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On 5-14-2011, I started a site called History Truth Squad, to ask questions like: What is historical truth? Why does history need a truth squad? Who are we, that we think we can defend historical truth, anyway? I've moved it over her to history-punk.com, and you can find the blog posts on the history-punk blog, tagged "TruthSquad."
TruthSquad is about the way history is used by people right now. People have always disagreed and argued about what history “tells us,” and what we should do as a result. Whole “schools” of historians have come and gone, revising each others' interpretations of the past. That’s not what TruthSquad is about; it's about how history is being used right now, to get people to think and act (and vote) in certain ways.
Everyone should be free to try to convince others to think or behave the way they think is best, or most efficient, or most noble, or coolest. But history shouldn't be misused to back up those arguments. Lying about history is like telling people that gravity doesn’t exist. What if you believed the gravity-deniers, and jumped out the window? “But wait,” you say. “Isn’t history about interpretation as well as facts?” Yes, but when we look at the media we don't see people having complicated discussions about subtle points of interpretation. What we see is, one guy making a factual claim like, “America was established as a Christian nation,” and the other guy saying, “No! It wasn’t!”
So who are we, and why do we feel qualified to be a History Truth Squad? Well, we’re full-time historians. That’s what we do. And we care about what’s going on right now in America.
Truth can be a very tricky concept for historians. But truth is pretty straightforward, for regular people. That’s part of a disconnect between the academy and the real world that’s been growing for a long time, and that disconnect allows critics to get in there and say that academics are not like “real folks,” and that they’re somehow trying to pull something over on regular Americans and destroy the country.
“People don’t really believe that,” you say? But they talk like they do. Conservative presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was recently in the news, pushing his new series of history education videos for American kids. Huckabee claims these cartoons will fix the problems caused by “our children's classes and learning materials [which] are often filled with misrepresentations, including historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness.” They’ll probably be used in conservative-leaning schools, and Huckabee is specifically marketing the videos to home-schoolers. The first episode is 'The Reagan Revolution.' The second is about World War II.
Most people don’t have the opportunity to get into a lecture-hall or read academic history books. They get their history in other ways: from TV, magazines, the web, and in books by popular writers who usually have a political agenda. Or in high school civics classes. Although we're concerned about developments like the Texas textbook controversy, the Truth Squad recognizes that there are people calling on history from both ends of the political spectrum. So in addition to books like Glenn Beck’s Broke, we’ll be looking at anything else that people seem to be reading and watching that justifies a political position using historical claims.
