewpoint, since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. the secondary literature in American history has become far more comprehensive. And it cannot be simply a matter of space constraints; the average high school history textbook is well over a thousand pages in length. One theory holds that American history text- books are simply the socializing instruments of a controlling elite. The stratification of American society is preserved. according to this theory. by the creation of what Marx termed “false consciousness." The theory ho...
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